The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (19 page)

In other words, grace is metaphorical nurturance. That is, just as nurturance feeds you, heals you, takes care of you, just as a nurturant parent teaches you to be nurturant and allows you to be a moral being, just as you can’t get nurturance unless you are close to your parents, just as you must accept nurturance in order to get it, so all of these things about nurturance are true of grace in liberal Christianity. Nurturance comes with unconditional love—in the case of grace, the unconditional love of God. What makes a religion nurturant is that it metaphorically views God as a nurturant parent. In a nurturant form of religion, your spiritual experience has to do with your connection to other people and the world, and your spiritual practice has to do with your service to other people and to your community. This is why nurturant Christians are progressives: because they have a nurturant morality, just as progressives have.

But at present nurturant Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others in this country are not organized. They are not seen as a single movement, a progressive religious movement. Worse, secular progressives do not see those with a nurturant form of religion as natural members of the same political movement. Not only do spiritual progressives need to unite with each other, they need to unite with secular progressives, who share the same moral system and political objectives.

What is a strategic initiative, and how is it different from regular policy making?

There are two kinds of strategic initiatives: The first is what I call a slippery slope initiative. The idea of a slippery slope initiative is to take a first step that seems fairly straightforward, but gets into the public eye an additional frame that you want to be there. The idea is that once the first step is taken, then it is easier and often inevitable to take the next step and the next step and the next step.

The conservative Supreme Court works by slippery slope decisions, one step at a time. Consider the following progression. First, the court allowed corporations to contribute to ballot initiatives as a limited form of the First Amendment right of free speech. Then, their Citizens United decision gave corporations the ability to contribute as much as they want in elections, as a form of free speech. Then their Hobby Lobby decision extended the First Amendment freedom of religion to corporations so that they do not have to provide contraception to women employees as specified by the Affordable Care Act, opening the door to a wider use of freedom of religion by corporations to avoid various fair treatment laws.

Let’s take another example. It used to be the case that conservatives tried to cut social programs one by one, and then they figured out how they could cut them all at once: through tax cuts. Cutting taxes is a strategic initiative, not of the slippery slope variety but of a deeper variety, one that has wide effects across many, many areas. If you cut taxes and create a large deficit, then when any social program comes up—it could be health care for poor children, or services for paraplegics, or whatever—there won’t be enough money for it. So you end up cutting social programs across the board in health, in education, in the enforcement of environmental regulations, and so on. At the same time you reward those who you see as the good people, namely the wealthy people—those who were disciplined enough to become wealthy.

There are other kinds of strategic initiatives as well. Take the example of same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage contradicts large parts of the strict father model. If it’s a lesbian marriage, there’s no father at all, and in a gay marriage, where there are two fathers, neither of them fits the traditional view of the male strict father. Opposing same-sex marriage is thus reinforcing and extending strict father morality itself, which is the highest calling of the conservative moral system. Same-sex marriage is therefore a stand-in; it evokes the larger issue, namely what moral system is to govern our country.

The same is true of the issue of abortion. Allowing women to decide for themselves on whether to end a pregnancy flies in the face of the whole idea of a strict father family model. In the strict father model, it is the father who decides whether his wife or daughter should have an abortion. It is the father who controls his daughter’s sexuality; when the daughter takes a lover, then the father loses control. If the father is to maintain control over his family, then the women in the family cannot freely control their own sexual behavior and their own ability to reproduce. Abortion is therefore not inherently a political issue, but only a political issue when it comes to whether strict father morality is to reign in American life. Abortion is a stand-in for the larger issue: Is strict father morality going to rule America?

So all I have to do to reframe my issue is think up some sound bite–worthy terms and use them in place of the conservative terms?

No! Reframing is not just about words and language. Reframing is about ideas. The ideas have to be in place in people’s brains before the sound bite can make any sense. For example, take the idea of “the commons”—that is, our common inheritance, like the atmosphere or the electromagnetic spectrum (bandwidths). These are the common inheritances of all humanity, and most people who discuss them in this way refer to them as “the commons.” Yet the idea of a common inheritance and of using it for the public good is not yet part of the frame structure that most people use every day. For this reason you can’t just make up a sound bite about the commons and have most people understand it and agree with it.

