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Liz Cheney and the Values Crisis among Conservative Leaders

Submitted by Ken Watts on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 12:18

IT'S NOT UNUSUAL TO FIND A SPIRITUAL issue just under the surface of a political tactic.

There's nothing wrong with influencing others, or using language to do it.

In fact, if you consider yourself a spiritual person, you can learn a lot simply by observing politicians.

Take Liz Cheney, for example.

She's a perfect morality tale, in miniature.

We all have multiple values, and the way we live our lives depends, in part, on which values we give precedence to, and on how far we will allow one value to override another.

Often, it's not so much bad values which lead someone astray as an imbalance of values.

In Cheney's world—the world of professional right-wing politics—one of the values which tends to be inflated is loyalty: loyalty to the party, loyalty to the team, loyalty to the corporations your team plays for.

Loyalty, in itself, is not a bad value.

We're all loyal to our loved ones, to our friends, to our employers.

A good politician is loyal to the people he or she represents.

But, on the whole, conservatives, and therefore Republicans, tend to take loyalty, especially loyalty to their political team, a bit further than liberals do.

This is why the Republicans are much more likely to vote in lockstep.

It's why there won't be one Republican vote for Health Care Reform.

Another value that's very common and very useful is truth.

We all value the truth—we don't like to be lied to, we like to find out what really happened, what the law really is, how something is really done.

We use language to communicate these things to each other, and most communication, even office gossip is largely fueled by our pursuit of the truth.

But we don't just use language to communicate truth.

We also use it to influence each other, and this is where things get interesting.

There's nothing wrong with influencing others, or using language to do it.

Most of politics involves the use of language to motivate, or cajole, or convince—whether we're talking about campaigning or cutting a deal on legislation.

But the right wing—or, I should say, right-wing leadership—seems to regularly allow the value of loyalty to completely override the value of truth when it comes to the political use of language.

Their loyalty to the team—to their party, their cause, their fellow travelers—causes them to be far more concerned with how their language affects the chances that their team will win than they are with whether their language is honest.

Liz Cheney knows that the attorneys who represented people accused of terrorism were acting out fundamental American values—that their role in our system of justice is part of what makes it fair, and respected throughout the world.

But she produces an ad which insinuates that those people, because they did their job—their patriotic duty to the system as American defense lawyers—share the values of the terrorists.

She lies.

She chooses loyalty to her party and clients over truth.

But she's not alone.

Next time: the more general problem
and the more general principle...