Conceptual Metaphors, Progressive Values, and Reframing in America: the Work of George Lakoff

George Lakoff is a professor at UC-Berkeley, teaching lingustics and cognitive sciences. He wrote a book in 1997(updated in early 2001) called Moral Politics: How Liberals & Conservatives Think. He got a lot more attention when Howard Dean made that book mandatory reading for Dean's campaign. he distilled his ideas into a little compact 100 page book entitled _Don't Think of a Elephant! Know Your Values & Frame the Debate_, which came out in August last year(a little too late) and for which Howard Dean wrote the intro.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/images/lakoff2.jpg

He took various analytical tooks from cognitive science and applied them to how people thought about politics, and why there were two . For example, WHY does someone who feels passionately about the environment also tends to support union causes, as well as local businesses? why does someone who despises any form of gun control also speaks of "the liberal media" in perjorative tones? His idea is that we conceive of our politics and our nation(s) in similar terms to how we tend to think about families:(from an interview in 2003)

...Well, the progressive worldview is modeled on a
nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones — those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant — and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it...

there are plenty of folks who subscribe totally to one view or the other, but very many who employ both in different areas of their life. like a guy who's tend to be a Strict Father authoritarian type at home, but more of a nuturant type at work(which describes several working class union types). or the teacher who has a very nurturant family life, but runs his classroom according to the more strict paradigm.

pay attention to this guy! if you haven't heard of him yet, you definately will in the 18 months(what with the build-up to the 2006 mid-term elections).

Much of why conservatives have dominated American national discourse for a long time is that they figured out how to frame things in a certain way, a way that reinforced their ideals and put the other side at a disadvantage:

Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.

If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" — something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Here's another example of how powerful framing is. In Arnold Schwarzenegger's acceptance speech, he said, "When the people win, politics as usual loses." What's that about? Well, he knows that he's going to face a Democratic legislature, so what he has done is frame himself and also Republican politicians as the people, while framing Democratic politicians as politics as usual — in advance. The Democratic legislators won't know what hit them. They're automatically framed as enemies of the people....

It's not just that we have the facts(e.g. Bush lied, the Vice President gave a LOT of favors to his old company, etc), but that these facts have to be communicated in a way that makes sense to your interlocuter. For example, going off on how deplorable the "permissive" attitude of your neighbor's family would necessarily make any sense to someone who doesn't self-restraint and painful self-discipline to be the end-all, be-all of life. it's outside of his frame of reference.

HOW did conservatives get good at this? easy; they dumped a SHITload of money into infrastructure:

...Because they've put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years their think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. [There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s.]

And now, as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas...