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Truthout...
Obama Returns to His
Moral Vision: Democrats Read Carefully!
by George Lakoff
Monday 18 April 2011
Last week, on April 13, 2011, President Obama gave all Democrats and
all progressives a remarkable gift. Most of them barely noticed. They
looked at the president’s speech as if it were only about budgetary
details. But the speech went well beyond the budget. It went to the
heart of progressive thought and the nature of American democracy and
it gave all progressives a model of how to think and talk about every
issue.
It was a landmark speech. It should be watched and read carefully and
repeatedly by every progressive who cares about our country - whether
Democratic officeholder, staffer, writer or campaign worker - and every
progressive blogger, activist and concerned citizen. The speech is a
work of art.
The policy topic happened to be the budget, but he called it “The
Country We Believe In” for a reason. The real topic was how the
progressive moral system defines the democratic ideals America was
founded on and how those ideals apply to specific issues. Obama’s moral
vision, which he applied to the budget, is more general: it applies to
every issue. And it can be applied everywhere by everyone who shares
that moral vision of American democracy.
Discussion in the media has centered on economics - on the president’s
budget policy compared with the Republican budget put forth by Paul
Ryan. But, as Robert Reich immediately pointed out, “Ten or twelve-year
budgets are baloney. It’s hard enough to forecast budgets a year or two
into the future.” The real economic issues are economic recovery and
the distribution of wealth. As I have observed, the Republican focus on
the deficit is really a strategy for weakening government and turning
the country conservative in every respect. The real issue is
existential: what is America at heart and what is America to be.
In 2008, candidate Obama laid out these moral principles as well as
anyone ever has and roused the nation in support. As president, as he
focused on pragmatics and policy, he let moral leadership lapse,
leaving the field of morality to radical conservatives, who exploited
their opposite moral views effectively enough to take over the House
and many state offices. For example, they effectively attacked the
president’s health care plan on two ideas taken from the right-wing
version of morality: freedom (“government takeover”) and life (“death
panels”). The attacks were successful even though Americans preferred
the president’s health care policies (no preconditions, universal
affordable coverage). The lesson: morality at the general level beats
out policy at the particular level. The reason: voters identify
themselves as moral beings, not policy wonks.
All politics is moral. Political leaders put forth proposals on the
assumption that their proposals are the right things to do, not the
wrong things to do. But progressives and radical conservatives have
very different ideas of right and wrong.
With his April 13, 2011, speech, the president is back with the basic,
straightforward idea of right and wrong that he correctly attributes to
the founding of the country - as UCLA historian Lynn Hunt has observed
in her important book “Inventing Human Rights.”
The basic idea is this: Democracy is based on empathy, that is, on
citizens caring about each other and acting on that care, taking
responsibility not just for themselves but for their families,
communities and their nation. The role of government is to carry out
this principle in two ways: protection and empowerment.
Obama quotes Lincoln: “to do together what we cannot do as well for
ourselves.” That is what he calls patriotism. He spotlights “the
American belief ... that each one of us deserves some basic measure of
security... that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard time
or bad luck, crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us.”
He cites the religious version of this moral vision: “There but for the
grace of God go I.” The greatness of America comes from carrying out
such moral commitments as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.
Analogous moral arguments can, and should, be given constantly for all
progressive policies at all levels of government on all issues: the
environment, education, health, family planning, organizing rights,
voting rights, immigration, and so on. It is only by repetition of the
across-the-board moral principles that the voting public gets to hear
how all these ideas fit together as realizations of the same basic
democratic principles.
Systems Thinking
President Obama, in the same speech, laid the groundwork for another
crucial national discussion: systems thinking, which has shown up in
public discourse mainly in the form of “systemic risk” of the sort that
led to the global economic meltdown. The president brought up systems
thinking implicitly, at the center of his budget proposal. He observed
repeatedly that budget deficits and “spending” do not occur in
isolation. The choice of what to cut and what to keep is a matter of
factors external to the budget per se. Long-term prosperity, economic
recovery and job creation, he argued, depend on maintaining
“investments” - investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges,
long-distance rail), education, scientific research, renewable energy,
and so on. The maintenance of American values, he argued, is outside of
the budget in itself, but is at the heart of the argument about what to
cut. The fact is that the rich have gotten rich because of the
government - direct corporate subsidies, access to publicly-owned
resources, access to government research, favorable trade agreements,
roads and other means of transportation, education that provides
educated workers, tax loopholes and innumerable government resources
taken advantage of by the rich, but paid for by all of us. What is
called a “tax break” for the rich is actually a redistribution of
wealth from the poor and middle class, whose incomes have gone down to
those who have considerably more money than they need, money they have
made because of tax investments by the rest of America.
The president provided a beautiful example of systems thinking. Under
the Republican budget plan, the president would get a $200,000 a year
tax break, which would be paid for by cutting programs for seniors,
with the result that 33 seniors would be paying $6,000 more a year for
health care to pay for his tax break. To see this, you have to look
outside of the federal budget to the economic system at large, in which
you can see what budget cuts will be balanced by increases in costs to
others. A cut here in the budget is balanced by an increase outside the
federal budget for real human beings.
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What Is a “System?”
Systems have the following properties:
Homeostasis: Stable systems are self-correcting or are correctable;
they have indicators that have to stay within a certain range for the
system to be stable. In an economy, there are indicators like
unemployment, GDP, and so on. In global ecology, the temperature of the
earth is a major indicator.
