The Need For a "Values" Conversation From the Left

I’ve read multiple books on 90s politics recently, and they have reminded me just how much “values” and “character” and “virtue” dominated public discourse back then. Conservatives used these terms very effectively to cudgel those to their left, who had supposedly helped create a Godless, anything-goes society. They browbeat “welfare mothers” as unvirtuous, fulminated against the horrors of same-sex marriage, and generally proclaimed that the freedoms unleashed by the 1960s were sending the country to hell in the devil’s handbasket. It was time, to paraphrase Billy Sunday, to take America to God’s bathhouse for a thorough washing.

This rhetoric worked well enough to get the news media to spend most of the Lewinsky Affair flaying Clinton over his (real, to be sure) failings while not bothering to call out the cynicism of the Starr investigation. The passing years certainly exposed the hypocrisy of some of Clinton’s biggest accusers. We learned that Newt Gingrich had extramarital affairs of his own, that conservative virtue czar William Bennett was a degenerate gambler, and that Ken Starr himself used his position as head of Baylor University to cover up sexual assaults on students. Now that Republicans have embraced the palpably unvirtuous Trump, they have mostly reduced their “virtue” concerns to forced birth and attacking trans teenagers.

It’s high time to start a values conversation from the left. I really do think we have a values crisis in this country, namely in how consumer capitalism has eroded people’s interest in anything other than getting and spending. Popular culture and especially social media are awash in the worship of wealth and the wealthy. Elon Musk can torch Twitter and lose billions of his fortune, and there are still legions of bootlickers who go online to show their fealty. So many people on social media are monetizing their lives, turning from human beings to “brands.” My own kids are well aware of luxury brands and attach great prestige to them despite the fact that there’s never been an emphasis on those things in their home. Honestly, it makes me despair that there’s any escape from this culturally-dominant materialism.

This mindset has political consequences. Trump himself is a manifestation of this worship of wealth and the wealthy and its accompanying glorification of a “freedom” predicated on putting other people down. So much of our society is broken because the people running it only care about making money with zero regard for any moral principle.

A values conversation from the left would start from this premise. Since the Reagan Era corporations have basically declared that anything is justified if it fattens their shareholders’ bottom line, to the point that the people spouting this greedy mantra actually think it’s some kind of moral code. (Seriously, I talked to an oil man in Texas once who seemed so satisfied with himself saying so.) This has led to workers getting squeezed and thrown on the trash heap, labor being outsourced to prisons and overseas sweatshops, and galling economic inequality.

There’s far more to living than making money, especially if we want to have a better way of life in this country. Folks on the left need to talk about the values that get left behind when capitalism runs amock. We need to revive community values as a counterweight against the prevailing “me first” attitude. We need to value human beings and treat them with dignity instead of treating them merely as a means to an economic end. We need to embrace a fuller understanding of success, one not measured in the amount of money or number of followers one has, but in positive impact on others.

It might seem like the consumerist ethos is hegemonic, but deep down so many people are yearning for a deeper and more meaningful existence. They are crying out for true connection in a world that only offers the false simulacra of connection online or the momentary high from buying that coveted new item. Even America’s churches have become havens for the most grotesque expressions of a vulgar “prosperity Gospel.” It’s high time for a “values” discussion that gets at the root of our collective crisis of the soul. It’s time to question that most unquestioned value, the one that proclaims making and spending money the ultimate life goal. Before we can have any political change, this reckoning has to happen.