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To me, the most interesting point is how Lakoff's programme interacted the change in what the left-wing project was about between then and now.
In 2011, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to deliver rising material standards of living for the bottom 99%. The activist base had started to shift to social issues (the tipping point was the failure of Occupy in late 2011) but the establishment wouldn't for a few more years. The frame that Lakoff was telling the Democrats to adopt was to fully lean into their role as the Mummy Party. (It isn't in the excerpt above, but Lakoff explicitly said was that the correct frame was that the nation was a family and the State was a "nurturant parent"). Of the six points, 2 is "accept support from successful businessmen who offer it", 4, and 5 are "git gud" and 1, 3, and 6 are "always talk like Mummy, talking like Daddy only benefits the Daddy party".
What actually happened is that the broader left-wing ecosystem of which the Democratic Party is part did embrace the spirit of points 1 and 3. They did organise around a single morality, optimise their communication to reinforce the frame of that morality, try to change the world through brain-changing morality etc. But the morality they adopted wasn't egalitarian therapy culture with the State as mother, it was woke culture with the State as HR lady. By 2020, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to raise the relative social status of historically oppressed groups at the expense of white males.
If its occasional, yes. But making a kid his brother's keeper, and particularly making big brother responsible for little brother's fuckups, is considered abusive parenting ("parentification" is the technical term), not nurturing parenting. The ideal Mummy State makes the badly-behaved retarded kid its problem, not the healthy siblings' problem.
But that's the rub and where the analogy falls short.
The State's problem IS my problem because of how taxes work. In the mommy/sibling/bad sibling framing, the mommy who takes on the burden of the bad kid is paying out of her own pocket. She isn't demanding the good kid get a job and then bring home 25% of his or her wages to immediately be wasted on indulging the bad kid's emotional needs.
People who decry the Nanny State concept, in my mind, aren't going far enough. There is no such thing as a Nanny State. There is only confiscation of the abundance that the responsible and capable have produce on their own to be redistributed for .... reasons?
Direct, socially network charity is what I want. If I see that there's a guy in my town struggling because of some legitimate bad luck, I'd want some sort of mechanism to directly help him out over and above just me giving him cash. Local level, socially networked welfare.
Some of the counterarguments I see are:
Some communities, as a whole, don't have the resources to do this. Response: Then that's a broken community. They should all move. Yes, I am serious.
Smaller communities don't have the "resources" to "administer" such benefits. Response: This is just a thinly veiled argument for bureaucracy and PMC jobs. GoFundMes can be setup in a matter of minutes with all the necessary reporting and compliance. There's no reason Anytown, USA couldn't have their municipal government set these up - and then instantly fund them - just as easily. The not-conspiracy conspiracy is that government technology implementation is so awful party because of naked job preservation instincts by bureaucrats.
"What, so you want people to BEG their neighbors for money!? How despicable!" Response: "Beg" is hyperbole. Asking for an receiving charity is a pro-social act (Christians even call it Saintly). I'd rather have this be open and explicit than what we have now - covert signaling, counter-signaling, and assumptions of who is on what kind of government assistance. Furthermore, because government assistance is secured through faceless paperwork, people do not feel the same sense of humility and become, eventually, entitled.
Again, a Nanny State doesn't exist. The reality is far worse. We could solve these problems by admitting that PMC'ism is rampant and that individual emotional self-preservation, currently, outweighs pro-social society wide benefit. That's liberal, "humanist" individualism for you.
What if giving him cash is just mathematically the most effective option? I occasionally donate to GiveDirectly because I believe in their premise: that the administrative efficiency of just distributing cash directly is so high that enabling the occasional bad behavior is outweighed by all the good behavior it promotes and bureaucratic behavior it avoids. I'd concede that not every individual would benefit from the cash-- I don't give money to homeless people directly because I reasonably suspect they would misuse it-- but that's a rule-proving exception. Deciding which particular individual you want to give cash to re-introduces the hated administrative burden; better to do something like a UBI or the libertarian negative tax rate.
I think I agree, morally, that no amount of government spending can ever replace charity... but some amount of government spending is just sensible economics.
I'm not sure that it is.
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
And perhaps worse than that, that you can move people on the bubble into that category.
Funny, I just saw a new left-wing outlet wrestling with research that hinted at weak results when people are given money.
The left's answer is to keep taking from those better off and giving to those worse off without even trying to grapple with that. And the right's answer is to institute an authoritarian system which governs everyone as if they are those people. A better answer -- discrimination -- is anathema to both.
Huh, seems like the traditional failure mode the right wing is accused of facing is the opposite. Just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fewer/no services, let people (even those who might prudently use any additional help) fend for themselves.
That's another thing the right is accused of, yes, but since I support it I wouldn't call it a failure mode. The kinds of things I'm talking about are bans on vice: drugs, gambling, fast cars and loose women. The sorts of things many of those who are a bit more put together can either handle or recover from a bad experience, but result in some people going into a downward spiral. The right wouldn't let anyone do them, the left subsidizes the spiral.
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