Don't Think of an Elephant!

Reviews

• Recent book offers hopeful advice to ailing Democrats Timberjay News
• Challenging the Christian right in rural America People's Weekly World
• Review Buzzflash.com
• A New, Better Democratic Strategy St. Petersburg Times
• Review of Don’t Think of an Elephant Intervention Magazine
• John Kerry Was Framed Globeandmail.com
• Review OpEdNews.com
• Why the Democrats Need to Stop Thinking About Elephants New York Times
• George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant Axisoflogic.com
• The Best Book This Cycle The Daily Kos
• Review Publishers Weekly

Recent book offers hopeful advice to ailing Democrats
Timberjay News
By Marshall Helmberger
February 18, 2005

Two differing models of child-rearing—the strict father versus the nurturing parent— pretty well sum up the differences between the country’s two major political parties according to the author of a recent book that offers a possible road map for a Democratic resurgence in the U.S.

So excited was state Sen. Becky Lourey (DFL-Kerrick) after reading the book, titled: Don’t Think of an Elephant, that she bought a copy for every DFL member of the Minnesota Senate.

Written by George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC-Berkeley, the breezy paperback ($7.50 on amazon.com) offers the best explanation I’ve seen to date for the remarkable success of Republican candidates in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The terrorist attacks have so helped Republicans because they reinforced the underlying framework of the new Republican belief in strict father morality, which holds that the world is a dangerous place and that it is up to a strict male authority figure to protect us from evil.

Lakoff explains how Bush strategist Karl Rove masterfully uses language (such as having President Bush refer to our enemies as “evildoers”) to reinforce this world view and is simultaneously careful to present the president as a source of strength and consistency (i.e. the strict father). Likewise, they attacked John Kerry for “waffling,” which is viewed by strict father moralists as a sign of weakness.

Strict father moralists also view dissent as sinful, which helps to explain why Republicans have reacted so vehemently to any Democratic opposition to their policies. While most Democrats would view dissent as a distinctly American right, and even a responsibility in some cases, under the strict father world view, it is the duty of children (in the family sense) or citizens in the broader context to be obedient to the moral authority. In that context, offering political opposition is little different than backtalking to your father.

The thinking works the same on the international level, where the French and Germans were vilified by Republicans for their unwillingess to support the Iraq war. While Kerry made a major point of Bush’s failure to build a broader coalition of allies, in the strict father world view, the U.S. is the world’s moral authority and other nations have an obligation to support our policies. When it didn’t work that way, conservatives saw the fault lying with the other country’s disobedience, rather than with the administration’s heavy-handed approach. After all, the strict father doesn’t consult with his children about how to approach problems, so why should the U.S. consult with France?

What Democrats saw as a failure of diplomacy, actually reinforced the idea of Bush as the strong father figure. In other words, while Democrats were campaigning as if policy mattered, Republicans were waging their campaign on a far more fundamental, and more powerful, psychological level.

The Democrats, according to Lakoff, have long represented the opposing view of child, or citizen, rearing. While the strict father believes that people are basically evil and must learn obedience through sometimes painful disclipine, the nurturing parent model holds that children, or citizens, are basically good, but need affirmative guidance to help them on the path to a responsible and creative adulthood. This belief system rejects corporal punishment, since it holds that, in most cases, children can be properly guided without such blunt, and potentially counterproductive, tactics.

I suspect many parents would recognize the challenges in the nurturing parent approach. It’s harder work, because it requires better communication with your children and a willingness to be flexible. “Because I said so,” may be all the explanation needed in the authoritarian strict father household, but being a nurturing parent requires more than that.

Such differences play out in public policy, says Lakoff, with Democrats supporting nurturing policies such as workplace safety and environmental regulations, social safety net programs, and tax policies that help to redistribute income (sharing is considered a virtue to nurturing parents).

The Republican’s strict father framework opposes safety net programs, because they believe that people are poor due to their own bad decisions and that they shouldn’t be “rewarded” with government handouts that only encourage more irresponsible or immoral behavior. Republicans, for similar reasons, don’t like taxes that redistribute wealth, since they believe the wealthy got that way because they’ve led morally exemplary lives and should be rewarded with low taxes.

So why are many Democrats so excited by Lakoff’s book? In part, it’s because most of them have never understood the new style Republicans represented by the Bush administration. Without knowing how the Bush folks think and, more importantly, how they communicate so effectively with their followers, the Democrats were essentially fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

And Lakoff has advice for how to respond. He offers ways for Democrats to reframe the political debate and better communicate the strengths of their world view and their approach to issues. He also urges Democrats to steer clear of those who urge the party to become more like the Republicans. According to Lakoff, if Democrats allow the Republicans to set the terms of the political debate, the Republicans will always win.

Lakoff says Democrats need to take on big challenges in advancing their agenda, rather than simply quibbling over the details of Republican proposals, as they’ve done for far too long. If they can do that, Lakoff argues, the Democrats will rise again.

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Challenging the Christian right in rural America
People's Weekly World
By Paul Nelson
February 17, 2005

Polls from the recent presidential election showed that many working-class voters support Bush’s Christian right “values agenda.” Why?

From 1994 until 2002, I worked as a pastor at various Lutheran congregations in rural Iowa, and so have observed this trend firsthand. It’s debatable exactly how much the Christian right movement helped Bush’s re-election. But it has been extremely effective in its longer-term effort to convince working-class voters (many of whom attend church on a regular basis) that their enemy is a liberal/left agenda working to undermine moral values.

