Social Programs and Taxes
The metaphor of the Nation As Family is part of the conceptual systems of both liberals and conservatives. In that metaphor, the government is a parent. But what kind of parent, according to what model of parenting?
Liberals apply the Nurturant Parent model. Consequently, it is natural for liberals to see the federal government as a strong nurturant parent, responsible for making sure that the basic needs of its citizens are met: food, shelter, education, health care, and opportunities for self-development. A government that lets many of its citizens go hungry, homeless, uneducated, or sick while the majority of its citizens have more, often much more, than these basic needs met is an immoral, irresponsible government. And citizens who are not willing to support such governmental obligations are immoral, irresponsible citizens.
Social programs are also seen by liberals as ways for the government to simultaneously help people (Category 2) and strengthen itself (Category 5). From this perspective, social programs are conceptualized metaphorically as investments—investments in presently unproductive citizens (those who do not pay taxes and who use up government funds) to make them into productive citizens (those who do pay taxes and can contribute to society). The measure of a social program is whether it produces a return on the investment. A social program that doesn’t work is a bad investment. The question is not whether to have social programs, but rather which ones work well, that is, which ones produce dividends in the long run.
Liberals also conceptualize social programs as investments in communities. By putting money into the hands of people who don’t have it, the government creates jobs in poor communities. People with those jobs spend money, which creates more jobs, and so on. If this is done wisely, there can be a multiplier effect and the result can be a net creation of wealth for the society as a whole. Here the metaphor is one of investing in communities, instead of, or in addition to, investing in individuals. This too is in moral action Category 5.
Liberals also see many social programs as functioning to promote fairness (Category 1). They see certain people and groups of people as “disadvantaged.” For historical, social, or health reasons, which are not faults of their own, such people have been prevented from being able to compete fairly in pursuit of their self-interest. Racism, sexism, poverty, the lack of education, and homophobia are seen not only as barriers to empathy and nurturance, but also as barriers to the free pursuit of self-interest and self-development by disadvantaged individuals and groups. For liberals, it is the job of the government to maintain fairness, in the service of both moral self-interest and self-development. Hence it is the job of the government to “level the playing field” for the disadvantaged. This is why liberals support affirmative action.
Conservatives, on the other hand, apply the Strict Father model of parenting to the Nation As Family metaphor. To them, social programs amount to coddling people—spoiling them. Instead of having to learn to fend for themselves, people can depend on the public dole. This makes them morally weak, removing the need for self-discipline and willpower. Such moral weakness is a form of immorality. And so, conservatives see social programs as immoral, affirmative action included.
The myth of America as the Land of Opportunity reinforces this. If anyone, no matter how poor, can discipline himself to climb the ladder of opportunity, then those that don’t do so have only themselves to blame. The Ladder-of-Opportunity metaphor is an interesting one. It implies that the ladder is there, that everyone has access to it, and that the only thing involved in becoming successful and being able to take care of oneself is putting out the energy to climb it. If you are not successful, then it is your own fault. You just haven’t tried hard enough.
From this perspective, a morally justifiable social program might be something like disaster relief to help self-disciplined and generally self-reliant people get back on their feet after a flood or fire or earthquake. There is a world of difference, from the conservative perspective, between having government help a victim of a natural disaster (who does not have himself to blame for his misfortune) and having government help someone who is merely poor (who, in this land of opportunity, has only himself to blame for his poverty).
In addition, there is a related consideration that militates against social programs in the conservative worldview, what we have called the Morality of Reward and Punishment.
Strict Father morality assumes that it is human nature to be motivated by rewards and deterred by punishments. If people were not rewarded for being moral and punished for being immoral, there would be no morality. If people were not rewarded for being self-disciplined and punished for being slothful, there would be no self-discipline and society would break down. Therefore, any social or political system in which people get things they don’t earn, or are rewarded for lack of self-discipline or for immoral behavior, is simply an immoral system. Conservatives see the very existence of social programs as unnatural and immoral in this way.
