Both authors have contributed a piece of the explanation for our current political dilemma. Put them together in the right way, and we get a dramatically more comprehensive and simpler explanation for that dilemma than we now have.
Phillips, author of the recent books American Theocracy and Bad Money, knows political history, especially the political history of wealth, of religion, and of empires. Lakoff understands – or comes close to understanding, at least – the mind sets that underlie liberal and conservative ideologies. He explained this understanding in his 1996 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, and has applied it to our current politics both in his later writings and as a political adviser to the Democrats.
Phillips recently summarized our present national politics in a post at Alternet, excerpted from his new book. He argues the Republican and Democratic parties have disengaged from their traditional constituencies, and are thus "rootless." Rootless politicians stand for nothing in particular, put up whatever thin pretenses win votes, and sidestep pressing problems. Phillips is able to date the beginnings of this trend in America, which started some time in the 1960s or early 1970s. What’s more, he can point to historical precedents for the same phenomenon in other countries. (The outcomes were never pleasant.)
From Lakoff’s angle, liberals have been politically ineffective because they push their agenda via a "laundry list" of issues instead of promoting their underlying political mind set. The liberal laundry list has scarcely more traction now than it did at the height of then-President Reagan’s popularity, when polls showed that voters roundly disliked Reagan’s policies. Lakoff’s explanation for the ineffectiveness of the liberal approach is that ideology is driven by a broad (and mostly unconscious) moral vision, not a laundry list of issues. He aims to bring liberals’ moral vision to the front of their consciousness, and to educate them about how to get it across to voters more effectively.
But Lakoff has a weakness. Fortunately, it is Phillips’ strength. Lakoff’s explanation of the moral mind set that liberals and conservatives vote by is frozen in the present, lacking any apparent awareness of the historical evolution of American politics. And vice versa – Phillips is a virtuoso at uncovering political history, but his recounting of it is short on understanding the drivers of political evolution. If we can’t understand the reasons for the history Phillips has so carefully recounted, we will be doomed to repeat it. Conversely, if Lakoff’s psychological analysis can’t account for politics in the recent past, then its claim to explain it in the present is suspect.
Let’s correct those problems right now.
I’ll start with Lakoff. An example of his political history problem is the Religious Right. According to Lakoff, the same impetus that leads people to be politically conservative also leads them to interpret the Bible literally (if they are Christians). The problem with this explanation is that until recently Christian fundamentalism was a left-wing movement. A famous example was William Jennings Bryan, three-time liberal Democratic Presidential candidate and prosecuting attorney at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. What’s more, the timing of fundamentalism’s left-to-right switch coincides with Phillips’ tipping point towards political rootlessness. Lakoff can help us understand that coincidence, but we must first modify his theory to make it historically accurate.
Lakoff says that conservatism is an outgrowth of "Strict Father morality." According to Lakoff, conservatives hold up the Strict Father model of family structure not only for family relations but also as the moral framework for the social and political realms. Through a convoluted-as-hell chain of reasoning, he concludes Strict Father morality leads to Biblical literalism among Christians. I don’t feel too bad about not explaining it, since we just saw that historical evidence blows a hole through it anyway. I’ll dispense with it instead.
In setting aside Strict Father morality as an explanation for conservative religion (liberals have a parallel "Nurturant Parent morality" in Lakoff’s theory), we’ll also need a modified explanation of conservatives’ advocacy for business interests (and liberal advocacy for worker and consumer interests) since Lakoff ascribes those to Strict Father morality as well. Fortunately Lakoff gives a good alternative elsewhere in his book in the form of what he calls "Moral Order."
Lakoff introduces the concept of Moral Order to explain racism, sexism, and other status-based hierarchies. People at the top of a moral order deserve the most respect, while those at the bottom deserve the least. I prefer to call it "moral hierarchy" or "some-people-are-just-better-than-others." To show how moral hierarchy explains political ideology beyond just the "-isms" I’d like to add to Lakoff and Phillips one more voice, that of the late economist Robert Heilbroner. Heilbroner has as much to teach us about economic history as Phillips does about political history and Lakoff does about political psychology.
Heilbroner provides a crucial lesson on the origins of capitalism. Other societies divided up the spoils of the hunt or the harvest by family or other social ties, amount of work contributed, position of respect or authority, etc. Capitalism replaced these with the singular principle that all proceeds are the sole right of the owner of the equipment, land, and buildings – i.e., the capital – used for production. Previous conceptions of ownership had merely given owners exclusive use of what they owned; the new way expanded owner rights to include all productive output. Once encoded in law, this forced other participants in the production process, whatever their contribution, to have a contract with the owner to receive anything. Capitalism, for all its present practical benefits, started as a moral concept based on a new type of entitlement for owners (the practical benefits of capitalism weren’t even understood until Adam Smith, long after capitalism became entrenched). I’ll call it the Moral Superiority of Ownership. It’s largely invisible to us because we take it so for granted now; only Marxists completely reject the idea. But some Americans believe in it more wholeheartedly than others.
