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Poverty all too often means that parents who have to hold down multiple jobs cannot properly raise their children—not reading to them, not raising them to respect education, not being able to get them out of unhealthy environments. Poverty means children going to school hungry in the morning and not able to concentrate on classes.
Poverty is a freedom issue. It is obvious. People who are poor have a lot less freedom than people who are rich.
Equality and freedom are not separate issues. Discrimination is a denial of freedom.
Conservatives like to speak of wealthy company owners and investors as “job creators,” that they “give” people jobs, as if they just create jobs as gifts for people who are out of work. That is nonsense. The truth is that workers are profit creators, and that no one gets hired unless they contribute to the profit of owners and investors.
Unfortunately, framing enters in here. Pensions and health care are called “benefits,” as if they are generous gifts to employees. They are not gifts. They are earned as deferred payments for work done.
What he discovered was that, up until 1913, most wealth was reinvestment wealth. Even during the period of the industrial revolution, which is usually thought of in terms of productive wealth,
in France, a capitalist democracy concerned with égalité, in 1910, 70 percent of the wealth was reinvestment wealth, held by the very wealthy—not productive wealth, distributed over most of the population.
Between 1913 and 1980, most of modern economic theory was developed, whether liberal or conservative. It was primarily based on productive wealth, on GDP—on
Then in 1980, something changed—during the Reagan era in America. Reagan greatly cut taxes on the wealthy, started a major attack on unions and thereby on the wages of ordinary workers, cut regulations on business, and so on.
Being exponential, reinvestment wealth grew exponentially—like compound interest. In the United States, in 1976 the top 1 percent had 19.9 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 1 percent had 35.4 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 5 percent had 63 percent of the wealth; and the top 20 percent had 88.9 percent of the wealth. That left the bottom 80 percent with 11.1 percent of the wealth.
Greater wealth leads to many things, including: • Greater political leverage. Wealthy people and corporations have great lobbying power with public officials, and it is getting greater all the time. • Greater control over public discourse. Wealthy people and corporations can control public discourse in many ways—by owning media outlets, sponsoring shows, massive advertising, and so on.
The point of a classic liberal education was manyfold: to develop one’s mind and critical faculties in general, to teach about the world so as to open a world of possibilities in life, to provide skills for learning whatever one needs to learn, and to create citizens who contribute to a democratic society.
Economic growth means population growth, growth in the use of resources, growth in global warming, growth in weather disasters, and growth in the diminishment of the natural world. Over fifty years, even 2 percent growth is huge!
The Constitution applies only to human beings.
The Corporations Are Persons metaphor has so great a political impact that it is worth some discussion here.
Roman law recognized certain business and religious groups as institutions with the properties of human beings: goals, resources, functions, responsibilities, and privileges.
Before 1819, the commonplace conceptual metaphor that Institutions Are Persons began to be applied to corporations and was limited to such matters as goals, finances, responsibilities, privileges, and so on. But there is a difference between this very common and limited view of corporate personhood and a view that gave corporations constitutional rights!
This is a new, and very different, metaphorical extension of Corporations Are Persons to First Amendment rights and it opens the floodgates to a huge range of claims to be exempt from provisions of the law on grounds of religious principle as self-defined. In short, it puts corporations above the law. It is a step toward legalizing government by corporations.
another truth unframed in public discourse. • Corporations govern our lives.
even when you have to spend your time searching a company website or waiting on the phone to talk to a customer service representative, costs are being externalized: Your time is being spent while the company profits by hiring too few people in customer service. Various forms of “self-service” at gas stations, supermarkets, and big box stores are made to sound like conveniences for you, but they are really ways of making you work for the company for free.
Conservatives these days repeat the word homosexual, which contains the word sex and the slur homo.
Because marriage is central to family life, it has a political dimension.
The strict father is moral authority and master of the household, dominating the mother and children and imposing needed discipline. Contemporary conservative politics turns these family values into political values: hierarchical authority, individual discipline, military might. Marriage in the strict father family must be heterosexual marriage: The father is manly, strong, decisive, dominating—a role model for sons, and for daughters a model of a man to look up to. The nurturant parent model has two equal parents, whose job is to nurture their children and teach their children to nurture
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We all have to put our ideas out there so that political candidates can readily refer to them.
In conservative, strict father morality (see Moral Politics, chapter 5), evil is a palpable thing, a force in the world. To stand up to evil you have to be morally strong. If you’re weak, you let evil triumph, so that weakness in itself is a form of evil, as is promoting weakness.
It was another lesson in systemic causation. Foreign policy and domestic policy are inextricably linked. Guns made for war will be sold at gun shows and used to kill children. Drones and computer technology developed for the surveillance of enemies abroad will be used for surveillance of civilians at home. And money spent on war abroad will be drained from public resources at home.
What liberals don’t see is that the diversity can give conservatism as a whole considerable strength. Different versions of conservatisms are defined by particular domains of interest.
Free markets are moral: If everyone pursues his own profit, the profit of all will be maximized. Competition is good; it produces optimal use of resources and disciplined people, and hence serves morality. Regulation is bad; it gets in the way of the free pursuit of profit. Wealthy people serve society by investing and giving jobs to poorer people. Such a division of wealth ultimately serves the public good, which is to reward the disciplined and let the undisciplined be forced to learn discipline or struggle. Government. Social programs are immoral. By giving people things they haven’t
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Because immoral, undisciplined children can lead moral, disciplined children astray, parents should be able to choose to which schools they send their children. Government funding should be taken from public schools and given to parents in the form of vouchers.
Conservative political and intellectual leaders faced a challenge in carrying out their goals. They represented an economic and political elite, but they were seeking the votes of middle- and lower-class working people. They needed, therefore, to identify conservative ideas as populist and liberal or progressive ideas as elitist—even though the reverse was true.
strict father morality gave them an important advantage: It suggests that the wealthy have earned their wealth, that they are good people who deserve it—and that those who govern, both in the public and private sphere, should maintain the right moral order in society.
Ask your aunt or grandfather what they are most proud of that helped other people. Those of my students who have done this report that, to their surprise, their grandfather or other relative did a number of good things to help others and show some important social concerns.
Be sure to show respect to the conservatives you are responding to. No one will listen to you if you don’t accord them respect. Listen to them. You may disagree strongly with everything that is being said, but you should know what is being said.
Avoid a shouting match. Remember that the radical right requires a culture war, and shouting is the discourse form of that culture war. Civil discourse is the discourse form of nurturant morality.
Be calm. Calmness is a sign that you know what you are talking about.
Avoid the language of weakness—for example, rising intonations on statements.
Once your frame is accepted into the discourse, everything you say is just common sense. Why? Because that’s what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame.
Suppose he starts touting smaller government. Point out that conservatives don’t really want smaller government. They don’t want to eliminate the military, or the FBI, or the Treasury and Commerce Departments, or the nine-tenths of the courts that support corporate law. That is big government that they like. What they really want to do away with is social programs—programs that invest in people, that help people to help themselves.
