Explore "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In January 2005, I was invited to speak to the Charlottesville Democratic Party about moral psychology. I welcomed the chance because I had spent much of 2004 as a speechwriter for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Not a paid speechwriter—just a guy who, while walking his dog every evening, mentally rewrote some of Kerry’s ineffectual appeals. For example, in Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he listed a variety of failures of the Bush administration and after each one he proclaimed, “America can do better” and “Help is on the way.” The first slogan connected to no moral foundation at all. The second one connected weakly to the Care/harm foundation, but only if you think of America as a nation of helpless citizens who need a Democratic president to care for them.
In my rewrite, Kerry listed a variety of Bush’s campaign promises and after each one he asked, “You gonna pay for that, George?” That simple slogan would have made Bush’s many new programs, coming on top of his tax cuts and vast expenditures on two wars, look like shoplifting rather than generosity. Kerry could have activated the cheater detection modules of the Fairness/cheating foundation.