Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (29 page)

Freedom is an intimate part of your life as an American. Notice your freedoms. Work freedom into your everyday vocabulary. Use it or lose it.

Progressives make a lot of mistakes and conservatives just love to exploit them. Many of them are political mistakes—mistakes in political organizing, or failures in finding unity. Others are cognitive mistakes—mistakes in thinking and talking. Since I am a cognitive scientist, I will concentrate on the cognitive mistakes, mistakes in thought and language.

Mistakes in framing are extremely common among progressives. The most common mistake is to accept the right’s frames. This traps you in their value system and their way of seeing the world. You wind up thinking in their terms instead of your own.

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Stop using their words
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Their mode of thought and their values come with their words. Just using “judicial activism,” for example, accepts a frame in which (1) a judge is fair through being impersonal, mechanically applying the Constitution to cases at hand; (2) “activists” are emotional, irrational, and outside the mainstream; (3) liberal judges illegitimately impose their personal left-wing agendas from the bench and harm the country; (4) we must appoint conservative judges, who will stick to what is in the Constitution, not impose their own views, and that will be good for the country.

Every part of the frame is false. But if the public accepts the frame, the public will insist on radical conservative judges. Every time you use the words, you activate that frame in the brains of your listeners, thus helping to reinforce the frame and working against your own values.

What we need to do instead is to reframe from a progressive point of view. Talk instead about “freedom judges”—”judicial expansionists who have expanded our freedoms based on ideas there in the Constitution.” We can then set up the frame of the expansion of freedoms that are implicit in the Constitution: the expansion of voting rights; of public education; of public health; of protections for consumers, workers, and the environment; of science; and so on. Radical conservative judges can then be described as they are: anti-freedom judges.

You can defuse the conservative frames of “strict construction” and “judicial activism” without mentioning them. Whenever
a case reaches a high court, it is because it does not clearly fit within the established categories of the law. Judges have to either extend or narrow those categories, and when they do they change the law, in one way or another. The question is whether they change it in the direction of greater or lesser freedom. Are they expanding—or narrowing—voting rights, civil rights, fairness principles, public protections, privacy rights, education of the public, scientific knowledge, and other aspects of the public good? Do they want to take us back before the expansion of our freedoms or forward to a greater expansion of our freedoms? Are they profreedom or antifreedom?

The framing introduced is not just a matter of words or slogans. The expansion of freedom frame tells a deep truth. That truth defines a progressive mode of thought, what I call a fundamental frame. It is hardly original. The observation has been made many times. A variation on the theme—unity in the service of freedom—was used by Bill Clinton in his speech before the Democratic Convention in 2004:

What is new is the recognition that progressive freedom is the central idea in American life.

The expansion of freedom frame is general. It is not only about judicial activism; it applies to just about every issue. Take the 2005 bankruptcy bill, which had the effect of keeping poor people (though not wealthy corporations) from declaring bankruptcy in the face of overwhelming debt—in most cases debt from emergency medical care. This will keep tens of thousands of families enslaved to debt, often at the cost of their homes! It was sponsored and passed by conservatives. It was an antifreedom bill. It limited the economic freedom and the opportunity of poor and middle-class Americans. It was an assault on “ownership” and “opportunity”—conservative buzzwords that are Orwellian, used not with sincerity but rather to mean the very opposite.

Antifreedom bills are legion in the Congress as controlled by radical conservatives. The argument that they go against the grand tradition of progressive freedom in this country is a single argument that applies in case after case. The argument cannot be made only once. That will have no effect. It must be repeated over and over, on issue after issue. It is not a short-term strategy. It is a long-term strategy.

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Avoid negating their frame
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Negating their frame just activates the frame and traps you in a different way. Coming out against the president’s tax relief plan—or even offering a plan for tax relief for the middle class—keeps the tax relief frame, with taxation as an affliction to be eliminated.

At the founding of this country, there was a clear understanding
of the role of taxation in the government of a free society. States were called “commonwealths.” The commonwealth idea was a simple freedom principle: In order for individuals to be maximally free to pursue their individual goals, you need to use the common wealth for the common good to build infrastructure needed by, and available to, everyone: roads, schools, and public buildings like courthouses, hospitals, jails, and arsenals. The role of a government is to do what individual citizens cannot: build the infrastructure needed for security and prosperity for all and provide access to freedom. That same freedom principle has been expanded throughout our history, as our freedoms have expanded. We used taxpayers’ money to build the interstate highway system, the land grant colleges and public universities, the Internet, the federal regulatory system for banks and the stock market, and the court system, which is mostly used for corporate law. As we have discussed, no one can start a business, or prosper in big business, without such resources for individual freedom. Progressive taxation is fair because the wealthy use more of that infrastructure than the poor and so have more of a responsibility to maintain it. Again the issue isn’t words or slogans, but the idea—a freedom principle called the common wealth.

The expansion of freedom frame and the common wealth frame express fundamental truths about our country, truths conceptualized via fundamental progressive frames—mental structures that are realized in our brains and characterize deep ideas that apply across the board to issue after issue. Once those ideas become part of our national consciousness, once they become implicit in public political discourse, they are there, ready to be used.

