George Lakoff’s idea of “framing” is very much “in” among liberals nowadays. Frances Moore Lappé sums it up well:
“Frames,”? according to Lakoff, are the key to understanding how political ideas are received. Human beings don’t absorb information as raw material; we sift input through frames of meaning carried in the language we use.
Lakoff’s central idea is that conservatives see the world through a “strict father”? frame emphasizing discipline, self-reliance, forceful defense, while progressives see the world through a “nurturant parent”? frame…supportive, nourishing, emphasizing mutual responsibility. Lakoff claims that thirty-five to 40 percent of Americans fall into each camp, although most are some sort of mix.
The Right, Lakoff points out, is extremely good at selling their policies in clear, easy to understand “strict father”? frames. Progressives, on the other hand, too often seem to offer laundry lists of issues lacking any overarching moral framework.
So, it’s easy to see why progressives are rallying around Lakoff’s call to arms. Since polls show majorities actually agree with the progressive agenda on many key issues, including corporate power, the environment and abortion, focusing on “framing”? issues in ways that Americans can understand them seems like the answer they’ve been praying for. Certainly, much of Lakoff’s advice about communicating progressive ideas is powerfully insightful and right on target.
I’ve been resistant to Lakoff’s frames, partly because they seem too crude to really say much about real-world politics. Doug Muder’s reformulation of Lakoff’s two categories into the Inherited Obligation family and the Negotiated Commitment family seems, to me, much more likely to reflect how people are really feeling:.
The right distinction isn’t between the conservative nuclear family and the liberal nuclear family, but between two completely different ways of experiencing family. Those two modes of experience may express themselves in families that are not nuclear at all.
The key distinction in Ault’s account is not strictness vs. nurturance, but the Given vs. the Chosen. What, in other words, is the source of your responsibilities to other people? Are you born with obligations? Or do you choose to make commitments? As with strictness and nurturance, every actual person experiences some combination of obligation and commitment. But emphasizing one or the other makes a striking difference. […]
Several liberal/conservative issues become much clearer in this analysis than they are in Lakoff.
Abortion. In the Inherited Obligation model, having children is an obligation, not a choice. Of course a pregnant woman may find it inconvenient to have a child at this point in her life, but that’s no reason to let her opt out – obligations are almost always inconvenient. In the long run, however, children are a good deal; their obligation to you pays off when you are old. In demanding that a young woman carry a fetus to term, then, society is looking out for long-term interests she may not yet have the perspective to see.
Conversely, in the Negotiated Commitment model nurturance is a gift, not an investment. A child is more like a work of art and less like a retirement plan. Having a child out of obligation, without a sense of commitment, is seen as a recipe for disaster. Pregnancies that result from rape, ignorance, or a birth-control failure are set up for such a disaster. If society is going to hold a prospective mother responsible for the welfare of her child – and it should – she must be given a chance to decide whether this child is her project or not.
Same-sex marriage. The husband/father and wife/mother roles in the Inherited Obligation model are timeless, unchangeable, and necessary. Someone has to be the husband/father and someone has to be the wife/mother. Same-sex couples just can’t cover both roles, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.
But no comparable difficulty exists in the Negotiated Commitment model. A child has needs, and the parents have to negotiate a plan to meet those needs. Whether the parents are a mixed-sex couple or a same-sex couple – or even a single parent with a lot of committed friends – the problem is the same.
Mulder is also very interesting discussing why it is “Inherited Obligation” families often see the “Negotiated Commitment” model as a threat to their way of life, rather than just a harmless live-and-let-live alternative.
Our belief in negotiated commitment – that people are not obligated to relationships they did not choose – is like one of those devastating European germs that white settlers spread throughout the world three centuries ago. We are immune; our families are based on negotiated commitments and (though they are far from perfect) work quite well in that environment – as long as we can maintain the social safety net.
But Inherited Obligation families are not doing nearly so well. Blue states consistently lead red states in statistical measures of familial success – low divorce rate, low drop-out rate, low violent crime, low teen pregnancy. Divorce rates in particular seem to vary inversely to liberalism: conservative Baptist marriages fail far more often than those from more liberal Christian denominations.
