The governor says it's about money, but it's not. It's about breaking the union. What it's really about is the latest battle between two sides of the political spectrum who not only don't understand each other, they don't want to understand each other. There are other right-left/red-blue battles going on. The US House of Representatives, after signaling that they'd like to (but won't be able to) gut President Obama's health care reform legislation, is taking dead aim at what they see as classic incarnations of liberal waste - the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, etc. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Department of Education and other "wastes of taxpayers' money" will be up for the budget axe sometime soon.
Why is this happening? Why are teachers' unions being threatened with extinction? Why are public servants being treated like last week's pizza boxes? How did we come to this?
George Lakoff knows. He's a professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. In his book "Moral Politics - How Liberals and Conservatives Think," Professor Lakoff says, in essence, that liberals and conservatives hold two fundamentally different views, not just on how the country should work, but in fact on what it means to be an American.
To the liberal mind, America is about a neighborhood barn raising. You help me build my house, and I'll help you build yours. Ever watched "Extreme Makeover - Home Edition"? That's the ethic. Liberals subscribe to FDR's and JFK's philophies - Americans who have, have an obligation to assist those who don't have. It's in everyone's best interests to make sure that nobody is left suffering in the dust. Social Security was built on that concept. So was the Peace Corps and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A rising tide raises all boats. It's how we made it through the Great Depression. The federal government put people who were out of work, back to work. Through the CCC, the WPA and the rest of the alphabet soup initiatives, the United States was able to create an infrastructure that eventually prepared us to fight -- and win -- World War II. Labor unions are founded on the idea that everybody deserves a safe workplace, and the right to collective bargaining. The blue collar, middle class worker and his or her family is therefore protected. They get a fair shot at owning their own home and giving their kids a decent education.
I know this ethical framework first hand. Jews talk about social action. We call it "tikkun olam" - healing the world. That's an inherently liberal, blue-state concept. There's a reason Jewish Americans are so often Democrats.
Conservatives reject the entire premise I just described. To a conservative, it boils down to "I made this money by my own blood, sweat and tears, and I get to keep all of it, if I so choose. I earned it, it's mine. That's what built America." As Professor Lakoff put it in his recent HuffPo column,
Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don't think government should help its citizens. That is, they don't think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.Professor Lakoff then explains where the individual responsibility ethic comes from.
The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.I call that the Archie Bunker School of Philosophy. Archie didn't like unions.Governor Scott Walker is in the process of blatant union-busting. Protests in Wisconsin are focusing attention not just on budgets and unions, but how we address the problems we face. Busting a union and endangering the bedrock principle of collective bargaining won't do anything to solve budget shortfalls or heal a community in crisis. This is not a time for a decree from Archie Bunker. Today, what we need is a barn raising.
The only way that will take place is if people from Berkely to Madison to Manhattan begin to understand that communities benefit from treating each member as partners, not enemies.
Image credit: Wisconsin state house, tourism.state.wi.us
1 comments:
Interesting. So where does that put people like me who believe that we must help one another, but not through government or from the top down, but from the bottom up? Government is the least efficient and most rule driven actor. I believe that because of government individuals become less involved and concerned. Please don't start me on unions. Because of unions, I am paid identically to my co-workers, even though my productivity rates differ. These entities take away from personal responsibility to society - which allows an individuals to feel no remorse for activities that are anti-social. They've lost that social connection.
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