It is for this reason that any form of socialism or communism is seen by conservatives as immoral, and why, for many conservatives, any social program is seen as a form of socialism or communism. Here is a particularly clear statement of the position, explicitly linking political conservatism with childrearing according to the Strict Father model. The statement is by James Dobson, from the updated version of his classic book, The New Dare to Discipline (References, B3, Dobson 1992). Dobson is the country’s most influential spokesman for conservative family values among conservative Christians. The quotation comes from a section on the importance of behaviorist principles in raising children.
Our entire society is established on a system of reinforcement, yet we don’t want to apply it where it is needed most: with young children. . . . Rewards make responsible efforts worthwhile. That’s the way the adult world works.
The main reason for the overwhelming success of capitalism is that hard work and personal discipline is rewarded in many ways. The great weakness of socialism is the absence of reinforcement; why should a man struggle to achieve if there is nothing special to be gained? This is, I believe, the primary reason why communism failed miserably in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There was no incentive for creation and “sweat equity.” . . .
Communism and Socialism are destroyers of motivation, because they penalize creativity and effort. The law of reinforcement is violated by the very nature of those economic systems. Free enterprise works hand in hand with human nature.
Some parents implement a miniature system of socialism at home. Their children’s wants and desires are provided by the “State,” and are not linked to diligence or discipline in any way. However, they expect little Juan or René to carry responsibility simply because it is noble of them to do so. They want them to learn and sweat for the sheer joy of personal accomplishment. Most of them are not going to buy it (Dobson, The New Dare to Discipline, pp. 88–89).
Here Dobson makes explicit the link between Strict Father family values and conservative politics. Social programs subvert human nature. They violate the very thing that, in Strict Father morality, makes morality possible: rewards for discipline and punishment for lack of it. Rush Limbaugh belittled the very idea of national health care as “Rodhamized medicine,” after superdemon Hillary Rodham Clinton (References, C1, Limbaugh 1993, p. 171). When he did so, conservatives in his audience understood that he was invoking this view of the immorality of social programs in general.
As we shall see below, the principle of the Morality of Reward and Punishment plays an enormous role in the conservative worldview. The reward side rules out any government distribution of wealth or benefits that is not based on free market competition, and it makes the right to the disposition of private property absolute; the punishment side focuses the criminal justice system on retribution. That is a lot for one principle to do, and as we shall see it is central to a great many conservative stands, aside from social programs.
We can now see clearly why liberal arguments for social programs can make no sense at all to conservatives, whether they are arguments on the basis of compassion, fairness, wise investment, financial responsibility, or outright self-interest. The issue for conservatives is a moral issue touching the very heart of conservative morality, a morality where a liberal’s compassion and fairness are neither compassionate nor fair. Even financial arguments won’t carry the day. The issue isn’t about money, it’s about morality.
President Clinton’s Americorps program is a very clear example. It is a double social program: a college loan program and a program to help local communities. The Americorps program allows students to pay off their college loans by working for social programs in local communities.
Since the social programs are immoral for conservatives, so is any program that uses government money to pay for workers in such programs. The government’s offer to pay off college loans in this way provides a financial incentive for students to work in such programs. Conservatives see such an incentive as a form of pressure placed by the government on students to engage in an immoral activity. Moreover, paying the students constitutes a second social program, which is doubly immoral.
From a conservative perspective, the students are being coddled through the government’s provision of a ready-made way for them to pay off their loans; the disciplined conservative alternative would be for students to have to find jobs for themselves in the workplace to pay off loans. Since the students are not seen as doing honest, productive work in the free market when they work in a social program, they are not seen as earning their loan payoff. And since not every citizen can get loans paid off in this way, getting such a loan at low rates is a form of payment for something unearned. Even worse, from the conservative viewpoint, Americorps gives both students and people in communities the idea that the government and individuals should be engaging in such activities—that communities should have people paid by the government to come in and help and that helping in such communities is an acceptable form of national service. Americorps, for conservatives, is immoral through and through.