We have trouble grasping how tolerance can be threatening. Ault explains:
Liberally minded people often do not realize … that rather than respecting fundamentalists views, they are denying them by insisting that religious beliefs or ethical standards be seen as personal, private matters we must all tolerate in one another – that moral standards are relative, not absolute. … Shawmut River’s commitment to absolutes was in keeping with the binding character they saw in the family obligations through which their world was organized. To see moral standards as personal and relative, on the other hand, widened the scope of individual autonomy and freedom in ways that denied and threatened to undermine lives that depended upon seeing family obligations as nondiscretionary – not as something individuals can choose or not choose, but as absolutes they have to accept.
Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats, drawing on Lakoff (sort of), are saying that we have to “reframe” our advocacy of reproductive rights; we have to talk about “freedom” rather than “choice,” and so on. I’m pretty much a “whatever works” person; there are dozens of correct arguments in favor of keeping abortion safe and legal, and we should be willing to try all of them out and see which ones work.
But talking about how to “frame” arguments in favor of legal abortion and other feminist issues seem a bit besides the point. As Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women sharply observes, “Dems spend far more time trying to find new and clever ways to talk about abortion rights than they actually spend talking about a woman’s right to choose motherhood or not. ” She links to this terrific article by Martha Burk:
Lakoff is probably right that Bush’s appeal to women and men alike was more emotional than rational. But the erosion of women’s support for Democrats was also a result of the Kerry campaign strategy. The Kerry campaign shied away from talking to women at all, choosing instead to go for the white male warrior vote. Women’s advocates were alarmed about this from the beginning, when the Democrats refused to fund a strategy to get women to the polls, while the Bush team had a person in every precinct who was responsible for turning out the female “W”? vote.
Even female Republican pollsters like Kellyanne Conway admit that women lean Democratic “if left to their own devices.”? That’s because women depend more on the social safety net (the compassionate “parent government”? in Lakoff-speak), and the Democrats have traditionally stood for better social services like expanding health care and child care, and ensuring retirement through Social Security (women’s main source of retirement income ). But the Democrats failed to exploit this natural advantage, instead trying to out-tough-guy Bush on the war and homeland security. According to the Votes for Women 2004 project, Republican women’s events were about how much the campaign valued women, while Democratic women’s events were about extracting money from female donors to use on general campaign themes. Significantly, among women who stayed away from the polls, homeland security ranked third behind the top concerns of jobs and economic security and health care security.
Leaving women out of the debate was not new for the Democrats. They have shown us in the last two elections that they don’t want to be too vocal about women. Every time George Bush said to Al Gore, “I don’t trust the government, I trust the people,”? Gore had the perfect opportunity to counter with “except for women in making their own decisions about their own bodies.”? He never once took that opportunity. In 2004, the Dems avoided “women’s issues”? at every turn, even taking the Equal Rights Amendment out of the platform for the first time in 40 years. When their own internal polling showed the pay gap as one of the top concerns for women, the candidate didn’t want to talk about it publicly. As for the abortion issue, only those far inside the Beltway could decode Kerry’s rambling answer in the final debate to conclude he was…sorry, Howard…pro-choice. Even so, the DNC is now blaming the loss on “being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion,”? according to Dean.
(Curtsies to Marriage Debate and Lucinda Marshall.)
Mr. Ampersand writes: But talking about how to “frame”? arguments in favor of legal abortion and other feminist issues seem a bit besides the point.
i agree. Lakoff’s book is embarassingly simplistic – but you know who can be even more simplistic? the Democrats who believe in this whole business of “reframing” & the like as their ticket to power. awhile ago i had the distinct displeasure of being present at a gathering of Democrats (it wasn’t my fault – i had to work!) who were discussing Lakoff’s book, with a state senator no less.
the discussion was entirely focussed on how Democrats needed to talk about things differently. why? because the ignorant masses were fooled into believing the Repugs (b/c, y’know, they “won” the past two elections). thus the need to come up with new & improved phraseology to get them to “come back” to the Democratic Party.
and upon that level the discussion remained. no discussion whatsoever of what Democrats, especially elected officials, are doing (or not doing, just as important). one guy asked “whatever happened to labor?” as far as supporting the party went. the answer: “unions are all about paychecks, so they went with the Repugs” – i shit you not. not a word, not one, about NAFTA.
oh, and another thing: there’s only TWO ways of thinking in the world. yeah, i know, big world, alotta people, millions of different things going on, but still… only TWO.
sigh…
I agree with Jam & Amp on the oversimplified nature of “framing.”
