valuesidentitygraham

Some links I've read in the last week:

It goes against our nature; but the left has to start asserting its own values

Keep Your Identity Small

Common Cause Report (pdf download)

This echoes what George Lakoff has written about morality in politics from a cognitive science background. I've been thinking similarly about identity, and the values issue is something I've been frustrated with many liberals and progressives over for awhile.

I try to avoid carrying labels into political discussion (though I do occasionally claim the word 'libertarian,' to avoid it becoming the exclusive territory of the sort of rightist Friedman/Hayek worshipper I used to be.) In politics, people don't vote their interests, they vote their identities. Mass political persuasion involves building myths and a lot of the myths lead people to accept certain terms and concepts as their identities, and certain rival concepts as threats to those identities. It used to be the in thing in right-leaning political talk was to bash "identity politics" (meaning concern with the relative problems and wellbeing of different demographic groups, ethnic, national, religious and sexual minorities, etc.), but conservatism itself is all about identity politics. Specifically, conservatism in the U.S. is about asserting and reinforcing ones' self-identity as a "real American," which in many ways requires one to shove out certain people, ideas, and tendencies out as not-really-American. ("Othering," as some social theory verbiage would have it.)

Progressive goals and the history of America's progress to gradually put the promise of the Declaration and Constitution into greater actual practice, depends on a common moral vision, the empathy for fellow conscious beings which underlies true morality. If you shirk from the the concept, if you say things like "oh, I don't like to use the word 'moral' or 'evil'," you hand victory to forces whose 'morality' is rooted in authoritarianism.