Taking Our Values Public

Bernie Horn

July 13, 2005

Why do we progressives wince at the word “values?” Because it has become a club, fashioned by the right wing to bludgeon our candidates.  It has become a code word to attack our morality. In this war of words, how can progressives fight back?  How do we reframe the values debate? 

First, we have to understand how the conservatives have hijacked the word.

Thanks to the right-wing messaging machine, many Americans think the term “values” is synonymous with “moral values,” defined by a specific religious code of personal conduct.  It’s an attempt to convince the public that conservatives have values and progressives do not.

But that’s just spin.

Everybody makes value judgments constantly, and most values have nothing to do with morality.  They simply measure “good” and “bad.”  Values judge how fabrics feel, how flowers smell, how foods taste, how music sounds.

In the realm of public policy, we certainly want government officials to uphold the values of honesty and integrity, but that would be true whether they administered conservative or progressive public policies.

So how do conservatives equate moral values with opposing public health coverage, favoring lower taxes or blocking the exercise of free speech?  And how do they get away with ignoring the most basic Judeo-Christian value—love thy neighbor—as they advocate for discriminatory policies?

Conservative Value Confusion

This is the message framing trick: The right wing’s “moral values” refer to private, not public, policy values. 

“Private values” signify commonly accepted measurements of a good person.  They include loyalty, piety, generosity, courtesy, bravery, respectfulness and patriotism.

The term “public values” means commonly accepted measurements of good public policy. Substantive public values include fairness, justice, equality, freedom, opportunity and security. There are also procedural public values, like efficiency and transparency, which measure the administration of government, whether the substantive policy is progressive or conservative.

Significantly, the private value most commonly misused by conservatives is “personal responsibility.”  Unemployment, hunger, discrimination are all the individual’s problem, they say. They’re not a societal problem. Conservatives twist the language of responsibility to shirk responsibility.  It’s downright Orwellian.

But conservatives don’t even have to say the words “personal responsibility.” They just use the framework of personal responsibility to present their messages.  Studies consistently show that when news stories involving social issues are framed to focus on individuals’ misfortunes, the public tends to place responsibility on the individual.  When similar stories are framed to focus on the conditions and policies that cause individuals’ misfortunes, the public tends to hold government policies responsible.  (See Bales and Gilliam, “Communications for Social Good,” 2004.)  For the same reason, trumpeting private values suggests individual responsibility, the conservative position.  Using public values suggests societal responsibility, the progressive argument.

So how do we construct a language of progressive public values?  It’s easy, because progressive values reflect historic American values.

Historic American Values

“We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”  These famous lines from the Declaration of Independence are the greatest values statement in U.S. political history.  It proclaims public values—measurements of the quality of governments, not individuals.

Here is where we begin to formulate progressive values, by translating the three tenets “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” into contemporary language.

By “Life,” Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration did not mean simply the right to survival. They meant a right to personal security.

By “Liberty,” Jefferson was referring to the kinds of freedoms that were ultimately written into all federal and state Bills of Rights, blocking the government from infringing upon speech, religion, the press and trial by jury, as well as protecting individuals from wrongful criminal prosecutions.

But how do we translate Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness?”  It cannot mean that everyone has the God-given right to do anything that makes them happy. To understand “pursuit of happiness,” we must consider an earlier part of the same sentence:  “all men are created equal.”  Jefferson is not saying we have an unlimited right to pursue happiness; he is saying that all of us have an equal right to pursue happiness.  In today’s language, we’d call it the right to equal opportunity.

Contemporary Progressive Values

Now let us rearrange and restate America’s historic values as a Progressive Declaration:

First, progressives are resolved to safeguard our individual freedoms.  We must fiercely guard our constitutional and human rights, and keep government out of our private lives.

Second, progressives strive to guarantee equal opportunity for all.  We must vigorously oppose all forms of discrimination, create a society where hard work is rewarded, and ensure that all Americans have equal access to the American Dream.

Third, progressives are determined to protect our security.  While forcefully protecting lives and property, we must ensure the sick and vulnerable, safeguard the food we eat and products we use, and preserve our environment.

Our progressive values differ fundamentally from those of conservatives.  While conservatives work to protect freedom, opportunity and security only for a select few, progressives work to extend these rights to all Americans. Now, that’s morality.

When presented with this structure, some progressives note that the words freedom, equal opportunity and security sound awfully moderate to them.  Exactly! These are values that resonate with the vast majority of Americans.  The concept of framing is to build a bridge connecting progressives with undecided voters.  When we use familiar public values to describe and defend progressive policies, average Americans understand that we’re on their side.

It’s not that progressives should never use private values. The personal attributes of individual candidates for office are properly measured by such values. But the point is that progressives gain the upper hand when we move the policy debate from private to public values, because we’re the only ones who favor freedom, equal opportunity and security for all.

This is a battle we can win. We can assail the right wing’s perversion of the language of values.  We can declare our own values through a progressive linguistic framework.  We can sway Americans to our side by showing that progressive—not conservative—policies are grounded in “values.”