The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (8 page)

These changes were propelled by empathy, by identification with the problems and plights of ordinary people, feeling what the characters felt, seeing such plight around them, and propelling legal and governmental change. By 1776, human rights became “self-evident” via the development of empathy for one’s fellow citizens. Such empathy formed the basis for a union of states, and American democracy.

Historian Danielle Allen, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, has taken the study of the Declaration of Independence one important step further in
Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
. It’s a thorough reading of the declaration, though the central passage again is the classic one on self-evident truths. But Allen, going through the original copies, argues that the period at the end of that passage was not there in the original document: It was inserted later. Her case is backed up by the grammar of what follows. Here is the passage as a whole, with the original punctuation:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Allen argues that, with the period, the self-evident truths end with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, what I’ve described above as coming from the well-being system, but lacking the idea of citizens establishing and working through a government on the basis of empathy for the well-being of all. The passage ending with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is about freedom, but what follows is about equality, with the central role of the government to secure it.

The grammar—the succession of
that
clauses and the plural (“to effect their safety and happiness”)—shows that the passage goes beyond the pursuit of happiness to the role of government in guaranteeing equality in the unalienable rights.

Allen is right that this is a big deal. Her point is not just about a period. It is about our political division. As I describe in my book
Whose Freedom?
, progressives and conservatives have very different views of freedom. Conservatives talk about their version of freedom, which does not include either equality or the role of government in securing it. They also attribute their view to the Founding Fathers. And though conservatives seek radical change, they use the term “conservative” as if it conserved the values of the founding of our nation.

At issue is what freedom is supposed to mean, what democracy is supposed to mean, and what personhood is supposed to be.

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The Private Depends on the Public

F
rom the beginning, America provided public education, public hospitals, public roads and bridges, an army to protect the union, a legislature to make laws regulating and maintaining the union, an executive to carry out those laws, a justice system to enforce those laws, a national bank, a patent office, means to promote interstate commerce, and above all, a system for the public to choose those who govern us. Without such public resources there could have been no satisfactory private life and no functioning business community in America—and no democracy!

This tells us something deep and crucial about American democracy, and Western democracy in general. American democracy has grown out of the idea of a union—a coming together of citizens who care about each other and therefore care about their nation as a whole. America has worked as a democracy because enough Americans have taken responsibility for each other—that is, for the nation—using their government to provide public resources for all, enough and of the right kind to provide decent private lives for most of our citizens.

Understanding this requires noticing and appreciating those public resources, appreciating the civil servants who provide them, and understanding that we as citizens take on the responsibility, both through paying for them and providing political support.

It is even more true today that the private depends on the public. We, as citizens working though our government, have provided much more—an electric grid, public universities, an interstate highway system, publicly funded scientific research that has resulted in the field of computer science and all computer technology, satellite communications that make telecommunications and the Internet possible, modern medicine, airports and an air traffic control system, pilot training through the air force, a center for disease control and a food and drug administration, an environmental protection agency, a national park and national monument system, a public resource management system, a civil service to replace the corrupt old spoils system, and on and on. And perhaps the greatest public resource of all is a public system for managing and guaranteeing the functioning of all of these public resources: a government—a system of governing—up to these tasks.

Without all of this, the blessings of modern American private life and private enterprise would not be here. The private depends on the public. Public resources make private life possible.

It doesn’t take much to see this. The evidence is all around us every day. There used to be signs on public projects: “Your tax money at work!” But such signs appear no more and the most basic truth of our democracy goes largely unspoken. Why?

Progressives take it for granted, as part of their moral and practical assumptions, like breathing or noting that the sky is blue. This is an important fact about how brains work. Some ideas and some knowledge are so deep that they rarely if ever even come to consciousness. Nobody goes around saying things like, “People breathe,” or “You have a nose.”

But for conservatives, the very idea that the private depends on the public is anathema—immoral. Conservatives have a different view of responsibility. Whereas progressives believe centrally in empathy (caring about their fellow citizens), both personal and social responsibility, and a commitment toward doing their best toward those ends, conservatives believe only in personal responsibility.

This yields a completely different view of democracy, that democracy provides what they call “liberty”—the ability to seek one’s own interests without the responsibility of others to help them, without any responsibility to help their fellow citizens, and without interference from the government.

This is a moral conviction, as deep in the conservative brain as the progressive moral vision is in the progressive brain.

Again, I say “brain”—not “psyche” or “mind”—for a deep and vital reason: All thought is physical, carried out by the neural circuitry in one’s brain. Thoughts don’t just float in air. As a result, you can only understand what your existing brain circuitry allows you to understand. The fundamental frames through which you understand the world are physical. Your moral identity is as much a physical part of you as your lungs or your nose. You can only make sense of what your brain allows. If the facts don’t fit what your brain physically allows, the brain circuitry stays and facts are either ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, or seen as a form of immorality to be fought against. It is a fact that the private depends on the public—perhaps the most central fact of American democracy—and yet strict conservatives either can’t see it or see it as a form of immorality so fundamental that it must be defeated at all costs.

This is a major part of what is driving the divisiveness of our country and the conservative move to make our government dysfunctional. It is behind the conservative moves to privatize as much of government as possible: to privatize education, public health, public safety, water resources, regulation of business practices, much of national defense, and on and on.

Can brains change? Can the brains of enough Americans change so that this basic fact of our democracy can be comprehended and appreciated?

In many cases, no. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, yes.

What makes it possible is biconceptualism.

