Winning the Moral High Ground: Struggle for the Moral High Ground

Winning the Moral High Ground: Five Rules for Political Messaging (full series)
Worldviews, Values, and Will to Survive | Struggle for the Moral High Ground
Five Rules for Effective Messaging | Getting Off Defense

The Struggle for the Moral High Ground in Politics

George Lakoff is one of the Left’s most talented and influential messaging experts. A central theme in his writing is that the “progressive” view of a good and healthy society is grounded in people caring about others as well as themselves and that conservatives are concerned foremost about their liberty, with little concern or commitment to the well-being of others in society. Following Lakoff’s view, investment in “the public”—that is, the government—is the natural expression of caring about one’s fellow citizens. In contrast, the conservative preference for limited government is grounded in self-interest.[i]

Lakoff and colleagues offer the Left rich examples of how to evoke positive associations of caring about people when talking about leftist policies and how to frame conservative support for limits on the power of government in a more self-interested and less public-spirited light. Awareness of the assumptions and implications embedded in that moral framing of our political differences is essential to offering an effective competing narrative.

In fairness, leftists are no doubt better at talking about their policies in terms of moral concerns about the poor, the suffering, and people who feel marginalized, and conservatives certainly talk more about individual rights and personal liberty. But is support for liberty really at odds with caring about others, especially people who may be struggling? Consider three fundamental conservative positions:

• Free enterprise produces a higher standard of living and more opportunity for upward mobility than state-controlled economies.
• Human nature is such that too much power in too few hands will inevitably lead to self-serving abuse of power.
• Policies that purport to care about people and help them too often cause harm by promoting helplessness, dependency, psychological victimhood, and generational poverty that in turn create a permanent voting bloc for the people promoting those policies.

Following those beliefs, limits on the power of government and healthy skepticism about the effects of expansive governmental programs are actually forms of caring about the welfare of fellow citizens. They are a means of creating a healthy, thriving economy that allows upward mobility and protecting people from abuse of power and political exploitation. Caring about the welfare of others is implicit in the conservative value for liberty, however, and that can create a messaging challenge for conservatives faced with the Left’s explicit claims of caring and compassion.

Even though conservatives would likely take exception to his assumptions about the motives of leftists and conservatives, Lakoff is important reading for anyone who wants to better understand the power of moral framing in politics. Some of the most useful insights into the role of values in political preferences, however, come from the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. Although Haidt and his team are admittedly liberal, they have made a conscientious effort to cut through the biased view of conservatism in academia and to understand conservative values in a more objective light. Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion details the results of extensive interviews with people around the globe as they wrestled with moral questions. The researchers probed beneath the initial answers to explore the standards on which people arrived at moral judgments. Their work identified six foundations to which people commonly appealed in making and justifying their moral decisions in general, but with a particularly enlightening look at political decision-making.[ii]

Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory holds that humans are social creatures who have evolved moral inclinations to support cooperation and other actions that aid the survival of our species. Different cultures, demographic groups, and individuals may disagree about how to apply these moral ideas in practice, and they may disagree about their relative importance, but the theory contends that the tendency to appeal to these six foundations is wired into human nature.

Haidt’s theoretical interpretations are interesting in themselves, but the practical benefit of his work lies in the empirical observation that Left and Right may use the same words to describe their values while meaning very different things. Those observations are particularly relevant to the bitter division in American politics.

Each of the following foundations in Haidt’s theory contrasts a desirable moral inclination with its violation:

1. Care vs. Harm. A common theme in moral psychology research is that humans have a moral obligation to care for others and not to cause harm or suffering, and this theme was confirmed in Haidt’s research.
2. Liberty vs. Oppression. Haidt’s theory ties the quest for equality to the fact that humans are hierarchical creatures who surrender some freedom of action to those in authority in order to maintain peace and preserve order. When those in authority abuse their power and become oppressive, however, humans will band together in an egalitarian effort to depose the oppressors.
3. Fairness vs. Cheating. Because of the advantages of working together for common benefits, humans have evolved a moral sense of fairness, of honoring obligations, and for proportionality between actions and outcomes, and we have developed a dislike for cheating or failing to honor obligations.
4. Loyalty vs. Betrayal. Humans are not just social creatures; we are also tribal creatures. Haidt’s research found that people appeal to loyalty to one’s own group as a moral expectation, with betrayal of one’s own group considered offensive and immoral.
5. Authority vs. Subversion. Respect for authority is a moral obligation, and subversion is discouraged as long as that authority is used fairly for the benefit of the group and not abused by those in positions of authority. Thus, this foundation works in concert with the Liberty Oppression foundation above.
6. Sanctity vs. Degradation. Although the specifics differ, nations, religions, and other groups typically elevate some people, places, or objects to the level of sanctity and prohibit their degradation. Although the specific taboos differ across cultures, most societies have things that one just does not do.

