Mourning in America

I’ve been a baby long enough. I’ve had the graphics on the site black for long enough. It’s time to stop complaining, stop feeling sorry for myself (or, for that matter, for the US), and start up back in from the position of opposition, a position I’ve only had to be in for the past four years—though it seems like so much longer.

I still, of course, hate the President and hate his smirking jokes (like how he now asserts that he has the “will of the people” supporting him and, hence, won’t answer more than one question from a reporter), but that hatred gets me nowhere. It gets us nowhere. In fact, it hurts—since it marginalises me from a US that is now trying to convince itself that it elected George Bush by a huge majority.

It didn’t. It most certainly did not.

Bush’s victory was, perhaps, not razor thin, but thin enough, especially considering that he was an incumbent (how the incumbent rule—and, by extension, polling—failed us all is a question that needs to be considered). Compare his victory to Clinton’s in ‘96, or, perhaps more instructively, to Reagan’s in ‘84. It’s not for nothing that Pat Buchanan was on television this week lamenting the end of the conservative era. For him, the conservatives peaked with Reagan, when the whole nation was sweeping him into power. Now, when we fear that conservatives are even stronger, they can barely get together a majority, and still need to rely on underhanded efforts (the historic fag-hating get out the vote drive) and a completely misled electorate to pull it off.

In the aftermath of this election, I’ve been forwarded a lot of polarising urls. I’ve seen how states with high average IQs all (and I mean all) went for Kerry, whereas states with low IQs all went for Bush. Anyone who reads this page, I hope, is smart enough to see the myriad problems with a page like that. Furthermore, the Blogging of the President assembled a bunch of “interesting” (by which I mean not necessarily informative) maps. Most of them continue to give the impression, via their red/blue totality that there is some sort of massive divisiveness in this country. That could be. But, as the purple America map shows, it’s still the US as a whole that can’t decide one way or another for certain. As the speeches during the DNC suggested, we’re a united nation, and we need to imagine ourselves as such, not as two massive warring factions, separated by IQ, or living conditions, or wealth, or economics.

That said, Thomas Friedman’s assertion that this was the first election in his life where it seemed less like a vote between two forms of policy rather than like a vote for two definitions of America seems still, in some important ways, valid. For all Nader has said about how the Democrats and Republicans are the same party twice, if you buy Friedman’s thesis, then Nader must be totally wrong.

Luckily, there is a way of viewing the split without having to imagine secession or imagining that conservatives are idiots or assholes (though I maintain that the people running the GOP are, to a body, raging assholes; I’d put the number at about 60% for the people running the Democrats). The evangelical base is, of course, something to be increasingly worried about (especially its more Dominionist strains, eager to dismantle the temporal Constitution, forcing us, in one writer’s words, to refight the Enlightenment), but even raving evangelicals, or at least the type of people who say that “moral values” are what guide them to making their choice for president, even they, one out of five times, went for Kerry.

Tocqueville saw us as a very moral/moralistic nation back in the 1830s. This, in fact, surprised him. And it’s still sort of true, as we’ve all seen in statistics or Time cover stories about angels. What this means, then, is that political appeals, from both sides, need to be made in moral terms. The GOP, in the past 40 years, have turned this into an art. And the problem is that, in so doing, they get to smear the Democrats as somehow immoral, or, at least, amoral. That’s an absolute crime, of course, and the train pulling that action has built up a ton of inertia, with an entire complex of religious apparatus keeping that the case.

But it’s simply not true. Democrats are not immoral. They never have been. They’re not even amoral. Again, they never have been. The two most seriously religious presidents of my lifetime were both Democrats, and I’m starting to think that John Kerry is actually more spiritual and fundamentally religious than Bush, who though he says he speaks to God, can hardly ever be seen going to church or participating in the religious traditions of this country.

The problem is that the Democratic (and here I’m going to stop referring to this in party terms and start referring to it in conservative/progressive splits) version of morality is suppressed. Progressives have not made the case well that being in favor of keeping no gender-based restrictions on marriage is a moral case. They have not made the case that lawyers, taking on corporations in order to hold them morally accountable for the damages that their negligence or products cause, are doing a moral service. They have not made the case that taxes, as investments in our country’s (and children’s) future are morally good.

Most importantly, given recent conservative focuses, they have not made the case that guaranteeing pre- and post-natal health care to mothers and children is not only a moral issue but—get ready—more moral than arguing for the protection of fetuses.

