Can There Be a Politics without Family Values?
Suppose I am right that the divisions in American politics are a reflection of diametrically opposite moral systems based on radically different models of the family. And suppose I am right in my analysis of those moral systems. Then there are important next questions to be asked:
• Can political values in America be separated from family values?
• Is there any way to avoid the application of family values to the political arena?
• Since metaphorical thought lies behind both liberal and conservative politics, is there a way to expel metaphorical thought from politics and from political values?
Can Political Values Be Separated from Family Values?
The nation is not literally a family. The government is not literally our parent. In real families there are genetic bonds and bonds of love between parents and children. No such bonds exist between the government and its citizens. Governments are not even people. But the people who run governments have power—life-and-death power over individual citizens.
Democratic institutions have evolved to protect citizens from the abuse of such power. The separation of powers can be seen from our perspective as a way to keep the government from functioning as an authoritarian strict father. The separation of church and state can be seen as an attempt to insulate our political institutions from the Strict Father morality of many religions.
But morality is by no means absent from democracy. On the contrary. American democratic institutions are based on certain moral schemes, in particular, Moral Fairness, Moral Empathy, and Moral Self-Interest—the maximization of the self-interest of all. Let us begin with Moral Fairness. Among the forms of fairness that are institutionalized are:
• Equality
• Impartial Rule-Based Distribution
• Rights-Based Fairness
• Contractual Distribution
Equality shows up in the one-man, one-vote electoral laws, and in proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Impartial rule-based distribution is the basis of the impartial application of laws. Rights-based fairness is realized in constitutional rights, which the government has a duty to protect. And contractual distribution is realized in the enforcement of contracts.
Moral Self-Interest allows individuals to define what is in their interest in any way they want, with life, liberty, and safety taken for granted as being in one’s interest. Moral Self-Interest presupposes Moral Fairness in the form of fairness of competition.
METAPHOR AND THEORETICAL LIBERALISM
Though this book is about political liberalism, not modern theoretical liberalism, it is useful to see how modern theoretical liberalism makes implicit conceptual use of the metaphors we have been considering. Let us consider, in very schematic form, John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness (see References, C3).
Both Moral Fairness and Moral Self-Interest, as they apply in the setting-up of a democratic state, presuppose Moral Empathy. To see why, consider the question “Why would you want the state that you are born into, or that you enter, to be one that is based on Moral Fairness and Moral Self-Interest (which is ‘moral’ because it supposedly maximizes the self-interest of everyone)?”
Considering that there are always going to be people who are, in some ways, more powerful than you, you would not want that power differential to result in your being treated unfairly or in having your pursuit of your self-interest squelched. In short, you would want other people to treat you the way they would want to be treated. It is Moral Empathy—putting oneself in other people’s shoes—that leads to having a form of democracy based on Moral Fairness and Moral Self-Interest. And to guarantee that there will in fact be Moral Fairness and Moral Self-Interest, you have to have the right kinds of institutions and take part in their governance.
Thus, even in theoretical liberalism, metaphors for morality from the Nurturant Parent model are at the basis of liberal theory.
MORALITY AND POLITICS
Democracy is commonly defined and studied by scholars in terms of liberal institutions, like an independent judiciary and civilian control of the military, not in terms of metaphorical moral concepts. Yet the institutions must function in terms of such moral concepts if they are to be considered really democratic. A form of government in which there are so-called “democratic” institutions, where those institutions do not serve these metaphorical moral schemes—where there is no real self-governance or fairness or moral self-interest—is a hollow democracy at best. Democracy with hollow institutions, institutions that do not realize such moral ideas, is not something worth calling a democracy.
In short, any real democracy comes with some form of morality built into it. Is this form of morality really separable from forms of morality based on models of the family? If the answer were yes, one might argue that any form of morality based on ideal family models ought to be kept out of a democracy.
This is, however, impossible. There are two ways to see why. First, look at the word “ought” in “ought to be kept out of a democracy.” What moral principles govern the use of that “ought”? For those whose primary moral principles come from some family-based moral model—either a Strict Father or Nurturant Parent model or perhaps some other, there is no higher set of principles. If you believe that your family-based values are all-encompassing, then you will conclude that those values ought not to be kept out of politics. Because there are people—many people, both liberal and conservative—who do believe that their family values are all-encompassing, those people will never accept some “higher” morality that restricts their family values to non-political arenas.
