Freedom, Liberty, Freedom

By George Lakoff, AlterNet. Posted September 3, 2004.

Over the first three nights, the Republican Convention speakers carefully crafted a tri-partite frame for George W. Bush's Thursday acceptance speech:

• Night 1: The Global War on Terror defines our lives and our generation.
• Night 2: With enough discipline, all Americans can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become prosperous. Those girly men have only themselves to blame.
• Night 3: Kerry is weak, unpatriotic, antimilitary, against national security, without resolve, soft-hearted, confused, and totally unfit to be commander-in-chief.

After Wednesday night's bare-knuckled assaults by Zell Miller and Dick Cheney, the president's speech Thursday was comparatively kinder and gentler.

The president responded to Democratic charges – that he has lost over a million jobs, done nothing about the 45 million people without health care, hurt education by refusing to fund the No Child Left Behind program and had badly injured Medicare by not allowing it to compete on drug costs with private HMOs. He began by simply saying the opposite, listing "accomplishments:" tax cuts working to produce jobs, No Child Left Behind passed, Medicare "reform" passed.

He then went on with his opportunity society program, based on strict father conservative values. Just as good children must learn discipline both to be moral and to be prosperous, so good citizens – the ones with discipline – can become prosperous by seeking their self-interest if the opportunity is there. For conservatives this means getting government out of the way – providing "pathways" and not programs.

Freedom was the thread linking his domestic policies to his foreign policy. In domestic matters, it is freedom from the United States government.

George W. Bush: I am running with a compassionate conservative philosophy: that government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives.

In all these proposals, we seek to provide not just a government program, but a path – a path to greater opportunity, more freedom, and more control over your own life.

We must strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account nest egg you can call your own, and government can never take away.

Conservatives have long sought to destroy Social Security and Medicare, for two reasons: First, from their moral perspective, all social programs take away the need for discipline and create dependency. Since discipline is seen as the basis of all morality, all such programs are immoral. Second, there is a business motive. Businesses can make more money if they can get their hands on all the Medicare and Social Security money as investments in them, not in the people whose health and future are insured. The conservative solution is to privatize both programs, creating "personal accounts." More freedom.

The motivation for government-run Social Security was that each generation would pay for the next. In Medicare, as in any insurance program, the lucky (those not injured or diseased) would pay for those less lucky. In addition, there were the twin motivations of economy of scale and of protection, from stock market declines, bad judgment, and from an individual's squandering. But in conservatism, those not sufficiently disciplined deserve what happens to them. If you're undisciplined enough to squander your personal savings account or not shrewd enough to invest wisely, then you deserve to lose your health and retirement money.

After all, conservatism posits a natural moral hierarchy of winners and losers. Conservatism gives you motivation (a pathway) to win. If you lose, your loss is a motivation to win in the future. If you're not disciplined enough to take advantage of the opportunities, too bad for you. You just won't make it in the opportunity society. And you don't deserve to.

George Lakoff is the author of the forthcoming 'Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate' (Chelsea Green). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

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