Read Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea Online
Authors: George Lakoff
To ideological conservatives, these are fundamental freedoms, and the threat or loss of them constitutes tyranny, a threat to America’s defining ideal—liberty—a threat so visceral it threatens their very identity and way of life. This threat is what fuels the culture wars and defines conservative populism.
What makes these conservative views of freedom? And what makes these freedoms to conservatives?
The answer is strict father morality, as contrasted with nurturant morality. Strict father morality says that every moral adult has incorporated the right values and the right discipline, which has earned him or her the freedom to be his or her own moral authority. The natural and moral mechanism for this freedom is, as I have explained, the unconstrained free market, in which the free pursuit of individual self-interest maximizes the self-interest of everyone and thus best serves the community and the country.
Conservative freedom is the ultimate in freedom to and freedom from for each person, individually. It maximizes individual initiative and individual responsibility. Strict morality contrasts with nurturant morality, which you’ll recall focuses on individual responsibility (taking care of yourself) and social responsibility (caring about and working actively for the freedom of others).
Each of the above forms of freedom fits strict morality and violates nurturant morality. The violations occur in the area of empathy, the responsibility to act on that empathy, the recognition
of systemic causation, and the social necessity to build a shared infrastructure that is necessary for the achievement of individual goals.
For example, many of the conservative freedoms—say, unlimited property rights or unconstrained business practices—can adversely affect other people, thus interfering with other people’s freedoms. Under nurturant morality, that interference with the freedom of others disqualifies the practice as a freedom; it need not under strict father morality, if the interference doesn’t count as interference under strict father morality, or if the causation involved is systemic, not direct.
Conservative populism is based on strict father morality, its role in personal and cultural identity, and the way it extends simple freedom to the conservative version of freedom. The conservative message machine has created conservative populism by branding liberalism as an oppressor and conservative values as patriotic. The result has been to forge a conservative populist identity, within a moral and cultural war of conservative liberty versus oppression by the liberal elite.
Just as conservatives are more aware of, and able to articulate, their moral values, so they are more aware of the freedoms implied by those values. Progressives are less aware of, and less able to articulate, their implicit (real and felt) moral values and so are less aware of the concept of freedom that implicitly follows from those values but is rarely explicitly discussed. Progressives have a sense that conservatives are in the process of taking their freedoms, but those freedoms must be articulated if they are to be preserved and expanded. Here are progressive freedoms that are now being threatened or have been lost:
The freedom to be told the truth by my government: freedom of open information.
The freedom to have my children taught the truth and taught about the diversity of values in our culture and other cultures.
The freedom to find a good job and make a decent living at it through work.
The freedom to use or dispose of my property so as not to interfere with the freedom of others, and the freedom from the harmful use or disposal of property by others.
Freedom from pollution by others.
Freedom from the threat of those possessing and able to use deadly weapons, except for those exercising legitimate police powers.
The freedom to connect with the physical environment and the living things in it, and to see both preserved so that my progeny and progeny of others can do so as well.
The freedom to explore our common natural heritage without harming it.
The freedom to enjoy the preservation of our waterways and oceans and the aquatic life therein.
The freedom to live in a country free from discrimination and committed to reversing the harmful effects of past discrimination.
The freedom to buy safe products—guaranteed through regulation.
The freedom to eat safe food—food that is pesticide free, hormone free, antibiotic free, free of genetically modified ingredients, healthy, and uncontaminated.
The freedom to speak freely without harming anyone by the use of degrading or hurtful language and without being so harmed.
The freedom to practice my religion, if I have one, privately, without imposing it on the public or using public resources to support or promulgate it, and without having any other person’s religion imposed on me.
The freedom to do business freely and ethically—with the public protected through both government regulation and the civil justice system.
The freedom to choose among the widest range of consumer products possible at the lowest possible prices produced by ethical businesses—businesses that avoid third-world sweatshops, child labor, detrimental working conditions, detrimental effects on small businesses, preserve old-growth forests, minimize pollution, do not impose monocultures.
The freedom to make use of the common infrastructure provided by the use of the common wealth for the common good—highways and other physical infrastructure, public schools, communication systems, public health systems, disaster relief systems, the banking system, the courts.
The freedom to live in a community where my family and I are as secure as possible and where everyone is treated fairly and humanely.
The freedom to a private life not only free from government interference but also where government actively protects privacy—of personal information, of communication, of personal and family medical decisions, of sex lives, of personal associations.
The freedom to live in a corruption-free political system minimally affected by concentrations of wealth.
The freedom to live in a balanced economic system where assets do not unduly accrue to the wealthy and where there is no transfer of wealth from the general populace to the wealthy.
The freedom of access to information through media minimally affected by concentrations of wealth and political power.
Freedom from corporations exercising governing powers over one’s private life with no accountability—HMOs making fateful decisions about permitted medical treatments, insurance companies determining whether you can be insured, auto companies deciding how much gas you will have to use, food companies deciding how healthy your foods will be, credit card companies deciding what you will pay to borrow money.
The freedom to live in a country and a community governed by the traditional progressive values of empathy and responsibility—where leaders care about people and act responsibly toward them and where citizens care about each other and act responsibly toward each other and toward their country and their community.
