Dog Canyon » george lakoff

Conservative Lies About Human Nature

Glenn W. Smith — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:05:57 +0000

Since World War II, America’s elite policy makers have arranged and re-arranged our political and economic relationships around an empirically false – radically false – understanding of human being and behavior.

Paradoxically, the false portrait of humankind feeds both an unwholesome worship of dog-eat-dog individualism and a sense of powerless in the face of godlike market forces that must be obeyed no matter the cost in lives, global environmental catastrophe or gross economic injustice.

Its roots lie in the gloomy Hobbesian picture of unredeemable, brutish humanity and in the Enlightenment’s faith in universal reason. Twentieth Century conservative thinkers, looking to rationalize authoritarianism and excuse the inevitable social destruction caused by unrestrained greed, simply invented new concepts of human nature that made their policy goals seem essential.

It’s just one of many ironies that this authoritarian view was swallowed whole hog by so-called libertarians. It should be noted that Robert Nozick, author of the seminal libertarian book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, later spit out the worm he’d swallowed and repudiated his earlier work.)

The ugly, empirically false portrait is this: a human is a cold and isolated individual who uses unemotional reason to reach pre-determined ends. This is the widely discredited but still popular “rational actor” model. And there’s another color in the picture, which some are now calling the “rat choice” model. This tells us those pre-determined ends are always selfish or self-interested.

We are, these conservatives say, rats.

As virtually every field within the human sciences has found, we are nothing like that. Because we are hard-wired for empathy, we can and do act altruistically. We seek fairness. Our selves are not isolated, but interconnected in many ways. We are competitive, but we are also cooperative. Reason and emotion are intertwined. There’s no such thing as unemotional reason. We don’t coldly follow the rules of logic in making moral decisions.

In his new book, The Fair Society, biologist Peter Corning writes:

Contrary to the stereotype about our innate selfishness and greed, most of us share a desire to live in a society where fairness is the operative norm, where everybody’s basic needs are met…where there is a robust sense of ‘reciprocity’ – a rough balancing of benefits and obligations.

Cognitive scientists like George Lakoff have been urging us to understand the new 21^st Century understanding of human being and thinking. Dozens of others have made similar points. We can’t advance a progressive social vision using false assumptions disguised as unbiased scholarship, assumptions intended to forever preclude a fair, progressive, democratic society.

In her new book, Cultivating Conscience, UCLAS law professor Lynn Stout demolishes the concept of “homo economicus,” the descriptive name for the lonely, selfish, hyper-rational and exclusively materialist creature invented by conservative propagandists.

That view, Stout says, “implies we are psychopaths.”

It should come as no surprise that corporations and wealthy conservative ideologues funded the multi-decade effort to convince Americans our nature is other than it is. First came the Rand Corporation. It was there that economist Kenneth Arrow articulated the so-called “rational choice” theory. Here’s how historian Alex Abella summed it up in Soldiers of Reason:

Arrow’s rational choice theory would become a mainstay of economics and political science; by the 1960s…it would redefine the foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects of human activity…When applied to corporations, the theory exempted them from any social responsibility other than that owed to their shareholders…

Next came the so-called “law and economics” movement, centered mostly at the University of Chicago and spearheaded by Richard Posner, Gary Becker and others. In a nutshell, its propagandists insisted that the “rational actor” model be employed to decide legal disputes.

Such right-wing benefactors as Richard Scaiffe funded the law and economics movement with millions of dollars to the University of Chicago, the Manhattan Institute and other institutions. The funding was not intended to help a search for truth. It was intended to paint a picture of human nature that justified unbridled greed and the injustice that follows from its institutional legitimacy. There are echoes here of other authoritarian traditions that condemned the rabble to justify elite power. The religious myth about the Fall of Man, for instance, is accompanied by the assertion that only priests and pastors can save us from ourselves.

Conservative columnist David Brooks is clearly alarmed that the dark vision of humanity that fueled the conservative movement for decades is being unmasked. He is trying to fit the new, more humanistic and hopeful portrait into a scheme for more, not less, authoritarian control. In his book, The Social Animal, Brooks recommends the new human sciences be employed to shape (read: control) people’s behavior. He leaves untouched all questions about whether such control is moral.

Edwin L. Rubin, who elaborated on the “rat choice theory” mentioned above, summed up the motivations of those who invented the cruel, selfish homo economicus:

…rational choice theory and rat choice theory, when combined, provide a comprehensive argument for an unregulated market, an argument grounded in a theory of human behavior and human choices.

Just last week, philosopher John McCumber took on the rational actor model and homo economicus in the New York Times:

Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!

A moral imperative for the pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for society at large. That was the goal of the confidence men who sold us a false and destructive view of our own natures. So successful were they that many progressives (and most Democrats) remain content to operate within the frames and narratives generated by the scam.

Our most important a task involves replacing the deceitful view of humankind with the new – and true – picture of cooperative, empathic and complex human being (we can, obviously, be selfish, cruel and violent – but that’s not all we are).

A society organized around the values generated by such a picture will look radically different from political and economic structures forced upon us by the greedy authoritarians who sold us a bill of goods about ourselves.

Obama Returns to His Moral Vision: Democrats Read Carefully

George Lakoff — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 02:19:32 +0000

Last week, on April 13, 2011, President Obama gave all Democrats and all progressives a remarkable gift. Most of them barely noticed. They looked at the President’s speech as if it were only about budgetary details. But the speech went well beyond the budget. It went to the heart of progressive thought and the nature of American democracy, and it gave all progressives a model of how to think and talk about every issue.

It was a landmark speech. It should be watched and read carefully and repeatedly by every progressive who cares about our country —whether Democratic office-holder, staffer, writer, or campaign worker — and every progressive blogger, activist and concerned citizen. The speech is a work of art.

The policy topic happened to be the budget, but he called it “The Country We Believe In” for a reason. The real topic was how the progressive moral system defines the democratic ideals America was founded on, and how those ideals apply to specific issues. Obama’s moral vision, which he applied to the budget, is more general: it applies to every issue. And it can be applied everywhere by everyone who shares that moral vision of American democracy.

Discussion in the media has centered on economics — on the President’s budget policy compared with the Republican budget put forth by Paul Ryan. But, as Robert Reich immediately pointed out, “Ten or twelve-year budgets are baloney. It’s hard enough to forecast budgets a year or two into the future.” The real economic issues are economic recovery and the distribution of wealth. As I have observed, the Republican focus on the deficit is really a strategy for weakening government and turning the country conservative in every respect. The real issue is existential: what is America at heart and what is America to be.

In 2008, candidate Obama laid out these moral principles as well as anyone ever has, and roused the nation in support. As President, as he focused on pragmatics and policy, he let moral leadership lapse, leaving the field of morality to radical conservatives, who exploited their opposite moral views effectively enough to take over the House and many state offices. For example, they effectively attacked the President’s health care plan on two ideas taken from the right-wing version of morality: freedom (“government takeover”) and life (“death panels”). The attacks were successful even though Americans preferred the President’s health care policies (no preconditions, universal affordable coverage), as usual in politics. The lesson: morality at the general level beats out policy at the particular level. The reason: voters identify themselves as moral beings not policy wonks.

All politics is moral. Political leaders put forth proposals on the assumption that their proposals are the right things to do, not the wrong things to do. But progressives and radical conservatives have very different ideas of right and wrong.

With his April 13, 2011 speech, the President is back with the basic, straightforward idea of right and wrong that he correctly attributes to the founding of the country — as UCLA historian Lynn Hunt has observed in her important book Inventing Human Rights.

The basic idea is this: Democracy is based on empathy, that is, on citizens caring about each other and acting on that care, taking responsibility not just for themselves but for their families, communities, and their nation. The role of government is to carry out this principle in two ways: protection and empowerment.

