David Callahan is author of the book The Moral Center, and explains that progressives desperately need to reclaim the moral high ground from evangelicals and religious right-wing loudmouths that seem to dominate the debate when it comes to “morality” and “values.” Building on the set of ideas on how progressives could stop being afraid of values and morals discussions in the public eye and instead embrace them and show the American people that the moral authority stands with the progressive community-that truly American morals and values sound like equality, justice, opportunity, fairness, equal standing under the law, charity, privacy, freedom to choose the direction of one’s own life, as opposed to the “values” traditionally embodied by the right and the conservatives, which generally encourage things like “equality…for the privileged and our friends,” “justice…for the wealthy,” “freedom to choose the direction of one’s own life….as long as we approve,” and “opportunity…for the privileged few.”
Progressives certainly need to step up to the soapbox to reclaim the debate over those kinds of ethics and value norms that I don’t think any American could stand against-there’s a great depth of Americans who stand for things like personal freedom and personal responsibility, and they can very easily be tapped by progressive politicians and activists if they spoke the right language-the same language that the conservatives seem to know how to speak.
From Callahan’s article:
Polls show that church-going whites favor Republicans by a nearly 25-point margin and that the GOP also holds a huge edge among married parents. Unless Democrats can address this deficit, dreams of a new majority will remain just that.
To start with, progressives must face up to the extraordinarily negative views that voters hold about America’s moral state. A poll taken earlier this year, for instance, found that only 11 percent of Americans thought things were getting better when it came to values. Eighty-one percent said things were getting worse. People’s views have remained bleak despite much good news over recent years: Crime is down. Abortion is down. Teen pregnancy is down. Even the divorce rate has fallen.
Why the public’s persistent moral anxiety? A close study of opinion polls suggest that the hot-button issues of abortion and gay marriage are of less worry than a wide panoply of concerns—like greed and materialism, lax personal and corporate integrity, a more exploitative media, unabated poverty and the erosion of family life by both economic and cultural pressures.
The public’s moral outlook defies easy labels. Most people agree that individuals need to behave better—and also agree that Americans need to take better care of each other. The public believes in both personal and collective responsibility. Yet conservatives have cynically focused the values debate strictly on individual behavior. And they have channeled today’s moral anxiety—along with deep-seated gender and racial biases—for political gain.
Progressives need to change the conversation. One fresh way to do this is to focus attention on the morally corrosive impact of commercial forces. While the cultural divide between modernism and traditionalism is real, there is a bigger struggle underway in America—one between human values and market values.
He’s absolutely right, and Callahan goes on to discuss in detail exactly what some of those commercial forces are, and some more areas of interest for progressives to join the fray and begin to truly take the “morality” label away from conservatives, who have misused terms like “family values” for years.
[ Rescuing Morality ]
Source: TomPaine.com