Second, those family-based values cannot practically be kept out of politics anyway. To see why, consider how Moral Fairness is to apply to Moral Self-Interest to guarantee fair and unrestrained competition. Conservatives and liberals have two different answers depending on their family values. Liberals are concerned with those disadvantaged initially in competition and will want the state to guarantee fairness by helping them. Conservatives will reply that that is coddling—it is “bleeding heart liberalism” that supports moral weakness; instead, they will want to avoid all government “interference” in competition.
There is no neutral answer here. Non-family-based morality—if there is such a thing—just doesn’t cover the hard cases, which are most cases. It is family-based morality that gives case-by-case answers in a detailed enough fashion so that one can have policy goals.
Suppose we wanted to separate family-based morality from politics. Suppose we all wanted to have the state set up according to general principles of abstract non-family-based “democratic morality,” and that we wanted to keep family-based morality nonpolitical. That would be impossible to carry out in practice. The Nation As Family metaphor will carry family values over into politics whenever those family values are seen as politically relevant. There is no “higher” generally accepted moral or political principle to exclude family values from politics, and there is as well no practical way to exclude them.
Is There a Metaphor-Free Conception of Government?
If one is disturbed by the use of the Nation As Family metaphor, whether in conservative or in liberal discourse, one might ask whether there are alternative, non-family-based metaphors for politics, or even whether it is possible to have a metaphor-free conception of government.
The government is an organization. What kind of an organization is it, or should it be? There is a very long answer to this question, but the short answer is this: Governments have armies and judicial systems, and so governments have in part been modeled metaphorically as armies or as judicial systems. Thus, the American government has a top-to-bottom chain of command, as in an army. It also has a judicial structure in place, with clerks and administrators serving as judges deciding claims brought by citizens according to existing law. In addition, the American government is conceptualized as a business, which is to be run efficiently and not lose money.
In recent years, questions have arisen as to what kind of business it should be. Twentieth-century American bureaucracy was based on an industrial business, a kind of factory model, with bureaucrats as factory managers. This was seen as a way to reform the previous government, which ran largely on political patronage and favoritism. The industrial bureaucracy model was instituted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a reform. To minimize corruption, a system of rules and a staff of civil servants were put in place so as to make government as impartial and efficient as possible. At the time, factories were seen as models of efficiency. Impersonality was seen as a virtue, replacing favoritism and corruption.
The breakdown of the industrial model of governmental organization has been written about at great length in the literature on reinventing government, especially Reinventing Government by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler and Breaking Through Bureaucracy by Michael Barzelay. The present wisdom has been to replace the industrial metaphor, keeping the Government As Business metaphor, but making it a different kind of business, one specializing in customer service. Taxes, from this perspective, are seen as payments for services rendered to the public, and the impersonality of the factory-like bureaucracy is to be replaced by a more personal form of service.
The government is seen from this perspective as just selling its services to the public for tax money. According to this view, there is no morality in government, just services for sale. When government is framed in that way, it would seem not to have a moral function. It then becomes a practical, not a moral, question as to whether a particular government agency works better than private enterprise. Government as a service industry becomes subject to cost-benefit analysis. Under this model, if the private sector can do a better job, then it should.
Let us take as examples two very different cases. First, take Michael Barzelay’s example (1992) of the state of Minnesota motor pool. This is a perfect example of the government-as-service-industry concept. The job of the pool is to provide cars to state officials for the performance of state functions. There is no issue of morality here, just one of efficient operation. If the state motor pool cannot provide better and cheaper service than Hertz and Avis, then it should go out of business. So far, so good.
But compare this with the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has not just a practical mission but a moral mission—safeguarding the environment, which includes choosing a moral view of the environment. There is no neutral view of the environment; there are only moral views of the sort we discussed in Chapter 12. The EPA’s job is not merely to carry out morally neutral functions like measuring air pollution. Its very function is a moral one. Its regulations, its forms of testing, its research projects, and its sanctions all come out of a moral vision. Parts of its job could be farmed out to the private sector, but its overall job could not, because the market does not incorporate inherent values, such as the inherent value of nature that emerges from the Nurturant Parent model. It is at points like this that family-based morality enters crucially into government.