Feedback: Feedback can be controllable or uncontrollable. In our
economy, the Federal Reserve uses indicators as feedback in an attempt
to control certain aspects of the economy, using interest rates and the
money supply. In the global environment, the global ice caps are an
uncontrollable feedback mechanism. They reflect sunlight and heat,
which has a cooling effect. As the earth gets warmer, they melt and get
smaller, which lowers their ability to reflect and to cool, which makes
the earth get warmer, which melts them more, which heats the earth more
and on and on.
Non-Local and Network Effects: Global warming in the Pacific increases
ocean evaporation. Winds blow the additional water vapor toward the
northeast, pushing cold arctic air down over the East coast of the US
and the excess water vapor falls as a huge snowstorm. Warming in the
Pacific can produce huge snowstorms on the East Coast of the US via
such non-local effects.
Nonlinear Effects: A small cause can produce a large effect. A few
percentage points lowered in the tax rates of the wealthiest percent or
two of Americans can produce a trillion dollars of debt over the whole
country over a decade.
When a system has causal effects, as in the above cases, we speak of
“systemic causation.” “Systemic risks” are the risks created when there
is systemic causation. Systemic causation contrasts with direct
causation, as when, say, someone lifts something, or throws something
or shoots someone.
Linguists have discovered that every language studied has direct
causation in its grammar, but no language has systemic causation in its
grammar. Systemic causation is a harder concept and has to be learned
either through socialization or education.
Progressives tend to think more readily in terms of systems than
conservatives. We see this in the answers to a question like, “What
causes crime?” Progressives tend to give answers like economic
hardship, or lack of education, or crime-ridden neighborhoods.
Conservatives tend more to give an answer like “bad people - lock ‘em
up, punish ‘em.” This is a consequence of a lifetime of thinking in
terms of social connection (for progressives) and individual
responsibility (for conservatives). Thus, conservatives did not see the
president’s plan, which relied on systemic causation, as a plan at all
for directly addressing the deficit.
Differences in systemic thinking between progressives and conservatives
can be seen in issues like global warming and financial reform.
Conservatives have not recognized human causes of global warming,
partly because they are systemic, not direct. When a huge snowstorm
occurred in Washington, DC, recently, many conservatives saw it as
disproving the existence of global warming - “How could warming cause
snow?” Similarly, conservatives, thinking in terms of individual
responsibility and direct causation, blamed homeowners for foreclosures
on their homes, while progressives looked to systemic explanations,
seeking reform in the financial system.
A Golden Opportunity
It is rare that a presidential speech provides such opportunities for
Democrats, whether in office or not. The president has made overt the
moral system that lies behind every progressive position on every
issue. He has done it with near perfection. He went on offense, not
defense. He didn’t use conservative language tied to conservative
ideas. He correctly tied his moral vision to the American moral vision
and the very idea of American democracy - and patriotism. He used
systems thinking throughout. He tied every part of his budget proposal
to the American moral vision. And he showed clearly how the Republican
budget rejected those American moral ideals in every case. It was not
merely high political art. It is a model to be studied and followed.
There is one big problem with the speech that he apparently felt he
could not avoid: He stayed within Republican issue framing, keeping to
the Republican’s definition of the issue as the deficit and the budget
- even while the main features of the talk were his moral vision and
systems thinking. The media and the politicos have mostly not been able
to get beyond issue thinking, that the speech was about the deficit and
the budget, missing the larger themes. And the president, since the
speech, hasn’t pressed the political public on those major themes. He
needs help. He needs progressives to start talking publicly about that
moral vision and about the importance of systems in our lives and in
our politics.
Finally, Democrats need to understand why expressing their moral views
is so vital. The crucial voters in recent elections have been
misleadingly called “independents,” “moderates” and “the center.” In
reality, they are what I will call the “duals” - people who are
conservative on some issues and progressive on others, in all kinds of
combinations. They have both moral systems in the neural networks of
their brains, but applied to different issues. When one moral network
is activated, the other is inhibited - shut down. The more one moral
network is active, the stronger it gets and the weaker the other gets.
In 2008, the Obama campaign activated and strengthened the network for
the progressive moral system - and won over the duals. In 2010, the
Democrats stopped talking morality and kept on talking policy, ceding
morality to the conservatives, especially the Tea Party radical
conservatives. In doing this, they ceded the election. Policy without
an understandable moral basis loses.
Democrats need to both activate their base and activate the progressive
moral vision dormant in the duals among the voters. They can only do
this with an overt appeal to the progressive moral vision inherent in
our democracy. It’s time for the Democrats to shout their patriotism
out loud.
Details and Vision
Many progressives are skeptical about the president’s ability - or even
his desire - to live up to his moral vision. For example, the
Progressive Caucus in the House has produced its own People’s Budget,
put forth as an alternative to both the president’s and the
Republicans’. But the People’s Budget is an instance of the same moral
vision articulated by the president. In short, progressives should look
at this speech separating out the necessary budget details from the
moral vision they all need to be expressing on every issue.
In addition, all progressives need to start thinking and talking in
terms of systems. The nature of systems is central to understanding
what is going wrong in ecosystems, financial systems, social systems,
educational systems and even in particular systemic enterprises like
deep-water drilling, fracking, nuclear energy, food production, and so
on.
I would like finally to thank President Obama for bringing these issues
to the fore.
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