Liberals, of course, have a different moral perspective on social programs. Nurturant Parent morality, applied to politics, makes social programs moral, as we saw above. A double social program—at the same time helping communities and the students who work in them—is doubly moral. And the idea that helping such communities is an excellent form of national service is another plus, which makes it triply moral. That is why it is one of President Clinton’s favorite programs.
What we have here are major differences in moral worldview. They are not just differences of opinion about effective public administration. The differences are not about efficiency, or practicality, or economics, and they cannot be settled by rational argument about effective administration. They are ethical opinions about what makes good people and a good nation.
What is at issue in the debate over social programs is the very notion of what morality is and how morality applies to government. There is no morally neutral concept of government. The question is which morality will be politically dominant.
From this perspective, we can see why certain conservative proposals have puzzled liberals. Take, for example, Newt Gingrich’s proposal that AFDC children be taken away from their mothers and placed in orphanages. How did this support family values? Or Nancy Reagan’s alternative to programs to combat teen pregnancy and AIDS by the distribution of condoms to high school students and clean needles to impoverished drug addicts. The First Lady’s proposed solution was not to have such programs, but instead to tell the high school students and drug addicts to “Just say no.” Both the Gingrich and Reagan proposals seemed idiotic to liberals, but made sense to conservatives. The reasons should now be relatively obvious.
Orphanages
Why should conservatives have proposed that the children of welfare mothers be put in orphanages, even though orphanages may cost more than giving welfare to help mothers to raise their children themselves. Welfare, as a social program, is immoral under conservative values. How does it serve family values to take children away from the only families they have ever known? If the family values are Strict Father values, the answer is clear. To conservatives the problem is the lack of Strict Father values, beginning with self-discipline. They see welfare mothers as not having those values themselves, and not raising their children to have those values. They see orphanages as institutions that will inculcate those values. They believe that, if the children of welfare mothers are raised to have Strict Father values, then the cycle of dependency, immorality, and lawlessness will stop, and that this will help solve the problems of crime and drugs as well. As to the observation that orphanages impose hardships on children and that the children would be denied their mother’s love, the conservative reply is clear: These children need to learn the discipline to overcome hardships and they need to learn Strict Father values more than they need the love of a mother who doesn’t teach those values. Orphanages may cost the taxpayer more, but if they contribute to a moral society they are worth paying for.
Just Say No
Nancy Reagan’s proposed solution to the problem of drugs was to tell children to “Just say no.” That idea made no sense to liberals, who saw drug problems as having to do with despair over social conditions, with peer pressure, and with entrapment into addiction.
But to conservatives whose value system gives priority to Moral Strength, the problem of drugs is the personal lack of the moral strength to just say no. It is a problem of personal values, not of social change or drug treatment centers. The conservative answer to the drug problem is the inculcation of Strict Father values, especially the teaching of self-discipline. People without such discipline, who can’t say no, are immoral and deserve punishment. They should be imprisoned for drug use.
This is the same as the conservative answer to teen pregnancy and the spread of AIDS. Don’t give out condoms or clean needles, as liberals urge. That just encourages promiscuity. Instead, be tough and teach self-discipline, self-restraint, and abstinence. In a moral system in which morality is correlated with self-discipline and chastity and following societal norms, the moral people won’t get pregnant or get AIDS. And the immoral people. . . . Well, they have to learn to be responsible for their actions and they deserve what they get if they don’t learn. In the short run some people will get hurt, but in the long run, if a societal standard of behavior is set and adhered to, the nation as a whole will be better off.
IMMIGRATION
Within Strict Father morality, illegal immigrants are seen as lawbreakers (“illegals”) who should be punished. People who hire them are just pursuing their self-interest, as they should, and so are doing nothing wrong. From the perspective of the Nation As Family metaphor, illegal immigrants are not citizens, hence they are not children in our family. To be expected to provide food, housing, and health care for illegal immigrants is like being expected to feed, house, and care for other children in the neighborhood who are coming into our house without permission. They weren’t invited, they have no business being here, and we have no responsibility to take care of them.
From the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality, powerless people with no immoral intent are seen as innocent children needing nurturance. For the most part, illegal immigrants fall into this category.