Many parts of government have functions that are not morally neutral. Those functions cannot be done just as well by private industry, where it is the bottom line, not morality, that matters. For all such cases, government is not just involved in the sale of services for tax money. Instead, the mission of the agency is moral, and its success must be judged in significant part on moral grounds, not cost-benefit grounds. It is the moral mission of the EPA that offends conservatives. The same is true of the moral missions of the arts and humanities endowments.
One of the reasons that conservatives are offended by large segments of the federal government is that those aspects of government have a moral function that does not square with their morality. Take public schools, for example. Our public schools have been shaped by a moral function. They don’t just teach the three R’s. They teach how to understand our moral life, our history, our politics, and our culture. Public schools have been seen as having a moral mission: to create informed, open-minded, questioning citizens. Their job is not just to teach what is officially sanctioned—say, some officially sanctioned form of U.S. history that hides all the dark and controversial sides of our history. The most crucial part of the job of public schools is to produce independent, informed, questioning citizens. That has been seen as the most important part of their moral mission.
This mission is not independent of family-based morality. Conservatives disagree with that moral mission. It contradicts Strict Father morality. What is an “open” history to liberal educators is a “negative” history to conservatives.
An “open” history that discusses “negative” episodes will include criticisms of the functioning of all forms of morality in American history, including the functioning of Strict Father morality. For example, it might include earlier and harsher versions of the Strict Father family in which children were property who could be sold into indentured servitude or put to work in factories at an early age, and in which wives were seen as chattel. It would certainly include an account of the women’s suffrage movement and how it was fought by advocates of traditional Strict Father family life.
By the Principle of Self-Defense, Strict Father morality must be defended at all costs. It must not be subject to criticism in the schools. That would be immoral from its perspective. Hence, any history that puts it in a bad light is “negative.”
In addition, many conservatives have a version of the Moral Order metaphor in which the U.S. ranks higher in the Moral Order than any other nation, and so has more moral authority than any other nation. An “open” or “negative” history of the U.S. shows that the U.S. has not acted morally at all times, and that there is much about the morality of our country that could stand improvement. From a liberal perspective, it is good for our country and for our children to think about how the country might be improved morally. But such “benefits” of an “open” history cannot be seen as benefits by those who see the U.S. at the top of the Moral Order of nations. From that perspective, anything “negative,” anything that presents less than a pristine image, questions the legitimacy of American moral authority.
There is still another reason for conservatives to be against what they see as a “negative” history. If conservative politics rests on Strict Father morality, the national family must be seen as a moral family and the rules by which the national family operates must be seen as moral. Otherwise, the legitimacy of all forms of governmental authority is called into question. The very foundation of Strict Father morality is the legitimacy of parental authority. To someone raised with Strict Father morality, a “negative” history might call into question that authority. Strict Father morality cannot tolerate the questioning of legitimate authority by children. Children are supposed to venerate and idolize legitimate authorities, so that they can develop character by following the rules laid down by that authority. “Negative” history, conservatives believe, would lead to questioning authority and would threaten that process.
Of course, none of this holds in Nurturant Parent morality, where openness, questioning, and facing one’s dark side are virtues. The virtue of the teaching of history to children not as veneration, but as honest, tough-minded inquiry, is a liberal view. Nurturant Parent morality requires open, honest communication, questioning, and explanations. Conservatives are correct that an open/negative U.S. history curriculum fits a liberal moral vision. Liberals are correct that a goody-goody U.S. history is not only inaccurate but fits a conservative moral vision.
Conservatives have called for “a history that is acceptable to all Americans.” That means it must be acceptable to conservatives, which in turn means it cannot contain anything that either (1) questions Strict Father morality itself, or (2) questions the idea that the U.S. has more moral authority than any other nation, or (3) questions the moral legitimacy of the U.S. government.
There seems to be no way around it. American politics is suffused with family-based morality. When it comes to specifying policy goals, family-based morality is going to enter—in a big way. Family values are going to matter. The question is, which family values?