If Republicans have such a huge infrastructure, how do we catch up?

Progressives know that they have to make investments in media. What they tend not to know is that they have to make investments in framing and in language. The big advantage we have is this: Whereas it took more than thirty years, billions of dollars, and forty-three institutes for conservatives to reframe public debate so the debate occurs on their turf, we have the advantage of having science on our side. Through cognitive science and through linguistics, we know how they did it. And we know how we can do the equivalent for progressives in a much shorter time and with many fewer resources. We also know how they’ve done their linguistic training, and we know how to do it ourselves.

Unfortunately, many progressives think this can be done through ad agencies and through pollsters. That’s a mistake. You really do need linguists and cognitive scientists, platforms for in-depth and sustained discussion, and well-honed plans for keeping meaningful dialogue consistently before policy makers and the public.

What was the difference between the Rockridge Institute and other progressive think tanks? Are there any other think tanks that are dedicated to research on framing?

Rockridge was entirely dedicated to reframing the public debate, both from a policy perspective and from a linguistic perspective. Other progressive think tanks have other primary functions: responding to the initiatives of the right, answering conservative charges, telling the truth when there are conservative lies, and constructing specific policies that progressives can use. All of these are important functions, but they do not replace the framing function, a function that is absolutely necessary.

To my knowledge, there is now only one think tank devoted to the overall framing of issues from both a policy perspective and a communicative perspective—the Forward Institute in Wisconsin. The Forward Institute is dedicated to empowering the progressives of Wisconsin to frame state issues from a progressive viewpoint. They have studied the framing of Wisconsin issues and have trained trainers to work with a full range of progressives—from political leaders at all levels, to union leaders, to teachers, to Native Americans, to environmentalists, to citizen-volunteers all willing to speak around the state using progressive frames. The institute has just started. Only time will tell if they will get the funding they need to succeed.

Isn’t
tax relief
the natural way to talk about taxes? I’m a progressive, but I have to admit, they do seem burdensome sometimes.

Homework in school is burdensome too, but you have to do it if you’re going to learn anything. Exercise is burdensome, but you have to do it if you’re going to be in good physical shape. Taxes are necessary if we are going to make wise investments in our national infrastructure that will pay off for all of us years and years in the future. That includes investments in things like education and health care for those who can’t afford them. Education and health care are investments in people. They are wise investments because they give us an educated citizenry, an educated workforce, and a healthy and efficient workforce. Those are the practical reasons for taxes. Other reasons for taxes are public services—like police and fire, disaster relief, and so on.

There are moral reasons for taxes as well. Education and health are important factors in fulfillment in life, and this country is about fulfillment in life. There is a reason why the Declaration of Independence talks about the pursuit of happiness and links it to liberty. The reason is that they go together. Without liberty, there can be no fulfillment in life. Thus there are practical reasons why it makes sense to understand taxation as investment, and there are moral reasons to understand taxation as paying your dues in a country where you can pursue happiness because there is liberty and freedom.

How do you respond or reply directly to a Republican strategic initiative?

You can’t, and that’s why they’re clever. Tax cuts are not about tax cuts. That’s why you can’t reply directly to tax cuts so easily. They are about getting rid of all social programs and regulations of business. Vouchers and school testing are not ultimately about vouchers and school testing; they are about conservative control of the content of education and the elimination of public resources. To respond you have to put the individual issue into a much larger framework that fits your understanding of the situation. Tort reform is not about tort reform; it is about allowing corporations to act without restraints, and about taking funding away from the Democratic Party, since trial lawyers are a major source of Democratic funding.

Instead of trying to reply to strategic initiatives, you need to reframe the larger issues at stake from your point of view. You can discuss the strategic initiative, or at least some parts of it, from your framework. Take tort reform. Trial lawyers are really public protection attorneys, and tort law is law that allows for public protection—it’s public protection law. When tort law tries to cap claims and settlements, its effect is to take claims out of the hands of juries—that is, to close the courtroom door, to create closed courts instead of open courts. In open courts, where there are juries, the jury can decide whether a given claim is a matter of public protection. Large settlements often have to do with issues of public protection—that is, they go beyond the case at hand. And open courts are the last defense that the public has against unscrupulous or negligent corporations or professionals. When conservatives talk about the lawsuits, you don’t just say, “No, no, the lawsuits weren’t frivolous,” you talk instead about public protection, about open courts, about the right to have juries decide, and about the last line of defense against unscrupulous or negligent corporations.