Muder says, “We are immune; our families are based on negotiated commitments and (though they are far from perfect) work quite well in that environment – as long as we can maintain the social safety net.”
I’m curious to know how he explains the need for the social safety net.
I tend to formulate welfare justfications in terms of unchosen but necessary societal obligations!
People supported the Democrats when the Dems followed through on what they promised. Once the Dems started focusing more on winning the next one or gaining long-term political advantage rather than keeping their implicit contract with the voters, the voters made other choices. I was at an union meeting not too long ago where a union official told those assembled that the union needed to dump the Dems. I’m sure DNC operatives would be shocked to learn this, but they’re the ones who abandoned the unions first.
This framing thing only takes into account responsible people, it seems to me. What about all of those self-centered wingnuts? Catch one of them negotiating anything or feeling obligated to do something for someone else!
What Lee said. Do we really want to be complacent in this trend towards, “Watch what we say, not what we do?”
Framing, my ass. I’m pretty much an “Inherited Obligation” type, along with the rest of my old-school Sicilian-American family, and guess what—we’re liberal! Well, for the most part. I’ve got a couple of right-wing nutcase uncles, but really!
I’m with Lee. The Dems have abandoned the working class. Too damn many of my union brothers don’t bother to vote at all—because there’s no real choice to vote for (or, as is said at the hall “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”). Incredible numbers of single women don’t vote at all, and that’s because no candidate ever speaks to us or our concerns; we just seem to exist as finger-pointing fodder for both the Ds and the Rs.
I’m fully convinced at this point that the Dems have absolutely no sense of the degree to which they have abandoned their traditional constituency. No sense of the degree of betrayal that is felt. So, maybe I’m not being fair to the “Inherited Obligation/Negotiated Committment” model. ‘Cuz one thing about the former is “say what you mean, mean what you say.” It is stunning, the level of cognitive dissonance Democratic leaders must have, while at the same time wondering about the cognitive dissonance occuring in the “heartland”. What’s wrong with Kansas, indeed.
Excellent article (the Muder one), Amp. I was just having a similar discussion the other day, bewildered as to why exactly liberalism caused so much fear in some conservatives. I’m not sure he has the whole answer, but it’s definitely a start.
Hmm. You know, I think Muder is more on target than Lakoff, and like emjaybee, think something is missing, too.
What’s bugging me? Well, this assumption that liberal folks must be into government-as-big-daddy thing. See, there are differences between the Shawmut River model of Inherited Obligation and the one I grew up with. The social safety net was never viewed as a “big daddy government” intrusion, but as a social obligation. It’s another obligation. Paying taxes for things like public schools, Social Security, and the like was what you did as a citizen. Now, perhaps the folks at Shawmut River didn’t/don’t see it that way, but they had the luxury to. More recent arrivals to the U.S. had to “rebuild” that village from scratch, and rely on people not necessarily of blood relation, or even the same ethnic group. They had to find allies where they could.
FDR’s programs are still intensely popular with that generation. Because they want “big daddy” to come rescue them if they fall down? No. Because those programs represent the societal obligation that a nation has to its citizens. The people who had to fight to be recognized as citizens take that social contract seriously.
I don’t hear word number one from the Democrats about the destruction of the social contract. Not one effing word. Not one word about the reciprocity that used to be taken for granted in the social contract.
What La Labu said. Are “duty” and “obligation” forbidden words in DNC-land? I mean, the Germans had to rebuild their language practically from scratch after the Nazis were gone, because the Nazis had twisted the meanings of so many words and because so many others were tainted by association, but surely ownership of these two English words hasn’t been co-opted by the social troglodytes, has it?
