I was driving through a neighboring county and saw a political poster for a right-wing candidate.  I had noticed his sloganeering over the past few months and knew that he was some sort of Tea Party-aligned individual.  The slogan on his poster read:  “Faith, Family, Freedom.”  To be honest, I had a Pavlovian experience.  In looking at those three words placed together all I could do was grunt.  I knew exactly what this character was advocating.

My wife had a very different reaction.  She asked me, why would we on the left side of the aisle permit the political Right to seize those words and define them?  I had no response because I understood her basic point.

There is nothing intrinsic about “faith,” “family,” or “freedom,” together or separately, that should automatically convey a right-wing vibe.  Yet, the reality is that we on the Left have largely allowed the political Right to do just that.  In fact, we not only have allowed them to do so, but we have, at various points, turned our backs on these (and similar) words as if the ground had already been lost to the political Right.

So, my wife—and I need to credit her with this—offered a different strategic argument:  why not have left and progressive forces take those words and offer our own interpretation?  In fact, why not parade around with those words as central to our own agenda and hammer away at the Right?  I know, I know…other people have made similar points, but we don’t seem to change our practice.

Let’s consider what we could argue:

• Faith:  Left and progressives believe that individuals should have a protected right to worship as they see fit without fear of intolerance.  Not only that, many progressives believe that faith in a Creator or Supreme Being is central to the moral statement that we must advance.  How, in other words, could one imagine a Creator of all things who was/is an advocate of the free and barbaric market?  Of unjust wars?  Of the destruction of nature?  Not only this, but progressives advance the notion of the importance of having faith in humanity and the immeasurable possibilities of humans to outgrow the greed and self-destructive impulses that arise in class-based societies.

• Family:  Left and progressives believe that it is impossible to discuss family if individuals cannot exist outside of poverty and economic stress.  We believe that families need to be secure and that means a right to a job or income (if someone cannot work).  But for Left and progressives, family also means a loving relationship rather than a tyrannical, often patriarchal institution, in which two human beings make a commitment to each other and their children (if there are any) and collectively pledge to positively contribute to humanity.

• Freedom:  Left and progressives certainly believe in freedom.  We believe in freedom from tyranny, including the tyranny of unemployment.  We believe that countries and peoples should be free of fear of interventions by foreign powers, not to mention, to be free of weapons of mass destruction.  We believe that people should be free of want but also free of all oppression and intolerance that often drives minorities underground, or in some cases, to the brink of extermination.

In other words, there is nothing about these words, together or separately, that should have caused me to react the way that I did when I saw them.  Knowing that this right-wing candidate wishes to bring to mind certain values should not dissuade me and others from contesting this turf.  Instead, we need to use terminology as a battleground which we do not abandon.

In another setting, it is called flipping the script.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president ofTransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice   (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.