As the Christian right tells the story, an elite class of liberals and other “leftists” have banned God from public classrooms, taken take away their guns, “forced” gay marriage on their communities, and let women “kill” human life through abortion. Some commentators have dubbed this view — especially as expressed in some parts of rural, working-class America — “God, guns and gays.”

A recent book by George Lakoff (Don’t Think Of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate) offers insights for combating the Christian right’s domination of the values debate in America. The Christian right has developed a religious ideology that Lakoff aptly names “strict Father morality.” Under its influence, many working-class families (especially in rural America) have come to see their difficulties as having a moral, not economic, basis. “Strict Father morality” paints the world as governed in a top-down fashion by religious/moral values through which God rules heaven and earth, while Dad rules the home. To mess with this view of life, Christian rightists would say, risks bringing American society to the ruin of moral bankruptcy.

By implication, “special rights” for gays and lesbians need to be turned back since the traditional God-given moral order implies marriage as legitimate only between a man and a woman, with the husband as unquestioned head of the household. Any other human partnering is seen as unnatural and a violation of the top-down morality given to American society by God.

This moral order also implies that a woman must unquestioningly “support her husband,” and not be allowed the freedom to make her own reproductive choices or any other real choices for her life. This view can be seen in the theology of a Christian right group called the Promise Keepers, and in the writings of Dr. James Dobson. To allow a woman freedom to make decisions for herself would remove the wife from the moral authority of the husband and lead to a larger breakdown of the God-given moral order ordained for family life.

Or, consider another supposed implication of “strict Father morality”: organized prayer needs to be restored in public schools, as it represents public adherence to the moral order by all individuals and families in a community. Banning organized prayer from public schools, Christian rightists believe, has unleashed all kinds of social problems.

This top-down religious ideology obscures the very real economic chaos, financial insecurity and sheer worker exploitation that is an integral part of capitalist life for working families. In addition to being sexist and homophobic, it is ultimately an authoritarian view of American life. Left activists are portrayed as threatening the very foundations of our society’s religious/moral order. To counter this, “order” is presented as providing working people with “security” in an insecure world.

We on the left need to engage the working class in an honest and direct discussion about this ideology. We need to ask questions like: What is really happening in your life? Who are the political and economic elites that promote this religious ideology, and what are their class interests?

From my experience with church life in rural Iowa, I believe this kind of political discussion and involvement with working-class people — even in church halls — can indeed unmask the ideology of the right in all of its political/economic and religious/moral dimensions. This political work can also motivate working people — religious and non-religious — for the important tasks of organizing coalitions for fundamental political, economic and social change. This may seem like an overwhelming task, but it can and must be done for the advance of socialism in America.

Paul Nelson (larnel@peoplepc.com) teaches philosophy and world religions at Des Moines Area Community College in Boone, Iowa, and is an ordained Lutheran pastor.

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Review
by Thom Hartmann, Buzzflash.com
November 4, 2004



During the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican partisans began employing an unusually skillful use of language and advertising technique. The Willie Horton ads, for example, used an old NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) technique of "Anchoring via Submodalities," linking Dukakis, at an unconscious level in the viewer’s mind, to Willie Horton by the use of color versus black-and-white footage, and background sound. After a few exposures to these psy-ops ads, people would "feel" Willie Horton when they "saw" Dukakis.

It was no accident. Toward the end of that campaign, I was presenting at an NLP conference in New York, and a colleague mentioned to me how the GOP had hired one of our mutual acquaintances to advise them on the tools of persuasion. "He’s gone over to the dark side," my friend said sadly.

NLP and similar psychological techniques are somewhat like the Force referred to in the Star Wars movies – they can be used to heal or they can be used to manipulate (within limits). They’re grounded in the sciences of linguistics and hypnosis, and were first identified and codified in the late 1960s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

I’d first learned NLP in the healing context in 1978, when I was the Executive Director of a residential treatment facility for severely emotionally disturbed and abused children, and found it a powerful therapeutic tool. I applied an NLP technique called "Reframing" to the issue of Attention Deficit Disorder, suggesting that kids with ADD were "hunters in a farmer’s world" instead of "defective," a concept endorsed by NLP co-founder Richard Bandler (who trained me) in a foreword he wrote for one of my books and written up in a TIME magazine cover story in 1993. I'd also spent about a decade teaching NLP and training NLP Practitioners.

At the same time NLP was being used for therapy and to enhance communications, the dark side of the force was getting aggressive. Newt Gingrich in particular -- skilled in these techniques -- was working with Republican leaders and conservatives in the media to frame the word "liberal" as something akin to "traitor," an effort that ultimately led to his infamous "secret" memo to GOP leaders titled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control."

As FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) notes, Newt wrote, "Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. ... Apply these [words] to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

"Decay... failure (fail)... collapse(ing)... deeper... crisis... urgent(cy)... destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie... liberal... they/them... unionized bureaucracy... ‘compassion’ is not enough... betray... consequences... limit(s)... shallow... traitors... sensationalists...endanger... coercion... hypocrisy... radical... threaten... devour... waste... corruption... incompetent... permissive attitudes... destructive... impose... self-serving... greed... ideological... insecure... anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs... pessimistic... excuses... intolerant... stagnation... welfare... corrupt... selfish... insensitive... status quo... mandate(s)... taxes... spend(ing)... shame... disgrace... punish (poor...)... bizarre... cynicism... cheat... steal... abuse of power... machine... bosses... obsolete... criminal rights... red tape... patronage."