Obama quotes Lincoln: “to do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.” That is what he calls patriotism. He spotlights “the American belief … that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security… that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard time or bad luck, crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us.” He cites the religious version of this moral vision: “There but for the grace of God go I.” The greatness of America comes from carrying out such moral commitments as Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.

Analogous moral arguments can, and should, be given constantly for all progressive policies at all levels of government on all issues: the environment, education, health, family planning, organizing rights, voting rights, immigration, and so on. It is only by repetition of the across-the-board moral principles that the voting public gets to hear how all these idea fit together as realizations of the same basic democratic principles.

Systems Thinking

President Obama, in the same speech, laid the groundwork for another crucial national discussion: systems thinking, which has shown up in public discourse mainly in the form of “systemic risk” of the sort that led to the global economic meltdown. The president brought up systems thinking implicitly, at the center of his budget proposal. He observed repeatedly that budget deficits and “spending” do not occur in isolation. The choice of what to cut and what to keep is a matter of factors external to the budget per se. Long-term prosperity, economic recovery, and job creation, he argued, depend up maintaining “investments” — in investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges, long-distance rail), education, scientific research, renewable energy, and so on. The maintenance of American values, he argued, is outside of the budget in itself, but is at the heart of the argument about what to cut. The fact that the rich have gotten rich because of the government — direct corporate subsidies, access to publicly-owned resources, access to government research, favorable trade agreements, roads and other means of transportation, education that provides educated workers, tax loopholes, and innumerable government resources taken advantage of by the rich, but paid for by all of us. What is called a ”tax break” for the rich is actually a redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class whose incomes have gone down to those who have considerably more money than they need, money they have made because of tax investments by the rest of America.

The President provided a beautiful example of system thinking. Under the Republican budget plan, the President would get a $200,000 a year tax break, which would be paid for by cutting programs for seniors, with the result that 33 seniors would be paying $6,000 more a year for health care to pay for his tax break. To see this, you have to look outside of the federal budget to the economic system at large, in which you can see what budget cuts will be balanced by increased in costs to others. A cut here in the budget is balanced by an increase outside the federal budget for real human beings.

What is a “system?”

Systems have the following properties:

Homeostasis: Stable systems are self-correcting or are correctable; they have indicators that have to stay within a certain range for the system to be stable. In an economy, there are indicators like unemployment, GDP, and so on. In global ecology, the temperature of the earth is a major indicator.

Feedback: Feedback can be controllable or uncontrollable. In our economy, the Federal Reserve uses indicators as feedback in an attempt to control certain aspects of the economy, using interest rates and the money supply. In the global environment, the global icecaps are an uncontrollable feedback mechanism. They reflect sunlight and heat, which has a cooling effect. As the earth gets warmer, they melt and get smaller, which lowers their ability to reflect and to cool, which makes the earth get warmer, which melts them more, which heats the earth more, and on and on.

Non-local and network effects: Global warming in the Pacific increases ocean evaporation. Winds blow the additional water vapor toward the northeast, pushing cold arctic air down over the East coast of the US, and the excess water vapor falls as a huge snowstorm. Warming in the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms on the East Coast of the US via such non-local effects.

Nonlinear effects: A small cause can produce a large effect. A few percentage points lowered in the tax rates of the wealthiest percent or two of Americans can produce a trillion dollars of debt over the whole country over a decade.

When a system has causal effects, as in the above cases, we speak of “systemic causation” and the risks associated with systemic causation are called “systemic risks.” Systemic causation contrasts with direct causation, as when, say, someone lifts something, or throws something, or shoots someone.

Linguists have discovered that every language studied has direct causation in its grammar, but no language has systemic causation in its grammar. Systemic causation is a harder concept and has to be learned either through socialization or education.

Progressives tend to think more readily in terms of systems than conservatives. We see this in the answers to a question like, “What causes crime?” Progressives tend to give answers like economic hardship, or lack of education, or crime-ridden neighborhoods. Conservatives tend more to give an answer like “bad people — lock ‘em up, punish ‘em.” This is a consequence of a lifetime of thinking in terms of social connection (for progressives) and individual responsibility (for conservatives). Thus conservatives did not see the President’s plan, which relied on systemic causation, as a plan at all for directly addressing the deficit.

Differences in systemic thinking between progressives and conservatives can be seen in issues like global warming and financial reform. Conservatives have not recognized human causes of global warming, partly because they are systemic, not direct. When a huge snowstorm occurred in Washington DC recently, many conservatives saw it as disproving the existence of global warming — “How could warming cause snow?” Similarly, conservatives, thinking in terms of individual responsibility and direct causation, blamed homeowners for foreclosures on their homes, while progressives looked to systemic explanations, seeking reform in the financial system.

A Golden Opportunity

It is rare that a presidential speech provides such opportunities for Democrats, whether in office or not. The President has made overt the moral system that lies behind every progressive position on every issue. He has done it with near perfection. He went on offense, not defense. He didn’t use conservative language tied to conservative ideas. He correctly tied his moral vision to the American moral vision and the very idea of American democracy — and patriotism. He used systems thinking throughout. He tied every part of his budget proposal to the American moral vision. And he showed clearly how the Republican budget rejected those American moral ideals in every case. It was not merely high political art. It is a model to be studied and followed.

There is one big problem with the speech that he apparently felt he could not avoid: He stayed within Republican issue-framing, keeping to the Republican’s definition of the issue as the deficit and the budget — even while the main features of the talk were his moral vision and systems thinking. The media and the politicos have mostly not been able to get beyond issue-thinking, that the speech was about the deficit and the budget, missing the larger themes. And the President, since the speech, hasn’t pressed the political public on those major themes. He needs help. He needs progressives to start talking publicly about that moral vision and about the importance of systems in our lives and in our politics.

Finally, Democrats need to understand why expressing their moral views is so vital. The crucial voters in recent elections have been misleadingly called “independents,” “moderates,” and “the center.” In reality, they are what I will call the “duals” — people who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others, in all kinds of combinations. They have both moral systems in the neural networks of their brains, but applied to different issues. When one moral network is activated, the other is inhibited — shut down. The more one moral network is active, the stronger it gets and the weaker the other gets. In 2008, the Obama campaign activated and strengthened the network for the progressive moral system — and won over the duals. In 2010, the Democrats stopped talking morality and kept on talking policy, ceding morality to the conservatives, especially the Tea Party radical conservatives. In doing this, they ceded the election. Policy without an understandable moral basis loses.

Democrats need to both activate their base and activate the progressive moral vision dormant in the duals among the voters. They can only do this with an overt appeal to the progressive moral vision inherent in our democracy. It’s time for the Democrats to shout their patriotism out loud.

Details and Vision

Many progressives are skeptical about the President’s ability — or even his desire — to live up to his moral vision. For example, the Progressive Caucus in the House has produced its own People’s Budget, put forth as an alternative to both the President’s and the Republicans’. But the People’s Budget is an instance of the same moral vision articulated by the President. In short, progressives should look at this speech separating out the necessary budget details from the moral vision they all need to be expressing on every issue.

In addition, all progressives need to start thinking and talking in terms of systems. The nature of systems is central to understanding what is going wrong in ecosystems, financial systems, social systems, educational systems and even in particular systemic enterprises like deep-water drilling, frakking, nuclear energy, food production, and so on.

I would like finally to thank President Obama for bringing these issues to the fore.

Disaster Messaging

George Lakoff — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:19:13 +0000

Democrats are constantly resorting to disaster messaging. Here’s a description the typical situation.