If facts that don’t fit frames are rejected, does that mean we should stop using facts in our arguments?

Obviously not. Facts are all-important. They are crucial. But they must be framed appropriately if they are to be an effective part of public discourse. We have to know what a fact has to do with moral principles and political principles. We have to frame those facts as effectively and as honestly as we can. And honest framing of the facts will entail other frames that can be checked with other facts.

How do progressive values differ from traditional American values?

They don’t differ. Progressive values are traditional American values, all the values we are proud of.

We are proud of the victories for equality and against hierarchy: the emancipation of the slaves, women’s suffrage, the union movement, the integration of the armed forces, the civil rights movement, the woman’s movement, the environmental movement, and the gay rights movement.

We are proud of FDR’s conception of government “for the people” and his rally for hope against fear.

We are proud of the Marshall Plan, which helped to erase the notion of “enemies.”

We are proud of John Kennedy’s call to public service, of Martin Luther King’s insistence on nonviolence in the face of brutality, of Cesar Chavez’s ability to bring pride and organization to the worst-treated of workers.

Progressive thought is as American as apple pie. Progressives want political equality, good public schools, healthy children, care for the aged, police protection, family farms, air you can breathe, water you can drink, fish in our streams, forests you can hike in, songbirds and frogs, livable cities, ethical businesses, journalists who tell the truth, music and dance, poetry and art, and jobs that pay a living wage to everyone who works.

Progressive activists—for living wages, women’s rights, human rights, the environment, health, voter registration, and so on—are American patriots, working with unselfish dedication toward making a better world, a world that fits fundamental American values.

★
16
★

How to Respond to Conservatives

The earlier chapters are meant to explain what framing is and how it works through language and communication systems, what conservative and progressive worldviews are, what biconceptualism is, and what the deep issues are in framing. But sooner or later, you are on the front line called the dinner table. As my students regularly ask, “Thanksgiving is coming and I’m going to be eating dinner with my conservative relatives, and I am going to get in a row over politics with my grandfather or my aunt. It’s always painful. What can I do?”

T
he following is a letter I received in 2004 while writing the version of this chapter in the first edition. It arrived several days after I had appeared on a TV show,
NOW with Bill Moyers
.

I listened to Dr. Lakoff last Friday night on
NOW
with great interest. I love the use of words and have been consistently puzzled at how the far right has co-opted so many definitions.

So I tried an experiment I wanted to tell you about. I took several examples from the interview; particularly trial vs. public protection lawyer and gay marriage and used those examples all week on AOL’s political chat room. Every time someone would scream about [John] Edwards’s being a trial lawyer, I’d respond with public protection lawyer and how they are the last defense against negligent corporations and [are] professional, and that the opposite of a public protection lawyer is a corporate lawyer who typically makes $400–500/per hr., and we pay that in higher prices for goods and services.

Every time someone started screaming about “gay marriage” I’d ask if they want the federal government to tell them who they could marry. I’d go on to explain when challenged that once government has crossed the huge barrier into telling one group of people who they could not marry, it is only a small step to telling other groups, and a smaller yet step to telling people who they had to marry.

I also asked for definitions. Every time someone would holler “dirty liberal,” I’d request their definition of “liberal.”

The last was my own hot button. Every time someone would scream “abortion,” “baby-killer,” etc., I’d suggest that if they are anti-abortion, then by all means, they should not have one.

I’ve got to tell you, the results were startling to me. I had some other people (completely unknown to me) join me and take up the same tacks. By last night, the chat room was civil. An amazing (to me) number of posters turned off their capitalization and we were actually having conversations.

I’m going to keep this up, but I really wanted you to know that I heard Dr. Lakoff, appreciate his work, and am trying to put it into practice. And it’s really really fun.

Thanks,

Penney Kolb

This book is written for people like Penney Kolb. Progressives are constantly put in positions where they are expected to respond to conservative arguments. It may be over Thanksgiving dinner, around the water cooler, or in front of an audience. But because conservatives have commandeered so much of the language, progressives are often put on the defensive with little or nothing to say in response.

