This view of rationality comes into Democratic politics in a very important way. It is assumed that voters will vote their self-interest. Democrats are shocked or puzzled when voters do not vote their self-interest. “How,” Democrats keep asking me, “can any poor person vote for Republicans when Republican policies hurt them so badly?” The Democratic response is to try to explain over and over to the conservative poor why voting Democratic would serve their self-interest. Despite all evidence that this is a bad strategy, Democrats keep banging their heads against the wall.
In the 2012 election, Democrats argued that Mitt Romney’s policies would only help the rich. But most poor conservatives still voted Republican against their self-interest, even though Romney was recorded saying not very nice things about the poor in general.
It is claimed that about a third of the populace thinks that they are, or someday will be, in the top 1 percent, and that for this reason they vote on the basis of a hoped-for future self-interest. But what about the other two-thirds, who have no dream that they will ever get super-rich? They are clearly not voting in their self-interest, or even their hoped-for future self-interest.
People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with. They may identify with their self-interest. That can happen. It is not that people never care about their self-interest. But they vote their identity. And if their identity fits their self-interest, they will vote for that. It is important to understand this point. It is a serious mistake to assume that people are simply always voting in their self-interest.
A third mistake is this: There is a metaphor that political campaigns are marketing campaigns where the candidate is the product and the candidate’s positions on issues are the features and qualities of the product. This leads to the conclusion that polling should determine which issues a candidate should run on. Which issue shows the highest degree of support for a candidate’s position? If it’s prescription drugs, you run on a platform featuring prescription drugs. Is it keeping social security? Then you run on a platform featuring social security. You make a list of the top issues, and those are the issues you run on. You also do market segmentation: District by district, you find out the most important issues, and those are the ones you talk about when you go to that district.
It does not work. Sometimes it can be useful, and, in fact, the Republicans use it in addition to their real practice. But their real practice, and the real reason for their success, is this: They say what they idealistically believe. They say it; they talk to their base using the frames of their base. Liberal and progressive candidates tend to follow their polls and decide that they have to become more “centrist” by moving to the right. The conservatives do not move at all to the left, and yet they win!
Why? What is the electorate like from a cognitive point of view? Probably 35 to 40 percent of people have a strict father model governing their politics. Similarly, there are people who have a nurturant view governing their politics, probably another 35 to 40 percent. And then there are all the people who are said to be in the “middle.”
There is no ideology of the middle. There is no moral system or political position that defines the “middle.” The people in the “middle” are largely biconceptuals, people who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others, in all sorts of combinations.
Notice that I said governing their politics. We all have both models, either actively or passively. Progressives see a John Wayne movie or an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and they can understand it. They do not say, “I don’t know what’s going on in this movie.” They have a strict father model, at least passively. And if you are a conservative and you understand Oprah, you have a nurturant parent model, at least passively. Everyone has both worldviews because both worldviews are widely present in our culture, but people do not necessarily live by one worldview all of the time.
So the question is: Are you living by one of the family-based models? But that question is not specific enough. There are many aspects of life, and many people live by one family-based model in one part of their lives and another in another part of their lives. I have colleagues who are nurturant parents at home and liberals in their politics, but strict fathers in their classrooms. Reagan knew that blue-collar workers who were nurturant in their union politics were often strict fathers at home. He used political metaphors that were based on the home and family, and got them to extend their strict father way of thinking from the home to politics.
This is very important to understand. The goal is to activate your model in the people in the “middle.” The people who are in the middle have both models, used regularly in different parts of their lives. What you want to do is to get them to use your model for politics—to activate your worldview and moral system in their political decisions. You do that by talking to people using frames based on your worldview.
However, in doing that, you do not want to offend the people in the middle who have up to this point made the opposite choice. Since they have and use both models in their lives, they might still be persuaded to activate the opposite model for politics.
Clinton figured out how to handle this problem. He stole the other side’s language. He talked about “welfare reform,” for example. He said, “The age of big government is over.” He did what he wanted to do, only he took their language and used their words to describe it. It made them very mad.
It turns out that what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and guess what? When George W. Bush arrived, we got “compassionate conservatism.” The Clear Skies Initiative. Healthy Forests. No Child Left Behind. This is the use of language to mollify people who have nurturant values, while the real policies are strict father policies. This can even attract the people in the middle who might have qualms about you. This is the use of Orwellian language—language that means the opposite of what it says—to appease people in the middle at the same time as you pump up the base. That is part of the conservative strategy.
Liberals and progressives typically react to this strategy in a self-defeating way. The usual reaction is, “Those conservatives are bad people; they are using Orwellian language. They are saying the opposite of what they mean. They are deceivers. Bad. Bad.”
All true. But we should recognize that they use Orwellian language precisely when they have to: when they are weak, when they cannot just come out and say what they mean. Imagine if they came out supporting a “Dirty Skies Bill” or a “Forest Destruction Bill” or a “Kill Public Education” bill. They would lose. They are aware people do not support what they are really trying to do.
Orwellian language points to weakness—Orwellian weakness. When you hear Orwellian language, note where it is, because it is a guide to where they are vulnerable. They do not use it everywhere. It is very important to notice this and use their weakness to your advantage.
A very good example relates to the environment. The right’s language man is Frank Luntz, who puts out books of language guidelines, which are used as training manuals for conservative candidates, as well as lawyers, judges, and other public speakers—even high school students who want to be conservative public figures. In these books, Luntz tells you what language to use for a conservative advantage.
It was Luntz who persuaded conservatives to stop talking about “global warming” because it sounded too scary and suggested human agency. Instead, he brought “climate change” into our public discourse on the grounds that “climate” sounded kind of nice (think palm trees) and change just happens, with no human agency. By 2003, with the scientific consensus going against conservatives, Luntz suggested Orwellian language. He suggested using words like healthy, clean, and safe even when talking about coal or nuclear power plants. Hence “clean coal.” Conservative legislation that increases pollution is called the Clear Skies Act. He is supporting global warming denial by suggesting that people say that the science is not settled and that our economy shoul
d not be threatened. Recently, his focus group research showed support for cap and trade legislation. He has suggested using the language of “energy independence,” which supports continued fracking, but not talking about saving the planet.
Luntz once wrote a memo for talking to women. How do you talk to women? According to Luntz, women like certain words, so when you are talking to an audience of women, here are the words you use as many times as possible: love, from the heart, and for the children. And if you read George W. Bush’s speeches from that period, love, from the heart, and for the children show up over and over again.
This kind of language use is a science. Like any science, it can be used honestly or harmfully. This kind of language use is taught. This kind of language use is also a discipline. Conservatives enforce message discipline. In many offices there is a pizza fund: Every time you use the “wrong” language, you have to put a quarter in the pizza fund. People quickly learn to say tax relief or partial-birth abortion, not something else.
But Luntz is about much more than language. He recognizes that the right use of language starts with ideas—with the right framing of the issues, a framing that reflects a consistent conservative moral perspective, what we have called strict father morality. Luntz’s writing is not just about language. For each issue, he explains what the conservative reasoning is, what the progressive reasoning is, and how the progressive arguments can be best attacked from a conservative perspective. He is clear: Ideas come first.
One of the major mistakes liberals make is that they think they have all the ideas they need. They think that all they lack is media access. Or maybe some magic bullet phrases, the liberal equivalent of partial-birth abortion.
When you think you just lack words, what you really lack are ideas. Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily. There’s a way you can tell when you lack the right frames. There’s a phenomenon you have probably noticed. A conservative on TV uses two words, like tax relief. And the progressive has to go into a paragraph-long discussion of his own view. The conservative can appeal to an established frame, that taxation is an affliction or burden, which allows for the two-word phrase tax relief. But there is no established frame on the other side. You can talk about it, but it takes some doing because there is no established frame, no fixed idea already out there.
In cognitive science there is a name for this phenomenon. It’s called hypocognition—the lack of the ideas you need, the lack of a relatively simple fixed frame that can be evoked by a word or two.
The idea of hypocognition comes from a study in Tahiti in the 1950s by the late anthropologist Bob Levy, who was also a therapist. Levy addressed the question of why there were so many suicides in Tahiti, and discovered that Tahitians did not have a concept of grief. They felt grief. They experienced it. But they did not have a concept for it or a name for it. They did not see it as a normal emotion. There were no rituals around grief. No grief counseling, nothing like it. They lacked a concept they needed—and wound up committing suicide all too often.
Progressives are suffering from massive hypocognition. The conservatives used to suffer from it. When Goldwater lost in 1964, they had very few of the concepts that they have today. In the intermediate fifty years, conservative thinkers have filled in their conceptual gaps. But our conceptual gaps are still there.
Let’s go back to tax relief.
What is taxation? Taxation is what you pay to live in a civilized country—what you pay to have democracy and opportunity, and what you pay to use the infrastructure paid for by previous taxpayers: the highway system, the Internet, the entire scientific establishment, the medical establishment, the communications system, the airline system. All are or were paid for by taxpayers.
You can think of taxation metaphorically in at least two ways. First, as an investment. Imagine the following ad:
Our parents invested in the future, ours as well as theirs, through their taxes. They invested their tax money in the interstate highway system, the Internet, the scientific and medical establishments, our communications system, our airline system, the space program. They invested in the future, and we are reaping the tax benefits, the benefits from the taxes they paid. Today we have assets—highways, schools and colleges, the Internet, airlines—that come from the wise investments they made.
Imagine versions of this ad running over and over, for years. Eventually, the frame would be established: Taxes are wise investments in the future.
Or take another metaphor:
Taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America. If you join a country club or a community center, you pay fees. Why? You did not build the swimming pool. You have to maintain it. You did not build the basketball court. Someone has to clean it. You may not use the squash court, but you still have to pay your dues. Otherwise it won’t be maintained and will fall apart. People who avoid taxes, like corporations that move to Bermuda, are not paying their dues to their country. It is patriotic to be a taxpayer. It is traitorous to desert our country and not pay your dues.
Perhaps Bill Gates Sr. said it best. In arguing to keep the inheritance tax, he pointed out that he and Bill Jr. did not invent the Internet. They just used it—to make billions. There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money. He did not make his money alone. He used taxpayer infrastructure. He got rich on what other taxpayers had paid for: the banking system, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and the judicial system, where nine-tenths of cases involve corporate law. These taxpayer investments support companies and wealthy investors. There are no self-made men! The wealthy have gotten rich using what previous taxpayers have paid for. They owe the taxpayers of this country a great deal and should be paying it back.
These are accurate views of taxes, but they are not yet enshrined in our brains. They need to be repeated over and over again, and refined until they take their rightful place in our synapses. But that takes time. It does not happen overnight. Start now.
It is not an accident that conservatives are winning where they have successfully framed the issues. They’ve got a forty- to fifty-year head start. And more than two billion dollars in think tank investments.
And they are still thinking ahead. Progressives are not. Progressives feel so assaulted by conservatives that they can only think about immediate defense. Democratic office holders are constantly under attack. Every day they have to respond to conservative initiatives. It is always, “What do we have to do to fight them off today?” This leads to politics that are reactive, not proactive.
And it is not just public officials. I have been talking to advocacy groups around the country, working with them and trying to help them with framing issues. I have worked with more than four hundred advocacy groups in this way. They have the same problems: They are under attack all the time, and they are trying to defend themselves against the next attack. Realistically, they do not have time to plan. They do not have time to think long-term. They do not have time to think beyond their particular issues.
They are all good people—intelligent, committed people. But they are constantly on the defensive. Why? It is not hard to explain it when we think about funding.
The right-wing think tanks get large block grants and endowments. Millions at a time. They are very well funded.
Furthermore, they know that they are going to get the money the next year, and the year after that. Remember, these are block grants—no strings attached. Do what you need. Hire intellectuals. Bring talent along. These institutions also build human capital for the future.
Progressive foundations spread the money around—thinly. They give twenty-five thousand dollars here, maybe fifty thousand, maybe even a hundred thousand. Sometimes it is a big grant. But recipients have to do something different from what everyone else is doing because the foundations see duplication as a waste of money. Not only that, but
also they are not block grants like conservative foundations get; the recipients do not have full freedom to decide how to spend the money. And it is certainly not appropriate to use it for career development or infrastructure building or hiring intellectuals to think about long-term as well as short-term or interrelated policies. The emphasis is on providing direct services to the people who need the services: grassroots funding, not infrastructure creation. This is, for the most part, how progressive foundations work. And because of that, the organizations they fund have to have a very narrow focus. They have to have projects, not just areas they work on. Activists and advocates are overworked and underpaid, and they do not have time or energy to think about how they should be linking up with other people. They mainly do not have the time or training to think about framing their issues. The system forces a narrow focus—and with it, isolation.
You ask, “Why is it like this?” There is a reason. There is a deep reason, and it is a reason you should think about. In the right’s hierarchy of moral values, the top value is preserving and defending the moral system itself. If that is your main goal, what do you do? You build infrastructure. You buy up media in advance. You plan ahead. You do things like give fellowships to right-wing law students to get them through law school if they join the Federalist Society. And you get them nice jobs after that. If you want to extend your worldview, it is very smart to make sure that over the long haul you have the people and the resources that you need.
On the left, the highest value is helping individuals who need help. So if you are a foundation or you are setting up a foundation, what makes you a good person? You help as many people as you can. And the more public budgets get cut, the more people there are who need help. So you spread the money around to the grassroots organizations, and therefore you do not have any money left for infrastructure or talent development, and certainly not for intellectuals. Do not waste a penny in duplicating efforts, because you have to help more and more people. How do you show that you are a good, moral person or foundation? By listing all the people you help; the more the better.
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