Mulder’s article says:
“Abortion. In the Inherited Obligation model, having children is an obligation, not a choice. Of course a pregnant woman may find it inconvenient to have a child at this point in her life, but that’s no reason to let her opt out – obligations are almost always inconvenient. In the long run, however, children are a good deal; their obligation to you pays off when you are old. In demanding that a young woman carry a fetus to term, then, society is looking out for long-term interests she may not yet have the perspective to see.”
Um, maybe I’m being naive here (let me don my flame-protection gear now), or maybe misreading what is intended, but from the perspective of the pro-life/anti-abortion camp, wouldn’t the Inherited Obligation argument under the theory as stated be that a pregnant woman must carry the fetus to term because the fetus is already a child owed a certain specific set of obligations from its parents?
As the Democrats continue their perpetual slide to the right, there is a huge void that needs to be filled. It is time for progressives to abandon the Democrats once and for all and consign that party to the dustbin of history.
La Lubu(#7): You are spot on. You don’t and you won’t hear one effing word any more from the Dems about the destruction of the social contract, save for maybe Social Security and Medicare and even those will be in drastically different forms. What’s worse is that soon they won’t even pretend to care. Why would they? So long as they mutter the right platitudes about abortion, the usual constituencies won’t abandon them. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this blog. The item on framing was the most interesting I’ve seen today, but what led? You got it, another story about the abortion issue. Don’t get me wrong, choice is front-burner. But it’s time for progressives to admit it’s the only real advantage the Democrats are perceived to have over the GOP and time to ask consistently and aloud whether it’s that much of an advantage.
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Social conservative: God says, “My way or the highway.”
Social liberal: Trust me, my way is better for you.
Another thing that bugs me about the Muder article is the assumption that “liberal” means “upper-middle class white professional with at least a Master’s degree.” This is just further alienating blue-collar liberals like myself. It tells me that the Democratic leadership has not only internalized the “limousine liberal” trope, not only abandoned the old-school Democrats, but already ceded the fight. In other words, they have pretty much already asked people like myself “you’re not gone yet?!” Hey, I can take the hint….
The reason you aren’t seeing more “Negotiated Commitment” families, is probably because it takes a boatload of money in order to be one. As wages and job security slide ever downward, those inherited obligations become even more crucial to one’s survival, regardless of politics. The “Inherited Obligation” family of my origin was never ambivalent about the social safety net; ideas like unemployment insurance arose out of the labor movement, built by people with dirt under their fingernails, not the limousine liberals. Social Security wasn’t about abandoning the elderly, but about being realistic—when you’re working class, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for you to work in order to support your both children and your elderly parents, nevermind if either have expensive health concerns! The social safety net was all about “you do your part” (meaning: work, obey the law, observe your duties as a citizen) and “your government will do its part” (meaning: your basic needs will be met and your rights will be upheld). Note I said “your government”. Government isn’t Big Brother, it’s us.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in the paternalist assumptions, either. The big issue for my Republican-voting union brothers isn’t SSM or abortion. It’s gun ownership. Hunting is quite popular around here, and is more than about recreation or putting much-needed meat in the freezer. It’s a cultural heritage—-dare I say, spiritual heritage. There’s a helluva lot of guys I know for whom the woods is their church. And this also means that thoughts on environmentalism out here in the “heartland” are a helluva lot more nuanced and complex than what is being reflected in the media, including the alternative, more ‘left’ media.
Gaah. I’m just so damn tired of being dismissed by people who claim to be my allies.
“Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats, drawing on Lakoff (sort of), are saying that we have to “reframe”? our advocacy of reproductive rights; we have to talk about “freedom”? rather than “choice,”? and so on.”
See the June 2 article in AlterNet by Lakoff himself: http://www.alternet.org/story/22135/
His discussion of specfic word usage — “Which is better, ‘choice’ or ‘decision’? — seems trivial, sure. I agree with commenters above w.r.t. oversimplification in Lakoff’s specific arguments, and the way ‘reframing’ has come to be used.
But the central premise — that social conservatives should not be allowed to dictate the terms of debate — is useful. It shouldn’t be about words, but about ideas.