On the other hand, FAIR notes, Newt suggested that Republicans should also "memorize as many as possible" of the following "Positive Governing Words" to apply to any reference to Republicans or GOP efforts:

"Share... change... opportunity... legacy... challenge... control... truth... moral... courage... reform... prosperity... crusade... movement... children... family... debate... compete... active(ly)... we/us/our... candid(ly)... humane... pristine... provide... liberty... commitment... principle(d)... unique... duty... precious... premise... care(ing)... tough... listen... learn... help... lead... vision... success... empower(ment)... citizen... activist... mobilize... conflict... light... dream... freedom... peace... rights... pioneer... proud/pride... building... preserve... pro-(issue): flag, children, environment... reform... workfare... eliminate good-time in prison... strength... choice/choose... fair... protect... confident... incentive... hard work... initiative... common sense... passionate."

The result a decade of politicians and talk show hosts memorizing and parroting Newt’s word list is that, in much of the public’s mind, morality and patriotism are associated with conservatives while liberals are thought of in the terms described above.

And it's no coincidence that the most psychologically effective ad that the Bush campaign used in 2004 wasn't the wolf ad (that was #2) but one that had two specific NLP-based posthypnotic suggestions embedded into it, telling people that "in the quiet" and "when you're alone in the voting booth" that they "can't take the risk" of voting for Kerry. It looked like a simple check-list ad, but was saved for the last minute and played so heavily because it was so psychologically sophisticated and potent.

This is part of an overall attempt to manipulate, define, and "frame" the terms of discussion and debate in America. It’s a sophisticated and well-funded project, with roots in NLP and psychology. Groups from the GOP to the most well known right-wing think tanks to the White House have been systematically using it, and the average American has absorbed thousands of hours of its output over the past two decades.

Into this fray steps George Lakoff, professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Like several of the early founders of NLP, Lakoff is a linguist, and today could easily be called one of our nation’s best. Although he doesn’t explicitly reference NLP in his book, it’s an excellent primer in several aspects of this technology.

Lakoff opens his book with discussions of the views of government that are held by conservatives and liberals ("strict father" versus "nurturing parent"), and points out how often debates are won by conservatives even before the discussion has begun because they were first to seize control of the language. Part of this, Lakoff notes, is the result of a genuine difference in worldviews, but a larger and more insidious part is an intentional effort by conservatives to frame the terms of national discourse.

For example, when discussion is held about "tax relief," two historic understandings of taxation are lost: that taxes are the cost of admission to a civil society, and that those who want to evade taxes yet still use public assets like fire and police protection are freeloaders. Instead, taxes are cast as something oppressive, from which we need relief.

Perhaps the most useful part of the book is the end -- although the book is best read straight through, so the concepts in the end are in context -- where Lakoff presents his own far more ethical and honest version of Newt’s famous word list. For example, where conservatives talk about "Strong Defense, Free Markets, Lower Taxes, Smaller Government, and Family Values," Lakoff recommends progressives reframe discussions into terms of "Stronger America, Broad Prosperity, Better Future, Effective Government, and Mutual Responsibility." He even titles his last chapter, "How to respond to conservatives," and it’s filled with sound and pithy advice.

The DVD, "How Democrats and Progressives Can Win," expands particularly on this final part of Lakoff's book. It's a straightforward tutorial by Lakoff himself, and goes through a series of specific issues -- abortion, taxes, same-sex marriage, and the like -- telling progressives how to perform verbal jujitsu on conservatives, taking their frames and turning them inside out. It's best watched after reading the book, as there's a lot of shorthand in the movie that makes much more sense when you've first read the book. While it makes several references specifically about how to defeat Bush in the election of '04 -- which is now over -- the information is more useful and relevant than ever.

Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff, and the DVD How Democracy and Progressives Can Win are vital tools for anybody interested in helping bring about a return to democracy in America. At 120 pages it’s a quick read, yet the concepts contained are so important -- and explained in such an accessible fashion -- that it will transform your ability to communicate progressive values and ideas.




Thom Hartmann is the Project Censored Award-winning, best-selling author of 15 books, a nationally syndicated progressive talk show host, and a former psychotherapist, communications consultant, CEO of an advertising agency, and licensed and certified NLP Trainer.www.thomhartmann.com.

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A New, Better Democratic Strategy
by Robyne E Blumner, Times Perspective Columnist St. Petersburg Times
November 28, 2004



What are the Democrats to do now? After losing the presidency again and allowing Republicans to solidify their control of Congress, the Democrats are in reconnoiter mode. They are anxiously trying to figure out a winning strategy before they go the way of the Whigs.

If Democrats are looking for their own version of Karl Rove, they just might find him in Berkeley linguist George Lakoff. While New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is wondering aloud whether Democrats should embrace guns, and a handful of party leaders are suggesting Democrats allow for some "flexibility" on abortion rights, Lakoff is saying the opposite.

In his bestselling book, Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Lakoff says that tilting to the right is precisely the wrong strategy for progressives. He says such a move would alienate the base and reinforce the conservative world view for swing voters. Instead, he suggests that Democrats start promoting their own values by properly framing the debate.

Conservatives have been extremely effective at using semantics to promote their politics: "prolife, family values, the death tax, partial-birth abortion." Such verbiage puts opponents instantly on the defensive. Lakoff says that Democrats have to come up with their own arsenal of phrases that have simplistic, inherent appeal. They have to dump their tendency toward wonkish policy-speak.

The better educated of the electorate already trends Democratic, the trick is to capture the imagination of those Americans with a more casual attachment to complex public policy.

Lakoff is a cognitive scientist who understands how humans process and act on information. He says, much to the astonishment of the Democratic establishment, "people do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values."

