The Psychology of Redistribution

I'm glad I'm not the only one who notices this stuff.

Julian Sanchez points us to an interesting piece example of the left's psychology of redistribution, perfectly displayed at Firedoglake, "Republicans: “Take Away the Car Keys”":

Conservative ideologues looking to punish workers and the American middle class for auto industry failures are driven by an authoritarian worldview George Lakoff calls the strict parent model.

Senate Republicans see their opposition to the rescue of Detroit as whipping the children. They are not that different from the failed father who thinks his follies can be overcome by beating the wife and kids. Politically, they seek to avoid responsibility for the nation's economic woes. It's not the strict authority who's at fault. It's the misbehaving children. Conservatives think they must take away the keys to the car.

The strict parent worldview is not now and never has been compatible with democracy or economic egalitarianism. But it's always been part of American culture, and most of us carry at least some residual consequence of its cognitive gene. We may be committed democrats, but we laugh along when a boss at work quips, "This is not a democracy." Or we raise our children in a traditional strict model fashion. Lakoff calls this "biconceptualism." We use the strict model in some parts of our lives, and it's opposite, the nurturant or shared responsibility model, in others.

The authoritarian model has been culturally conserved by shrewd neo-Calvinist religious manipulators and free market extremists who recognize that wealth and power trickle up. Both models go way back. According to Hannah Arendt, Jan Patocka and other philosopher/historians, it was with the emergence of the polis from the household and the birth of Greek democracy that family organizational models were metaphorically mapped onto larger social and political groupings. (It's also true that the influence is reciprocal, as feminist theorists correctly point out. Patriarchal social organization leads to patriarchal families, and vise versa.) ....

The automobile industry is a shared, collective endeavor. What do we, the American family, want to make of it? We want affordable, safe, fuel-efficient, environmentally sound cars built by committed workers who are rewarded for undertaking this task on our behalf.

Framed this way, the financial rescue of Detroit can be seen as the moral endeavor of citizens taking responsibility for ourselves. Blame and punishment become less relevant. Current auto industry leadership might or might not need replacing. Certainly, punishing workers is insane. If we must lend our tax dollars to the effort, so be it. In return, the industry must agree to morally sound practices.

Read Sanchez's response here, although I really like this from the comments:

Leftists always try to psychoanalyze their opponents when they can’t answer their argument. It goes all the way back to Marx. Its easier to try to cast the argument against unions in terms of irrational emotion than it is to refute the actual points under debate.

Enough said ...