There are certain things upon which almost all Americans (one is tempted to say Humans) can agree upon. Some of them are, a clean and healthy environment, fewer crimes and less violence, better health and health care, more representative and cleaner government, stronger economies with more employment, better education, less drug use, more safety, more security.
These universal goals have been hijacked, some of them long ago. In some cases, such as the environment, the flaw is deep within the socio-economic structure. In others, it is the ascendant policy of a small number of revisionist, right-wing radicals. In *all case*s, logic dictates that we act in a way that we are not. In education and on the environment, the left needs to rethink its basis, just as much as the right.
The environment suffers from the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and from the economic valuation we give give it. To a fish in the sea, to a rain-forest in Brazil, to the trillions of plankton that provide half the planet’s oxygen, we give same initial economic value: zero. When the fish is caught and sold, when the timber is felled and sold, a value is given. When the plankton are destroyed by pollution, no value is given. This will, if the universe allows (my new version of inshallah) be the subject of another diary in the not -too- distant future.
The body of this diary the offspring of two diaries. One did well and one not so well and both failed to pass the Wile E. Coyote test: were they ready? This one isn’t either, but I really want to catch that Roadrunner (C).
The avowed aim is proclaimed loudly by the establishment and the media. The actual policy and actual effects should be self-explanatory. The preferred aim will only be used if the avowed aim is bad framing and needs to be reframed. The better policies and their effects should also be clear.
Avowed aim: Clean environment
Policy: Subsidies for oil and coal, weak fuel efficiency standards, no carbon tax, etc.
Actual effects: Underuse of alternative energy sources, unnecessary pollution, distortion of national foreign policy priorities, wars.
Better policies: Subsidies for conservation, solar, wind, geothermal, hybrid, fusion and clean fission technologies. Not to mention what happens if we assign a value to environmental systems that provide life-support for the planet.
their efffects: Increasing energy independence, less environmental damage. Not to mention the god-like power of fusion, if it ever takes off. An exercise for the student.
Avowed aim: Drug free population
Policy: Prohibition
Actual effects: Increasing drug use, esp among the young
Preferred aim: less drug disruption to society, less drug crime, (forget the drug free-free population, ain’t gonna happen.)
Better policies: All drugs should be legalized and the dangerous ones regulated. All taxes from the new industry fund rehab and anti-drug campaigns.
their efffects: Drug use and drug-related crime decline.
Avowed aim: Fewer crimes and less violence
Policy: More violence than sex on tv and in movies, drug prohibition, cheap and easily available firearms
Actual effects: More and more horrific violence, less ability to empathize with others, crime very profitable, tens of thousands of gunshot murders
Better policies: Reduce violence in the media by by inverting the violence/nudity scale. Nudity acceptable, the slightest hint of violence, not acceptable. Legalize and regulate drugs. Tax and regulate legal firearms with the same strictness as you would lethal chemicals or biological agents and really crack-down on illegal firearms.
their efffects: Less violence, crime pays less, fewer murders, less anxiety
Avowed aim: Healthier population
Policy: No universal healthcare, overuse of antibiotics, tolerance of pollution, subsidized gas and coal, lack of pedestrian-friendly cities, fast-food, cheap, legal tobacco and alcohol [the only reason tobacco is beginning to come under fire is because tobacco farmers, in most countries, no longer determine elections. In Greece, where they do, a pack of smokes can cost less than $2. In China, much, much less.]
Actual effects: Cancer epidemic, widespread heart disease, resurgent TB, superbugs, obesity epidemic, millions of uninsured
Preferred aim: better health and health care
Better policies: Provide universal health care. Reduce pollution by promoting hybrid vehicles, a carbon tax and a CO2 market. Stop subsidizing gas and coal. Pedestrianize cities, crack down on fast food, make tobacco less appealing and more expensive by eliminating subsidies for tobacco farmers and Big Tobacco.
their efffects: Healthier, happier, longer-lived and more productive societies (not necessarily in the narrow sense that economist’s mean), especially among the less well off. Expensive tobacco, no subsidies for tobacco farmers or companies. Discourage hard liquor through taxation.
Avowed aim: more representative and cleaner government
Policy: Partisan election officials, contempt for the equality of the voters, dirty tricks
Actual effects: Highly questionable elections that would not pass a “global test”
Better policies: Non-partisan election officials, fair national redistricting standards, zero-tolerance (aside: we should reuse their own slogans, reframed) for electoral shenanigans etc.
their efffects: Greater trust and participation in the political system.
