It’s Virtue, Not Values That Shapes Politics

As politicians sharpen their message for the stretch run, but also as we think about creating political support around progressive issues in whatever circumstances result from these elections, and looking forward to 08, I’d like to suggest the beginning of a different way to approach those issues, and the electorate.

I suggest we look behind “issues” and particularly turn away from focusing on “values,” which we can only talk about as ambiguous abstractions. I suggest we look to what motivates people to vote on values issues, and on other issues as well.

I believe that people vote on the basis of what makes them feel virtuous. And the candidates that convince voters that voting for them is the expression of virtue will win. The “virtue” over “values” also explains why many people who voted Republican in recent elections are turning against the party this year. But it also could be a way to reorient and reposition progressive efforts in the future.

For years we’ve been obsessed with “values” issues and “values voters,” but we really haven’t gotten very far in understanding them. We’ve been baffled because people seemingly voted against their own economic interests, or were excessively swayed by personality and code words, etc.

At the same time we’ve had limited success in attaining shared clarity in re-framing and the obsessive search for the “elevator speech” that sums up the progressive vision in a few words.

Maybe we’ve been going about it the wrong way. Talking about values means using words like “freedom” that mean different things to different people, though everybody thinks the word means the same thing to everyone, as Lakoff suggests. Or it means arguing over concepts, which generally get more and more abstract, at least in language. Or we end up using our code words that others don’t understand in the same way.

“Values” are names for what we value—what we consider priorities. But why? When it comes down to the personal level, to a person acting—a person voting—isn’t it more useful to consider that what motivates people is what makes them feel virtuous?

It’s unlikely we’re going to convince people to exchange one set of values for another. We can work on changing how people feel about issues and actions by showing them how virtuous they will feel and will be by supporting them.

The right wing, and especially the religious right, has made a living on defining what’s virtuous. They’ve worked hard to simplify all the underlying feelings into one: voting for conservative Republicans is virtuous. Voting against them is not.

There are complex issues that this approach makes very simple—and of course oversimplifies. But let’s stay with this one idea for now: how did the Republican/Religious Right define voting for them as virtuous?

The Republicans have succeeded by using the potential of modern politics to oversimplify, and to infuse those oversimplifications with emotion.

“The new politics of democracy,” writes political scientist Alan Wolfe, “resembles a daytime television melodrama more than an academic seminar: attention is captured when conscience is tempted, courage displayed, determination rewarded, wills broken, egos checked, pride humbled, and virtue rewarded.”

The key is virtue. Despite the hackneyed debates over “values,” voters zero in on more specific demonstration of virtue. Another political scientist, Andrew Hacker, believes the 2004 election turned on the beliefs of the middle of the middle class that their sense of virtue was reflected in Bush-Cheney. These voters felt the war on terror and in Iraq was virtuous—it displayed courage in defense of country and family. They look down on people without sexual self-control, while they themselves “show singular virtue by not doing such things that will lead them to resort to abortion.”

Liberal commentator Jeff Cohen is convinced that for many Americans, “liberal” means “libertine.” The right has defined “liberal” to mean “anything goes.” That’s why they’re now trying to get traction with wild accusations about pornography, or about phantom links to a group advocating an end to restrictions on sexual predation of children.

People feel virtuous when they do the right thing, and in many areas of life that comes down to self-control. The extreme right has managed to convince many voters that liberals are for no self-control. They are for sexual promiscuousness regardless of the consequences, and that’s why they support abortion.

Self-control means obeying the rules, and the rule is that men and women get married, have children and are financially and morally responsible for their families. It doesn’t matter if you want to sleep around, or you want to have sex with someone of your own gender, or you want to bum around instead of working. You do your duty, what you are supposed to do, and that makes you feel virtuous.

There are ways to counter these positions by emphasizing other virtues. Tolerance and community are still virtues in America. In practice, gay couples raising otherwise unwanted children and supporting their community institutions often neutralizes opposition and destroys stereotypes. This is just one example.

But virtue doesn’t apply only to values issues. It operates in economic issues as well. We are trained in this country to believe that working hard is virtuous, and that hard work is inevitably reflected in financial success. So even if they are barely making ends meet, they will feel more virtuous than those who aren’t. They are virtuously providing for their families. And they may feel that people who don’t succeed—who are poor, homeless, can’t pay their medical bills—must not be virtuous enough.

This can be overcome, with the right leadership, especially under circumstances that hit everyone economically, like high gas prices. There is already wide support for a raise in the minimum wage.

Of course, such politically powerful oversimplifications run roughshod over realities. But voters are not going to be convinced by facts without the context of why facts and arguments support their ideas of virtue.

The extreme right Republicans used these oversimplifications, these either/or formulas to create a politics of virtue carried to the extreme. This politics of virtue says we are the virtuous, we are the good people, and those others are not virtuous; they are the evil-doers. It is a short step to believing that because we are the virtuous, everything we do is virtuous, and because they—terrorists, liberals, etc.—are evil, everything they do, think and feel is evil, and always will be.

Republicans have gotten pretty far by fostering this image. I believe it helps to explain why so many Bush voters believed that Bush held positions on issues directly opposite to his actual positions, or facts that supported his positions. It wasn’t simply that these supporters were ignorant of the facts, but that they assumed that the virtuous candidate would hold virtuous positions.

But now we are seeing what happens when people who claim the monopoly on virtue are exposed doing unvirtuous things that no one can ignore forever, like Republicans using their power to steal and cheat and lie, and now to prey on young people, and then cover it up for their own benefit.

This also explains why they need to use fear—fear of terrorism mainly, but also fear of libertine liberals, of weakness and untrustworthiness. Fear pushes everything into either/or extremes: fight or flight, us or them, good or evil. And situations of danger and threat are when virtue is most important.

But at the moment the Mark Foley affair together with increasing anger over lies and failures in Iraq (honesty and competence are virtuous), are removing the halo from Republicans. They are no longer the paragons of virtue.

For some voters that will still not be enough. They will curse all politicians and officeholders as corrupt and incompetent. And even if all Republicans are not virtuous, they need to be convinced why Democrats are. But this provides an opening. Democrats who begin thinking about issues in terms of virtue may find ways to change the political dialogue and the political landscape.

If Democrats do win Congress, they will have an opportunity to begin re-focusing the national dialogue. How they attempt this may be crucial. It won’t be enough in the long run to have benefited from the Republicans losing their halo of virtue.

Democrats will need to convince people that supporting a plan to end the Iraq war and deal realistically with terrorism, plus election reform, universal health care and perhaps the key to everything—an international mobilization to address the Climate Crisis and create new jobs and a new economy at home with clean energy technologies—are all virtuous. They will help them support their families, support their communities, and display the virtuous behavior that is at the core of their religious or ethical and patriotic selves.