Too simplistic? I don’t think it is, or has to be just about Republicans vs. Democrats. ‘Reframing’ is an important tool for feminists, for example. Used here all the time, don’t you think?
My (admittedly simplistic) way of looking at liberals vs. conservatives is neither mommy vs. daddy nor negotiated commitment vs. inherited obligation, but utility vs. desert. Liberals want everyone to have the best they can have. Conservatives want people to get what they deserve. Basically, if you give a liberal an all-powerful magic wand, she probably turns the world into a wonderful, beautiful place where everyone’s happy and peaceful, and if you give a conservative an all-powerful magic wand, he probably turns the world into a wonderful, beautiful place where everyone’s happy and peaceful for the good people, and a burning hell of misery and torment for the evil people.
Examples:
Criminal justice system: Conservatives think that punishment is a good in and of itself, because it gives bad people what they deserve. Most liberals regard it as a necessary evil, but they generally support imprisoning dangerous people because they think the price of the losses for the criminal are outweighed by the gains for the rest of society, but they think that punishment and imprisonment is, by itself, bad, though it may be necessary embedded in a larger context.
Reproduction: Conservatives oppose abortion, and, more mildly, other forms of birth control, because they think that if you have sex, you deserve to get pregnant (or make someone else pregnant). It is a natural consequence of action, so it’s what you deserve. Liberals support election of whether to use birth control or not because they figure people will like it better if they can choose to have kids or not. (this leaves aside fetus-based arguments, but I think that can also be explained through utility vs. desert)
Taxation: Conservatives believe that income reflects a person’s contribution to society, and as such people deserve their pre-tax income to the extent possible. Liberals believe that, regardless of who deserves what, millionaires need an extra $10,000 less than a call center worker who just lost her job, because the millionaire will get along pretty much fine without it, even if he might not be as happy as otherwise, while the $10,000 to tide over the laid-off call center worker could really be a life saver.
La Luba’s criticism of Dem leadership seems all too accurate, but Muder may be really on to something here. Now, he does kinda set up the article as discussing his circle – a subgenre of pop sociology which is all too common source of blindly unselfconscious generalizing nowadays. But according to the recent Pew survey “Beyond Red and Blue,” the annoying assumption La Luba identifies (that “”liberal”? means “upper-middle class white professional with at least a Master’s degree.”) is more or less accurate. According to their typology, “Liberals are
Liberals (as defined by this survey) are off the chart on “cultural issues,” (God, guns and gays) drastically different from the other Democrats – also environmental regulation and immigration.
Blue collar liberals show up in the survey – probably&partially – as “Disadvantaged Democrats,: with nearly a quarter reporting family-member union membership, and overwhelmingly supportive or organized labor and gov’t help to needy Americans. I suspect a number of former New Deal-style Dems (or their modern equivalents) ended up as “Pro-Government Conservatives.”
Indeed, I think Muder’s article (I keep typing “Mulder” – cursed show) and La Luba’s comments combined do a great job of explaining some of the split (where it exists) between economic and cultural liberalism, and its basis in material conditions and general lived experience, & necessity. Or something.
The safety net as an obligation – of course! yes!
Very well put.
oh yeah Beyond Red and Blue.
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=242
I’m with Haikuist and DP. Big surprise for my legions of fans. :/
What Jam said. This idea is complete crap.
The trouble with the Democratic Party is that it is actively hostile to the interests of the people it claims to represent. The reason the Democrats are losing votes is because they no longer even pretend to fight for progressive programs. The discussion of Lakoff is just a matter of how they can do a better job of lying.
Well, the leadership is certainly hostile, Brian. The liberal rank and file is so terrified of the Right Wing that they mostly can’t stir themselves to think outside the two-party prison. Otherwise, IRV would be as hot a topic in blogland as SSM is. :(
But I’m sure that Hilary will save us. Right after the streets of Hell are closed for a snow day. :p
“The reason the Democrats are losing votes is because they no longer even pretend to fight for progressive programs.”
I’m not completely convinced – so far it looks like they just might have done a decent enough job being a speed bump for the privatization steamroller – but nevertheless, they’re not enthusiastically trying to destroy them all! So – why aren’t people voting for the lesser of two evils?