Avowed aim: Healthy economy
Policy: Tax cuts for the rich, deficits, corporate consolidation, lax oversight
Actual effects: Increasing inequality, additional risk in the global economy, more powerful and unaccountable corporations
Better policies: Tax cuts for the poor and lower middle class. Higher taxes and penalties on corporations and the wealthy. Apply and tighten anti-trust rules. Improve corporate oversight.
their efffects: Decreasing inequality, improving finances, fewer all-powerful corporations, greater public (that means us) oversight.
Avowed aim: Educated population
Policy: Chaos, fragmentation, low standards, low expectations, wrong priorities, where to start?
Actual effects: An overall uneducated, misinformed, incurious and conservative population
Better policies: Start younger and harder. This is the most important of all. Stay focused. Where to start?
their efffects: A brighter, more curious and progressive population.
Avowed aim: Free press
Policy: Media consolidation into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations
Actual effects: A more monolithic and tame press that is ever deeper in bed with its corporate masters and their political bedfellows
Better policies: Allow a few giants but keep a very healthy amount of undergrowth. Include one state owned giant (In Europe we have found that it makes sense to allow the state a voice of its own. The either become really good like the BBC or they become really bad, like most of the rest of Europe’s national broadcasters, and the private channels, in either case, get shamed into being better. Make sure the local and mid-level press is healthy, perhaps even through subsidies, and certainly through competition. P.S. Kill the FCC.
their efffects: A less monolithic and tame press that has ever less time for its erstwhile corporate bedfellows.
Avowed aim: Combat terrorism
Policy: War
Actual effects: More hatred for America, a giant live-fire training ground for terrorists, more and better terrorists
Better policies: War only when absolutely necessary and `when you do war, you do war’. At all other times, `speak softly and carry a big stick.’
their efffects: Empires and hegemonies are bluffs. American’s are supposed to be good at poker. We should almost never “call,” we should almost always “raise.” We are richer than they are.
[ed] removed a duplicate entry on healthy economies.
Originally posted at dkos but only seen by a score of people or less
Am I being foolish?
You’ve done a great job pulling a lot together here, Athenian.
As I was telling my spouse tonight, I’d love to be able to pass out pop quizzes to average citizens on well-covered issues to see how much Average Citizen even knows what American value is getting blown up today and just who is doing the blowing up.
Great job of outling problems/consequences. Don’t have time to post right now but for me everything stems from healtcare. Something I know a bit about as was misdiagnosed for 30 years.
Being misdiagnosed and also not having correct health care not only effects health but life in ways most people don’t think about..such as fact I had to forfeit several scholarships due to fact no one believed I couldn’t walk enough around large campus thus I couldn’t get aide to walk etc..which in turn meant my means of education denied which in turn effected any jobs I could get.
Long story and consider doing a diary on how health care can effect so much more than health.
More immediately though no child should be without healthcare period.
Will try and write more on this later.
Nice, comprehensive summary. My own personal list would read slightly differently in re drugs.
To my mind, the greatest damage that current drug policies do is the corruption of civil society in (e.g.) Columbia, Bolivia, Mexico and – once again – Afganistan by all those $/€ billions running amok.
Of course, the solution is the same in all cases – a controlled, open market for substances in the US.
Not to mention the contempt the young gain for all laws once they see the ridiculousness of the drug laws.
First, we need to have a conversation about W H Y.
You assume certain common agreements without providing a common human rationale for them. And you propose solutions presuming a certain ideological point of view.
That is not helpful, because you haven’t established common ground with people whose ideological point of view differs on these particular issues.
Look at it this way:
If you said, slavery is bad, you would have no disagreement across the political spectrum in the free world. People can agree on that and still be conservative Republicans, or liberal Democrats, libertarians or socialists.
However, the minute you start to suggest solutions, you run into a clash of ideologies:
The answers to these questions, unlike the common agreement on the principle, are conflicting and competing and not conducive to consensus.
So, how to we resolve the issue? Traditionally, we try to “convert” everyone to our world-view. We try to win politically and then impose our ideology, we try to get everyone to accept our belief-system, we try all sorts of things that require people to change – EVEN THOUGH we have already agreed on the common goal.