This is what author Thomas Frank was getting at in his brilliant book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, in which he reports that the poorest county in Kansas dependably votes Republican despite the GOP's consistent favoritism of the wealthy.

These voters are the "moral values" folks who vote Republican because they identify with its antigay, antiabortion, proguns and pro-God-in-government agenda. It doesn't matter that the Democrats are more likely to support access to the health care they need or fund the public schools they rely upon, Republicans share their "values."

And from where does one's set of value derive? According to Lakoff, it is all tied up in one's view of the family.

Why is it that conservatives have uniform positions on abortion, the environment, gun control, foreign policy and tort reform? What do all these issues have to do with one another? And, why is it that progressives hold exactly the opposite position on every issue?

Each group's world view is a natural outgrowth of varying family models, Lakoff says. Conservatives hold the "strict father" model and progressives hold to the "nurturant parent" model.

In the strict father model, the father is the moral authority who knows absolute right and wrong. He physically punishes disobedience as way to develop internal discipline in children. This gives children a moral compass, steeling them to compete successfully in a evil, dog-eat-dog world. Morality is tied to self-reliance and prosperity.

Applying this approach to social programs reveals why conservatives are so often opposed to having government help those in need. They see it as immoral to give to people who have not earned the help. They worry that aid programs promote malingering. This perspective also promotes a unilateralism in foreign policy, since the United States, as father figure to the world, knows best.

Lakoff says this view governs the politics of somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of Americans.

On the other side is the progressive nurturant parent model, a gender-neutral approach, that says a parent's job is to nurture and care for children and bring them up to nurture others. The goal is to create a better world.

Protection of children from crime and terrorism is part of the nurturant model but so is protection from a toxic environment, dangerous working conditions and unsafe food. That's why progressives are so ready to enlist government as a force against these harms. Fairness, freedom, two-way communication and personal fulfillment are nurturant values, says Lakoff. He believes another 35 to 40 percent of the population see politics through this lense. The remainder are the folks in the middle, or the elusive swing voters.

For Democrats to successfully regroup, according to Lakoff, they have to convince swing voters to "activate (the nurturant) world view and moral system in their political decisions." That means using the language of progressive values and offering initiatives that compliment those values.

He is on to something. In the news biz we know that great visions and small stories are always more compelling than cold, hard facts. It's time for Democrats to do a better job explaining why a nurturing world offers a more promising future than one centered on the rod.

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Review
by Scott D. O’Reilly Intervention Magazine
November 22, 2004



Democrats are now a minority party in America. If Karl Rove and George Bush have their way, liberals will soon be an endangered species. The election of 2004 was not decided by fraudulent voting machines, but by a fundamental political realignment that threatens to steer the country in a starkly conservative direction for a generation or more.

The cognitive scientist George Lakoff discerned this possibility more than a decade ago in Moral Politics (1994), a book updated in 2002, which helps explains the impeachment of President Clinton, and the Florida election debacle, in the context of a rightward revolt against secular government.

Conservatives have spent the last forty years, Lakoff argues, developing an infrastructure designed to put the Left in a stranglehold. Well-funded think tanks, media outlets like Fox New, an extensive talk-radio network, and state of the art direct mail campaigns have succeeded in framing the issues to the advantage of conservatives, in effect controlling the terms of political debate, while mobilizing a vast army of voters on the behalf of a conservative agenda.

The issue of “framing” is a critical component of Lakoff’s latest book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. What is framing? As a cognitive scientist, Lakoff studies how particular concepts activate a constellation of ancillary ideas and emotions that make up an audience’s worldview. For example, the concept of “tax-relief” carries with it a rich array of associations that include the lifting of an unfair burden, standing up for the little guy against big government, and the notion that hard work is rewarded when citizens keep more of the money they earn.

Frames, as Lakoff explains the term, are concepts that have a metaphoric and a moral dimension, and exert a very powerful influence on target audiences when activated. One tactic that conservatives use is carefully crafted language. For example, by using the term “death-tax,” conservatives conjure all sorts of negative associations, encouraging audiences that would never be affected by the estate tax to support an agenda that actually goes against their interests.

Conservatives, Lakoff argues, have simply been masterful at crafting language and concepts that resonate with a wide swath of voters. But language is only one part of the equation, and the most powerful part of Lakoff’s analysis emerges from his conjecture as to why such language appeals to large segments of the American electorate in the first place.

Lakoff contends that one’s political outlook and affiliation is shaped, to an extent greater than most realize, by one’s conception of the “ideal family.” In Lakoff’s view, there are two competing models of the ideal family in the United States: the Strict Father Model and the Nurturant Parent model.

The Strict Father model entails a particular worldview and childrearing philosophy. According to this model, the world is an inherently dangerous place, and the father is responsible for protecting his family and instilling strict discipline, which will build the character children need to compete in a fiercely competitive world. Character, according to this view, is largely a matter of internalizing explicit moral laws that teach right from wrong, and following these rules is the best route to success in a world where morality is largely black and white.

The Nurturant Parent model views the world as a friendlier place, even an arena for personal development. Empathy, not a rigid adherence to rules, is seen as the basis of morality; and cooperation and the common good are given a higher priority than competition. Further, morality is viewed as a complex affair, with the world and moral dilemmas suffused with shades of gray and nuance.

According to Lakoff, our expectations concerning the proper role of government derive from our conception of the ideal family. For instance, for conservatives, taxes that redistribute wealth are bad because they discourage competition; for liberals, progressive taxation is desirable because it can promote greater economic equality and fairness. But even more importantly, Lakoff’s analysis suggests how powerfully “the war on terror” tilts the political playing field in favor of conservatives.