Honestly. All this really bewilders me. Call me clueless.
Wow.
Yeah, the “Speed Bump” party. That sure makes me all hyped up about the Democrats. Well, I’m off to tithe to Joe Lieberman now. :/
Dan S (#21): You’re not clueless, we’re just out of patience. A speedbump isn’t good enough. Why should it be? Sure, change can be slow to come, but now we’re playing back-to-the-wall defense and the party that gave us Mr. “I-feel-your-pain” essentially agrees with their putative opponents. Social Security is the prime example. As Alexander Cockburn explains on the marvelous “Counterpunch” website, Clinton was set to do what Bush proposes, before his weenie got him in Dutch. Even now, few, if any Dems, call Bush on a lie much worse than what he said to get into Iraq: the supposed insolvency of Social Security. The Dems know, indeed it’s in the public record, that simply by lifting the cap on FICA wages, the system will be solvent at current benefit levels for an indefinite period. But you won’t see that bandied about too loudly, especially by the Hilary Clintons of this country. They won’t have to; they know that, whatever groups like NARAL and the ACLU do at state/local level, they’ll merely have to utter “choice” during the next presidential contest and any dink, even Joe “We Must Not Remain Silent On Values” Lieberman, will get the nods, the lolly, the volunteers and the “shut-up” squads if Ralph Nader throws his hat in again. We deserve all the results of the “lessr-of-two-evils”-ism that, I hope, come back to bite mainstream liberal saps in their asses.
Word, DP.
The members of the World’s Most Exclusive Club don’t want to do anything to jeopardize their hoards. Why should they have the same health plans, pension plans, salaries with increases, and tax rates as anybody else – they are the masters of the universe! The Dems have learned that the rich, mostly white, mostly urban limo-riders will bankroll them forevermore, so why do they have to appeal to their traditional constituencies? Every now and again, John Edwards talks about how the party has abandoned blue-collar workers, but I don’t see him actually doing anything to push the DNC to pay attention to them. As for actually trying a third-party run, it’s too risky – musn’t mess up retirement for principle, you know!
Heh heh. “Shut Up Squads.”
Sorry. I know it’s not really funny. With the exception of sex and violence, nothing sells in this country like repentence, recanting, and the return of the prodigal son/daughter. Just ask Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Moore, et al. :/
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Part of what frustrates me about the loyalty to the Democratic Party is that it was the case, from the time the ink was dry on the Constitution, that the political parties served the interests of the elite. I remember a comment by Engels in the 19th century that the unique thing about the US Congress was that, while in other republics the politicians tried to obscure their corruption, Congress was completely open about the fact that it were doing the bidding of monopolists and speculators.
The Democrats have been running for decades on the memory of the brief periods of progressive legislation — FDR, and the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, in particular. And in those periods, the US was being shaken by massive popular movements that were largely independent of the major parties. The Democrats offered the minimum they could to split off some of the moderates in those movements — and then fully participated in the periods of repression that followed, with the occasional claim of serving as a speedbump to the worst of the excesses.
I can think of few things in my adult life that have puzzled me more than Howard Dean’s continued popularity with grassroots Democrats:
http://www.counterpunch.org/frank06072005.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0607-27.htm
“Softcore liberals” ? Since I generally agree with Brian, I’d have to say that the term is redundant.
And as long as I’m up late rambling about nothing in particular, isn’t it interesting what never makes it into discussions of “framing” ? We are expected to seize the “virtue” ball from the Right Wing by adopting shiny new “frames,” but we never talk about the moral bankruptcy of Senators and Congresspeople who enjoy –for example– taxpayer-funded healthcare while they smugly move again and again to make sure that we taxpayers can’t have any such thing. I suppose to do so would require us to admit that discussions of crowning ourselves with a saleable aura of virtue and ethics don’t really mean diddly-shit when all we can do with this aura is use it to shill for the chronically self-centered and arrogantly unvirtuous elite that sit comfortably and immovably on both sides of the aisle. :(
What’s the old saying ? “They break our legs, and we say ‘Thank You’ when they offer us crutches.” Without a move toward serious electoral reform, all this “reframing” shit amounts to is a prettier and more lyrical hymn of praise from us to the professional leg-breakers/crutch-shillers. :(
Thanks for this great discussion. I hope I haven’t gotten here too late for the participants to notice.
