[Dialogue] Here is an article on the subject of What do we do now?

[KroegerD@aol.com]

Published in the December 6, 2004 issue of The Nation 
Our Moral Values 
by George Lakoff
 
We are the 55 million progressives who came together in this election, voted 
for Kerry and rejected the Bush agenda. 
We came together because of our moral values: care and responsibility, 
fairness and equality, freedom and courage, fulfillment in life, opportunity and 
community, cooperation and trust, honesty and openness. We united behind 
political principles: equality, equity (if you work for a living, you should earn a 
living) and government for the people--all the people. 
These are traditional American values and principles, what we are proudest of 
in this country. The Democrats' failure was a failure to put forth our moral 
vision, celebrate our values and principles, and shout them out loud. 
We must immediately convince our leaders to unite behind these values, 
express our common moral vision and hold the line against the Bush agenda because it 
is immoral! Bush will call them obstructionists. They must frame themselves 
as heading in the right direction, going forward not backward, defending the 
greatest of American ideals and moral principles, working against a radical 
right agenda that would lead our country to disaster and speaking for more than 55 
million highly moral, patriotic Americans. 
If we communicate our values clearly, most people will recognize them as 
their own, personally more authentic and more deeply American than those put forth 
by conservatives. At the very least they will see progressives as having 
deeply held, traditional American principles. This would be a huge step forward 
from the present state, in which conservatives are seen as having a monopoly on 
"values" and progressives are framed as the party of "if it feels good, do 
it," with no higher principles. 
Moral values at the national level are idealized family values projected onto 
the nation. Progressive values are the values of a responsible nurturant 
family, where parents (if there are two) are equally responsible. Their job is to 
nurture their children and raise them to be nurturers of others. Nurturance 
has two aspects: empathy and responsibility--both for yourself and your 
children. From this, all progressive values follow, both in the family and in 
politics. 
If you empathize with your children, you will want them to have strong 
protection, fair and equal treatment and fulfillment in life. Fulfillment requires 
freedom, freedom requires opportunity and opportunity requires prosperity. 
Since your family lives in, and requires, a community, community building and 
community service are required. Community requires cooperation, which requires 
trust, which requires honesty and open communication. Those are the progressive 
values--in politics as well as family life. 
Take protection. In addition to physical protection, there is environmental 
protection, worker protection and consumer protection, as well as all the 
"safety nets"--Social Security, Medicare and so on. Equality means full political 
and social equality, without regard to wealth, race, religion or gender. 
Openness requires open government and a free, inquiring press. Progressive political 
ideals are nurturant moral ideals. 
On the other hand, the strict-father family model assumes that evil and 
danger will always lurk in the world, that life is difficult, that there will 
always be winners and losers and that children are born bad--they want to do what 
feels good, not what's right--and have to be made good. A strict father is 
needed to protect and support the family and to teach his kids right from wrong. 
That can be done in only one way: punishment painful enough that, to avoid it, 
children will learn the internal discipline necessary to be moral. That 
discipline can also make them prosperous if they seek their self-interest and no one 
interferes. Mommy isn't strong enough to protect the family and is too 
soft-hearted to discipline the children. That's why fathers are necessary. 
Apply this, via metaphor, to the nation: We need a strong President who knows 
right from wrong to defend the nation. Social programs are immoral because 
they give people things they haven't earned and so make them undisciplined--both 
dependent and less able to function morally. The prosperous people are the 
good people. Those who are not prosperous deserve their poverty. Taxes take away 
the rightful rewards of the prosperous. Wrongdoers should be punished 
severely. Government should get out of the way of disciplined (hence good) people 
seeking their self-interest. The President is to be obeyed; since he knows right 
from wrong, his authority is legitimate and not to be questioned. In foreign 
policy, he is also the absolute moral authority and so needs no advice from 
lesser countries. 
The so-called "moral issues" are affronts to strict-father morality. 
Strict-father marriage cannot be gay; it must be between a man and a woman. For a wife 
to seek an abortion on her own or a daughter to need one is an affront to 
strict-father control over the behavior of the women in his family. They are not 
the main moral issues in themselves; rather they are symbolic of the entire 
strict-father identity as applied to all spheres of life. That's why they are so 
powerful for conservatives. 
Swing voters have both models--in different parts of their lives--and are 
unsure about which to apply to politics in a particular election. The job of a 
candidate is to activate his model in the swing voters. Conservatives know this: 
By talking to their base, they are activating their base model in swing 
voters. When liberals move to the right, they are shooting themselves in both feet: 
They alienate their base and they activate the other side's models in the 
swing voters, thus helping the other side. 
Democrats in Congress need to understand this. They must hold their ground, 
be positive and be aware that moving to the right is a double disaster. It will 
only help the radical right's agenda, break with values that unify us and 
make it harder to awaken our values in swing voters. 
The only way to trump their moral values is with our own more traditional and 
more patriotic moral values. Proclaim them and live them, and we will find 
that there are many more than 55 million of us. 
George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics and the bestselling Don't Think of an 
Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, is professor of linguistics 
at UC Berkeley and senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute.
© 2004 The Nation



Dick Kroeger
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