But sooner or later, you are in Penney’s position. What do you do? Penney’s instincts are impeccable, and provide us with guidelines.

• Progressive values are the best of traditional American values. Stand up for your values with dignity and strength. You are a true patriot because of your values.

• Remember that right-wing ideologues have convinced half of the country that the strict father family model, which is bad enough for raising children, should govern our national morality and politics. This is the model that the best in American values has defeated over and over again in the course of our history—from the emancipation of the slaves to women’s suffrage, Social Security and Medicare, the civil rights and voting rights acts,
Brown v. the Board of Education
, and
Roe v. Wade
. Each time we have unified our country more behind our finest traditional values.

• Remember that most people have both strict and nurturant models, either actively or passively, perhaps active in different parts of their lives. Your job is to activate for politics the nurturant, progressive values already there (perhaps only passively) in whoever you’re talking to.

What do I tell my students when they ask what to say at Thanksgiving dinner? My advice: Ask your aunt or grandfather what they are most proud of that helped other people. Those of my students who have done this report that, to their surprise, their grandfather or other relative did a number of good things to help others and show some important social concerns. My next bit of advice: Keep talking about those things. The more you keep talking about
their
empathy and responsibility toward others, the closer you can get to them. Don’t try to convert them. Just try to open up and maintain a positive relationship. If you show respect and affection for your relatives, you may get some back.

• Be sure to show respect to the conservatives you are responding to. No one will listen to you if you don’t accord them respect. Listen to them. You may disagree strongly with everything that is being said, but you should know what is being said. Be sincere. Avoid cheap shots. What if they don’t show you respect? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Turn the other cheek and show respect anyway. That takes character and dignity. Show character and dignity.

• Avoid a shouting match. Remember that the radical right requires a culture war, and shouting is the discourse form of that culture war. Civil discourse is the discourse form of nurturant morality. You win a victory when the discourse turns civil. They win when they get you to shout.

• What if you have moral outrage? You should have moral outrage. But you can display it with controlled passion. If you lose control, they win.

• Distinguish between ordinary conservatives and nasty ideologues. Most conservatives are personally nice people, and you want to bring out their niceness and their sense of neighborliness and hospitality.

• Be calm. Calmness is a sign that you know what you are talking about.

• Be good-humored. A good-natured sense of humor shows you are comfortable with yourself.

• Hold your ground. Always be on the offense. Never go on defense. Your voice should be steady. Never whine or complain. Your body and voice should show optimism. Never act like a victim. Never plead. You should convey passionate conviction without losing control. Avoid the language of weakness—for example, rising intonations on statements.

• Conservatives have parodied liberals as weak, angry (hence not in control of their emotions), weak-minded, softhearted, unpatriotic, uninformed, and elitist. Don’t give them any opportunities to stereotype you in any of these ways. Expect these stereotypes, and deal with them when they come up.

• By the way you conduct yourself, show strength, calmness, and control; an ability to reason; a sense of realism; love of country; a command of the basic facts; and a sense of being an equal, not a superior. At the very least you want your audience to think of you with respect, as someone they may disagree with but who they have to take seriously. In many situations this is the best you can hope for. You have to recognize those situations and realize that a draw with dignity is a victory in the game of being taken seriously.

• Many conversations are ongoing. In an ongoing conversation, your job is to establish a position of respect and dignity, and then keep it.

• Don’t expect to convert staunch conservatives.

• You can make considerable progress with biconceptuals, those who use both models but in different parts of their life. They are your best audience. With biconceptuals your goal is to find out, if you can by probing, just which parts of their life they are nurturant about. For example, ask who they care about the most, what responsibilities they feel they have to those they care about, and how they carry out those responsibilities. This should activate their nurturant models as much as possible. Then, while the nurturant model is active for them, try linking it to politics. For example, if they are nurturant at home but strict in business, talk about the home and family and how home and family relate to political issues.
Example
: Real family values mean that your parents, as they age, don’t have to sell their home or mortgage their future to pay for health care or the medications they need.

• Avoid the usual mistakes. Remember, don’t just negate the other person’s claims; reframe. The facts unframed will not set you free. You cannot win just by stating the true facts and showing that they contradict your opponent’s claims. Frames trump facts. His frames will stay and the facts will bounce off. Always reframe and fit the facts to
your
frame.

