Building On The Progressive Victory

Building on the Progressive Victory
by George Lakoff

Lakoff has a real good one here.

He can be a bit of a pill sometime (a sleeping pill), but this one is a very interesting read.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1214-25.htm

....Like Shuler and Casey, swing voters are biconceptuals, with both conservative and progressive worldviews in different areas of life and with both available for politics. How did these biconceptual candidates appeal to biconceptual swing voters? By taking progressive positions, and campaigning vigorously on them. How did this work? They activated the progressive values in the brains of swing voters.

Why did it work? Because swing voters, being biconceptual, already had many progressive views. A large proportion of those identifying themselves with the word "independent" or even "conservative" happen to have progressive views in many issue areas: They love the land — as much as any environmentalist, even though they wouldn't use words like "biodiversity"; many are progressive Christians who take Christianity to be about helping the poor and serving the needy; many are civil-libertarians, though they would never join the "too liberal" ACLU; and most care about their families and empathize with people in dire straights. In short, these are self-identified "conservatives" and "independents" who have very real progressive values in important areas of life.

What is a progressive worldview? It's simple: You have empathy for others, and you act responsibly on that empathy, being both responsible for yourself and socially responsible as well. Progressives say, "We're all in this together" while conservatives say," You're on your own." It was running on those progressive values that won the election for the Democrats.

(snip)


What does this say about what the direction of the Democratic Party should be — and not be? It says that the Democratic Party should not be moving to the right on the positions its candidates ran on. Success as a party depends, instead, on having a clear moral vision and carrying it out. Right now, it is the progressive moral vision that has brought them electoral success and a mandate for change.

Does this mean that the Democratic Party, as a party, should endorse all progressive positions? That is something for the party to work out, and it will certainly answer no. But, the Democrats may well wind up advocating mostly progressive positions, though far from all of them.

(snip)

What's wrong with conservatism has to be shouted from the housetops. Bob Burnett has made a good start in a paper at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/killing-conservatism_b_35771.html