Category: Politics

Progressives suck at political morality

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.)

Vote suppression is the only “election fraud.”?—?a lesson in “values framing” for Democrats

“They hate fair elections. This is about Republicans subverting democracy for those who vote against them. Vote suppression is the only ‘election fraud happening here.’ We know better.”

If I say, “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” what did you just picture in your mind? It works the same for any moral political statement?—?and all politics is moral. My statement frames our side in “fair elections” and their side in “subverting the vote” through “vote suppression”. Even uttering their poll tested phrase, “election fraud” is risky, and probably unnecessary, but I left it in for illustration. It MUST come after the rest, if it has to be used.

I found a typical post from a Democrat answering Republican a talking point by using that same talking point to “frame” their statement, falling right in to the same damned trap Democrats have been falling for for decades.

Here’s the original, “This isn’t about election fraud, it’s about republicans obstructing the vote from those who may vote against them. We need to call it what it is, an attack on our democracy and fair elections.”

The trick I used to rewrite this is simple. All I really did here is reverse it and add a few more values statements. The conclusion is first, so that MY values (and yours) “frame” the topic, instead of letting THEIR poll tested trigger phrase frame the topic. I did the same with the overall structure of this post.

Come on Democrats, our values are better than theirs. This might seem like a little thing, but the knowledge of how this works is the only advantage Republicans have. They’ve been killing us?—?often literally?—?by simply using a technique we refuse to learn.

What is the hangup?

Trump won on a feeling of powerlessness

The professional left through the DNC delivered us an impressive defeat, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by installing unpopular insider Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket, instead of allowing record breaking independent Bernie Sanders to take the nomination and helping him sale to victory. The result; losing the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and so much more at state and local levels.

This robust thumping should give the professional left and DNC insiders a chance to finally understand what they have refused to see about working people. People feel powerless. It’s that simple. Racism, misogyny and white privilege are embedded in Donald Trump’s hateful campaign, but they are not the primary motivation for most Trump supporters. Working citizens are having a hard time. They feel little power to shape their situation and their futures, or to protect their children and their communities from all sorts of threats, including the whims of big business and their own employers. They see (correctly) business in cahoots with big and local government. Maybe some of them are doing just fine in quantifiable terms, but whatever wealth can be attributed to them provides little agency. The power gap driven by historic wealth gap is simply too large. The professional class within the ranks of Liberal Democrats seem to delight ignoring this problem completely, or even apologizing for it (looking at you Paul Krugman). Donald Trump addressed this powerlessness directly in his campaign, and it’s not surprising it found resonance.

The professional left and the DNC have turned a blind eye to ongoing disempowerment, to their own peril. Nothing about the way they handled Sanders in the primary can be spun positively in light of this. But there’s a real chance for progressive Democrats to finally get the party on the right foot. Let’s talk about empowerment for working people. It doesn’t have to be unions?—?my favorite prescription is worker owned employers, an idea that sounds even bipartisan, evoking a great ownership society. The left already has a lock on compassion, but we need a positive vision to replace losing neoliberal and meritocratic idiocy. Losing has consequences, and the consequence of this loss is Donald Trump’s special brand of ignorance, regression and counterproductive GOP policy which will only make things worse for the very people who supported him?—?working people.

Bringing Sanders supporters to Clinton

I’ve been trying to figure out what Hillary Clinton would have to say to turn this Bernie Sanders supporter into a Hillary Clinton supporter. Here’s what I think she has to do to win our (and probably some Trump) support. She needs to acknowledge the pain and stress we are feeling?—?intellectually or empathically, I don’t care which?—?and it’s enormous stress, crushing really. We’ve seen wage stagnation for decades, increasing school tuitions, crumbling public institutions including meak unions, increasing debts, reduced opportunities to work meaningful jobs, with respectful pay?—?there’s so much more. It’s pretty clear we are in trouble to those of us outside of the gentrified bubbles around the country, and even to many of us within. Some acknowledgment that the system she has been a part of, even helped design to some degree, has been responsible would be nice too, though not strictly necessary.

Based on her surrogates in the the media, and generally what I’m hearing from her supporters, who seem to prefer to use rhetoric to dismiss the pain and stress people feel as if it’s childish, or unwarranted (screw you), I’m not sure she (or they) really understand how bad things are for working people, and citizens in general. It’s bad, and I’m not sure why she (and her supporters) can’t trust us or respect us enough to hear it when we tell her. If Clinton can figure out how to communicate that she does get it (and if she really does), then she can easily win the white house. If she can’t, Trump has a real shot (despite being a terrible candidate?—?I mean, monumentally bad, just from a purely political standpoint, not even getting into substance—just super bad).