Crossposted from jesselava.com.

E.J. Dionne normally shows a pretty solid understanding of how important it is to expand the definition of "moral values" beyond conservative bugaboos such as gays and abortion. Yet in his column yesterday, which celebrates the decline of moral values as an operative issue to American voters, Dionne seems to employ precisely that outmoded definition:

In 2004, so many on all sides just knew that cultural and moral issues were the wave of the future. But a funny thing happened on the road to the revival tent. The crash of the economy has concentrated the minds of Americans on other things. Moral conflict just isn't what it used to be.

Citing a new Pew survey asking Americans about their priorities, Dionne says this:

The proportion responding with "moral values" fell by more than half -- from 22 percent in the exit poll (and 27 percent in Pew's own post-2004 election survey) to a mere 10 percent. Concern over the economy and jobs more than doubled, from 20 percent in the 2004 exit poll to 50 percent in the new survey. The other issues that gained substantial ground were health care and education.

The drop in concern over moral values was particularly sharp among older working-class voters who have been trending Republican for years. Moral issues, said Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, are "less pressing, especially to the populist conservatives who are feeling great economic pressures these days."

What Dionne fails to mention is that creating a fair economy that serves the interests of working-class people is a moral issue. So is health care. And education. The warped political lexicon of our time tends to equate morality with sexual traditionalism, but we should be working to change that. We shouldn't just accept it.

Every chance we get, we should be putting economics and other issues of day-to-day significance to people in moral terms. We should be clear that whether a poor kid gets to go to a high-quality school -- and whether a worker has power at work, and a family has good health insurance, and a senior citizen is able to retire with a modicum of dignity -- are all about our values as a nation.

Why is it so important to put things in such terms? The first reason is that it's accurate; there are moral dimensions to how our economy is set up and how well vulnerable people tend to fare in it. Our collective failure to address people's basic human needs is not primarily a technocratic issue; it's a moral one.

The second reason is strategic: even if the term "moral values" isn't scoring high on polls today, it will again one day. And it's our job to help change the debate to remind people that if they want moral governance, they should be thinking about social justice. Besides, regardless of the poll numbers, social movements rarely succeed solely by appealing to people's self-interest. Movements need to be a vehicle for people's sense of shared values -- a feeling that something bigger than they are is at stake. Ceding the term "moral values" to conservatives makes the effort to build a progressive social movement that much harder.

Dionne gets this, but he missed the boat yesterday. It's all too easy to slip into a familiar rhetorical frame -- even for those who often rail against it.