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Samuel George Gaze

She's With Him - Discourse versus Moral Foundations of Politics

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Thursday, 22 Dec 2022, 19:16

https://www.sheswithhim.com/

Jayne Riew is a photographer and the wife of the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose Moral Foundation Theory I've written about in a series on this blog. It's almost certainly no coincidence that one of her recent photography projects, sheswithhim.com, deals with similar themes as Haidt. In this project she presents interviews with women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US election. Trump faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and the interview's focus seems to have been how these women, some self-described as feminists, justified voting against the first female candidate for a major US party in favour of Trump, who was caught bragging about his sexual misconduct with women to a journalist leading up to the election. 

Riew's work is an interesting case study for the application of moral foundations theory to politics, and also provides an opportunity to analyse the data with a more critical lens and concepts from discourse analysis. Do conservative moral foundations underlie the women's justifications, or can discourse analysis tell us more about how language is used to construct these political arguments? 

The first thing to notice about these interviews is that the answers come from a defensive position. The women seem to have been asked why 'as women' they voted against Clinton and for Trump. This fact frames their argument as a defence of their status as 'good women,' whatever society takes that to be. Posed this way, the question appears more like a challenge. How can a good woman have voted for Donald Trump (and against Hillary Clinton)? This implicates both their identity and their moral justifications. Since this is an oppositional question, it is also more easily understood as coming from a Democratic world-view. The women were not responding to a neutral, but to an imagined hostile Clinton voter - perhaps another woman. This somewhat informs the language and arguments they used in response. 

There are two main arguments the women draw on to justify their choice. The first is that Clinton was not a good candidate to vote for, and further, that the Democratic party was not a good choice either. They argue this in two ways. One is that Clinton and the Democrats were not competent and therefore not a 'rational' choice, and the second that they were morally wrong, and therefore no a 'moral' choice. Grievances include: Clinton's approach to Benghazi, her somewhat hypocritical feminism, the Democrats treatment of car manufacturers, the mishandling of the Flint water crisis, the lack of jobs, the apparent lack of immigration controls, and unfair taxation. These were presented both in moral and rational terms as reasons against the Democrats. 

The second argument used is quite different. They argue against what some of them call 'the left' or 'liberals' - the wider cultural movement associated with the Democratic party and Clinton voters. The women object to the power that these people have in the media and in academia, and to the way they treat the political opposition. It is this group that the women seem to be responding to in their question. They talk about the left as rigid, self-obsessed, lazy, belligerent and rude. Some of the women apparently cast their vote as a kind of protest against this phenomenon. Trump himself does not appear so much in the arguments of these women; they seem to be giving arguments to vote against Clinton, rather than arguments in favour of Trump. None of the women seem happy to defend his character, but it is excused. 

Can moral foundations theory make sense of these arguments? I tried to code some of their responses for moral foundations, but the process is actually quite difficult. Sometimes it is obvious when a person is using a moral argument: 

"The big corporations get away with everything. But small businesses are the backbone of this country!" 

This clearly falls into Haidt's 'fairness' foundation. The Democrats are being criticised for their support of monopoly capitalism which is impacting the interviewee's small business. She argues against this on the grounds that the economy should be fairer. 

On the other hand, sometimes it is far from obvious when a moral argument is being used:

"Just look at the Middle East. We take out flawed yet stable dictators, and then we’re surprised that someone worse fills the void? I am very critical of the way Hillary handled Libya." 

What kind of argument is this? Is it an argument from rationality, that Clinton was not good at handling the Libyan civil war? Or is it an argument from the moral foundation of care, that Democrats do not care about the Libyan people? Given the ambiguity of many passages in the interviews, it seems possible to imagine a moral foundation for much of what was said, and even then it is not clear when a statement falls into one foundation or another:

"A true feminist would not stand for such degrading behavior."

Is this a statement about the sanctity of womanhood, or an appeal for equal treatment on the basis of fairness? There is no reason it could not be both, but it serves to illustrate that there is a lot of room for interpretation in moral discourses. They do not always fit in neat boxes. 

Looking across all six interviews and trying to code for moral foundations, there is another interesting feature that provides a sticking point for Haidt's theory. The women drew variably from each of the foundations, but the overall picture was that there was an almost equal reliance on each of the foundations. Three women drew from fairness discourse, three from care, three from sanctity, three from loyalty, and three from liberty. Two drew from the fairness related 'proportionality' discourse (that you get what you deserve, not equality). It is somewhat predicted by Haidt's theory that conservative voters will draw from these categories equally - but for one problem. None of the women drew from the foundation of authority and subordination. There was no talk about the disobedience of children, the insubordination of employees, or lack of willingness to submit to military discipline. 