In fact, the Bush administration does everything in its power to activate and reinforce the Strict Father model. During the campaign, Bush kept reminding voters that we were at war and that his first responsibility as commander-in-chief is to protect and defend America. The Bush campaign painted Senator Kerry’s emphasis on international cooperation as effeminate, and the Bush campaign ridiculed Kerry for engaging in nuance when moral matters like the war on terror simply came down to a matter of good versus evil.

H.L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is wrong. For Bush, however, the simple solutions he offers to complex problems, like terrorism or taxes, have the virtue of appealing to a large segment of the population that is inclined towards the Strict Father model. The Bush campaign’s rhetoric, imagery, and ideas seemed tailor made to tap into and exploit this pervasive mindset.

The Kerry campaign, on the other hand, was far less psychologically astute, seemingly trying to win over an amorphous pool of swing voters by remaining as bland and morally innocuous as possible. Kerry did not activate the Democratic base by tailoring his message as cunningly as conservatives did in activating their base.

Lakoff makes a persuasive case that unless the progressive movement begins to develop the kind of language and ideas that stimulate the values associated with the Nurturant Parent model, they will continue on the path towards electoral irrelevancy. This is not an encouraging prospect. But Lakoff does provide hope. There are ample grounds to believe that many of the ideas now being championed by conservatives are fatally flawed. The notion of “tax-relief,” which rests on the metaphor that taxes are a form of punishment, is faultily conceived, Lakoff argues. A better metaphor, Lakoff suggests, is that taxes are “the price of civilization.”

Former Vice President Dan Quayle once rhetorically asked, why use the tax system to punish our best citizens? He was expressing an article of faith among conservatives, namely that a progressive form of taxation is morally objectionable because it punishes successful citizens while rewarding the least deserving citizens. Lakoff argues that this is a shortsighted way of looking at taxes; because the wealthy invariably benefit the most from public spending, they owe the most back in return.

For example, Vice President Dick Cheney once claimed that the government had nothing to do with the riches he made as the CEO of Halliburton. Cheney’s claim is preposterous on many levels. Corporations could not create the wealth they do without tapping into a pool of employees educated in public schools, without publicly funded infrastructures like modern highways and airways, or without a publicly financed investment like the Internet.

Lakoff demolishes the rationale behind the “taxes equals punishment” metaphor that forms the basis of Bush’s fiscal policies. Empirical evidence would seem to bear Lakoff out; low-tax, low-service states of the Deep South seem to lag behind their “progressive taxation” counterparts on a range of social, educational, and economic measures. Yet the “taxes equals punishment” metaphor exerts a strong psychological attraction for a significant number of voters, even as it works against their interests.

The metaphor of “the war on terror” offers similar possibilities for conservatives to mislead Americans against their interests. Before his reelection, Bush ridiculed Senator Kerry for suggesting that “the war on terror” was a metaphor: “My opponent must believe we are at war with a metaphor,” the president chortled.

But Kerry’s point was valid. Once the Bush administration managed to bait and switch Saddam Hussein for bin Laden, they were well on their way towards extending the martial metaphor in perpetuity. As Lakoff observes, the events of 9/11 could have been framed as a crime rather than an act of war. A concerted effort to mobilize the world community to bring bin Laden and his accomplices to justice before an international court was an alternative course the Bush administration chose not to pursue. International alliances could have been strengthened, global law enforcement cooperation improved, and new international security arrangements and institutions devised. Instead, we got the war in Iraq.

In fairness to the Bush Administration, it should be pointed out that the World Trade Center Towers were bombed in 1993 and legal proceeding did little to discourage Islamic extremists. But Bush’s war on terror has so far failed to capture bin Laden, and his invasion of Iraq has arguably been a boon to al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts. The point is that metaphors matter and that framing issues in light of some metaphors rather than others can confer enormous political advantages. Conservatives recognize this to a far greater extent than progressives; if you doubt this, ponder the outcome of a hypothetical race between Hillary Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the midst of a “war on terror” mentality.

Lakoff’s book shows why conservatives are winning the war of ideas, but also why the American public is losing in the process. Campaigning and governing, alas, are two different things. By helping us to understand why the Bush administration is succeeding and misleading at the same time, Lakoff’s work offers trenchant insight and encouragement for the future.




Scott D. O'Reilly is an independent writer with degrees in philosophy and psychology. He is a contributor to the book The Great Thinkers A-Z and is working on Deconstructing Demagogues, a book which examines how politicians use and misuse language. You can email your comments to Scott at

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John Kerry Was Framed
by Christopher Dreher, Globeandmail.com
November 20, 2004



"People don't understand what the division in the country is all about," says Berkeley, Calif., linguist George Lakoff. "Liberals think conservatives are stupid, but that's not true. They are just operating within a different frame."

Prof. Lakoff is a cognitive scientist who specializes in how conceptual systems are expressed in language. He's also the new political guru for Democrats mystified by this month's U.S. election results.

He first published Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think in 1996, to little apparent notice. In 2000, he reached out to consult with Al Gore's presidential campaign, but was, in his words, "thoroughly ignored."

Moral Politics kept quietly gathering an audience, and in 2003 a revised edition reached the Top 10 of Amazon.com's bestseller list.

This year, a central figure in John Kerry's camp asked for Prof. Lakoff's feedback, but the results weren't much better. "A certain amount of what I said was taken seriously and incorporated," Prof. Lakoff says. "Most was not."

