Rethinking Progressive Values
Bernie Horn
Senior Director, Policy & Communications
Why do we progressives wince at the word "values?"
Because it has become a club, fashioned by the right wing to bludgeon our candidates. It has become a codeword to attack our morality.
It's a war of words, and conservatives come armed with a powerful linguistic frame. How can progressives fight back? How do we reframe the values debate?
First, we have to understand how the right wing has hijacked the word "values."
What does "values" mean?
Thanks to the right wing messaging machine, many Americans think the term "values" is synonymous with "moral values," defined as a specific religious code of personal conduct. It's an attempt to convince the public that conservatives have values and progressives do not.
But that's just spin.
Everybody makes value judgments constantly, and most values have nothing to do with morality. They simply distinguish "good" and "bad."
Values judge how fabrics feel, how flowers smell, how foods taste, how music sounds. Values measure the quality of an athletic performance, the enjoyment of a party, the success of a shopping trip, the profitability of a company. Courage is a value. Health is a value. Good business sense is a value. But none of these are moral values.
In the realm of public policy, is an efficient government program any more moral than an inefficient one? A well-designed playground? A convenient licensing office? We certainly want government officials to uphold the values of honesty and integrity, but that would be true whether they administered conservative or progressive public policies.
So how do conservatives equate moral values with opposing public health coverage, favoring lower taxes, or blocking the exercise of free speech? And how do they get away with ignoring the most basic Judeo-Christian value—love thy neighbor—while defending the morality of discrimination?
Conservatives confuse public and private values
This is the message framing trick: the right wing's "moral values" refer to private, not public policy values.
"Private values" signify commonly accepted measurements of a good person. They include loyalty, piety, generosity, courtesy, bravery, respectfulness and patriotism.
The term "public values" means commonly-accepted measurements of good public policy. Substantive public values include fairness, justice, equality, freedom, opportunity and security. There are also procedural public values, like efficiency and transparency, which measure the administration of government whether the substantive policy is progressive or conservative.
Significantly, the private value most commonly misused by conservatives is "personal responsibility." Unemployment, hunger, discrimination are all the individual's problem, they say. They're not a societal problem. In other words, conservatives twist the language of responsibility to shirk responsibility. It's downright Orwellian.
But conservatives don't even have to say the words "personal responsibility." They just use the framework of personal responsibility to present their messages. Studies consistently show that when news stories involving social issues are framed to focus on individuals' misfortunes, the public tends to place responsibility on the individual. When similar stories are framed to focus on the conditions and policies that cause individuals' misfortunes, the public tends to hold government policies responsible. (See Bales and Gilliam, "Communications for Social Good," 2004.) For the same reason, trumpeting private values suggests individual responsibility, the conservative position. Using public values suggests societal responsibility, the progressive argument.
So how do we construct a language of progressive public values? It's easy, because progressive values reflect historic American values.
Historic American values
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." These famous lines from the Declaration of Independence are the greatest values statement in U.S. political history. It proclaims public values—measurements of the quality of governments, not individuals.
Here is where we begin to formulate progressive values, by translating the three tenets "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" into contemporary language.
By "Life," Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration did not mean simply the right to survival, which would suggest that being beaten almost to death is okay. They meant a right to personal security.
By "Liberty," Jefferson was referring to the kinds of freedoms that were ultimately written into all federal and state Bills of Rights, blocking the government from infringing upon speech, religion, the press, and trial by jury, as well as protecting individuals from wrongful criminal prosecutions.
But how do we translate Jefferson's "pursuit of Happiness?" It cannot mean that everyone has the God-given right to do anything that makes them happy. To understand "pursuit of happiness," we must consider an earlier part of the same sentence: "all men are created equal." Jefferson is not saying we have an unlimited right to pursue happiness; he is saying that all of us have an equal right to pursue happiness. In today's language, we'd call it the right to equal opportunity.
Today's progressive values
Now let us restate the Declaration's historic values as contemporary values: we progressives are determined to (1) safeguard individual freedom, (2) guarantee equal opportunity for all, and (3) protect the security of all Americans.
Freedom describes situations where the government has no proper role, where it does not belong. Equal opportunity describes situations in which the proper role of government is to act as an honest referee between private interests. Security describes situations where the proper role of government is to act as a protector of the people.
Let us consider, in turn, how to communicate each value.
Freedom—
Its roots in American history: For two centuries, America has been defined by its commitment to freedom.
Our position: We must fiercely guard our constitutional and human rights, and keep government out of our private lives.
Other words for freedom: Liberty, basic rights, choice (when it means a decision should be a personal choice rather than the government's choice).
Equal opportunity—
Its roots in American history: America's historic success has come by providing all citizens, not just a privileged few, with the opportunity for a better life.
