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Progressives suck at political morality

Sep 3, 2021

A conservative Republican would look at this meme, and see no contradiction.

There’s no logic in political arguments — it’s all moral, and more specifically, based on a moral world view, which is a metaphor built on a specific kind of family dynamic. Political world views are the family metaphor, extended to the broader nation. For conservatives, its the strict father dynamic, for progressives, it’s the supportive family dynamic. All political statements are built on one of these family metaphors.

The meme in question depicts a mask with the label, “My Body, My Choice” and a uterus with the label “Your body, your choice”. It’s a left leaning, meme, meant to highlight an apparent obvious contradiction in conservative logic, and to those who already agree with the pro-choice premise on the issue of abortion, they’ll get it instantly, and share it, and laugh at conservatives, and maybe even hope that they’ll convince someone that they’re being contradictory. The problem is, a conservative would perceive no such contradiction. They’d interpret the same information as presented as having no contradiction at all, and if you don’t understand why, then you just don’t understand politics.

In strict father morality, the “strict father” makes the decisions for the family unit, and his authority should not be challenged. That’s the core moral at play in this meme, and both these anti-mask and anti-abortion arguments fit right in to that — there is no contradiction. The strict father role is to protect their family. They are supposed to decide how to do that, through their own hard-earned discipline. They alone must decide whether to employ masks to protect their families, and they alone decide how to handle reproduction for the family, especially where risk is involved, for both the mother and the unborn baby. We can’t logic our way out of any of this. That’s how their entire moral world view is built. There is no contradiction in this meme from their perspective.

Progressive morality is very different. It’s built on a model of support, empathy and nurture. It says we must build our families up through support and nurture, so they are prepared to take on the world. It says that we should defer to the validated authority, because the supportive family’s authority is not just “Dad,” it’s whoever within the family unit has demonstrated command of the facts on any given issue through open inquiry. Every progressive family works this way — extended to national politics, that means we build support structures, and defer to experts. For the masks issue, the validated authorities — medial experts — say they work, so we wear one. Simple. Progressive morality, by the way, lines up with what we’ve come to learn about how human nature really works through science. It’s better, frankly.

Abortion is harder — and frankly, the “pro-choice” folks on the reactive left frame that one all wrong. It’s not only about choice, it’s about support, and especially support and empathy for women who find themselves in a situation that is challenging, both socially and personally. If we constrain the moral frame to just our “validated authority” morality, then abortion is about woman’s personal choice, because they are the validated authority of their own bodies, but it’s not only about that. We are truncating the moral argument by over emphasizing choice. There’s a whole set of moral tools we are leaving on the table on this one.

But progressives and liberals have largely not learned how any of this modern moral argument works, so they are mostly reactive — the right wing frames the left’s positions, and it’s almost always a trap. For example, “gun control” is an absolutely terrible metaphor, that puts government in “control” of an entire issue, and is about an illiberal as you can get, from a policy standpoint. It’s about “gun accountability” — conservatives literally never talk about accountability, because that’s external, it subverts the role of the disciplined “strict father”. But that doesn’t mean we should shy away from making the argument — in fact, it’s important.

There are biconceptuals, those who hold both incompatible moral world views at the same time (no, they aren’t crazy, but they are unaware, mostly). The way to get them on our side is, exclusively, to make arguments that are framed within our better moral world view. We must tap in to progressive supportive family metaphors, to strengthen those pathways in the brains of biconceptuals. But we don’t, and it’s why we constantly lose ground. If we know our values, it’s much easier to make moral arguments. This is important — we are losing the war, even though we have the plainly better family dynamic.

In the supportive family dynamic, parents have equal and equivalent responsibilities, to support and guide our families (and the public by extension) to supportive policies — like public education, and social safety nets, and minimum wage laws, child labor laws, etc. It’s not just better to make the moral argument — it’s necessary to make any progress. But the arguments in this meme don’t do that — we can’t logic our way to victory. That tactic been failing for decades. Political thought is not logical or rational. Reason doesn’t work to convince anyone of anything in politics. All politics is moral.

(What is he talking about? If you are interested in hearing from a real scientist on the topic, here is the best intro to moral politics from George Lakoff I can find.)