With the fundamental frames in place, it becomes much easier to craft powerful and lasting slogans that express surface frames—the progressive equivalents of the “death tax.” You need deep fundamental frames to hook those surface frames to. The ultraright conservatives, over three decades, developed their system of fundamental frames and got them out into the public
sphere. That’s why their slogans expressing surface frames work.

Establishing fundamental frames in public discourse takes patience and perseverance. It is a necessary investment in the future. This is probably not going to be done by major political leaders, who tend to want slogans that will work effectively right away. These frames need to be established instead by progressives across the country—whoever is speaking out on issues, especially those in the media. It is a necessary part of taking back freedom.

A great many progressives function with a folk theory of the mind, based on a philosophical paradigm called rationalism. The folk version of rationalism is a myth about reason and its relationship to politics. It says that progressive thought came out of the Enlightenment in the form of rationalism.

The rationalist myth tells us that

• Reason is what defines our essence as human beings and sets us off from other animals.
  

• Therefore, reason is universal (all human beings have the same capacity for reason).
  

• Reason is conscious (we are aware of our thought).
  

• Reason is literal (it can directly fit the world).
  

• We all have an unconstrained free will.
  

• We are acting rationally when our free will follows the dictates of reason rather than our passions.
  

• It is irrational to be against your material self-interest. Therefore, reason serves to maximize our material self-interests.
  

• Because reason is universal, we can govern ourselves; we don’t need the authority of the church or a king or aristocrats or experts.
  

• Since reason makes us equal as human beings, the best
  form of government is a democracy—one that serves the rational self-interests of all.
  

• Since facts matter for material interests, a rational government should promote access to the facts and should support science.
  

• Universal reason gives rise to universal moral principles.
  

This idea comes in various philosophical versions, and their corresponding folk versions, of what constitutes morality:

• Consequentialism: The rational consequences of your actions for everyone, not just your actions themselves, should be judged.
  

• Utilitarianism: The greatest good for the greatest number (a version of consequentialism).
  

• Kantianism: Treat everyone as an end in itself and never as a means only.
  

• Rawlsianism: Act as if you had no knowledge of your own place in society, as if you might have the lowliest status.
  

The rationalist myth is social (about groups) and collectivist (about everyone), rather than individualist (about individuals, one at a time). It is antihierarchical (we share the
same
capacity for reason, which makes us equal). It is literal—it does not admit conceptual frames or conceptual metaphors—since reason has to fit the world directly. Rationality is seen as conscious. Since reason is universal, the concepts used in reasoning are universally shared. With the same concepts available to all, free will is not constrained by the unavailability of concepts. All the above-listed moral theories judge actions not in themselves but on the basis of their effects on others.

Much of traditional liberalism was based on the rationalist myth—as was traditional liberal economics, which assumed that
people acted like rational actors (maximizing self-interest), as well as liberal foreign policy, which assumed that nations also acted as rational actors (maximizing their national interests—their national wealth, military strength, and political influence).

Modern cognitive science has shown that this theory is false in just about every detail. Most thought is not conscious. Though some forms of reason are universal, much of reason is not, because we think using frames and conceptual metaphors, which need not be universal. Recent Nobel Prizes in Economics reflect this new, antirationalist knowledge about the mind: Rationality is bounded; thought uses frames, prototypes, and metaphors, which do not fit traditional rationality; and relevant knowledge is not shared. Economic decisions are largely made at an unconscious level. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed that reason is dependent on emotion, not independent of it; people with strokes and brain injuries that leave them unable to feel emotions or judge emotions in others cannot act rationally.

Many progressives still abide by aspects of the rationalist myth, which results in destructive political consequences for progressives. For example, rationalism claims that, since everybody is rational, you just need to tell people the facts and they will reason to the same right conclusion. That’s just false, as we have learned from election after election. The facts alone will not set you free. If the frames that define common sense contradict the facts, the facts will be ignored. Cognitive science tells us why: The frames that define common sense are instantiated physically in the brain. When you hear a fact that is inconsistent with a physical structure in the brain (a frame), the physical structure (the frame) stays and the fact is ignored or explained away. Nonetheless, progressives keep using facts alone to argue against radical conservative frames.

What is needed is a new common sense that will naturally fit fundamental truths about the world and society.

If the rationalist myth were true, one could reason correctly
as follows: Reason is conscious. Everyone can and should think rationally. Rational actors seek to maximize their self-interest. Therefore, pollsters and those who run focus groups should be able to ask voters what issues are most important for them and what policies would maximize their material self-interest, and voters should be able to tell them. Voters, being rational, should vote to maximize their material self-interest. Thus, if candidates take voters’ six most important issues and craft programs to maximize voters’ self-interest, voters, being rational, should vote for those candidates.

That’s what the rationalist myth predicts, but it’s not true. Voters may prefer the Democrats’ positions on issues yet still vote Republican. Why?