• The Republicans outmessage the Democrats. The Democrats, having no effective response, face disaster: They lose politically, either in electoral support or failure on crucial legislation.
• The Democrats then take polls and do focus groups. The pollsters discover that extremist Republicans control the most common (“mainstream”) way of thinking and talking about the given issue.
• The pollsters recommend that Democrats move to the right: adopt conservative Republican language and a less extreme version of conservative policy, along with weakened versions of some Democratic ideas.
• The Democrats believe that, if they follow this advice, they can gain enough independent and Republican support to pass legislation that, at least, will be some improvement on the extreme Republican position.
• Otherwise, the pollsters warn, Democrats will lose popular support — and elections — to the Republicans, because “mainstream” thought and language resides with the Republicans.
• Believing the pollsters, the Democrats change their policy and their messaging, and move to the right.
• The Republicans demand even more and refuse to support the Democrats.

We have seen this on issues like health care, immigration, global warming, finance reform, and so on. We are seeing it again on the Death Gusher in the Gulf. It happens even with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

Why? Is there anything the Democrats can do about it? First, it has to be understood. It doesn’t just happen.

The Difference Between Framing and Messaging

Framing is the most commonplace thing we do with thought and language. Frames are the cognitive structures we think with. They are physical, embodied in neural circuitry. Frames come in systems. Their circuitry is strengthened and often made permanent through use: the more the circuits are used, the stronger they get. Effective frames are not isolated. They build on, and extend, other frames already established.

All words are defined in terms of conceptual frames. When the words are heard, the frames are strengthened — not just the immediate frames, but the whole system.

Fit matters. The brain is a “best-fit” system. The better a new frame “fits” existing frames, the more effective it will be; that is, the more people will think, and make decisions, using that frame.

Frame conflict

The activation of one brain circuit may either activate or inhibit another. A frame that fits a system will activate other frames in the system and make them stronger. Strongly activated frames will weaken frames that they inhibit.

There are progressive and conservative frame systems. Activating the conservative frame system, weakens the progressive frame system — both individual frames for particular issues, but also the system as a whole.

That is how framing works. There are consequences.

High-Level, Moral Frames Matter More

Higher-level frames, deeper in the system, have a disproportionate effect.

The more the language of frame is repeated, the stronger the frame gets, along with the system the frame is in. And the weaker the frames of the contradictory system gets. The stronger high-level frames are, the more effective frames that fit them will be. And the less effective frames that contradict them will be.

In politics, the high-level frames are the moral systems that define what is “right” for a conservative or progressive.

Most Framing is Unconscious

Frames are conceptual; they are the elements of thought. Most thought is unconscious. Words activate frames. We are rarely conscious of the frames that are activated by the words we hear. Yet those frames are there in our brain circuitry, and more we hear the words, the stronger the frames get, even though we aren’t aware of it.
Framing is Long-term

Framing is the establishment of permanent (or long-term) high-level frames and systems of frames with the brains of voters. Framing can be done by long-term careful political messaging, or through education (say, by controlling school textbooks).

Prototype Framing

An important part of framing is the establishment of prototypes: social stereotypes, prototypes (typical case, ideals, nightmares, salient exemplars). Stereotypes are used in automatic reasoning and decision-making.

Bi-conceptual Framing

For important domains of thought, like morality, religion, and politics, it is commonplace for people to have two inconsistent frame systems that inhibit each other. When those frames apply to different issues and in different contexts, we speak of “bi-conceptuals.” When you can shift back and forth on an issue, you are bi-conceptual on that issue. That is, you can frame the issue in two ways, using inconsistent higher-level frame systems.

Contested concepts

In politics, the high-level frames are moral frames. There are opposing conservative and progressive moral systems. Important political concepts are “contested,” overlapping in some classic cases, but diverging in content depending on the moral system. Thus, vital political concepts like Life, Freedom, Responsibility, Government, Accountability, Equality, Fairness, Empathy, Property, Security, and so on are contested.

A major goal of political framing is to get your version of contested concepts accepted by the voters. Messaging can then use these concepts and their language freely and effectively.
That is how framing works generally — independent of whether the frames are used in politics. In politics, bi-conceptual voters can shift back and forth on an issue, depending on how the issue is framed in terms of higher-level political systems.

Political Messaging

Messages use words. The words activate frames. In political messages, you have a double intention: to get voters to think using your frames and to keep voters from thinking using the other side’s frames, which contradict yours.

Your message will be more effective if it fits existing high-level frames in the brains of voters, and less effective it contradicts such high-level frames.

Political messaging and bi-conceptual voters

Your goal, with bi-conceptual voters, is to activate your system of political frames and inhibit the other side’s system of political frames. Your message should therefore fit your high-level frame system, and it should not fit the other side’s high-level frame system. If it fits the other side’s high-level frame system, your message will be helping the other side, because it will tend to make voters think using their frame system.

Why Does Disaster Messaging Arise?

Suppose the other side has structured its messaging over a long period of time to consistently strengthen its high-level frames, prototypes, and versions of contested concepts in the brains of voters. They can now do effective messaging by using those high-level, morally-based frames in messages that evoke the existing strong high-level frames.

Why Conservatives Consistently Win Messaging Battles

In the US, conservatives have set up an elaborate messaging system. It starts with an understanding of long-term framing and message experts who know how to use existing their long-term frame systems. Then there are think tanks, with experts who understand the high-level frame system and how it applies to the full range of issues. There are training institutes that teach tens of thousands of conservatives a year to think and talk using these framing systems and their language and argument forms. There are regular gatherings to consolidate messaging and policy around a contemporary issue that fits the conservative moral system. There are booking agencies that book conservative spokespeople on tv, talk radio, etc. There are lecture venues and booking agencies for conservative spokespeople. There are conservative media going on 24/7/365.

As a result, conservative language is heard constantly in many parts of the US. Conservative language automatically and unconsciously activates conservative frames and the high-level framing systems they are part of. As the language is heard over and over, the circuitry linking the language to conservative frames becomes stronger. Because the synapses in the neural circuits are stronger, they are easier to activate. As a result, conservative language tends to become the normal, preferred “mainstream” language for discussing current issues.

This messaging system has existed and has been extended and strengthened over many years. Democrats have a few of these elements, but they are relatively ineffective, since they tend to view messaging as short-term and issue-based, rather than long-term and morally based. Democrats tend not to understand how framing works, and often confuse framing (which is deep, long-term, systematic, morality-based, and conceptual) with messaging (which is shallow, short-term, ad hoc, policy-based, and linguistic).

This situation puts Democrats at a messaging disadvantage relative to conservatives, which leads to conservative victories. Hence the regular need for disaster messaging.

Polling and The “Mainstream”

When the Democrats are out-messaged, they call upon polling and focus groups to given an “empirical, evidential” account of public opinion and which language is preferred by the public. The “evidence” comes from polls and focus groups that test the normal “mainstream” language and logic, versus language and logic that is not “mainstream.” This is, naturally, conservative language and logic, because the conservative messaging system has systematically made it that way patiently over years. The pollsters therefore report that the “mainstream” of Americans prefer the conservative language and logic, and the policies that go with them. The pollsters then suggest moving to right to go to where the public is. They then construct and test messages that move enough to right to satisfy the “mainstream.” They also construct “good arguments.” If the “good arguments” activate the conservative worldview, the conservative position will just get stronger in the brains of the voters.

What’s Wrong?

When the Democrats use conservative language, they activate more than the conservative framing on the given issue. They also activate and strengthen the high level, deep conservative moral frames. This tends to make voters more conservative overall — and leads them to choose the real conservative position on the given issue, rather than the sort of conservative version provided by the democrats.

Disaster framing is a disaster.

The “Center”

There are bi-conceptuals of many kinds— you can have partly conservative, partly progressive views on many issues, and people vary considerably. There is no general ideology of the center. The myth that there is a single “center” is an artifact of current polling practices.
Here’s how this works. Ask people whether they When you pick a given issue and poll on the most common “mainstream” language. It will be favored by both full conservatives and bi-conceptuals who happen to be conservative on that issue. Those bi-conceptuals may identify as “democrats” or “liberal-leaning” or “independents.” With suitable framing, those bi-conceptuals should shift on the issue, while the true conservatives will not.