Illegal immigrants are seen as innocent poor people looking for a better life who are often exploited, for example, when they are lured or brought into the U.S. by employers who are willing to break the law to increase their profit. The stigma of illegality and the enforcement of the law should, in such cases, focus on law-breaking employers.
Illegal immigrants typically perform low-status tasks cheaply that citizens will not do for those wages: farm, sweatshop, and restaurant labor, housecleaning, childcare, gardening, odd jobs, and so on. They are a necessary part of the economy, keeping farm and garment-making profits high and food and clothing costs low. They allow families in the middle class and above to have two-job households by providing housecleaning, childcare, gardening, cheap fast food, and so on. When they do this, they support the lifestyles of better-off people, providing an important service to a great many people. They increase the nation’s tax base by permitting middle-class families to have two incomes and allowing many industries to make high profits that are subject to taxation. Out of fairness, they deserve to be compensated for their low pay by having their basic needs guaranteed. Since illegal immigrants historically have become citizens, they should be seen as citizens in the making.
Through the Nation As Family metaphor, they are seen as children who have been lured or brought into the national household and who contribute in a vital way to that national household. You don’t throw such children out onto the street. It would be immoral.
Here we can see the Nation As Family metaphor playing a critical and almost direct role in the form of reasoning.
Taxation
Dan Quayle, in his acceptance speech at the 1992 Republican convention, attacked the idea of progressive taxation, in which the rich are taxed at a higher rate than the poor. His argument went like this: “Why,” he asked, “should the best people be punished?” The line brought thunderous applause.
It should now be clear why, from the conservative world-view, the rich should be seen as “the best people.” They are the model citizens, those who, through self-discipline and hard work, have achieved the American Dream. They have earned what they have and deserve to keep it. Because they are the best people—people whose investments create jobs and wealth for others—they should be rewarded. Taking money away is conceptualized as harm, financial harm; that is the metaphorical basis of seeing taxation as punishment. When the rich are taxed more than others for making a lot more money, they are, according to conservatives, being punished for being model citizens, for doing what, according to the American Dream, they are supposed to do.
Taxation of the rich is, to conservatives, punishment for doing what is right and succeeding at it. It is a violation of the Morality of Reward and Punishment. In the conservative worldview, the rich have earned their money and, according to the Morality of Reward and Punishment, deserve to keep it. Taxation—the forcible taking of their money from them against their will—is seen as unfair and immoral, a kind of theft. That makes the federal government a thief. Hence, a common conservative attitude toward the government: You can’t trust it, since, like a thief, it’s always trying to find ways to take your money.
Liberals, of course, see taxation through very different lenses. In Nurturant Parent morality, the well-being of all children matters equally. Those children who need less care, the mature and healthy children, simply have a duty to help care for those who need more, say, younger or infirm children. The duty is a matter of moral accounting. They have received nurturance from their parents and owe it to the other children if it is needed. In the Nation As Family metaphor, citizens who have more have a duty to help out those who have much less. Progressive taxation is a form of meeting this duty. Rich conservatives who are trying to get out of paying taxes are seen as selfish and mean-spirited. The nation has helped provide for them and it is their turn to help provide for others. They owe it to the nation. What is punishment and theft to conservatives is civic duty and fairness to liberals.
There are, of course, other ways of conceptualizing taxation, proposals that stand outside of the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models. These are proposals that come from the business community.
The government is commonly conceptualized as a business. If it is seen as a service industry, taxes can be seen as payment for services provided to the public. Those services can include protection (by the military, the criminal justice system, and regulatory agencies), adjudication of disputes (by the judiciary and other agencies), social insurance (as in Social Security and Medicare and various “safety nets”), and so on.
Under the conceptualization of government as a business that provides services to the public, the questions asked are whether the service is cost-effective and efficient, whether the public is getting the kind of services it wants and needs, and whether the public is willing to pay for the services it wants. If taxes are conceptualized as what you pay for government services, then they are neither punishment nor theft nor civic duty.
