Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (9 page)

In
Chapters 7
and
8
, I will describe in detail the nurturant parent and strict father family models and the ways they extend simple, uncontested freedom into two versions of the idea. But before that, I want to review some things to bear in mind as we go through those chapters.

First, the family models are idealized. And they are applied metaphorically. One may use a family-values model metaphorically to structure one’s politics without having been brought up that way and without using it for one’s own family life. The family model you were brought up with does not necessarily determine how you will operate in your own family or what your politics will be. There are many other factors involved: whether you accepted or rejected your family, your peer group as you were growing up, your education, your work and life experience, a trauma you may have experienced.

Second, real families are more complicated than the ideal models. There are many complex variations on such models. Though it is commonplace for fathers to be strict and mothers to be nurturant, the reverse happens in millions of cases. Do not take the stereotype for the reality. Furthermore, fathers may operate on one model and mothers on another. Thus, many children are brought up with both models simultaneously.

Third, some subcultures have somewhat different models for actually raising their families, but may use these models for politics or other aspects of life.

Fourth, when they are used metaphorically—not literally—these models organize moral and political worldviews. They form the basis, via the nation-as-family metaphor, of coherent and integrated progressive and conservative worldviews. They allow one to explain how disparate political and moral positions on issues fit together and how progressives and conservatives will come down on new issues in given political contexts.

They also explain why a child-rearing organization like Focus on the Family, which teaches strict father child rearing to millions of parents, is politically conservative, why its child-rearing principles, which literally are apolitical, fit a conservative moral and political view of the world.

Fifth, these metaphorical models are
de
scriptiv
e
, not
pre
scriptive. They describe how people
do
think, not how they
should
think.

Sixth, in neither model are citizens of a nation literally treated as children. In both models, the siblings in a family map onto fellow citizens, the family onto the nation, a parent onto the leader of the nation. What is preserved from family to nation are the
values
that define the central relationships in the family. Are the central values empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and interdependence? Or are they moral authority, discipline, and self-reliance through the individual pursuit of self-interest?

Seventh, these idealized models are mostly unconscious—lived by, used to think with, but often below our awareness. Even though they are unconscious, they can be revealed by various techniques from the cognitive sciences—cognitive analyses, cognitive interviewing, and psychological experiments.

Finally and most important, just about every American has both models engrained in his or her brain, either actively or passively. If you were raised in America, you have been exposed to both models—at least in movies, books, and stories, and on TV. Even if you use only one model in every active part of your life, you can still understand a movie or a story based on the other
model. It is in your brain, but used passively for understanding rather than for action.

A great many people are what I call “biconceptuals.” They use both models actively—but in different parts of their lives. They may be strict at home but nurturant on the job, or the reverse. There are a lot of blue-collar workers who are strict fathers at home but nurturant in their union politics, and professors who are nurturant at home and in their politics but strict in the classroom. One may be an economic progressive and a social conservative—or an economic conservative and a social progressive. Or one may be a progressive on domestic policy and a neoconservative on foreign policy.

What I find scary in the current situation, as an advocate of dynamic progressive freedom, is that the radical right is using its message machine to move people more and more toward a thoroughgoing conservatism, toward using the strict father model in all aspects of life and politics. What is “extremist” in thoroughgoing conservatism is turning the clock back on the grand expansions of American freedom.

Though the history of our country is progressive overall, there have always been partial conservatives—financial, social, and religious. There have also always been pragmatists—partially progressive and partially conservative in various ways, but wanting things to work: our economy, our educational system, our public health system, our system of national parks. The radical conservatives are reducing the number of pragmatists.

The radical conservative movement has not merely formed coalitions among the various types of conservatives; it is creating a real ideological movement based on strict father morality and the conservative version of freedom. By having a single system of values and their own idea of freedom, radical conservatives are slowly but surely creating an overall fusion of types of conservatives: a blend of the libertarian, financial, social, religious, and neoconservative.

What permits this fusion of types of conservatives is the application
of a strict father model to more and more domains of life—personal life, religion, economics, social life, global politics. As the strict father model becomes applied by individuals to more and more aspects of life, the traditional American progressive idea of freedom shifts toward a radically conservative view of freedom.

What I am calling progressive freedom is simply freedom in the American tradition—the understanding of freedom that I grew up with and have always loved about my country. America has always been a progressive country, and the progressive ideal of freedom has been cherished, defended, and extended over more than two centuries. What contemporary conservatives call freedom, as we shall see, is a radical departure and threatens freedom as we have known it.

Progressive freedom is dynamic freedom. Freedom is realized not just in stasis, or at a single moment in history, but in its expansion over a long time. You cannot look only at the Founding Fathers and stop there. If you do, it sounds as if they were hypocrites: They talked liberty but permitted slavery; they talked democracy but allowed only white male property owners to vote. But from a dynamic progressive perspective, the great ideas were expandable freedoms: expanding civil rights, voting rights, property rights, tolerance, education, science, public health, workers’
rights, protected parkland, and the infrastructure for progressive freedom—the banking system, court system, transportation system, communication system, university system, scientific research system, social services system, and all the other aspects of the common good that we use our common wealth for. Expanding and deepening the ideas of the Founding Fathers is what dynamic progressive freedom is about.