Do they form a “center?”

That is an empirical question, but they do not appear to. Change the issue and a new issue-specific “center” may appear, person-by-person.

Such polling is rarely done, so claims about a single “center” — or a single left-to-right spectrum — should not be believed.

The Importance of Bi-conceptuals

Pollsters tend not to test for bi-conceptuals. They are not just undecideds, or independents, or mere swing voters. They are voters who have both relatively strong progressive and conservative high-level moral systems and apply them in different contexts to different issues. There are usually a significant number — in the US my guess is around 20% ± 3. They often determine elections. If they are given only conservative messaging, that messaging will activate their conservative frame system. If they are given progressive messages often enough over a reasonably long period, there is a good chance that their progressive moral system will be activated and strengthened.

The directly contradicts the traditional view of mainstream pollsters. As a result, it has not been tested empirically on a large scale, though there is one solid result.

Recommendation

Don’t move to the right. Start thinking longer term. Build as much of a communications system as possible. Design long-term framing for your own high level, moral system and basic policy domains. Fit your immediate messaging needs to the long-term frames. Carry on both kinds of messaging in parallel.

Polling

Design polling to study bi-conceptuals through value-based frame-shifting. Always use batteries of questions.

How Conservatives Change Policies Without Winning Elections

How do conservative Republicans have a large effect on policy even when they are largely out of office? Their communication system is never out of office. That allows a conservative minority to stonewall and resist and gain popular approval for it. Their communication system intimidates Democrats into disaster messaging and policy shifts to the right. The Republicans don’t have move the country in a conservative direction by holding office. Their communications system can get the Democrats to move the country to the right by forcing disaster messaging upon them.

The example of immigration

The most recent example of disaster framing is reported on in an important Politico article by Carrie Budoff Brown, “Dems Tough New Immigration Pitch”. It’s an excellent piece, and I will be quoting liberally from it.

Brown reports that Democrats have taken “an enforcement-first, law-and-order, limited-compassion pitch that now defines the party’s approach to the issue.” Democratic leaders are now following the advice of pollsters Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, and Guy Molyneux and strategist/focus-group dialer Drew Westen: Talk like Republicans.

“The 12 million people who unlawfully reside the country? Call them “illegal immigrants,” not “undocumented workers,” the pollsters say.” The pollster team was organized by John Podesta of the Center for American Progress.

“When [voters] hear ‘undocumented worker,’ they hear a liberal euphemism, it sounds to them like liberal code,” said Drew Westen, a political consultant who has helped Sharry hone the message through dial testing. “I am often joking with leaders of progressive organizations and members of Congress, ‘If the language appears fine to you, it is probably best not to use it. You are an activist, and by definition, you are out of the mainstream.’”

And craft a policy with lots of Republican elements. Here is what President Obama, following the pollsters’ advice, said at a Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House:

“The way to fix our broken immigration system is through common-sense, comprehensive immigration reform. That means responsibility from government to secure our borders, something we have done and will continue to do. It means responsibility from businesses that break the law by undermining American workers and exploiting undocumented workers — they’ve got to be held accountable. It means responsibility from people who are living here illegally. They’ve got to admit that they broke the law and pay taxes and pay a penalty, and learn English, and get right before the law — and then get in line and earn their citizenship.”

Conservative Republican elements are being communicated here: Use force against the illegals (“secure our borders”); get tough (“held accountable”}; personal, not social, “responsibility”; criminals (“living here illegally”); be punitive (“admit they broke the law and pay taxes and pay a penalty”); English only (“learn English”); they’re getting free handouts (“earn their citizenship.”).

Put aside for a moment the substance of the policy, and notice that these are conservative Republican themes that fit a conservative Republican view of the world. Democrats, starting with the President, are using the language that activates the conservative Republican view of the world. Why? As Brown reports,

“We lost control of the message in the 2007 debate,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigrant rights group that worked with Center for American Progress founder John Podesta on the messaging overhaul.

“We were on the inside fighting off amendments, and the other side was jacking up their opponents and getting Rush and Hannity and O’Reilly on fire about this. We needed to do a much better job on communications.”

But the biggest factor came from Greenberg’s polls: the threat that Democrats could lose “swing districts” in elections, but could win them with this message. So the Democrats not only adopted the message, but much of the largely conservative policy that went with it.

A major feature, however, is that the “illegals” would be legalized while on the path to citizenship. The conservative response is obvious: It’s just amnesty warmed over. The Democrats are still soft on “illegals” — a term now embraced by Democrats who follow Drew Westen’s recommendation.

With the Administration’s lawsuit against the recent Arizona anti-immigrant law, you can bet that the Republicans will use that lawsuit to pin “soft on illegals” on Democratic candidates. And the Administration’s new “tough” right-wing rhetoric will only help support the Republicans.

Repetition over The Long Term

The only way progressives can avoid the disaster of disaster messaging is by regularly saying what they believe, in an effective messaging system — out loud, over and over, with the idea of changing how the public thinks and talks over the long haul.

Here is an uncompromising example of a possible op-ed:

End A Bad Law: 287 g

Bad laws, laws that hurt far more than they help, should be eliminated. Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is a bad law. Here’s why.

Almost all immigrants who entered the US without papers are honest, hard-working, decent people, who have often risked their lives to come the America. They do essential work, mostly for low wages, work that makes the lifestyles of most Americans possible: cleaning homes, caring for children and the elderly, gardening, cooking in restaurants, working on farms, doing odd jobs, working on construction. They deserve our gratitude. They are America’s mainstays, good guys. There are twelve million of them in America, helping us all live better every day.

A small number, as in any population, are bad guys: occasional murderers, human traffickers, drug dealers, gang members, and thieves. They need to be captured and convicted.

But 287 g mostly harasses, jails, harms, and deports the good guys, and in doing so, mostly lets the bad guys escape.

287g allows local police and jailers to act as deportation agents with ultimate power over the lives of the good guys, who are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Their very entry into the US without papers constitutes sufficient “guilt” to justify their mistreatment and deportation.

287 g promotes a form of racial profiling. 287 g is immoral, an affront to the human rights that define what America is about.

287 g is also ineffective in getting the bad guys, partly because it uses so many resources on going after the good guys.

As Alex DiBranco reports, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that 287(g) is poorly managed, ineffectively organized, and arbitrarily implemented from place to place; ignores or actually provides false information to the public; fails to focus on non-citizens who pose a safety threat; gives shoddy training; and lacks oversight and has not terminated those local partners who have clearly violated the terms of the agreement — local law enforcement officials running amok in hunting down harmless undocumented immigrants. 287(g) also deters undocumented immigrants who witness a crime from coming forward and encourages racial profiling in which Latinos are “guilty until proven innocent.”

287 g should be ended, and replaced by a law that protects the good guys and pays serious attention to catching the bad guys. It is not just ineffective; it is downright immoral.

The Point

Almost every day, I get a request from somewhere in the US — or various other countries — to help some group do disaster messaging. It’s sad. Reframing rarely works with disaster messaging.

To work long-term, progressive messaging must be sincere and direct, must reflect progressive moral values, and must be repeated. Progressive framing is about saying what you believe, telling the truth, and activating the progressive worldview already present in the minds of those who are partly conservative and partly progressive.

Framing is, of course, about policy, more than about messaging. What you say should go hand-in-hand with what you think and do.

And, of course, the best messaging requires an excellent communications system, or it won’t be heard. Progressives have the money to build such a system. The question is whether they understand the desperate need for such a system, and whether they have the will to build it.

A Revolution of Crazy Aunts and Uncles

Glenn W. Smith — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:30:48 +0000

If we want an extravagant democracy, we should live together like one another’s crazy aunts and uncles.

We are, after all, a nation founded by aunts and uncles. Take the family of Vilhelm Moberg, the Swedish author of the monumental “Emigrants” saga. “All of Moberg’s aunts and uncles had gone to America,” said one reviewer of Moberg’s sources for the epic. Moberg’s family wasn’t unique.