These freedoms are consistent with progressive values—traditional American values. They are the freedoms we ought to have. Some of them have been taken away. Some are being taken away. In other cases, America has made progress toward them and the progress has been, or is being, reversed. Still other freedoms are implicit in our values but as yet unrealized.
Some of these are discussed widely, such as freedom from discrimination, from the effects of wealth on elections, from government intrusions into privacy. But the generalization is rarely made: These are all progressive freedoms. They all come from the same source, the traditional progressive values of empathy and responsibility. These are the values that lie behind our Constitution and our principal founding documents. And it has been the expanding realization of the freedoms defined by these values that we are most proud of.
Moreover, these are the freedoms that should underlie a truly
progressive populism, not merely an economic populism. Populism is about identity—identity as an ordinary American, not just economic self-interest. One of the major components of identity is one’s value system: strict, nurturant, or biconceptual (strict in some areas, nurturant in others). Conservatives have swung a preponderance of biconceptuals to their side by repeating conservative values—including conservative ideas of freedom—over and over on issue after issue, while putting down progressive values. But biconceptuals have progressive values as well as conservative ones. Progressives can appeal to biconceptuals through communicating progressive values and progressive ideas of freedom—conveyed honestly, assertively, and repeatedly, while criticizing conservative values, either explicitly or implicitly.
The key to appealing to biconceptuals is understanding which nurturant values are identity defining. Here are some of the key forms of identity that embody nurturant values:
Identification with the land:
either through its beauty, a sense of place, the way one makes a living (farming, ranching), or recreation (hunting, fishing, hiking, camping). Protection of the land can be seen as protection of the self; a threat to the land can be seen as a threat to the self. Freedom is the freedom to continue enjoying or using the land.
Identification with one’s community:
Biconceptuals seem to prefer nurturant communities, with leaders who care about the citizens and are responsible to them, and where citizens care about each other and are responsible to each other and to the community as a whole. A threat to the community is a threat to the self; community improvement is self-improvement. Freedom is the freedom to live in and serve such a community.
Identification with one’s religion:
Most Christians are progressive
Christians, seeing God as a nurturant parent offering unconditional love, grace (metaphorical nurturance), understanding, forgiveness, and protection, and Christ as a model of caring about others and acting responsibly on that care (healing the sick, feeding the hungry, protecting the oppressed, uplifting the downtrodden, serving the poor). Freedom is freedom from the burden of sin, attained through good works (which earn restitution and forgiveness). Progressive Christians reject the idea of God as a punitive strict father, commanding obedience, demanding discipline, severely punishing, and threatening hell. Biconceptual Christians can be appealed to through their progressive side.
Identification with one’s family:
Many biconceptuals are nurturant parents in the home and identify with their role as parents. They may be strict only in some other aspects of life. Freedom is spending time with, and caring for, your family.
Identification with one’s job:
There are many biconceptuals whose jobs are inherently nurturant and who identify with those jobs: teachers, healers, caregivers, providers of social services, public advocates, and many, many more. Freedom is the ability to effectively help others.
Identification with one’s person:
It is common to identify primarily with your very body: with your physical security, your health, your looks, your concerns about aging. Many biconceptuals see this concern as addressed through living in a culture of care and mutual responsibility, rather than a culture where you’re on your own. In short, they identify with nurturant values when thinking of their bodies, though they may have strict values about other matters. Freedom is security and health.
Identification with one’s country:
At election time and in times of crisis, it is common to identify with one’s country and one’s vision of how it should be. For some, one’s identification as a patriot, as an American first and foremost, is one’s primary identification. Many biconceptuals see progressive values as those defining America—the values of tolerance, equality, unity, opportunity, human dignity, mutual responsibility, and care for all. Freedom is mutual responsibility.
Populism depends on these forms of identification and the kinds of everyday freedoms associated with them. A progressive populism will require progressives and biconceptuals in the poor and middle classes to overwhelmingly adopt these forms of identity. Identification with one’s own material well-being is secondary!
A progressive populism will also have to see ordinary Americans as progressives, and conservatives as a threatening elite—not merely wealthy and/or powerful, but as having values that represent a visceral threat to morality, identity, and patriotism: a threat to preserving the land, strengthening nurturant communities, living progressive religious values, supporting nurturant family life, making a living helping others and the community in general, finding security, identifying with one’s country, devoting oneself to traditional progressive values.
Correspondingly, conservative populism wins when it succeeds in framing ordinary Americans as oppressed by a liberal elite. It wins when it identifies conservatism with patriotism. And it wins when strict father values dominate personal and cultural identification with the land, community, religion, family, kind of work, one’s physical person, and one’s country—and when nurturant values threaten those forms of identity.
Conservative populism has been carefully constructed and groomed for nearly forty years. It has been grounded in a preexisting conservative cultural populism in the South, Midwest, and
West. It is social and cultural at its root, and has had conservative political populism placed on top of it. A progressive populism must start with preexisting progressive social and cultural nurturant forms of identity. They exist, both in progressives and in biconceptuals.
But because conservative populism is already in place, progressive populists face an extraordinary challenge. They must activate progressive populism and destroy conservative populism at the same time. This is not an easy job.