This is NOT the way to resolve the world’s problems. We must find ways to articulate common values in a way that transcends sectarian beliefs, and then, with consensus established on goals, we must invite an open democratic DIALOG about potential solutions.
International diplomacy works best when competing powers are able to agree on actions toward common goals, WITHOUT requiring either side to surrender or abandon their beliefs and adopt the other side’s. In my opinion, such strategies should be applied to our social problems as well.
I personally sympathize and would support all of your proposed solutions, but that is only because we both share certain progressive values and a common belief in the role of government and at least a similar belief about the effects of capitalism on human civilization.
Many, many, many people with whom we could find consensus on goals, do NOT share those beliefs.
We can either continue to try to either convert them all, or impose our will on them, or we can try to find ways to achieve our common goals without converting them.
“First, we need to have a conversation about W H Y.”
Frankly that is what is why was trying to start. If we can all agree that slavery is wrong, we can at least agree to begin to discuss how to correct it. I believe I have pointed out several areas where we can all agree on the desired end result and that the present policy is counterproductive. I threw out my better policies to get the conversation going.
“We can either continue to try to either convert them all, or impose our will on them, or we can try to find ways to achieve our common goals without converting them.”
I am arrogant enough to think that my proposals reflect reality more closely than the the beliefs of our opponents but I am certainly willing to discuss it with them. I do not wish to impose anything, I merely want to inject the failure of current policy into the debate.
How do you think the other side would react to my post?
I hope my comment didn’t come across as disagreeing with your fundamental point. What I meant to point out, was that you were presenting a liberal world-view (that is not a criticism of the world-view; it is a world-view that I share, to a great extent). A conservative reading your post would, in my opinion, reject it on those grounds.
I suppose I would do your effort more justice if I used a specific example.
Environment:
Actually, in this case, I think your solution-strategy has merit. You have contrasted two sets of subsidies in a clever way, which reframes the argument away from the “eco-freaks vs. capitalism”, and correctly framed it in terms of a choice between two different kinds of government interventions.
The problem, in my opinion, is not that conservatives disagree with the general statement that we all support “a clean environment”; the problem is that, on every policy issue, there are tradeoffs to be made. It is the very nature of a society that each policy involves certain restrictions on certain freedoms in service of other freedoms. Choosing between these options is based on one’s individual (and our collective) hierarchy of values.
So, for a conservative, a clean environment is a nice thing, but a free market is a fundamental necessity. For a liberal, a free market is a nice thing, but a clean environment is a fundamental necessity.
Thus, a conservative is less willing to trade-off essential economic freedoms in order to possibly gain healthier lungs somewhere down the line, while a liberal is less willing to trade-off breathable air for the freedom to build yet another widget-factory.
While I am a huge fan of George “Don’t think of an elephant” Lakoff’s reframing argument, I think it is best applied to redefining goals, and identifying problems, in a way that forms common ground, which in turn can lead to an open discussion about solutions; I believe reframing is far less effective (in the long-run, in terms of actually solving problems rather than winning an electoral skirmish–although you clearly can fool some of the people some of the time in the short run) when reframing is used, as the GOP so ardently uses it, to hide a partisan agenda behind innocuous language. (Not saying you are doing that here, but I think that is what many Democratic strategists are trying to do, and I think it short-changes the value of Lakoff’s argument..)
So, how do we solve this impasse?
First, in my opinion, an I recognize this is at the moment a decidedly minority opinion, you have a conversation about the goals themselves, rather than the solutions. If we had an open debate in this country about WHY we need to protect the environment, BEFORE we start talking about solutions, we might find surprising points of consensus.
We tend to assume that everyone understands the dangers of a polluted environment and sees it as one of the critical, life-or-death issues of our time. From my conversations with reasonably intelligent conservatives (which, despite the snark you hear on dailykos all the time, is not an oxymoron), I don’t think that is the case at all. Because the argument has focused on government regulation vs. free markets, all the scientific data supporting global warming, for example, has been dismissed as partisan deception in service of a socialist agenda. Thus, no matter how many scientists agree, no matter how clear the evidence is, it will not sway many minds.
(If you doubt this, just look at the ongoing assault of evolution.)
Now, of course, part of that can be attributed to the irrational, paranoid agenda of the far-Right, which has poisoned public debate to the point that there is no longer any trust in a factual, reality-based common basis for discussion.
