Moral Julia

In his op-ed piece "The Party of Julia" in yesterday's The New York Times, Ross Douthat analyzes "the policy vision and philosophical premises" of the president for persons and the nation as he seeks re-election -- inasmuch as that vision is depicted in the White House's new slideshow about its composite everywoman "Julia":

The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did — as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

Noteworthy is not just the absence of an explicit and stable family structure; it is the absence of any family member not merely incidental to the story of family's replacement by government in the narrative of an individual's life.

In previous posts, in February and in April, I have observed the challenges of family structure in contemporary life and the difficulties that those challenges may pose for civic life.  I am not alone in discerning these trends.  Indeed, Mr. Douthat suggests that, while the president's vision may involve some inherent "condescension," "in an increasingly atomized society, where communities and families are weaker than ever before, such a vision may have more appeal — to both genders — than many of the conservatives mocking the slide show might like to believe."

This all brought to mind George Lakoff's book Moral Politics (1996).  In it the UC Berkeley professor seeks to help readers, but especially liberal readers, understand the cognitively systemic ways in which people think about morality and politics.  For him the two are intimately related.

At the heart of Mr. Lakoff's analysis is the family.  His thesis, in a nutshell, is that how one conceives of the nuclear family and its moral structure and function, so one conceives of the central government and its policy structure and function.  The systems of one's moral reasoning apply both to family and to government, and the cognitive conceptual metaphor that links them is the family.  A cognitive mapping occurs whereby what one expects of one's family one expects of one's government:  the government as family and what it should be. 

Professor Lakoff uses this idea of moral reasoning -- informed as it is by family-based metaphors that characterize the moral systems of two different family models -- to explain his view of the differences between so-called "liberals" and "conservatives" in American political life.  Without getting into the details of Mr. Lakoff's argument (which is immensely compelling but not above critique), the connection between it and the president's vision for government through Julia's dependence on it as a surrogate parent should be readily discernible.  The mapping of family onto government is overt.

Last month, the president met with his outgoing Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev on the controversial subject of missile defense in eastern Europe.  The U.S. president was overheard by a hot microphone saying, "This is my last election.  After my election, I have more flexibility."  The not-so-subtle message was that unconstrained by political (voter) accountability he could move things aggressively in new directions.  Mr. Medvedev replied, "I understand ... I will transmit this information to Vladimir [Putin], and I stand with you."

Based on "The Life of Julia" and Mr. Douthat's assessment of its implicit and explicit philosophical and political trajectory, one wonders whether the chief executive's apparent intention to stretch U.S. government policy in new directions also applies to both the family and liberal egalitarianism per se.