It is difficult to come up with political disputes that do not involve differing interpretations of one or more of these foundations. Clearly, leftists and conservatives interpret these moral ideas very differently. For example, looking at loyalty, authority, and sanctity, we see that conservatives value loyalty to American interests over global ones, respect for the Constitution as defining the limits of political authority, and national symbols such as the flag. For the Left, loyalty is more globalist than national, the ultimate authority is science (or at least scientists whose thinking aligns with the Left’s political goals), and we see environmentalist causes taking on an air of religious sanctity.

But it is in his treatment of caring, equality, and fairness that Haidt’s theory is especially enlightening and useful. His research confirms the common perception that liberals place particularly heavy weight on caring for the suffering and oppressed and a quest for a more egalitarian society and that conservatives place a high value on liberty. But Haidt’s findings also show that conservatives weigh and balance all six moral foundations but that liberals appeal primarily to the first three: caring, resisting oppression in the quest for equality, and fairness.

Applying Haidt’s theory to our open borders, for example, we see that leftists talk about illegal immigration in terms of caring about oppressed people who just want a better life. Conservatives focus more broadly on loyalty to our own citizens and caring about people who are harmed by criminals and terrorists who take advantage of our open borders, the subversion of rule of law, the unfairness of allowing some to cross our borders illegally while legal immigrants have honored our laws, the unfairness of Left’s exploitation of illegal immigration to grow their electoral base, and the potential oppression that will result if the Left’s use of illegal immigration as an electoral strategy produces a one-party system.

Of particular relevance for the competing worldviews in Figure 1, Haidt’s analysis of his research findings does confirm that liberals think of equality in terms of outcomes but that conservatives think of it in terms of equality of rights. With the idea of equality being so fundamental to American political discourse, these competing interpretations have tremendous implications for the role of government.

It is important to recognize the implications of Haidt’s finding that conservatives appeal to all six foundations and that liberals appeal primarily to caring about the oppressed, promoting more equal outcomes, and fairness. Conservative audiences may resonate with messages about the last three foundations—for example, loyalty to our own citizens, appeals to the Constitution as a political authority, and the sanctity of our historical and national symbols. But those foundations are less important to leftists than to conservatives, and so arguments based on those values will have little appeal beyond the conservative base. The most hotly contested moral foundations have to do with the first three foundations as both Left and Right appeal strongly to those values but see them through radically different moral lenses.

During the COVID pandemic, for example, a common conservative argument was that lockdowns were unconstitutional expansions of governmental authority. Even if that argument was technically correct, the appeal to authority resonated primarily with the conservative base and ran the risk of surrendering the moral high ground of caring to the Left’s arguments that lockdowns were essential to protect people from harm. Pointing to the harm caused by lockdowns and the need to consider existing, repurposed medications to relieve suffering, on the other hand, gave conservatives a more effective challenge to the Left’s claims that their policies were grounded in caring about people and that conservatives only cared about their own liberty.

Consider just a few questions that are now at issue in the way conservatives and leftists think and talk about fundamental moral values and the policies that promote those values, and notice how many of Haidt’s foundations are central to those questions:

• What does it mean to care about your fellow citizens, especially those in need? Does caring necessarily equate to governmental programs? Are promoting free enterprise, opportunities for upward mobility, and protecting people from political exploitation and abuse in themselves a form of caring?
• When we talk about equality, do we mean that people can and should be equal in the eyes of the law while still being different in other ways, or does the idea of equality mean that we should work toward uniformity across an ever-increasing range of measures?
• Are differences in achievement the natural result of living in a free and diverse society in which people have different talents, skills, character traits, habits, and goals, or are those differences the result of some kind of systemic unfairness that should be righted by politicians, bureaucrats, and experts who can decide what is fair and what is unfair?
• When we talk about justice, do we mean applying the same standards for people regardless of their demographic characteristics or political connections, or do we mean having different standards for different groups as a corrective for what is perceived as systemic unfairness?
• When we talk about tolerance, do we mean respecting the right of others to think differently from the way we think and to openly debate ideas, or do we mean suppressing views that that our political elites deem incompatible with the communal good?
• Do we believe that wealth is created primarily by self-discipline, ingenuity, and hard work or is wealth just “distributed” like cards in a poker game, with some lucky people getting a good hand and others less fortunate getting unfairly shorted?

Answer these and similar questions about the moral values that should guide the society we live in and you have begun to answer any policy questions about the role of government in society and what kind of economic system we should have.

Let us now consider ways that conservatives can be more effective in making the case for what we believe.

In the next installment, Daughtery gives five rules for effective messaging.

[i] Lakoff, George; Wehling, Elisabeth. The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic (pp. 3-4). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

[ii] Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.