There are other reasons behind this mad suggestion for the materteral and avuncular model of citizenship. For one thing, it’s a handy excuse to incite more use of the neglected adjective, materteral, meaning aunt-like. Aunts can be just as crazy and wise as uncles, yet a Google search of the word materteral produced only 4,110 responses to avuncular’s fat 237,000.

How many have experienced a home (or a school or a neighborhood or a bureaucratic state) that has sobered and tidied itself into choking boredom? How many have noticed that escape into Life doesn’t take a Moses, but just one rocking, rule-breaking, self-assured and crazy aunt or uncle to liven the place up?

Conjure someone recognized as a relation. But this relation is also a unique and maybe dangerous “Other” whose otherness comes with seductive and liberating promise. Such a person reminds us that the human heart is always too big for the ribs of law and etiquette we hide it beneath for safety’s sake. In a democracy, shouldn’t that describe us all?

In her marvelous book, Novel Relations, Ruth Perry notes that 18th Century women often turned to their aunts for emancipating assistance when threatened by parents’ selfish, authoritarian demands for love-denying arranged marriages. In fact, Perry says that was the beginning of the modern role of the aunt. And what Perry says of aunts is also true of uncles: our deference to them is voluntary – one reason, perhaps, that they are good symbols of both wise authority and freedom.

In a democracy of freethinking aunts and uncles I bet we could at the very least eliminate some cruel instances of man’s inhumanity to man – speed bumps and parking tickets, for instance.

More seriously, what would become of prejudice and bigotry in such a land? Confronted with someone strange and different, or when we ourselves are looked upon as strange and different, wouldn’t it be humanizing and liberating if the first thought was, “Hey, it’s another nutty uncle! What will I learn of freedom from this person?”

It was the 20th Century French filmmaker Jean Renoir who provoked these thoughts. Renoir comes with credentials: “Everyone who believes in democracy should see this film,” Franklin Roosevelt said of Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece, Grand Illusion. Joseph Goebbels ordered all negatives of the film destroyed in 1940. Set in a World War I German prison camp, Grand Illusion is not an anti-war polemic. It’s not a political movie. Then again, its promise of egalitarian love under political duress makes it a revolutionary film. We might to pay careful attention to what Renoir has to say about democracy (and uncles), given that Roosevelt, one of the 20th Century’s great champions of democracy, loved Renoir’s masterpiece while Goebbels, one of history’s greatest enemies of democracy, hated and banned it.

During his wartime exile in America, Renoir wanted to make a movie of a 19th Century novel that should become the founding document of our materteral, avuncular democracy: Claude Tillier’s My Uncle Benjamin. In a memo to Hollywood mogul Darryl Zanuck, Renoir said:

Claude Tillier’s novel, My Uncle Benjamin [is about] the birth of democratic ideas in my country. The worth of this book lies in a kind of shrewdness and peasant common sense, closely related to a type of wit that is very popular in America. For several years I have dreamed of making a film of this book.

If I can’t convince you to join the uncles and aunts at the barricades, maybe I can at least persuade you to read My Uncle Benjamin. The action takes place in a rural French village inhabited by a wonderfully irreverent cast of mid-18th Century peasants. It is no rural paradise. They are messy and imperfect. They hate pretentiousness, they mock the throne, they love one another, they worship freedom, they eat, drink, err, make love, argue, bond, give birth, die. As Tillier’s biographer, Melvin B. Yoken said, Tillier “portrays vigorously the robust, hearty life and activity of the little man in its splendor, folly, and serenity.”

Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne considered My Uncle Benjamin a classic. He poked fun at himself for thinking he’d discovered it. It’s telling that Milne talks lovingly of the book between mentions of Shakespeare and Wind and the Willows author Kenneth Grahame.

Dr. Benjamin Rathery’s grandnephew narrates the book. Uncle Benjamin Rathery is a compassionate quack and hard-drinking raconteur. We’d call him self-centered, except his compassion is boundless. We’d call him lazy, except he’s always on the move. We’d call him a coward, except he puts his life on the line for others. Benjamin is the model crazy uncle. “If you have not read how that jovial giant impersonated the Wandering Jew for the simple folk of Moulot, you have skipped as good a thing as you shall find in Rabelais or Le Sage,” said essayist Michael Monohan.

Tillier, of course, is only one of many who wrote of aunts and uncles. Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt is another grand testament to our cause. Greene’s character, Aunt Augusta, is the model crazy aunt.

I know that “sisters” and “brothers” are the conventional salutations of solidarity. “Brother” and “sister” do evoke a healthy, anti-authoritarian horizontality of democratic relationships. The trouble with brothers and sisters, though, is that ghostly parental figures are always hovering about the frame.

Frames and narratives of family dominate the language of politics. For instance, we say “Mother Country,” or “The Father of Our Country.” As George Lakoff has shown, though, it goes further than that. Metaphors from two broad categories of parenting – responsibility-building nurturance and obedience-training authoritarianism – are mapped onto progressive and conservative political culture, respectively.

Conservatives have long exploited the framing potential of the strict, authoritarian parental narrative. Progressives have been slower to exploit their own responsibility-building nurturant narratives.

We can’t escape these structures in our brains any more than we can escape having mothers and fathers. But maybe we can create new pathways for politics by using metaphors of misbehavior and nurturance that evoke our values of empowerment, responsibility and independence, too.

That’s where Uncle Benjamin and Aunt Augusta come in. Let’s tell their stories. Let’s subvert the narrative models of familial oppression that infect our politics.

The 19th Century authors who made Uncle Sam the mythical embodiment of America knew what they were doing: they substituted an extra-nuclear family member for parental authority, directing the nation’s nieces and nephews toward loyalty to the State.

I want something different. I want all of us to be free as the crazy aunts and uncles we adore, to be citizens who don’t look up to an Uncle Sam, but across the table to our neighbors.

Character Versus Brand: A Lesson in Framing

Glenn W. Smith — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:30:41 +0000

Advertising and marketing gurus have so successfully established the importance of “brand” that we in the political sphere often lose sight of the real core of political argument: character.

The distinction is not trivial. Brand is about a list of facts or attributes. It’s character people use in sizing up strangers, checking in on friends, weighing the merits of a politician.

Coca-Cola is not about content. In fact, it’s nearly content-less. It is a successful brand. Character is all about content. That’s why it’s important in politics. We predict future actions of others based on our beliefs about their character. We can make those predictions because characters appear in stories, and stories follow certain arcs.

We organize our social selves through narratives. We tell stories. We listen to stories. We organize our memories in stories. Even our dreams are stories, though sometimes crazy ones. They are often crazy because our brains try mightily to organize the random neuronal firings during sleep into coherent narratives.

Narratives have characters. They don’t have brands. They have protagonists or heroes. They have victims. They have villains. They have helpers and other secondary characters.

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry tried to establish his role or character. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Kerry presented himself as a valiant war hero. That’s such a stock character that Americans would have no trouble understanding it.

The problem was, Kerry didn’t act like a hero. He did not quickly and forcibly stand up to his attackers (Swift Boaters who, with strategic brilliance, diminished Kerry the Hero) as a hero would. He didn’t behave like the character he wanted to establish. A good novelist or film-maker wouldn’t make this mistake. Kerry’s movie flopped.

George W. Bush and his handlers understood the role of character, as infuriating as their success is. One could look at the time of Bush’s national public life, from the start of his campaign in 1999 to the end of his term in 2008, as a decade-long movie. Bush’s character was well defined. Americans thought they could predict what the character would do. Many of us knew the character was a hollow fabrication, but our early predictions of Bush disasters went unheard because of the power of his narrative fictions.

Historically, many progressives have believed that Universal Reason would lead their audiences to reach the right and just solutions if they were just given the facts. But people don’t think like that. We think in stories, stories influenced by emotion, by habit, by expectations.