Since Nov. 2, however, Prof. Lakoff has had runaway success with a new, slim tract, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. It tries to explain how "frames" -- mental constructs that guide the way each person perceives reality -- are crucial to the Republican grip on power.

Prof. Lakoff's theories might also help explain George Bush's reelection to a perplexed world.

Before Moral Politics, Prof. Lakoff says, he was puzzled by the seemingly incongruous beliefs conservatives displayed. "I had no idea how owning guns and abortion and lower taxes and being against tort reform could fit together."

Yet he realized that he himself held an exactly contrary set of views and biases. So he searched for a cognitive model that would explain both systems of thinking.

He came up with a theory of "deep framing" based on two different metaphorical models of the ideal family -- one represented by the strict father and the other by "understanding" parents.

Contemporary conservatives gravitate toward the former, prioritizing strong protection and order. The liberal family paradigm, on the other hand, discounts gender and values empathy toward others.

.The secret is, he says, that all people unconsciously hold both ideals, whether actively or passively. People may be strict in one part of their lives, for example with children, and nurturing in another, say in giving their employees a generous number of days off.

"If you have both versions [in your brain] and can use either one," he explains, "it then depends on which is activated."

The Democrats misunderstand this, for example, when they water down their views to attract swing voters: "You [should] talk to swing voters the same way you talk to your base If you want to change things, you strive to activate your model in other people.

"The conservatives understand this and through the use of specific language, visuals, gestures and everything else, they're activating the 'strict father' frame in everyone they can, therefore 'strict father' is reinforced."

Why are conservatives so successful with framing? According to Prof. Lakoff, they have been working on how to promote and instill conservative ideals for over three decades, creating more than 40 think-tanks and spending billions of dollars on conservative causes.

"It's not like they understand the cognitive models involved, but if you put thousands of people into 43 institutions and think-tanks, they'll come up with answers over the years," he says.

Another reason Democrats fell behind, he says, is due to a belief in an Enlightenment concept of human nature, that human beings are rational and will act logically if given the facts. "The truth is," he says, "people have different frames and different notions of reason. The highest value on the right is protecting and extending its moral structure, while the highest on the left is to help individuals."

In his new book, Prof. Lakoff identifies different types of language that conservatives use in reframing. One is legitimate, straight talk about something the conservative believes in, such as tax relief.

A second is manipulative, such as the grisly and misleading idea of "partial-birth abortion": Prof. Lakoff suggests that instead of tacitly validating the Republicans' language, Democrats use something like "save-the-mother abortion."

The final mode is Orwellian -- language that means the exact opposite of what it means, such as the Clear Skies act that increases the amount of pollution or a Leave No Child Behind education reform that actually leaves plenty of children behind.

"What's interesting from a linguistic standpoint," Prof. Lakoff says, "is that they only use Orwellian language when they have to. They couldn't call the Clean Air Act the Dirty Air Act, so they know they're losing. That should be a red flag saying, 'Attack us!' "

The solution is not just renaming catch phrases. It's also necessary to reframe the systems of thought behind the issues: A liberal "pro-life" agenda, for instance, might be attached to values such as child care, education, health insurance for all children, and sex education to minimize unwanted pregnancies.

Then, every time the other side casts "pro-life" as meaning "anti-abortion," Prof. Lakoff says, "you switch it. Which is honest -- it allows you to say what you believe, and allows you to adhere to your own values."

According to Prof. Lakoff, people on the left suffer from "hyper-cognition" - they give long-winded explanations to a question because they don't have the language to articulate succinctly.

His prescription is to institute a network of think-tanks and organizations outside the Democratic Party that work together to develop a broad political framework.

And it seems that the party is finally ready to listen. Prof. Lakoff been asked to work with Democrats in the House and Senate leadership beginning next month, to find a common message to help counter Republican dominance.

He estimates that creating the entire infrastructure is at least a 10-year project. However, he says, "a whole lot can be done in the next four years before the next election."

Christopher Dreher, a Boston-area journalist, writes frequently on ideas for The Globe and Mail.
Bell Globemedia
© 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.




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Review
Don’t Think of an Elephantate: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
by Rob Kall, OpEdNews
November 19, 2004



The republicans have spent 30+ years framing the issues. They've invested hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in think tanks that devise strategies for pitching policies, for wrapping policies in words and language. They literally have a play book on how to frame the issues—the words and phrases to use and not use.

George Lakoff shines light on the way that language is used by the republicans and right wingers and then goes further, explaining the ways people think-- the images and language they use in their heads. He explores the moral/political value systems that drive liberals and conservatives. Then he explains how to take back the language, the words and the dialogue.

If you haven't read his work—either this book or his longer, more academic one, Moral Politics, then you will probably routinely fall into the trap of using language and words that the right wing has loaded with framing, spin and meaning that already has you at a disadvantage by just uttering those words.

Once you've read the book, you'll understand the buzzwords and phrases that the right wing routinely uses in their speeches and talking points. I can't imagine attempting to understand today's politics without digesting a serious dose of Lakoff




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Why the Democrats Need to Stop Thinking About Elephants
by Adam Cohen, New York Times
November 15, 2004



If George Lakoff had his way, the Kerry campaign would have run a commercial attacking the "baby tax." Dr. Lakoff, a Berkeley linguistics professor and Kerry campaign adviser, wanted to divide the interest on the national debt by the number of Americans born each year. The result, $85,000 per newborn, say, would have been handed to a baby in the form of a bill, and the baby would have started to cry. That, Dr. Lakoff says, "frames" the issue "in a way people can understand."