The Brain and Constant Public Discourse

Biconceptualism is a fact about the brain. A great many people have in their brains versions of both progressive and conservative moral values in all sorts of combinations. And they apply these different moral values to different issues.

Remember that there is no ideology of the moderate—no set of views held by all moderates. A moderate progressive has mostly progressive views, but also some conservative ones. A moderate conservative has mostly conservative views, but also some progressive ones. But there is no single set of policies that defines a “middle.”

Progressive and conservative worldviews contradict each other. Both are characterized in the brain via neural circuitry. How can you have contradictory neural circuits in the same brain? Easy. The answer is mutual inhibition, a very common kind of brain circuitry: When one circuit is active, it turns off the other. Which is turned on at a given time is a matter of context. Someone with both worldviews applies them to different issues in different contexts, resulting in the brain circuits for the different values unconsciously and automatically switching back and forth depending on the issue. That’s what it means to be a biconceptual.

It is often these biconceptuals who, as voters, are the target of intense campaign attention. But Republicans understand how to appeal to them better than Democrats do. Recall that all politics is moral, and that a voter’s implicit sense of morality is absolutely central to a voter’s identity. Since biconceptual voters have both moral systems—mostly one but partly the other—conservatives need to keep their voters and attract the partly conservative moderate Democrats. Conversely, progressives need to keep their voters and attract partly progressive moderate Republicans. There is an honest strategy for achieving this goal, and also an Orwellian one. The honest strategy is to use only your language and avoid using the other side’s language. That will maximally activate your moral system in the moderates on the other side. The Orwellian strategy involves using the other side’s language in an attempt to “reach” those with moderate or opposing views. But if you use Orwellian language, you will be activating the other side’s moral system, making it stronger, and shooting yourself in the foot.

However, some political organizations use Orwellian language. For instance, an hour before writing this, I received a robocall from the “Center for Worker Freedom” asking me to support a measure that they said would support worker freedom. They are an anti-union organization and the measure is anti-union, though the telephone message didn’t mention that. They were trying to fool Democrats into supporting an anti-union measure out of ignorance.

It is vital that progressives understand why just citing the facts doesn’t work, and why attention to public discourse must be constant, not just focused on elections. Here are the basics that progressives need to understand.

There is a crucial logic to the way the brain works with respect to public discourse. Here are ten key points to that logic.

1. The more a brain circuit is activated, the stronger its synapses get.

2. The stronger its synapses get, the more likely it is to fire and the stronger the firing is.

3. When two circuits inhibit each other, the stronger one circuit gets, the weaker the other gets.

4. Suppose two mutually inhibitory circuits apply to different issues. As one gets stronger and the other gets weaker, the more likely it is the stronger one will start applying to more issues and the weaker one to fewer issues.

5. Language changes the strength of those circuits. Conservative language activates circuitry for the conservative worldview; progressive language activates circuitry for the progressive worldview.

6. Imagery fitting one worldview or the other matters as much or more.

7. Frequency of language use and imagery matters. The more frequent the language use or imagery, the more strengthening occurs.

8. Journalists are trained to use the most frequent language in public discourse.

9. The conservative turn in America has come from the constant use of conservative language in public discourse. So much so that progressives have often adopted conservative language, thus helping the conservative cause.

10. Because of the effect of language and imagery on the brain, the constant use of one ideology’s language over the other’s has an enormous effect on our politics.

Conservatives have been doing a better job at getting their language into public discourse. The enormous conservative communication system has done its job well, especially on the central issue of our democracy—that the private depends on the public. The central conservative strategy to minimize, or even eliminate, public resources has been to eliminate the money that funds public resources—taxes! Taxes for the wealthy have been cut by conservatives, who have defended huge tax loopholes, and have even drastically cut funding for the IRS so that there are not enough IRS workers or modern computers for the IRS to monitor tax evasion—mostly by the wealthy. Since the 1970s, the concept of taxation has shifted from the source of needed, and often revered, public resources to the idea that taxation is a burden—an affliction in need of “tax relief.”

The constant talk of taxation as an affliction and a burden has led biconceptuals to “switch” to viewing taxation as a burden rather than something that makes our private lives possible or that creates a base from which corporations prosper. While conservatives drive these frames home, progressives don’t realize that they have to drive their own frames home—and only later realize that the conversation has completely changed. “Suddenly” not just conservatives are talking about the burden of taxes instead of the value of public services, but so are the media, so are moderates, and, eventually, the “tax relief” language works its way into even progressive discourse. The term
Tea Party
was chosen to make it sound patriotic to oppose taxation.

The only progressive who has succeeded in getting across the idea that the private depends on the public is Elizabeth Warren, who has argued it repeatedly, and did so with special success when she was running for the Senate in 2012. At one point in his presidential campaign, President Obama tried the argument, but messed it up when he tried ad-libbing in a public talk and said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Conservatives jumped on his remark and attacked him viciously for it. He could have fixed it by making the point correctly the very next day and every day thereafter, getting the idea out into public discourse, and allowing the press to do its job and present the overwhelming evidence for it. But the president was too timid and dropped it, missing a major opportunity to change public discourse.

Can progressives turn this around? Yes, but not without serious conscious commitment. The president and every progressive candidate, office holder, and public figure of any kind can start now: say it right, over and over. Connect the private-depends-on-the-public concept to something that conservatives will understand: freedom. Public resources allow for freedom in case after case, opening up all kinds of opportunities in life. It is the freedom that public resources afford that make them central to democracy.

Saying it right—and saying it over and over—is advice that can be applied to issue after issue.