• If you remember nothing else about framing, remember this:
Once your frame is accepted into the discourse, everything you say is just common sense.
Why? Because that’s what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame.

• Never answer a question framed from your opponent’s point of view. Always reframe the question to fit your values and your frames. This may make you uncomfortable, since normal discourse styles require you to directly answer questions posed. That is a trap. Practice changing frames.

• Be sincere. Use frames you really believe in, based on values you really hold.

• A useful thing to do is to use rhetorical questions:
Wouldn’t it be better if . . . ?
Such a question should be chosen to presuppose your frame.
Examples
: Wouldn’t it be better if we could fix the potholes in the roads and the bridges that are crumbling? Or, wouldn’t we all be better off if everybody with diseases and illnesses could be treated so that diseases and illnesses wouldn’t spread? Or, wouldn’t it be better if all kids were ready for school when they went to kindergarten?

• Stay away from set-ups. Fox News shows and other rabidly conservative shows try to put you in an impossible situation, where a conservative host sets the frame and insists on it, where you don’t control the floor, can’t present your case, and are not accorded enough respect to be taken seriously. If the game is fixed, don’t play. And if you do play, reframe and don’t be a patsy.

• Tell a story. Find stories where your frame is built into the story. Build up a stock of effective stories.

• Always start with values, preferably values all Americans share such as security, prosperity, opportunity, freedom, and so on. Pick the values most relevant to the frame you want to shift to. Try to win the argument at the values level. Pick a frame where your position exemplifies a value everyone holds—like fairness. Example: Your uncle says, “We need right-to-work laws. Unions are corrupt and run by thugs. They force you to join and just take your money.” Response: “Unions make you free—free from being a slave to a company. Without a union, you have to take whatever wage the company offers, often with no pension or medical care, with no constraints on hours or scheduling, and no guaranteed overtime pay. I wouldn’t want to be a slave to a company I work for. I want to be able to eat dinner with my family and have weekend time with my kids. Unions created weekends. People used to have to work six-day weeks for less pay than they get now. Unions created eight-hour days, when people used to work ten or twelve for no more pay. Unions put you on an even basis with the company. I want to be paid fairly, treated fairly, be respected in the company where I work, and feel good about the company. I’m not interested in being a slave. Whatever I pay to a union I more than make up for with pay from my job.”

• Be prepared. You should be able to recognize the basic frames that conservatives use, and you should prepare frames to shift to. My website, www.georgelakoff.com, posts analyses of frame shifting.
Example
: A tax cut proponent says, “We should get rid of taxes. People know how to spend their money better than the government.”
Reframe
: “The government has made very wise investments with taxpayer money. Our interstate highway system, for example. You couldn’t build a highway with your tax refund. The government built them. Or the Internet, paid for by taxpayer investment. You could not make your own Internet. Most of our scientific advances have been made through funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health—great government investments of taxpayer money. Computer science was developed with taxpayer money, so was the satellite system, so were the chips in our cell phones, so were the wonder drugs we need. No matter how wisely you spent your own money, you’d never get those scientific and medical breakthroughs. And how far would you get hiring your own army with your tax refund?”

• Use wedge issues, cases where your opponent will violate some belief he holds no matter what he says. Student debt is a good example. Ask if he believes in equality of opportunity and an opportunity society, which conservatives have continuously argued for (as opposed to “equality of outcome.”)
Reframe
: “Many poor students with talent can only go to college if they get a government loan. But those loans cost between 6 percent and 12 percent interest and leave students with a mountain of debt that many cannot afford. The income from that debt yields profit for the government that is scheduled to be funneled into the general fund for many years into the future. Elizabeth Warren has proposed lowering the student debt interest rate to an affordable 3.86 percent, still giving the government some profit, while making up the profit lost to the government by plugging tax loopholes that allow the rich to avoid paying taxes. The students would then go to college, get out without a mountain of debt, and then be able to use the money they earn—not to pay off the government loans, but to get married, buy homes, and have kids, spending that money in the economy and boosting the economy and creating jobs. Do you want equality of opportunity with the poor able to afford college loans and boost the economy or do you want to protect unfair tax loopholes for billionaires and kill off equality of opportunity?”