Paul Krugman's column yesterday was, predictably, a significant cut above the common response to Obama's speech:
A Tale of Two Moralities
By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: January 13, 2011
On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to "expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together." Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.
But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let's listen to each other more carefully; but what we'll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn't really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it's about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.
So far, so good--and so far above the level of the rest of the commentariat. Unfortunately, though, Krugman still doesn't grasp the essence of the difference between the two moralities-the difference that George Lakoff so cogently comprehended in Moral Politics all the way back in 1996--the authoritarian "strict father" morality of conservatives vs. the humanitarian "nurturant parent" morality of liberals/progressives. More on that in a bit, but first let's note how Krugman's more limited sense of the difference-rooted in economics-plays out:
And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences - something that won't happen any time soon - but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
What are the differences I'm talking about?
One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state - a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society's winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net - morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It's only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That's what lies behind the modern right's fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There's no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
There are several things to note about Krugman's formulation, not the least of which is that his framing is far more favorable to the other side than it should be, as it needlessly grants the false premise that what people "earn" in a deeply politicized, far-from free-market economy is unproblematically "theirs", while those who earn far less, due to various power inequities, are unproblematically "less fortunate". This is, of course, quite typical of liberal vs. radical political views, but we're certainly justified in hoping for something more nuanced from a sophisticated economist like Krugman--who has become increasingly conscious of neo-liberalism's shortcomings and importance of getting basic moral perspectives right.
Krugman surely does not think that CEOs generally, or top Wall Street trader and executives have unproblematically "earned" their exorbitant compensation packages. Indeed he is critical of them partly because of their self-satisfied belief that they have, when it would be far more accurate to say they have captured said packages. Yet, his on-the-fly critical perspective has not yet filtered down into his bones.
A second problem is that this difference actually cuts much deeper--and leaves the conservative side without a real leg to stand on. The conservative side is frequently articulated in terms of a "libertarian tradition" descending from John Locke. But Locke's "social contract", and the argument it derives from, are directly antithetical to the libertarian view, which is actually more accurately represented by Ayn Rand's extremely anti-social ideology. Locke's argument was that (Randian) individual liberty in a "state of nature" is extremely insecure, and hence not a plausible basis for a way of life. The "social contract" comes into being as a way of securing basic liberties by subjecting less basic ones to the contractual process. This argument was primarily intended to shift the basis for legitimating state authority away from a top-down religious authority to a bottom-up secular authority. It was not intended to radically repudiate traditional notions of shared social responsibilities, as in fact it explicitly provides a justification for why they should be respected.
A third problem is that Krugman believes there is a seprable problem of "how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds." This leads back to Lakoff's more deeply systemic understanding of the moral differences involved. More on this below.
To continue with Krugman's piece:
This deep divide in American political morality - for that's what it amounts to - is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform - whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress - was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today's G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today's Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we're talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.
If we set aside my objections to Krugman's formulation for the moment, then this exactly so. Even as late as 1993, the congressional Republican majority accepted the basic logic of the welfare state. It was only during the debate over healthcare reform that Senate Republicans were convinced to shift from a position of supporting a Republican alternative--the Heritage Foundation model that later became the basis for RomneyCare and then ObamaCare--to a position of total opposition. And even today, the majority of conservatives in the population at large do not subscribe to this position when asked about support for Social Security, Medicare, etc. It is not just a recent divide, but one that is precariously maintained as well.
Krugman goes on to say:
In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion - a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.
Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it's acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it's not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.
This, however, is factually false. The anti-abortion side has repeatedly engaged in violence as well as encouragement and support for it. Bill O'Reilly's repeated demonization of Dr. George Tiller as "Tiller the baby-killer" is but the most prominent and outrageous example.
What's more, not only is factually false, but the politics of abortion and other "social issues" has been key to dividing America into two competing moral camps long before the GOP decided to come out frontally against the welfare state in the battle against healthcare reform during Clinton's first two years. Krugman's mis-perception of the rules surrounding the abortion debate reflects his deeper mis-perception about the broader nature of the moral divide. Hard-core anti-abortionists, on the premise that abortion is murder (a premise they don't logically follow up on in a consistent manner, but that does structure much of what they do and believe), do not believe that common ground is possible, or that there is a seprable problem of "how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds." If abortion is murder, then it's morally wrong to "to keep the expression of those differences within bounds." It's morally right to kill those on the other side. It's just as simple as that.
And this, of course, involves not just the rejection of the welfare state and the New Deal. It involves the rejection of John Locke, and the social contract, and the embrace of pre-modern theological politics, the Divine Right of Kings, and, if necessary, the bloody wars of Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition and all the rest of the bloody authoritarian agenda. That is the ultimate in "strict father" morality, and that is what we are up against today.
p.s. Teacherken also has an excellent diary on Krugman's diary at Dkos, here.
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