Written by david rosenbaum   

George Lakoff makes three very good points in his March 12 post on writingforgodot.

1. Republican rhetoric does not depend on persuasion through reasoned argument. It is about “pounding the most radical conservative ideas into the public mind by constant repetition.”

2. Merely refuting those ideas does not decisively defeat them, but tends to validate them as legitimate terms of debate.

3. Democrats can and must articulate a compelling message of their own that does not incorporate by reference the spurious talking points of their opponents.

All true. However, if the essential progressive values are, as Lakoff says, “empathy and responsibility”, can a political message be built on them? Probably not in those terms. “I feel your pain” is a spectacularly bad theme for a re-election campaign. And a general case for empathy will inevitably sound like asking voters to put another’s interest ahead of their own.

Instead of empathy, better to argue “patriotism”, which is said to be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but context matters. Democrats would not be using patriotism to enflame xenophobia or to gin up another war, but to contextualize a discussion about what is good for America, what our situation demands of us, what price is worth paying, what is in our best national interest, and what we must do together. Empathy is an indispensable moral principle (probably the indispensable moral principle), but politically it translates as “poor you, poor me, (and alas, least affectingly) poor the other.” Patriotism, though subject to grievous misuse, is a better political entry point to understand our own proper interests as both righteous and collective — country as community writ large.

“Responsibility,” too, is a concept that doesn’t quite work as Lakoff might wish. No one is likely to view their own beliefs as irresponsible (“greed is good”, for example). Any debate in those terms must quickly devolve into, “Is not. Is too”. Nothing, no matter how outrageous to somebody else, will be anything but responsible to its advocate. Better to adopt such terms as “caring” and “careless.” Who will deny that it is careless to allow people to poison the air and water? Dare anyone deny that we are careless when we don’t look after our money and oversee the institutions to which we entrust it? Wouldn’t losing the automobile industry have been more than a little careless? And what about selling the future short through inferior educational opportunities, neglect of promising technologies, and failing infrastructure? Careless in the extreme. Democrats intend to take care of the national interest, to “take care of business” as it were, while Republicans intend only to take care of Business.

Laissez faire is the Republican keystone. An idiomatic translation might be, “Why care?” So the Democratic indictment of Republicans is just that — they are careless. What don’t they care about? You name it. Wall Street crimes and abuses, public health, conservation, Osama bin Laden (as G. W. Bush famously said), fiscal deficits (as Dick Cheney famously said), Social Security and Medicare, staffing the courts and agencies, tax breaks for off-shoring jobs and bank accounts, unemployment insurance, cloture, transportation and the infrastructure, whether or not Saddam had WMD, corporate personhood, paying for Medicare D, borrowing to finance tax cuts, enforcing environmental and other rules, privacy, voters’ rights, subsidizing oil and gas companies, energy efficient light bulbs for goodness sake, the minimum wage, medical or climatological science, the 99%, public lands, workers’ rights, paying interest on money we owe, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, discrimination against women, the LGBT community, racial, religious and ethnic minorities.

Any issue of importance in this cycle can and should be expressed as a matter of something Democrats care about and Republicans don’t care about or haven’t taken proper care of. They aren’t the Party of No merely. They’re the party of No, We Don’t Care.

Republicans, of course, will declare what they do care about (message: we care). They care about a preposterous “jobs agenda” (deregulating banks, eliminating simulative spending, wasting the environment, and cutting taxes for the rich). They care about contraception, returning national health care to the mercies of the insurance industry, union busting, and starting new wars (that will do nothing but raise the price of gas, which they purport to care so much about). Fine. It is right for political parties to say in specific, concrete terms what they do and don’t care about. That’s exactly the conversation Democrats should desire. It is conducted on Democratic terms and in a congenial vocabulary. It is also a conversation that invites deep voter engagement, because, well, people care about whether people care.