Perhaps this is because these women were drawing on arguments they thought the average 'liberal' would relate to. Perhaps this was because, as Haidt tries to show, independent voters lying somewhere between the parties have more mixed moral feelings than the extremes, and need not have drawn on the discourse of authority to make their case. Whatever the case, I think the broadness of the moral foundations and the variability of their use suggests that moral discourses are best understood as functional tools for doing things with words, rather than natural categories with defined parameters. 

Looking from the perspective of discourse, we can see that the women construct their arguments to defend themselves from accusations of being 'bad women.' They are reacting to a moralisation of their position which draws from a discourse of loyalty, or solidarity as a sisterhood. This in itself is interesting, since Haidt argues that liberals are less concerned about loyalty to the group. Yet here the argument is that female Trump voters are engaging in betrayal. To reject this subject position they try to construct themselves as good women within the prevailing discourses of womanhood.

" ...my husband and I do everything. We work hard."

"I’m also a feminist. My generation went through women’s lib together."

"My husband and I enjoy a nice life. We've raised five amazing children to adulthood."

  "As a legal immigrant who came for graduate school, then worked for free to get experience, struggled for years..."

A good woman is constructed as a hard worker, a law-abiding person, a wife, a mother, selfless, but also capable of advocating for herself according to her identity. These statements function to inoculate the women against this positioning on the basis of their vote. They present a counter-narrative arguing that 'good women can vote against Clinton.' These accounts also present a counter-narrative to the prevailing one about Trump's hostility to immigrants - some of these women highlight their migrant status, arguing that immigrants do not need to credit these claims of hostility. 

The women also draw on the moral discourse of care to explain their vote. Whereas Haidt characterises Democratic voters as more motivated by care, these Republican voters also draw on care discourses, and in this way critique the Democrats for showing a lack of care:

"...when Governor Snyder went to Washington to ask for help. I read the court proceedings. They made him beg for assistance and cross examined him. Families in Flint needed help."

"...we know a lot of small business owners who can't make ends meet and it's a direct result of Obamacare and taxation."

Certainly, care discourse can be variable and situational - it is a moralisation that all understand, and it can be appealed to in the interests of all kinds of social groups, from car manufacturers to migrant families. What is more important in discourse analysis is the function that care discourse is used for. Here it is used to communicate contempt for the Democratic party, while the record of the Republican party is not analysed, from which cases can surely also be taken . Moralisation is here acting simply as a stake inoculation for the speaker who does not necessarily have to show moral care in a consistent way. The vote could easily have been for unspoken reasons, or even for no particular reason at all. This problematizes Haidt's insistence that people have different moral personalities; the differences drawn upon might be artefacts of the discourses of each party in relation to each other. 

Reasons to vote against the Democrats are certainly not reasons to vote for the Republicans, but within the interpretative repertoire of these women, there really is no other alternative. The interviews indicate that Trump was successful in presenting himself as the anti-establishment candidate who represented the promise of a new and different politics. He was also able to act as a lightening rod for the women who felt threatened what they constructed as the hegemony of liberal discourses in the media and academia. 

"I also resented that when I opened the October issues of my fashion magazines, the editors all endorsed Clinton for president."

"Yale is the place where you go to have intellectual discussions, right? Where there's diversity and dynamism? Not really. Everyone is on the left..."

"In almost every social setting I find myself in I am insulted by arrogant people who assume that everyone agrees with their politics..."

The women construct their social world as filled with liberals, and they define themselves in opposition to this. The left is constructed as a threatening monolithic entity which supported Hillary Clinton and has no space for a critique of her, or the Democratic party. The interviewees insisted that they were being stereotyped, but also engaged in some stereotyping of their own, characterising the left as lazy, naive, and weak, all tinged with the language of moralisation. In doing so, they constructed themselves as the opposite, and their vote as proof of their character as 'good women'. They talk about themselves as independently minded, pro-women, courageous and hard-working, claiming the discursive high ground against the hordes of Democrat voters. From this we see the way that political and moral language is involved in the discursive construction of the self; their political stance defines their difference and uniqueness. Perhaps this is slightly ironic, given that defining the self in political terms is something of a critique of the left, to find a similar process occuring in Trump voters. 

The existence of this corpus of interviews itself should raise some questions. Riew herself voted Democrat, but it seems that this selection of interviews does contain an argument against certain aspects of the US culture war. Taken all together, these interviews seem to present the narrative that voters were responding to the country swinging "too far left" during the Obama years, whatever this is understood to mean. This is something that Haidt himself has made a particular point of arguing in interviews about the state of academia and politics. It has also become a common position for right-wing media to take in the years since the Trump vote, characterising itself as an insurgent movement to reinstall the 'moral majority' as cultural hegemons in the USA and beyond. What function this argument serves could be the subject of a different post.

A look at the moral discourses of politics in this blog shows they can be thoroughly relative. They are quite flexible enough to be used in many and various sites where power is contested; what terms such as care and fairness mean look very different through the eyes of people inhabiting different social identities, and are used variably to argue for diverse political outcomes. 


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