One might, at first glance, think that such a conceptualization of government might be compatible with conservative moral views. The reasoning goes like this: Conservatives are pro-business. Why wouldn’t they want to see the government operate as a business, in this case a service industry? It would force government to become efficient and cost-effective (see References, Dl, Barzelay 1992).
Indeed, President Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” program, under the direction of Vice-President A1 Gore, has many of these elements. But as Rush Limbaugh would probably say if he got the chance, “A rose by any other name smells just as. . . . ” The government may be downsized, streamlined, and made more efficient and cost-effective. It may be de-bureaucratized and made much more responsive to the public. Taxation may be reconceptualized as payment for services. But from the perspective of conservative morality, it is still taxation. It violates the Morality of Reward and Punishment in two ways. First, you don’t have a choice as to whether to purchase this service. The government still takes the tax money you’ve earned, which by the Morality of Reward and Punishment, you deserve to keep. Second, it is still a huge system that does not work by the Morality of Reward and Punishment. It is an enormous system in which the incentive for profit motive does not apply, and the Morality of Reward and Punishment sees such systems as serving the immoral purpose of removing the incentive of reward, the very basis of morality.
You may metaphorically think of the government as a business, and bring principles of good business practice to it, and make it responsive to the public as a good service industry would be, but the government will still not be a profit-making enterprise. That is why conservatives want to privatize government as much as possible. And it is why President Clinton’s successes in streamlining government and making it more cost-effective did not earn him high marks with conservatives.
Taxation is not merely a moral issue; the very basis of morality is at stake! That is why the issue of taxation is at the very heart of conservative moral politics.
Military Spending
Ronald Reagan came into office pledging to spend less on government. Yet he increased the military budget significantly. Was this a contradiction?
In the summer of 1995, the conservative House of Representatives cut billions out of programs for the poor—$137 million from Project Head Start alone. Yet the conservative House, ostensibly committed to budget cutting, allocated to the military $7 billion more than it had requested. It also supported the reinstitution of expensive and controversial Star Wars research (see References, D2, S. Lakoff and H. F. York, 1989).
Why are conservatives, who say they want to spend less on government, allocating much more to the military than it even requests in inflated estimates? Given that the Cold War is over and we are not in danger of invasion, why do conservatives want to increase military spending, even though it means bigger government?
In the Strict Father model, it is the duty of the strict father to protect his family above all else. By the Nation As Family metaphor, this implies that the major function of the government is, above all else, to protect the nation. That is why conservatives see the funding of the military as moral, while the funding of social programs is seen as immoral.
There is more than a little irony in this. The military is, on the inside, a huge social program, with its own health care, schools, housing, pensions, education benefits, PX discounts, officers’ clubs, golf courses, and so on—all paid for at public expense. But the military represents the strength of the nation, and strength has the highest priority in the Strict Father model.
Moreover, the military itself is structured by Strict Father morality. It has a hierarchical authority structure, which is mostly male and sets strict moral bounds. The ethic of moral strength has priority: Everything is keyed to hierarchical authority, self-discipline, building strength, and fighting evils. It is the principal governmental institution that embodies Strict Father morality. Supporting the military as an institution is supporting the culture of Strict Father morality. This makes the military sacrosanct to conservatives. Since it functions in support of conservative morality, conservatives see it as worthy of support even beyond its protective function.
Liberals, focusing on issues of nurturance, see other priorities as more important than the military. They note that the U.S. spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. Given that we are not in danger of being invaded, and given the end of the Cold War, liberals see no need for much of the military spending. At present, the U.S. is prepared to fight two wars on two fronts, which is seen as overkill. We still maintain 100,000 NATO troops in Europe, which to many liberals is pointless. Much of the money spent on the military could be spent in much better ways, strictly from the point of view of cost-effective government.
But to conservatives, support for the military is support for conservative values. People who go through the military often enter with Strict Father moral values or acquire them. To spend less money on the military is to weaken Strict Father morality—and political conservatism. Correspondingly, for liberals, spending less money on the military means freeing up more for social programs. That, for liberals, is a means to a moral end.