Yet there it is, for anyone who wants to see it. The entire progressive program, even in its inconsistencies and sniping, comes from a moral background. I’m reminded of the scene in Reds where John Reed and Louise Bryant are being questioned by a congressional commission of some sort (I don’t remember it perfectly), and the congressman asks them if they believe in Jesus Christ. They respond that they believe in his teachings, but not in his being the son of god. Shaw picks this up also in Androcles and the Lion. And these days, we have organisations like the Sojourners, showing that neither side has a monopoly on the Christian values that, whether I like it or not, make up primary source for the values of the people in this nation.

Many of my fellow students who came up to Wisconsin on Election Day to work with me for ACT have, in their despondence, asked what to do now. How can we mount a successful opposition that can undo what is starting to seem like a conservative hegemony?

And that’s the first step: making certain that it does not enjoy the power of a hegemony. Bush proclaims that he has earned “political capital” (though perhaps it’s “earned” that should be in scare quotes there), and that now he intends to spend it on an agenda that is unchecked by reëection efforts. And he could succeed in this, if we let our guard down. We can argue until we’re blue in the face that Bush has no real mandate, but if he convinces America that he does (which he did in 2000), then it doesn’t matter, because he will have the mandate of hegemony.

Now the earlier discussion of morals comes back. Right before Election Day, I bought George Lakoff’s most recent book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. I’d been hearing a ton about Lakoff on dKos, but the presentations of his work were always very thin to me—they seemed to just say “well, Lakoff says we have to reframe the debate and stop calling the estate tax the death tax.” That’s obvious, of course.

Still, I figured Lakoff, as a (fellow) academic, would have something more interesting to say than what gets filtered down into dKos. And I’m sure he does in his book Moral Politics. In fact, I think a lot of this post is a demonstration of the conclusions Lakoff reaches in that book, arrived at semi-independently by myself. Still, that book is over 400 pages long, and Elephant can be read in one sitting. So the choice is clear.

Now, the book is a mess—it’s obviously hastily edited, and a lot of the chapters are simply reprints of AlerNet articles Lakoff has written. Furthermore, it’s often repetitive and, even worse, totally unrigorous. I cringe when I hear dKos posters refer to it as “wonderful.”

But it does have kernels of truth to it, and it explains in clear terms the underlying thesis Lakoff has been pushing since Moral Politics—that there are two different family metaphors available to an American, and whichever gets expressed more in our political allegiances determines how we vote. If we are swayed more by the strict-father model, we vote conservative or Republican. If it’s the nurturing parent that wins us over, we vote Democrat. If we’re self-important pricks with no morality, we vote for Nader.

The conservatives, through message discipline and internal consistency, have managed to create a hegemony of ideas (not of values), in which dissenting voices seem heretical or at least treasonous. This doesn’t have to be the case. If the progressives could adopt a similar llevel of discipline and consistency, then they could establish a frame with which to attack the conservatives.

What is the result? I’m not certain. Lakoff (now referred to as a “guru” among the Democrats in this good general article of introduction) seems to just hope that the progressive frame becomes the dominant frame. That is, obviously, my political goal, too, but it doesn’t seem as fair, from a democratic standpoint. But that’s not right, too, since we do want to get rid of the conservative frame. Part of me wants to imagine both frames at equal value—where all voters see Democrats and Republicans as all moral individuals, except with different priorities and expressions of that morality. Then I remember that I’m no longer six, and that the conservative moral basis also invites vice, in the form of greed or gluttony. The progressive moral basis cannot be reconstrued in similarly evil terms (though the conservatives would argue that it encourages sloth and pride).

So, no. I do want the conservative frame to get destroyed. It’s hateful and unworthy of the values in the Constitution. But I grant that the only way to beat it is by using its techniques to build a credible alternative.

Lakoff encourages, implicitly, support of his think tank throughout his book. He calls it the only progressive group currently working on reframing as a goal, as opposed to the general reactive technique used by the progressives up to this point. He may be technically right. But I see in our politicians a new thread that’s picking up Lakoff’s theories implicitly—I see it in Barack Obama, in Clinton’s DNC speech, even in John Edwards’s “Two Americas” speech. I even saw it in Kerry’s stumping and responses in the debates. The seed is sown, and now, if we’re looking for what to do to stop the Bush hegemony, it’s to tend to that growing progressive tree, until it’s ready to take all of America under its shade.