After 2004 there was a lot of talk about values. The term “framing” is all about values, though many mistake it as another word for “spin.” The term originated in the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, and by it he referred to the narrative frames that dominated social interaction. For instance, a hospital comes with predictable roles. Janitors clean, surgeons operate on us, nurses nurse. The hospital is a frame with predictable roles.

In political and cultural communication, our frames and narratives have to match up. We can’t have the Big Bad Wolf reminisce about his compassionate grandmother while he swallows Red’s grandmother. It’s a matter of character, you might say.

We may find it becomes surprisingly easy to express our values if we begin by thinking of who we are. What is our character? Just like we do in our private relations, we might discover that we naturally communicate our values through characterizations in narratives voters can understand.

Barack Obama understands stories. His grasp of cultural narrative and character is one of the things that most alarms his opponents. His character is well-defined, and most of the Republican attacks upon him are intended to 1) Undo or replace the characterization; or, 2) Point out how his actions don’t match the character Americans believe him to be.

Forget brand. We are writing the novel of America’s future. We must write the characters of that future.

“Sixteen Tons”: A National Anthem?

Glenn W. Smith — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:30:26 +0000

Centuries of cultural inheritance teach us that debt puts us at moral and material disadvantage. As Margaret Atwood points out in her book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, there are ancient reasons that Jesus was called the “Redeemer.” He came to pay our debts.

Buddhist laws of karma teach much the same principle, except Buddha taught us to redeem ourselves. Sooner or later, what goes around comes around.

But here’s the thing about debt. For the poor and middling, debt, despite its illusions, tends to limit freedom. Think of the burden of student loans. Knowledge is power, right? But, as millions have discovered, career choices (and even, sometimes, possibilities of love and family) are foreclosed by such a debt.

For those already wealthy, debt increases freedom. That’s how the rich get richer. Capitalism, itself deeply in debt to Calvinism, explained this moral paradox by making financial wealth a visible sign of God’s invisible favor. Abracadabra, what looked immoral (accumulating great wealth at the expense of your neighbors) became the very symbol of morality. If one is rich, one is moral.

The trickery, of course, turns traditional Western morality on its head. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note in their book, Philosophy in the Flesh, we often conceptualize well-being as wealth. According to the Moral Accounting metaphor – central to Western moral thought – increasing others’ well-being increases their wealth. Decreasing their well-being metaphorically decreases their wealth. “I’m in your debt,” means, morally, that I owe you a favor.

Capitalists, with an assist from the Calvinists (and Adam Smith’s faith in self-interest), literalized the metaphor. Financial wealth became moral well-being, more wealth even better-being. When financial wealth equals morality, no further moral book-balancing is necessary, unless, perversely, it is we who are somehow in debt to those who have exploited us.

For instance, thieves like AIG executives can, quite logically within this warped moral scheme, demand bonuses for the part they played in decreasing the well-being of the world. We owe them for taking our money away from us.

Which brings me to Merle Travis’s legendary song, “Sixteen Tons.” It’s a song about debt, in this case the practice of paying coal miners just enough that they remain in debt to the coal company store.

St. Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.

It’s like the student loan scam. They lend you just enough to train you to work for them, just enough to make sure you behave yourself and don’t wander from the mine. (The Republican craze to deregulate public university tuition sure did serve the interests of their campaign contributors in the credit industry. As tuition rose beyond the paycheck-to-paycheck means of most Americans, more of us were forced to borrow from those companies.)

There’s something odd and maybe revealing about American’s love for the song “Sixteen Tons.” Recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955, it sold two million copies by December, making it the most successful single ever recorded at that time. Just eight years earlier, when Travis recorded it on a folk album, he was labeled a communist for singing about workers’ woes.

Did Americans of the 1950s, many of them in huge debt to mortgage companies as they moved into new suburban homes, sense something was morally amiss in the post-War boom? Is that why the song spoke to them? Or did they suddenly imagine they had finally escaped from the coal companies and sang along with Ernie to celebrate their freedom by condemning their past? I don’t know. I picked the ‘60s “go-go” version of the song for the YouTube video above because it captures the ambiguity.

If it was the latter, we are coming to realize the escape was imaginary. Today, federal spending needed to stimulate the economy will ultimately cause inflation, and inflation rewards big borrowers – the already wealthy. Why? Because they can pay pack a loan worth $1 yesterday with a dollar worth 50 cents tomorrow. Those of us who, thinking it prudent, saved $1 yesterday could find it worth 50 cents tomorrow.

If we are to escape a second Great Depression, we will have to step up consumption. That’s how pumping money into the economy is stimulating. We’ll have to buy more at the company store. Producing for that consumption will take energy. Coal, for instance. So, as Atwood points out, we will increase the most dangerous debt of all: our debt to the planet Earth.

An economic stimulus is necessary at this time. We have to cope with the disaster left us by the Bush Administration. And, as a big borrower, the federal government will benefit somewhat from inflation as the dollar is devalued. But that’s not lost on our creditor, China, either. Needless to say, it will behoove us to quit borrowing before China quits lending.

America is likely to discover that it’s more like a poor or middling citizen of the world when it comes to debt, its autonomy diminished by continued borrowing from China and other countries.

As we work to re-design the institutions of American capitalism – and it is urgent that we do so – we should start by rejecting the metaphorical trickery of the past. While one can be moral and wealthy, wealth does not equal morality.

Instead, our wealth must serve moral purposes, which means a balanced accounting of the well-being of the world and of one another. We can regulate against destructive immorality, but I don’t believe we can successfully impose such a morality from the top down, the way Calvinist Elders and robber barons did with their “my wealth makes me moral” sleight-of-hand. The real revolution will be won in the hearts of individuals.

Death Before Disorder: Health Care and “The Reader”

Glenn W. Smith — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:30:33 +0000

In the movie, “The Reader,” Hannah Schmitz is on trial for her Nazi-era war crimes as an SS officer and prison guard, including the murder of 300 Jewish prisoners kept locked in a burning church. Why, she’s asked, didn’t you let them out? Her answer, a terrifying one, is that she couldn’t. The prisoners might escape. “There would be chaos,” she said.

Schmitz’s matter-of-fact choice – the death of others before a perceived risk of disorder – shocks the courtroom. Schmitz’s act is terrifying, but not because it is a rare moral failure. It’s because it is so common. Another Hannah, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, called this sort of evil banal. By that she meant that ordinary people often commit evil acts. They are not sociopaths. They are simply and unquestioningly following the rules of their culture or state.

Isn’t this one way to describe the American health care system and the resistance to reform? Don’t we keep many locked inside the burning building of a system that denies health care to millions? Don’t we coldly guarantee their ill health and death, because reform threatens some sort of ideological disorder?

Good art is transformative, and it refuses reduction to simple summary or “the-moral-of-the-story” analysis. There’s much more to Schmitz’s awful choice, including her inability to imagine, even in retrospect, that another choice was possible. The story of “The Reader” is about love, evil, redemption, memory, and the role of storytelling itself in the possibility of love and empathy.

In brief, “The Reader” is about a young German boy, Michael Berg, who, after a chance encounter and an erotic affair, falls in love with the older Schmitz. Much of their time together is spent with him reading to her from novels great and trivial. Some years later, his law school class attends the war crimes tribunal in which Schmitz stands accused.

While watching the movie, the first thing that came to my mind was historian Lynn Hunt’s fascinating thesis that the rise of the novel greatly expanded the human capacity for empathy with strangers. The film plays with this empathy-producing feature of narrative, leading us at the outset to empathize with Schmitz, whose simple act of kindness toward the boy, Michael, leads to the affair.

Then, along with Michael, we are forced to confront the moral implications of our attachment to Schmitz when we discover her terrible past. Michael’s dilemma is this: Rather than admit to her illiteracy, she confesses to writing a report that damns her in connection with the church fire that killed 300. Michael, though, knows she couldn’t have written it because he knows she’s illiterate. What should he do? What can he do?

