Voting: Financial security, illiteracy and moral framing.

Frequent reader S introduces the topic of voting (and non-voting) patters of the financially insecure with this comment.

This probably says a lot about New Albany. It surely affects local elections even more, I would guess. Perhaps a different kind of "Get out the vote" campaign strategy is called for ...

Perhaps the most noteworthy revelation to be drawn from the survey is the very existence of Americans who feel financially secure.

Study: Financially Insecure Americans Less Likely to Vote (Associated Press)

Less financially secure Americans lean toward the Democratic Party, but are also less likely to vote, especially in midterm elections, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

The survey released Thursday by the nonpartisan Washington-based research group looked beyond income to measure economic security, instead considering such factors as whether people are employed, have difficulty paying bills or possess a retirement savings account.

Those who Pew ranked as the most "financially secure" were almost certain to be registered to vote, with Pew classifying 63 percent as likely to vote in November. But among the bottom 20 percent, only 54 percent are registered and only 20 percent were likely voters in the midterms.

In this excerpt from Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, Henry Giroux takes it a step further: Illiteracy isn't just about being unable to read words on a page. Rather, it describes the loss of a filter by which one translates "private troubles to broader social issues."

The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy, by Henry Giroux (Moyers and Company)

Wright Mills argued 50 years ago that one important measure of the demise of vibrant democracy and the corresponding impoverishment of political life can be found in the increasing inability of a society to translate private troubles to broader public issues ...

... It is not that we have become a society of the spectacle — though that is partly true — but that we have fallen prey to a new kind of illiteracy in which the distinction between illusion and reality is lost, just as the ability to experience our feelings of discontent and our fears of uncertainty are reduced to private troubles, paralyzing us in a sea of resentment waiting to be manipulated by extremists extending from religious fanatics to right-wing radio hosts. This is a prescription for a kind of rage that looks for easy answers, demands a heightened emotional release and resents any attempts to think through the connection between our individual woes and any number of larger social forces. A short list of such forces would include an unchecked system of finance, the anti-democratic power of the corporate state, the rise of multinationals and the destruction of the manufacturing base and the privatization of public schooling along with its devaluing of education as a public good. As the public collapses into the personal, the personal becomes “the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence,” the formative educational and political conditions that make a democracy possible begin to disappear. Under such circumstances, the language of the social is either devalued, pathologized or ignored and all dreams of the future are now modeled around the narcissistic, privatized and self-indulgent needs of consumer and celebrity culture and the dictates of the allegedly free market. How else to explain the rage against big government but barely a peep against the rule of big corporations who increasingly control not only the government but almost every vital aspect of our lives from health care to the quality of our environment?

Depressed yet?

Let's not neglect George Lakoff, whose work was considered in this space a few weeks ago. Added to a variable consciousness borne of financial insecurity, and illiteracy as launching a crisis of democracy, there's the familiar but now modeified "illiterate and impoverished chicken who when bothering to vote at all opts for Colonel Sanders," owing to unconscious "strict father morality.

Lakoff: " Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth."

... George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this precis: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."

Unless the school corporation referendum brings out municipal voters in May, there'll almost certainly be another historic low in turnout.

Who'll be the ones pulling those metaphorical levers?

Lakoff: " Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth."

Long but recommended reading for Chairman Adam ... to be fair, for all of us on the "left" side of the aisle.

 ... George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this precis: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."

Leading to this expression of what it means to be a Hoosier in Pence-istan, circa 2015:

 ... In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves.

I was directed back to Lakoff after too long an interregnum when I stumbled on this article, and the "strict father family" framing explaining why the chickens vote for Colonel Sanders.

The following is a Truthout interview with Professor George Lakoff about his latest effort, THE ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!, to convince progressives to “frame” their political language and appeals based on deep-seated and active values. These are positions and actions that most of the public supports, but absent appropriate “framing” often vote their fears instead of progressive beliefs. It is necessary to ground a nurturing politics for the common good and core values in language and a moral foundation that appeals – rhetorically and emotionally – to the better selves of voters.

You write, “remember that voters vote their identity and their values, which need not coincide with their self-interest.” I remember writing a commentary on a poor congressional district, let’s say about 98 percent white, in Kentucky. Most of the residents were on food stamps, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid – or all of them. However, they have voted in recent elections by landslide majorities to re-elect a congressman who opposes food stamps and supports cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Can you elaborate on how this can occur?

A single moral worldview dominates conservative policies in every domain of life – family, personal identity, sex, religion, sports, education, the market, foreign policy and politics – what I’ve called strict father morality. Your moral worldview is central to how you understand your life.

In a strict father family, the father is in charge and is assumed to know right from wrong, to have moral as well as physical authority. He is supposed to protect the family, support the family, set the rules, enforce the rules, maintain respect, govern sexuality and reproduction, and teach his kids right from wrong, that is, to grow up with the same moral system. His word defines what is right and is law; no backtalk. Disobedience is punished, painfully, so that children learn not to disobey. Via physical discipline, they learn internal discipline, which is how they become moral beings. With discipline they can become prosperous.

If you are not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough, not taking enough personal responsibility and deserve your poverty. At the center is the principle of personal responsibility and moral hierarchy: those who are more moral (in this sense of morality) should rule: God over man, man over nature, parents over children, the rich over the poor, Western culture over non-Western culture, America over other countries, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over non-Christians, etc.

On conservative religion, God is a strict father; in sports, coaches are strict with their athletes; in classrooms, teachers should be strict with students; in business, employers rule over employees; in the market, the market should decide – the market itself is the strict father, deciding that those who have financial discipline deserve their wealth, and others deserve their poverty; and in politics, this moral system itself should rule.

Conservatives can be poor, but they can still be kings in their own castles – strict fathers at home, in their personal identity: in their religion, in their sex lives, in the sports they love. Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth.

Back to Zoe Williams at The Guardian for a brief sketch of the nurturant-family model.

... The nurturant-family model is the progressive view: in it, the ideals are empathy, interdependence, co-operation, communication, authority that is legitimate and proves its legitimacy with its openness to interrogation. "The world that the nurturant parent seeks to create has exactly the opposite properties," Lakoff writes in Moral Politics. As progressives identify failures of logic in the conservative position, so it works the other way round (one of Lakoff's examples: "How can liberals support federal funding for Aids research and treatment, while promoting the spread of Aids by sanctioning sexual behaviour that leads to Aids?").