Progressives don’t look backward to before these freedoms were extended to some “original” nascent idea frozen in time, and they don’t work to reverse these freedoms as radical conservatives do. As times change, freedoms must expand—or they will contract. Freedom doesn’t stand still. Radical conservatives are not going away. If progressives do not keep expanding American freedoms, radical conservatives will contract them.

Progressive freedom is simple freedom, with the vague parts filled in by the progressive worldview. The progressive worldview, I argue, is organized around the nurturant parent model of the family, which centers on empathy, responsibility, and strength. To see how this works, let us look at the nurturant parent model.

In this model, both parents (if there are two) are equally responsible. There is no gender hierarchy. The job of a parent is to nurture his or her children, and to raise the children to be nurturers of others! Nurturance involves empathy and responsibility (for both oneself and others), as well as everything that responsibility requires: strength, competence, endurance, and so on.

Nurturant parenting is the opposite of permissive parenting,
since it stresses caring about others, responsibility for oneself, and responsibility for others.

Nurturant parents are authoritative without being authoritarian. That is, because they are responsible for and to their children, they become competent parents, learning what they need to learn, and earn the respect of their children—in part by respecting the children. They set fair and reasonable limits and rules, and take the trouble to explain and discuss those limits and rules with their children.

From empathy and responsibility, all progressive values, both within and outside the family, follow:

Security:
Security has two aspects, attachment and protection.

Attachment:
This is a positive connection, based on unquestioned caring, between child and parent. Politically, attachment is a positive connection between citizen and nation, based on an understanding that the nation cares about its citizens and citizens care about their nation and each other. This is progressive patriotism. Political attachment is the spirit of union we felt all over America right after 9/11, the spirit quickly destroyed by the Bush administration.

Protection:
Parents who empathize with their children protect them fiercely. Families make sure their children are protected; in politics, nations make sure their citizens are protected. Protection is a major progressive theme: worker protection, consumer protection, environmental protection, disaster relief, and safety nets—as well as police and military protection.

Fairness:
If you care about your child, you want him or her to be treated fairly. Similarly, political leaders who care about their citizens want them to be treated fairly.

Happiness and fulfillment:
Unhappy, unfulfilled people tend not to want others to be happier and more fulfilled than they are. Empathy therefore requires that parents be happy and fulfilled, and that they work to make their children that way.

Freedom and opportunity:
To be fulfilled, a child has to be free, sufficiently independent to find his or her own way in life. Because
of the link between freedom and property, freedom to pursue one’s dreams requires opportunity, sufficient access to a job (a means of acquiring property) or to education (which allows you to get property).

General prosperity:
Opportunity for all, correspondingly, requires general prosperity spread evenly enough to afford everyone freedom to realistically seek one’s own fulfillment in life.

Community:
In a nurturant community, leaders care about citizens and act responsibly toward them, and citizens care about their community and each other and act responsibly toward their community and each other. Such a community requires
cooperation
, which requires
trust
, which requires
honesty and openness
. This is true both of the family and of politics.

That is the nurturant parent model of the family and how, in overly simple terms, it structures basic progressive values. We can see immediately some of what it says about progressive freedom:

• Freedom is necessary for fulfillment in life.
  

• Freedom requires opportunity. Freedom doesn’t exist, or is extremely diminished, in the absence of opportunity—say, in extreme poverty. This is akin to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s freedom from want.
  

• Security is required for freedom. This is Roosevelt’s freedom from fear.
  

A nurturant family uses its resources for the good of the family as a whole—for the common good—so that each member can have the freedom to pursue his or her individual goals. The parents may put aside money for the education of the children, or to get
a nicer home, or a new family car, or for a down payment on a home for a grown child, or to enable one of the parents to make a career change, or for a disabled child’s medical expenses. So that family members can be free to fulfill their needs or their dreams, the family’s common wealth is often necessary.

There is a version of this at the heart of progressive politics, an idea as old in America as the colonies: pooling the common wealth for the common good so that individuals can have the resources to be free to pursue their individual goals. That is why there are names for states like the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The idea is that a—and perhaps the—central role of government is to use the common wealth for the common good to make individual freedom possible. The common wealth builds the infrastructure for freedom.

Think of all the ways that individual freedom is made possible by that infrastructure, by the use of the common wealth for the common good.

• Physical security: Firefighters for fires, the police for order, the army for defense, FEMA and the national guard for disasters and emergencies, the criminal justice system. Physical security is required for freedom—freedom from fear.
  

• Family security: Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, public housing, homeless shelters. Family security allows family members freedom from want.
  

• Public health: Food inspections, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control. Public health provides freedom from harm via disease, unhealthy food, and dangerous pharmaceuticals.
  

The following allow for freedom to travel and communicate, as well as the freedom to engage in business, and more generally to pursue one’s goals.