We’re now prepared to modify Lakoff’s theory. To understand political history, we need to add one more item to Lakoff’s list of moral hierarchies: The Moral Superiority of Ownership. Disagreement over this moral hierarchy accounts for the conflict over whether business owners are more deserving than workers and consumers, both today and historically going all the way back to the nation’s founding. It stands in direct parallel to Lakoff’s gender hierarchy, which produces a conflict over whether or not men are more deserving than women, race hierarchy, a conflict over whether whites are more deserving than non-whites, etc.
The explanation for political ideology now follows straightforwardly. Conservatives see the ownership-based economy as divvying wealth in the fairest possible way; reversing that through taxes and social programs (unless they benefit owners) is unfair. In the conservative mind, those social programs take from more deserving people and give to less deserving ones. Liberals, on the other hand, believe non-owners deserve to be compensated for the arbitrary, unfair entitlements given to capital owners. Moderates want varying degrees of limitation on the entitlements of ownership. Likewise, the race, gender, and other moral hierarchies each has its extremists, moderates, and non-believers that make up its own spectrum. Different combinations of beliefs lying at various points along each of these spectra give rise to the different varieties of liberals and conservatives. To see how this explains all the issues liberals and conservatives disagree over is too long-winded for now; for those interested, I give the details in this essay. At the moment I want to turn to explaining the recent political history Kevin Phillips has so well illuminated.
To wit: Why did American politics trend towards rootlessness after the 1960s? And why does that time also coincide with a switch among Christian fundamentalists from liberal to conservative?
The answer is rooted in the fact that prior to the social movements of the 1960s and 70s liberals and conservatives were distinguished almost entirely by their degree of belief in the moral superiority of ownership. Conservatives believed in ownership-based moral hierarchy, while liberals were relative egalitarians with respect to the owner-vs-worker/consumer hierarchy. Although race, gender, and other non-economic moral hierarchies were sometimes political issues before then, they didn’t divide people along liberal vs. conservative lines. The roots that grounded each political party were thus pretty simple.
But starting with the civil rights movement, liberals have extended their egalitarian moral logic to include the ideal of abolishing the race, gender, and other social hierarchies along with the ownership hierarchy, feeding the emergence of a New Left and a New Right since that time. On the conservative side, Ronald Reagan reacted to the New Left by expanding conservatives’ embrace of moral hierarchy from just ownership to include race, gender, and religion, melding a new conservative coalition. He did so with clever indirectness, by articulating a link between government regulation, welfare, and non-"traditional values." Reagan’s anti-regulation, anti-tax message had obvious appeal for traditional business advocates, who saw regulation and taxation as impinging on the rights of owners. But Reagan’s language also reached out to social-hierarchy advocates who saw regulation as interfering with states’ rights (the Feds imposed anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action, and obstructed state and local government establishment of religion) and taxes as funding poverty programs for undeserving people. In fact, those who subscribe to both the ownership and social hierarchies acquired their own moniker during Reagan’s tenure: "Neo-conservative."
One result is that American national politics has become more fractious over the last twenty-five years. When liberals and conservatives expanded their basic moral logic to larger spheres, it left fewer issues open to compromise.
Another is that fundamentalists switched from liberal to conservative. That’s because fundamentalism was an overwhelmingly Southern phenomenon. When the South answered Reagan’s call to conservatism in the wake of the civil rights and women’s movements, fundamentalism followed simply as part of the Southern landscape. The Religious Right is a coincidence of political history.
The third result is rootlessness. Back when voters based their allegiance primarily upon the ownership hierarchy, politicians could zero in on them easily. But now that the other moral hierarchies have gotten into the act, it’s much harder because voting behavior has become more fractionated. Rootlessness was further exacerbated by the opening given to corporate lobbyists when a huge segment of voters dropped their vigilance against the ownership hierarchy. Reagan made life look simple to conservatives for a while, but as two successive waves of congressional Republicans have found, that appearance was superficial.
Now that Phillips, Lakoff and Heilbroner have helped me to understand America’s political past and present, I’ll venture a guess about its future: The political potency of the race and gender hierarchies has been gradually weakening, eroding Reagan’s coalition. That coalition will eventually break, leaving fundamentalism again politically up for grabs. The recent growth of evangelical groups emphasizing environmental stewardship as a Biblical mandate may be early evidence of this. The passing of the Reagan coalition might also allow the working class to wake up to the fact that they got pounded economically by ignoring the ownership hierarchy. But I’ll be very surprised if they put the blame in the right place. I wish you luck, America.