"Framing" is a hot topic among political junkies and in the blogo-sphere right now, thanks to Dr. Lakoff. In Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, his surprise best seller, Dr. Lakoff argues that Republicans have been winning elections because they have been better than Democrats at framing issues - from taxes, to abortion, to national security - in ways that resonate with core American values.

Dr. Lakoff has been stepping out of the classroom lately to lecture everyone from the Senate Democratic caucus to "living wage" advocates on how to use linguistics to craft a more effective message. "Framing" alone won't give the Democrats the White House, or the Senate and House. But Dr. Lakoff's theories offer the Democrats a road map for going forward.

The title "Don't Think of an Elephant!" comes from a classic experiment Dr. Lakoff conducts in Cognitive Science 101. He tells his students not to think of an elephant, and he has yet to find one who has managed it. Thinking about elephants is the frame, and negating it simply reinforces it. This was the problem, he says, with President Richard Nixon's famous declaration, "I am not a crook."

Trying not to think of elephants, Dr. Lakoff suggests, sums up the Democrats' plight. Since Republicans have framed the key issues, Democrats cannot avoid being on the losing side. Take taxes. Republicans have succeeded in framing the issue as "tax relief," a metaphor that presents an affliction, and that predetermines who are the heroes - tax opponents - and villains. Taxes are, of course, necessary even for programs Republicans back, like the military, and simple economics dictates that we cannot keep cutting taxes and maintaining spending forever. But the Democrats are hard-pressed to make these points once the frame is "tax relief."

It is not by accident that "tax relief" presents taxes in moral terms, as a calamity in search of a cure. Values, Dr. Lakoff argues, are the key to framing campaign issues. Democrats have an unfortunate tendency, he says, to see campaigns as product launches, believing that if they roll out a candidate with the best features, or positions on issues, voters will support him. Republicans understand that people vote their identity, not their self-interest - that they seek out candidates whose values appear to match their own.

After the election, pundits made much of the influence of a few "moral" issues, like gay marriage and abortion, on the outcome. But Dr. Lakoff argues that values play an important role in almost every campaign issue. The Republicans' success has been driven in large part, he argues, by their ability to frame less morally charged subjects in terms of core values. He is impressed by a line from President Bush's last State of the Union address: that we do not need a "permission slip" to defend America. It reframed multilateralism, once a widely accepted foreign policy principle, as weakness and national infantilization.

As Dr. Lakoff sees it, Democrats need to start framing issues in terms of their own values, which, he insists, are no less popular with the American people than the Republicans' values. This project will, however, take more than spin and sloganeering. On many subjects, he argues, the Democrats suffer from what he calls "hypocognition" - more simply, a lack of ideas. Republicans have been working for the past 40 years, since the defeat of Barry Goldwater, in well-financed think tanks, on developing conservative ideas that voters will rally around. The Democrats, he says, need to start catching up.

One frame Dr. Lakoff likes, which he believes could become a progressive wedge issue, is "poison-free communities." The Republicans' war on government regulation has left industry increasingly free to spew toxins into the air and water, despite the harm it is doing to the public. Keeping people healthy is a core progressive value, but it is one that many swing voters and Republicans share. Few people want their children poisoned by mercury in the name of a theory about the appropriate size of government.

Framing can also deflect the other side's charges. Dr. Lakoff argues that the Democrats should fight the Republican campaign for "tort reform" by recasting it. Rather than debate over frivolous lawsuits, he says, they should talk about protecting people from law-breaking corporations and negligent doctors. When Republicans talk about greedy trial lawyers, he says, Democrats should talk about - and he really needs a better phrase here- "public protection attorneys."

For all of his good insights, Dr. Lakoff can get a little too caught up in his own frame. His intense focus on language leaves too little room for other attributes of a successful campaign, like a charismatic candidate or a strong field operation. Just as professional campaign managers have given too little thought to his frames and hypocognition, he has a tendency to undervalue what they do. The least compelling part of his book is a commercial he suggests Democrats use on taxes. His script begins, "Taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America." That quickly reframes the issue to: "Where did I put the remote?"




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George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant
By John N. Cooper, Axisoflogic.com
Octoberr 25, 2004



How many times have you heard progressives profess utter bewilderment at the propensity of Bush supporters openly and willingly to vote against their own best interests?

George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC Berkeley, offers insights and explanations into both this question and the self-defeating response of the progressive community in his August 2004 book, Don't Think of an Elephant [Chelsea Green Publishing, ISBN 1-931498-71-7].

According to Lakoff, rather than vote in their own interests, most voters act consistent with their image whom or what they wish they were or would like to be. Rather than view this diverse nation in something like its full complexity, most respond to national events and issues according to the role they see for themselves in one of two extreme models of the nuclear family: either that dominated by a stern, authoritarian father (although it is clear there are domineering matriachs sufficient for the most demanding taste ); or that led in a more-or-less gender neutral, cooperative, nurturing mode. In the worldview of the authoritarian model, we are all born bad and can be corrected only by stern discipline, ruthless competition and self-denial.

In the nurturing view, we are all born with potential to be good which has only to be encouraged and allowed to emerge. Voters gravitating to the former worldview, tend to be more comfortable with the conservative, or neo-con, agenda; those preferring the latter, tend to gravitate toward the progressive.

