> Maybe I should have spelled it out. The phrase "personal responsibility,
> hard work, and self improvement" came from a pro-Tea Party editorial.
> It's standard right-wing rhetoric. It resonates with many people. When
> right-wingers use this rhetoric, they have in mind a particular
> conception of "personal responsibility, hard work, and self improvement"
> that we don't share. (That's what I meant when I wrote, with
> deliberately provocative irony, that "we disagree" with "hard work and
> personal responsibility.") But by default they have succeeded in making
> those values "right-wing" in US political discourse. This is, I argue,
> because the left has no rhetoric/argument/theory on this question, or at
> least none as familiar and instantly recognizable as the Right's.
But why does the idea of personal responsibility "resonate" with people in our society? --Because it is a crucial ideological lynchpin of capitalist social relations! A capitalist society needs to have a population that treats people as individuals responsible for themselves.
"If you're poor, it's your own damn fault!" "You can succeed if you try hard enough!" "I'm a self-made man!" All of this follows directly from the rhetoric of "personal responsibility", obscures the actual mechanisms by which resources are allocated in capitalist societies, and makes it almost impossible to conceptualize alternatives to capitalism.
Rather than perpetuating ideological tropes like "personal responsibility" that reflect and support capitalist social relations, why not challenge them with other themes that "resonate" with people? --For instance, we have a long tradition of mutual aid in our society: barn raising, volunteer fire departments, farmer co-ops, charity organizations. The idea that people can work together to make things better for everyone is a well-known sentimental cliche in our society, and it is fundamentally incompatible with the notion that free-market competition leads to the most effective allocation of resources. If you want to draw from existing popular rhetoric, why not use that trope? It's "familiar and instantly recognizable"!
Miles