Morality, Not Just Money
Throughout this section of the book, I will be arguing that political policies have everything to do with moral visions—for both liberals and conservatives. The conservative political agenda, for example, is not merely to cut the cost of government. The conservative agenda, as we shall see, is a moral agenda, just as the liberal agenda is.
Consider, for example, the issue of the deficit. How did it get so large?
Liberals like to think of Ronald Reagan as stupid. Whether he was or not, those around him certainly were not. While constantly attacking liberals as big spenders, the Reagan and Bush administrations added three trillion dollars to the national debt by drastically increasing military spending while cutting taxes for the rich. They could count; they saw the deficit increasing. They blamed the increases on liberal spending, but Reagan did not veto every spending bill. Moreover, Reagan’s own actions accounted for much of the deficit increase. Had financial responsibility and the lessening of spending been Reagan’s top priorities, he would not have allowed such an increase in the deficit, simply by not cutting taxes and not pushing for a military buildup far beyond the Pentagon’s requests.
While the deficit was increasing, there was a vast shift of wealth away from the lower and middle classes toward the rich. Liberals, cynically, saw this shift as Reagan and Bush making their friends and their political supporters rich. Certainly that was the effect. It is hardly new for the friends and supporters of politicians in power to get rich. This is usually seen as immorality and corruption, and with good reason. Many liberals saw Reagan that way.
But Ronald Reagan did not consider himself as immoral. Certainly he and his staff could tell that their policies were producing vast increases in the deficit, when they had come into office promising a balanced budget. Reagan was not forced to pursue deficit-increasing policies. Why did he do so?
I would like to suggest that he pursued deficit-increasing policies in the service of what he saw as overriding moral goals: (1) Building up the military to protect America from the evil empire of Soviet communism. (2) Lowering taxes for the rich, so that enterprise was rewarded not punished. Interestingly, for President Reagan as for any good conservative, these policies, however different on the surface, were instances of the same underlying principle: the Morality of Reward and Punishment.
What was evil in Soviet communism, for Reagan as for other conservatives, was not just totalitarianism. Certainly Soviet totalitarianism was evil, but the U.S. had supported capitalist totalitarian dictatorships willingly while overthrowing a democratically elected communist government in Chile. The main evil of communism for Reagan, as for most conservatives, was that it stifled free enterprise. Since communism did not allow for free markets (open to Western companies) or for financially rewarding entrepreneurship, it violated the basis of the Strict Father moral system: the Morality of Punishment and Reward.
Adding three trillion dollars to the deficit actually served a moral purpose for Ronald Reagan. It meant that, sooner or later, the deficit would force an elimination of social programs. He knew perfectly well that the military budget would never be seriously cut, and that a major increase in tax revenues to eliminate the deficit would never be agreed upon. In the long run, the staggering deficit would actually serve Strict Father morality—conservative morality—by forcing Congress to cut social programs. From the perspective of Strict Father morality, Ronald Reagan looks moral and smart, not immoral and dumb as many liberals believe.
The ultimate conservative agenda, as I will be arguing in the following pages, is moral, not financial. It is a thorough political revamping of America in the service of a moral revolution, a revolution that conservatives believe will make Americans better people and improve American life. So far as I can tell, the main issue in every conservative political policy is morality—good versus evil. There is nothing surprising in this. Conservatives consider themselves moral people and they talk about morality and the family constantly. But to liberals, who have their own very different moral system, conservative policies are so immoral that any conservative discussion of morality is taken as demagoguery.
Of course, liberals also see their policies as moral and their overall politics as serving moral goals. Conservatives, however, talk as if liberals were degenerates opposed to morality; as if they were corrupted by special interests; as if they loved expensive and inefficient bureaucracy; as if they wanted to take away the rights of citizens. Each side sees the other as immoral, corrupt, and lunkheaded. Neither side wants to see the other as moral in any way. Neither side wants to recognize that there are two opposed, highly-structured, well-grounded, widely accepted, and utterly contradictory moral systems at the center of American politics.
The failure to see that politics is fundamentally about morality demeans American politics. It makes all politicians look immoral. And it hides the deep logic behind political positions.