But a great part of the problem is that the Left has abused the findings on global-warming in order to justify a political agenda. Frankly, we’d rather beat up the Bush administration for rejecting Kyoto than work to create a national consensus on the facts. If Bush turned eco-freak all of a sudden, there would be panic in the Democratic party. And, we’d rather use global warming as a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon corporate excesses, rather than make it simply socially unacceptable to poison the planet, no matter what the economic benefit.
(As an aside, this is one of the things that upsets me the most about those, like kos, who advocate and pursue a Machiavellian strategy of warfare against the right. Whenever I hear a Democrat talk about the Republicans “taking an issue away from us”, I cringe. Isn’t making our values universal, rather than partisan, values the whole point? Now, I’m not talking about phony tokenism that superficially papers over a difference. We can argue, for example, that the Bush policies disproportionately hurt minorities, but we can’t argue that they are a government comprised of white European males any more–at least no more than Democratic governments are. Rather than celebrate that fact, that ethnic and gender diversity in power has become a non-partisan value, many Democrats mourn the loss of a wedge issue–just as Clinton drove many Republicans crazy not, as they blustered publicly, because he was such a flaming liberal, but in fact, as they admitted privately, because he took issues like welfare reform away from them. It is a growing pathology in this country to place conflict over consensus, to value differences over common ground. Anyway, enough with this segue, back to the main point.)
Slavery, which I use often as an example, is no longer an issue that divides us on partisan, religious or ideological grounds. No one could publicly defend a corporations right to employ slaves, no matter how enormous the economic benefit. And no one rejects slavery on political grounds – no one would claim that government should not intrude in the free market in this case. Rejection of slavery is a core human value.
I submit that preserving our planet is not yet recognized as a core human value, at least not in American culture. That is where our focus should lie, in my opinion. We need to shift the argument from the solutions to the goal, from the politics to the problem.
I think, incidentally, that this is one of the clearest cases of a generational problem. We have done a pretty good job of raising an environmentally-conscious generation of kids, and, in twenty years, I believe the national consensus will have shifted somewhat, to valuing protection of the planet above protection of free markets. But there is no guarantee we’ll still have a democracy at that point, so there is no guarantee our policies will change. That is why we must redouble our efforts to educate and find common ground.
In any case, I appreciate your post, because we need more discussion about the issues, rather than promoting the same old solutions based on a preformed ideology.
End rant.
Plenty of food for thought there.
I would be really interested in seeing the response from a reasonably intelligent conservative to all this since I was trying to examine things that might work.
I know that for many conservatives several of the issues are matters of principle and it does not matter that their policy is a failure, such as drug prohibition and abortion. These things (drugs and abortion) are seen as evils which must be against the law rather than problems which can be managed. But if there are any reasonable conservatives left out there, I’d like to hear from them.
Some of the ideas I proposed find support in the Economist hardly a bastion of the left, though they do always claim to be liberals in the old sense.
The concept of drugs and abortion as “evils” is a religious concept. No one wants to come out and say it, but the idea of our domestic policy being governed by Christian concepts of “sin” is a profound violation of the principle of Separation and the Establishment Clause.
We have nearly half a million people in prison for non-violent drug “crimes” – that is more people than all of Western Europe has in prison for any reason – and they have a large population. We spent countless billions on prohibition that could be used for more productive purposes, and the sole justification is a moral indignation – a simply cost-benefit analysis shows the irrational counterproductive nature of the policy.
Until we are willing to confront the incompatibility between a rational republican democracy and a theistic code, we will not solve our most profound problems. But, of course, it is taboo to even raise this issue. It is taboo to point out that the abortion debate is NOT really a conflict between social conservatism and social liberalism, it is a conflict between reason and religious dogma.
In fact, many on the Right who are not driven by religious concepts of “sin” support the legalization of recreational drugs, and also oppose bans on abortion. It is the religious hijacking of the microphone that leads to the confusion of human rights with “sin”.
I liked your comment about how we don’t value the plankton in the seas, we only value the fish we can sell, even though they wouldn’t exist with out the plankton, because we can’t sell plankton.
We derive ALL of our value from the most basic sources, but we give not credit or respect to any of them, even as we stand of the brink of irreparably damaging or entirely losing them.
We don’t put an economic value on: clean water, clean air, productive soil, unpolluted beaches, a variety of plants and animals (until they’re dead, of course).
What would the world look like if we did? Who would have the highest GDP? Who would be the “superpower” then?