Lakoff further details how the conservative community has co-opted the language used to 'frame' the public's perception of issues confronting the electorate. 'Framing' is important because the vista of perceived solutions to any problem is limited, just as looking out a window, by what is and is not within the field of view. For a trivial example, telling a class of Berkeley frosh not think about an elephant guarantees the pachyderm will be on their minds. More significantly, since Bush took office, taxes have been routinely referred to publicly in terms of 'tax relief', as though taxes were an onerous burden, rather than obligatory dues owed by all for the maintenance and improvement of the general good. Even what constitutes the general good differs depending on viewpoint: in the authoritarian model, well-being is equated with wealth accumulation, and its attendant virtues of over-riding, self-serving self-interest, rapacious acquisitiveness, and disregard for the rights and welfare of others.

In the nurturing model, the well-being of the individual, family or community is directly linked to the welfare of others, within, adjacent to, or beyond any such grouping, so an ethic of sharing and neighborliness is promoted. In the former, disparities between individuals' well-being and welfare are viewed as a natural result of differences in competitiveness. In the latter, such disparities are seen to result largely from defects in a dysfunctional social organization.

Practically, Lakoff argues that roughly a third of the American electorate supports primarily the authoritarian-family model for national governance, a third the nurturing-family model, and roughly a third moves from one mode of response to national events to the other depending on the specific issues.

Conservatives have effectively framed public discourse in terms that invoke the hyper-competitive view in which there are always, expectedly, winners and losers: the more of each, the better the system is working. Yet, in all the major religions there is the recognition that it is more blessed to give than to receive, that those who benefit from a society or social organization owe the most in return because the benefit they have received has been obtained from and through that social organization.

The failure of the progressives to frame debate in terms of the values they share - cooperation, sharing of both burden and benefits, equity and equality, caring and concern for the less-fortunate - has resulted in the conservatives' agenda prevailing by default. Lakoff suggests that the first step toward reversing the trend of the last twenty-five to fifty years, rather than defensively reacting to the world-view of the neo-cons, is take the initiative to frame public discussion in terms of the values and virtues of the nurturing model. For example, view taxes as our investment in the well-being of the future, not a burden but support of the infrastructure on which future well-being of all depends, not to be evaded by present recipients of the most benefit but owed in proportion to benefit already received.

This slim volume contains ten chapters divided into two sections. The first chapter consists of a brief description of Lakoff's vision how the 'framing' of public discourse both focuses and limits the range of debate. The next five are reprints of pungent, poignant Lakoff web-essays, with one exception from his writings for Alternet.org, dealing with Schwarzenegger, gay marriage and the runup to the present Iraq war. Although of possible historical interest, it is unfortunate that these were not recast in a present perspective instead of being included seemingly untouched from their original times and contexts.

In the second section, the last four chapters of the book detail specific proposals how the progressive community, rather than defensively playing catchup to neo-conservative framing, can counteract their agenda, retake the initiative in a dynamic, pro-active way, and recapture the imagination and enthusiasm of a much more substantial fraction of the American electorate than at present: in Ghandi's words, "Be the change you want!"

© Copyright 2004 by AxisofLogic.com




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The Best Book This Cycle
By Kos, The Daily Kos
Sep 20th, 2004



I'm not one to recommend books lightly. In fact, I don't think I've ever said, "you HAVE to get this book." But there's always a first time for everything.

I get swamped with review copies of books these days, and given the number of liberal-leaning anti-Bush books saturating the market, there's no shortage of reading material that I'll unfortunately never get to. But I nearly flipped with joy when I checked my mail today (too lazy to do it yesterday) and found a copy of George Lakoff's new book, Don't think of an elephant!, he of the Rockridge Institute. I'd been dying to read my first Lakoff book since I read this piece he wrote for the American Prospect. The fact that the obnoxious Jonathan Chiat of the New Republic dissed him only made me more anxious to read him. And rumors that the DNC have taken Lakoff on as a consultant clinched the deal.

So back to the book, I knew after reading just a handful of pages that if there's one book you read this year, it should be this one. Lakoff's obsession is the use of language to frame political debate. And it's his findings that will help rescue the Democratic Party from itself, extracating itself from playing with the frame built by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (think tanks, leadership institutes, media outlets, etc). What's a frame? You know them -- "Death Tax", and "Tax Relief", and "Pro-life", and so on. Bush says, "We don't need a permission slip from the UN to defend the US", and suddenly, the Republicans have framed the runup to war in a certain way. Our mistake, as a party, has been our willingness to play within our opponents' frame, rather than building our own.

I will be writing more about the book over the coming days. I'm absolutely smitten by it.

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Review
Publishers Weekly

Lakoff, a cognitive scientist and linguist at Berkeley, believes he knows why conservatives have been so successful in recent years and how progressives like himself can beat them at their own game. This slim book presents a simple, accessible overview of his theory of "moral politics" and a call to action for Democrats mourning November’s election results. Lakoff’s persuasive argument focuses on two ideas: what he calls "framing," and the opposition of liberals’ and conservatives’ concepts of the family. Conservatives, he says, have easily framed tax cuts as "tax relief" because of widespread, preexisting views of taxes as burdensome, and liberals have had little success conveying the idea that taxes are a social responsibility. In Lakoff’s view, conservatives adhere to a "strict father" model of family, in contrast to liberals’ "nurturant parent" view, and he sees this difference as the key to understanding most of the two sides’ clashes. His writing is clear and succinct, and he illuminates his theories through easy-to-follow examples from current politics. Although the book has been updated since the election, many of its sections were originally written long beforehand, so some comments are outdated (at one point Lakoff wonders, for example, whether George Bush’s support of the gay marriage amendment will help him keep the White House). However, the process of regaining power may be a long one for Democrats, and Lakoff’s insights into how to deal with conservatives and appeal to the general public are bound to light a fire under many progressives.

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