Relentless Inquiry

Thanks much to Kragen for pointing me to Red Family, Blue Family

This quote sums up a stunning amount of analysis, absolutely necessary to go from Lakoff's 'Moral Politics' framing to understanding *why* the Democrats aren't communicating well and *how to fix it*.

Liberally minded people often do not realize … that rather than respecting fundamentalists views, they are denying them by insisting that religious beliefs or ethical standards be seen as personal, private matters we must all tolerate in one another – that moral standards are relative, not absolute. … Shawmut River’s commitment to absolutes was in keeping with the binding character they saw in the family obligations through which their world was organized. To see moral standards as personal and relative, on the other hand, widened the scope of individual autonomy and freedom in ways that denied and threatened to undermine lives that depended upon seeing family obligations as nondiscretionary – not as something individuals can choose or not choose, but as absolutes they have to accept.

Should We Just Give Up?

As I have discussed these ideas with my friends, surprisingly often they jump to the conclusion that I’m advocating surrender. “So what are saying? That they’re right? What do you want us to do, give up?”

Not at all. But I am saying that we have to drop our self-image as nice guys. The mere fact that people think I’m advocating surrender demonstrates just how attached we are to that image. It’s comforting to think that we only want what’s best for everybody, and that the only reason people oppose us is because they’re stupid. But it’s not true.

Liberals have a vision of how the world should be. I believe in that vision. It is a fairer, more just world than has ever existed before. It is better adjusted to the realities of modern life. And it is, in my opinion, the only vision of the future that does not eventually lead to competing fundamentalisms fighting a world war.

But no matter how peaceful and good our vision is, eggs will be broken to make our omelet. Eggs have already been broken. We need to take responsibility for that. And we can’t expect people with cartons of half-broken eggs to simply shrug and let us do our thing.

The Shadow Frame

Because we don’t admit that people have reasons to be afraid of us, we end up scaring them unnecessarily. We communicate badly with the Christian Right, and just as our incomprehension of them leads to paranoia, so does their incomprehension of us.

Republican propagandists take advantage of that misunderstanding by projecting a shadow frame onto us. Their demonic liberal is a person with no moral depth or seriousness. Convenience is his only true value. Words that we revere, such as freedom and choice, rebound against us: We like these words because we want to be free of our obligations and choose the easy way out.

Just as married people sometimes imagine the single life as far more licentious and libidinous than it ever actually is, so people born into life-defining obligations imagine a life free from such obligations. The truth about liberals – that we more often than not choose to commit ourselves to marriage, children, church, and most of the other things conservatives feel obligated to, and that we stick by those commitments every bit as faithfully, if not more so – easily gets lost.

The virtue of the Negotiated Commitment model is that it is flexible and efficient. The negative framing of those qualities is slippery and slick. Democrats cooperate with their own demonization when they talk about “moving to the center.” Such tactical moves emphasize our slipperiness: We feel free to re-choose our positions whenever they become inconvenient to our quest for power.

This explains why Democrats never seem to get to the center, no matter how far they move. Swing voters aren’t waiting for us to say something different, they just doubt that we mean what we say. The more we change our message to court them, the more our slickness turns them off.

Framing Liberal Positions

The most important fact that conservatives don’t know about liberals is this: We believe that a life without commitments is superficial and empty. Unlike the demonic liberals you hear about on Fox News, real liberals are morally serious people who are not looking to take the easy way out when there are greater issues at stake.

Consider, for example, liberal parents. The Negotiated Commitment model offers them very little in exchange for the effort and expense that they put into parenting. They don’t have to do it, and they can’t demand that children reciprocate after they grow up. Most liberal parents understand the situation. But they volunteer to raise children anyway. Liberals join the Peace Corps, work in soup kitchens, and stand together with unpopular oppressed peoples rather than walking away from. Why? Because liberals are serious, committed people.

Our rhetoric needs to capture the seriousness of our beliefs and commitments. We should, for example, miss no opportunity to use words like commitment and principle. Our principles should be stated clearly and we should return to them often, rather than moving towards a nebulous center whenever we are afraid of losing.

John Kerry didn’t lose because he was a liberal. He lost because people couldn’t figure out what he was. They couldn’t recite his principles or predict where he would come down on future issues. Republican slanders stuck to him because he projected no clear image of his own.

There is a lot to promote about liberalism and the Negotiated Commitment model behind it. We take people as they are, rather than demanding that they fit themselves into an increasingly outdated set of roles. We face problems directly, rather than making people jump through hoops that may or may not be relevant. And so, for example, we ask: “Who is going to feed the child, teach the child, protect the child, and love the child?” rather than “Who is going to be the father and who is going to be the mother?”

The Negotiated Commitment model is tolerant by its nature. It recognizes the freedom of other people to negotiate their own commitments differently than we negotiate ours. In a country whose citizens have so many different backgrounds, and a world with so many cultures – each with its own notion of inherited obligations – such tolerance is a necessity.

We are committed to maintaining and extending the social safety net. We are committed to giving everyone an opportunity to succeed. We are committed to finding common ground with other countries and building a global consensus that works.

And, in spite of the cultural values that currently divide us from the working-class families of Kansas and Shawmut River and thousands of other communities around the nation, we remain allied with their economic interests. For some people that will never be enough, and we will never get their votes.

But many, given an accurate view of liberals and the values that motivate us, may come to see that we are not so scary, and that their differences with us can be bridged. And as the plutocratic agenda of the Right lets jobs continue to be lost, wages continue to stagnate, and the gap between rich and poor stretch ever wider, they may recall that the New Deal was not such a bad idea after all.