This brings me back to the awful truth of the banality of evil. What are we to do when confronted with many who resist health care reform because they lack the independence and insight to imagine the consequences of their resistance? It is very easy to demonize (easy because they deserve it) powerful and greedy leaders of the medical/insurance industrial complex. They know what they do.

But, as Michael discovers, it is not so easy to condemn their blind and deaf functionaries. Nor is it easy to forgive them.

Schmitz clearly has a capacity for empathy. We see this in her reaction to great stories, by Chekov, Twain, and others. But that capacity was deadened by the Nazi state.

And so it is with a large number of Americans who defend a murderous health care system because their state has convinced them that chaos would follow reform. Their capacity for empathy is turned off by a thousand different cultural influences that celebrate selfishness and make “others” invisible or vaguely dangerous. After all, they can say, they didn’t set the building ablaze. Order requires that they allow others to die behind the locked doors.

As the story of “The Reader” unfolds, we recognize the need to enliven the capacity for empathy among those who have lost it. And the best way to do that is through storytelling. Which is why many contemporary thinkers (George Lakoff, for instance ) advise progressives to awaken the capacity for empathy by using powerful, emotional narratives that make plain our moral responsibilities to and for one another.

Republicans: “Take Away the Car Keys”

Glenn W. Smith — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Conservative ideologues looking to punish workers and the American middle class for auto industry failures are driven by an authoritarian worldview George Lakoff calls the strict parent model.

Senate Republicans see their opposition to the rescue of Detroit as whipping the children. They are not that different from the failed father who thinks his follies can be overcome by beating the wife and kids. Politically, they seek to avoid responsibility for the nation’s economic woes. It’s not the strict authority who’s at fault. It’s the misbehaving children. Conservatives think they must take away the keys to the car.

The strict parent worldview is not now and never has been compatible with democracy or economic egalitarianism. But it’s always been part of American culture, and most of us carry at least some residual consequence of its cognitive gene. We may be committed democrats, but we laugh along when a boss at work quips, “This is not a democracy.” Or we raise our children in a traditional strict model fashion. Lakoff calls this “biconceptualism.” We use the strict model in some parts of our lives, and it’s opposite, the nurturant or shared responsibility model, in others.

The authoritarian model has been culturally conserved by shrewd neo-Calvinist religious manipulators and free market extremists who recognize that wealth and power trickle up. Both models go way back. According to Hannah Arendt, Jan Patocka and other philosopher/historians, it was with the emergence of the polis from the household and the birth of Greek democracy that family organizational models were metaphorically mapped onto larger social and political groupings. (It’s also true that the influence is reciprocal, as feminist theorists correctly point out. Patriarchal social organization leads to patriarchal families, and vise versa.)

I agree with anthropologists like Christopher Boehm, who date the birth of democracy and its ethic of shared responsibility as far back as the Paleolithic, 10,000 years ago, when hunter gatherers organized together to limit abusive authority. You can read much more about this in my series, “The Promise of Popular Democracy,” at OpenLeft, Part I, Part II, Part III.

As Lakoff says, these models are wired into our brains. They are not bodiless, weightless, free-floating ideas we can take or leave. John Dewey recognized them as habits of thinking. When Republicans carefully frame issues around blame, punishment and authority, their frames are understood. Even people who consider themselves liberal democrats can sometimes be persuaded with these frames, since, as I said, they are likely to use the strict model in some part of their lives.

While it is important to get the facts of the auto manufacturers’ woes right and to point out the dire consequences to millions of Americans of the failure to rescue the industry, it is not enough. People aren’t computers who reason through the facts to perfect solutions. We see things through our emotionally laden worldviews.

We have to contest the strict model metaphors and values – out loud. It’s the only way to activate the value system and worldview of shared responsibility.

The automobile industry is a shared, collective endeavor. What do we, the American family, want to make of it? We want affordable, safe, fuel-efficient, environmentally sound cars built by committed workers who are rewarded for undertaking this task on our behalf.

Framed this way, the financial rescue of Detroit can be seen as the moral endeavor of citizens taking responsibility for ourselves. Blame and punishment become less relevant. Current auto industry leadership might or might not need replacing. Certainly, punishing workers is insane. If we must lend our tax dollars to the effort, so be it. In return, the industry must agree to morally sound practices.

This is an opportunity to shape the manufacture of American automobiles. Conservative efforts to exploit the issue for political gain can be seen as irresponsible and craven.

But unless we articulate progressive values, we are at a disadvantage with conservatives who don’t hesitate to argue punishment and authority. If the strict, authoritarian worldview is activated by conservatives, and the progressive worldview of shared responsibility is not, how can we hope to prevail? We remain in the backseat of a car we don’t like, a car very likely to be driven over a cliff by a strict parent who demands the wheel while denying any responsibility for where we go.

Don’t think of a sick child

Glenn W. Smith — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:00:12 +0000

George W. Bush doesn’t want you to think of a sick child. Not Graeme Frost. Not Gemma Frost. Not Bethany Wilkerson. Not any of the real children affected.

He wants you straining your eyes on the fine print of policies, puzzling over the nuances of coverage — whether you can afford premiums for basic, catastrophic, comprehensive or limited health insurance. Last week on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” even Tucker Carlson kind of got it right, saying, “No one child is a metaphor — he’s a kid!” That’s the point. They’re all kids, each one, one by one. The question is, do you care?

The actuaries don’t. And can’t. Health insurance companies make their money by denying care. They maximize profit by authorizing as little care as they can get away with. That’s what all those administrative costs — as high as 30 percent — and all that paperwork are mostly about. It takes a lot of people to justify denying care.

It’s the opposite of the way the market is supposed to work: Make more money by delivering more product. The health insurance industry makes more money by delivering less product. It maximizes profits by minimizing care.

Profit-run medicine is not, and cannot be, full care. What is needed is patient- and doctor-run medicine. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is just that. Our children need care. Our doctors provide it. The government handles the transactions, period. And we pay a lot less and get a lot more, because there are virtually no administrative costs and no profits being taken by outsiders.

Profit-maximizing insurance, as opposed to doctor-provided care, forces the nation to choose among its children: who will get care and who won’t, who will suffer and who won’t, who will live and who will die.

Bush and his conservative allies don’t want us to see sick children, just as they don’t want us to see those bodies in bags coming back from Iraq. They’re in the habit of sweeping our human casualties under the rug.

But Americans are a compassionate people. We do care about sick children. We do care about our dead and wounded vets and their families. We do care about victims of Hurricane Katrina. Empathy and compassion are what this country is about. America is about caring for one another, about being in the same boat, about being a national family. It is not about profiting from someone else’s suffering, especially if that someone else is a child.

Government in America has a sacred moral mission to protect us, its citizens. Protection means more than the military and the police. It means worker protection, consumer protection, environmental protection and Social Security. And it means health security.

President Bush warns us against “government-run” healthcare, which is anything but government run. In SCHIP, the government doesn’t deliver care, it enables it. It directs payments. Bush wants to leave the nation’s children — and the rest of us — to the mercy of profit-run healthcare. The reason we need SCHIP is that profit-run healthcare has failed.

When children in your family fall sick, you don’t look away. You make sure they are cared for and get better. That’s the way the American family should also work.

George Lakoff’s Freedom Frame

Glenn W. Smith — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:26:44 +0000

George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist whose theories have deepened our understanding of the brain and how we think, act, talk and feel. He works in the domain of mirror neurons and cognitive systems, which may be the stuff beneath our poetry but not necessarily the stuff of poetry. Still, readers who follow him in his new meditation on the fate of freedom in America might find themselves calling up their own images from our historic struggle for freedom:

An escaped slave lifts his eyes to the night sky, looking for the constellation of stars that will guide him north to freedom. “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” he’s been told in coded song;

A woman in a high-collared dress endures the contemptuous slanders (and the spit, and the thrown rocks, and the beatings, and the jailings) from those who violently oppose a woman’s right to vote;

A sharecropper’s daughter learns to read by candlelight, determined to escape the cruel, enforced poverty that threatens her family and her future.