Our position: We must vigorously oppose all forms of discrimination, create a society where hard work is rewarded, and ensure that all Americans have equal access to the American Dream.
Other words for equal opportunity: Fairness, justice, due process, fair share, level playing field, equal access to power in government.
Security—
Its roots in American history: Over the course of 200 years, America has embraced the idea that to make us truly secure, government must not only deal with domestic criminals and foreign military threats, but also protect our health and well being.
Our position: While forcefully continuing to protect lives and property, we must strengthen programs that insure the sick and vulnerable, safeguard the food we eat and products we use, and preserve our environment.
Other words for security: Health, safety, shared responsibility for the future.
When presented with this structure, some progressives note that the words freedom, equal opportunity and security sound awfully moderate to them. Exactly! These are values that resonate with the vast majority of Americans. The concept of framing is to build a bridge connecting progressives and undecided voters. When we use familiar public values to describe and defend progressive policies, average Americans understand that we're on their side.
Progressive values differ fundamentally from those of conservatives
The framework of freedom, equal opportunity and security succeeds because it uses values that are universally popular and suggest progressive solutions. In addition, these public values do not evoke progressive weaknesses, as many private values do. For example, compassion is an admirable private value, but when progressives use it in a policy debate, listeners think we're impractically soft-hearted. Conversely, compassion works for conservatives because their policies are expected to be somewhat callous.
Oh yes—conservatives claim to favor freedom, opportunity and security. But conservative actions do not match their words.
Economic conservatives seem to think "freedom" means free enterprise. But American markets are in no way "free" of the government; rather, they are fully dependent on the government. Our markets are based on a dense web of laws enforced by multiple layers of federal, state and local agencies. Even the dollar itself is a function of government. Businesses are not free to sell diseased meat, make insider stock trades, pollute our air and water, or discriminate on the basis of race, gender or ethnicity. Since markets determine economic interactions between private interests, a successful market is based on equal opportunity, not freedom.
Even more perversely, fundamentalist social conservatives argue that "freedom" gives them a right to use the power of government to impose their religious views on the rest of us. But that is the very opposite of freedom. Freedom is the absence of government intervention.
Similarly, today's conservatives oppose the concept of "equal opportunity." They are against ending many forms of discrimination, even though equal treatment is a precondition for equal opportunity. They don't even attempt to pursue equal opportunity in commerce; instead conservatives lobby for government favors, no-bid contracts, and economic development give-aways. And right-wingers seek to destroy anything that allows individuals to stand up to larger economic forces, with labor unions, consumer protections and anti-monopoly policies under constant attack.
As for "security," consider what conservatives are trying to do to Social Security. It is part of a cold-blooded plan to dismantle New Deal and Great Society programs that protect our health, our safety, and our environment. In every way, the right wing is making our country less secure.
In sum, our progressive values differ fundamentally from those of conservatives. While conservatives work to protect freedom, opportunity and security only for a select few, progressives work to extend these rights to all Americans. Now that's morality.
Put another way, we progressives support the historic American concept of checks and balances. When social and market forces do not naturally promote freedom, equal opportunity and security, we will work to achieve them through checks and balances supplied by our government. Or as James Madison put it in The Federalist, Number 51: "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part."
Progressives can and must win the battle of values
George Lakoff has done a superlative job writing and speaking out about the failures of progressive message framing. He has appropriately urged progressives to loudly proclaim our values to all Americans.
Yet, those familiar with his prescriptions for change will notice that this paper contradicts his "nurturant family" messaging solution. Lakoff's idea accepts the right wing's framing of public policy with private values, specifically a family model with the conservatives playing the role of "strict father." He argues that progressives should respond with our own family model, carefully couched in gender-neutral terms.
But Lakoff's recommendation violates his own basic principle of framing: "when you are arguing with the other side, do not use their language." Further, we must sadly accept that most Americans do not think in gender-neutral terms. If we adopt this strategy, the right wing would easily use gender stereotypes to assign progressives the "mommy" role, casting us as soft-hearted and weak. In a hard-fought political campaign, using the private values of a "nurturant family" frame simply would not work for progressives.
It's not that progressives should never use private values. The personal attributes of individual candidates for office are properly measured by such values.
But the point is that progressives gain the upper hand when we move the policy debate from private to public values because we're the only ones who favor freedom, equal opportunity and security for all.
This is a battle we can win.
We can assail the right wing's perversion of the language of values. We can declare our own values through a progressive linguistic framework. We can sway Americans to our side by showing that progressive, not conservative policies are grounded in "values."
For more information contact Policy Director Bernie Horn at 202-956-5135, email bhorn@cfpa.org, or visit www.stateaction.org.