The class bias in my article comes largely from the way I use one of my main sources, James Ault’s “Spirit and Flesh”. Ault is contrasting working-class conservatives with academic liberals because those are the two groups of people he is most familiar with. He’s not trying to characterize a more general liberal/conservative difference, just express the culture shock of an academic liberal confronted with a working-class conservative church community. I’ve applied his insights to a more general situation than he intended, and that creates some of the problems you’ve pointed out. I still think that applying Ault’s insights to Lakoff’s theory is a good idea, but I need to improve my presentation.
Lakoff’s theory is easily cheapened to be just about words, and many of the people who think he is a liberal savior are doing just that. But Lakoff himself is a little deeper, I think. (BTW, if you want depth, “Moral Politics” is much better than “Don’t Think of an Elephant”.)
Lakoff’s key point, I think, (and forgive me if I get too abstract here) is that situations don’t conceptualize themselves. People construct concepts and then project them onto situations. When you use the words introduced by your opponents, you may end up adopting their conceptual structure without examining it.
So, for example, if you use Bush’s “War on Terror” phrase, you’ve tacitly accepted a number of the Bush administration’s assumptions: that the Iraq invasion is connected with 9/11; that the worldwide elimination of terrorism as a tactic is a reasonable goal for the United States to take on; and that the natural approach towards this goal is military. If you actually don’t believe these things, you’re constantly going to be backtracking and explaining, while your opponents can put forward a simple, direct message.
But Lakoff’s “reframing” only works if you actually have a different set of concepts than your opponents do. If you have a different way of looking at things, then you probably need to use a different set of words. But if you don’t have any substantially different ideas, then changing the words is exactly the kind of dishonesty that various people in this discussion have pointed out.
I’d like to suggest that it’s not an either/or. Sometimes you just have a gut hunch that there’s something wrong with the way an issue is being presented, and you make up some new words just to have some different way to talk about it. As you use those words, you start to understand your hunch and begin to express some honestly new ideas. The words and the ideas can grow together … assuming that you keep thinking and learning.
Lakoff and Framing
I found the posts very interesting. I recently listened to Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. I had mixed feelings but mostly was left with the feeling of something missing. For me that came through in his taxes discussion where all the emphasis was how one thought about taxes rather than who should or shouldn’t pay taxes.
In all honesty I did like Doug Muder’s reformation, but it was too conservatively biased for my taste. I like the obligation / committment frame over the strict parent / nurturing parent frame. Possibly, because as Muder points out, (I believe) it has a stronger connection to reality.
For example, some of the most conservative people I know would be a closer fit to the nurturing model, and the most liberal people the strict parent model. Lakoff does acknowledge this somewhat saying different framing is dominant in different contexts.
My larger point being the obligation / committment framings seem to have more potential. However; I would see them in a broader context that Muder.
Let’s take abortion for example. I have to admit the reference to changing the frame from one of choice to freedom made me chuckle. That does not appear as a major reframing to me. In the obligation frame Muder kind of left it on a personal level of obligation to (responsibility to) an upcoming fetus. I was recently listening to Jarad Diamond he argues that over population was an important environmental factor in civilizations collapsing. Obligation can be directed towards more than a fetus, but your other children, community, or society. As a single parent of two children I find it difficult to grasp how another parent could meet their obligation to multiple children (3 or more). If we all did that we’d end up like those African societies where family planning is not being funded. If our obligation was to 7 generations, I imagine the politics would look a little different.
Some other (left of center) obligation examples;
– Corporation have an obligation to pay a living wage that is tied to living standards.
– Corporations have an obligation to pay their fair share of taxes. taxes.
-Corporations have an obligation to the communities they are located in. They can not just pack up leave without paying a decent severance package to the community.
– Corporation have an obligation to pay full employee costs. Many corporations like Wal-Mart currently rely on states and tax payers to pick up many of the costs.
Nate