These are pictures in the American Grain. They are part of our historical consciousness. They might even appear in public school history books, illustrating the progressive tradition of freedom that promises to all the opportunity to choose and pursue our goals, that teaches interdependence, empathy and an understanding that one’s freedom is inextricably tied to the freedom of everyone else.

But it is a tradition under sustained assault from those who view freedom another way. To a conservative tradition that has never trusted the will of the people — the unprivileged masses — “freedom” is achieved by following strict rules, by accepting the discipline of those in authority. The “battle over the America’s most important idea” is not new.

We see the two ideas of freedom — the authoritarian and the egalitarian — struggling with one another in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. In his new book, “Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) George Lakoff holds these competing traditions up to the light.

Lakoff’s central premise is that warriors with radically different worldviews fight the war over freedom. To conservatives, their authoritarian freedom seems the only natural road to human fulfillment. People are born bad, and will remain bad and “unfree” without discipline, punishment, hierarchy, and authority. To progressives, justifying authority in the name of freedom seems little more than a transparently hypocritical justification of elite privilege and control.

As described by Lakoff, progressives believe freedom means the opportunity for individuals to set and achieve their own goals, and the recognition that freedom is impossible unless we accept responsibility for ourselves and for others. Conservatives recoil at the progressive notion of liberty and argue that the prattlings about freedom and responsibility from the left are nothing but weak pleas for leniency from the debauched and the libertine, the unworthy and the unreconstructed.

Framing the political battle in America (and across the globe, really) around the idea of freedom, Lakoff focuses attention on what really is at stake in the trench-bound war of attrition we call contemporary politics: continued expansion of human freedom or a retreat to an elite-run distopia, a kind of knaves’ old world in brave new world clothing.

Lakoff became a celebrity in 2004 as the world caught up to his 1996 groundbreaker, “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think” and made “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate” a sensational bestseller.

But his ideas are fruitful in ways not understood by some of his fans and nearly all of his critics. Kevin Drum, in his review of “Whose Freedom?” in Mother Jones magazine, complains about “the political class that has uncritically lionized Lakoff.” He has a grudging admiration for Lakoff’s insight that the language of family life is mapped onto the political domain, that conservatives can be understood as embodying a “strict father” morality while liberals operate in a nurturant, empathetic family moral model. Drum also sees the value in the discoveries of cognitive linguists, that the brain uses conceptual systems, structural contexts hard-wired into the developing brain, which determine the meaning of words.

Still, Drum complains that this “genuinely useful concept” has not produced world-shaking results. This is like attacking James Watson and Francis Crick for not immediately eradicating all human disease once they had discovered DNA. Wishful thinking makes for bad critique.

I think Drum’s resentment is misplaced. Rather than direct it toward Lakoff, it might constructively be directed at some consumers who fetishized Lakoff’s work and thought themselves experts in framing because they’d bought a book by the famous Berkeley professor. This is a legitimate problem in an era of celebrity and consumer politics, but it is not a problem created by Lakoff.

Democratic officeholders embraced Lakoff’s new ideas. The consultant class, however, was less enthusiastic, in part because he had become a celebrity, which made him potentially dangerous to their bottom lines.

Lakoff, founder of the Rockridge Institute, recognizes the serious research that must be done to fully uncover and employ the practical benefits of his insights into conceptual frames. But like many of us, he’s also aware of the urgent need for profound change. The policy consequences of extremist conservative rule are — literally — killing people, not just in war, but in the de facto euthanasia we call a health care system, through the poisoning of the environment, through the enforced poverty and obscene income disparity of our time.

Some of his recommendations seem as simple as common sense. For instance, he tells us that progressives should define the U.S. adventurism in Iraq as an occupation rather than a war. Also, in a recent conversation he spoke of belittling the argument for a constitutional ban on flag burning by speaking of lighting up the flag as “bad manners, and we don’t outlaw bad manners in the Constitution.”

The flag burning debate takes us back to the importance of understanding our warring conceptions of freedom. For conservatives, Lakoff says, the flag is at once a symbol of authority and of freedom. Conservatives cannot hear or understand arguments against the ban that are based on freedom of speech. “It is a big deal for anyone who believes in strict father morality,” Lakoff said. In other words, progressives will never convince them that a constitutional ban on flag burning destroys our freedom because for conservatives, freedom is woven into the flag itself.

In “Whose Freedom?” Lakoff has three goals: 1) Describe the distinctly different ideas of freedom held, respectively, by authoritarian, strict parent morality and nurturant morality; 2) Show us how to advance the progressive ideal of freedom; and 3) Deepen our understanding of conceptual frames so we might see their influence and grow beyond the conceptual systems that shape our brain and constrain what we can think, say, or do. The latter goal lifts the book beyond a discussion of political freedom and into an exploration of the possibilities of human freedom in a deterministic universe.

In the summer of 2005, before Lakoff sat down to write “Whose Freedom?,” he grew agitated as he discussed the implications of conceptual frames on free will. I tried to argue that “frames are not forever.” He wasn’t buying it, though his probing questions (which I couldn’t answer) hinted at the direction he would take in the new book. If unconscious conceptual systems determine our thought and action, in what sense can we be truly free? He answers that question early and late in the book.

“At stake here is the deepest form of freedom — the freedom that comes from knowing your own mind. If you are unaware of your own deep frames and metaphors, then you are unaware of the basis for your moral and political choices,” he writes in the introduction.

And, in his conclusion, he adds, “We were not raised to think in terms of frames and metaphorical ideas. And we were not raised to think in terms of alternative worldviews — that our countrymen and even our next-door neighbors might see the world in a radically different way. In short, we were not raised to see certain deep truths that are essential to our freedom. Transcending the ideas that we were raised with — growing to see more — is the cognitive work of achieving freedom.”

In other words, by understanding how language and the mind work, we might take some of the “forever” out of the systems our minds use to understand the world. The possibilities of freedom are enlarged and extended, and that’s what the progressive ideal of freedom is all about. I’m convinced that conceptual frames evolve and change. Five centuries ago, the Renaissance thinker Desiderius Erasmus engaged in a spirited debate with Martin Luther over free will. Luther preached predestination. Free will was a dangerous illusion, since God determined our futures.

Luther, and Calvin after him, overthrew the authority of the Church, but they laid the foundation for the contemporary authoritarian, strict-parent model of family and governance. Obedience to earthly authority and conformity to strict social mores, they taught, would reveal a person’s status as one of the predestined Elect. Erasmus, who felt and witnessed the euphoria of expanding cultural and intellectual freedoms during the Renaissance, thought predestination dark and demoralizing.

Erasmus authored a book on child rearing and education that was very much in the nurturant mode. It recommended empathy and the teaching of responsibility, cooperation, and experiment. Rules, Erasmus thought, should not be followed too strictly. The Reformers were scandalized. They edited Erasmus’ book, replacing his ideas with their own recommendations of discipline, punishment, and the importance of authority.

If we can so clearly see the defining historical moments of conceptual systems still with us today, as we can see the strict parent morality in the Reformation, we can imagine some future observers looking back and seeing the defining moments of altogether different conceptual frames. As the poet Charles Olson wrote, “What does not change / is the will to change.”

The possibilities of freedom are more than illusion. That is freedom in the American Grain. George Lakoff, like Erasmus before him, is afraid the narrow, conservative minds of today’s political Reformation will snuff out the fires of liberty once and for all. He urges us to battle. He tells us to follow the Drinking Gourd.

Dog Canyon » george lakoff

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