The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

by George Lakoff

  Conservatives have come to own the words freedom and liberty. These words weigh heavily in the conservative vocabulary. These words are among the most powerful in our politics because of the centrality of the concept of freedom to democracy. Conservatives have no right to that ownership.

  Words have contestable meanings, and the word freedom means very different things to progressives than to conservatives. As I pointed out in Whose Freedom?, freedom is a contested concept. Conservatives and progressives use the word to opposite effects.

  As we have seen from a careful reading of the original Declaration of Independence documents, the progressive meaning is at the heart of our democracy and it is time to take it back. Most of the issues in public discourse, both in elections and in everyday decision making, come down to issues of freedom.

  Health Care

  Comedian Jimmy Kimmel sent an associate out onto a Los Angeles street corner with a microphone to ask passersby a simple question: Which do you like better, Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act? The overwhelming majority said they didn’t like Obamacare, but thought that the Affordable Care Act was a good idea. Most did not know that they were the same thing. After all, different names typically refer to different things.

  How did they get the negative impression of “Obamacare”?

  After Obama was elected in 2008, but before he was inaugurated, he had a pollster do a survey of which provisions for his health care act would be most popular. A group of those provisions came in between 60 and 80 percent in popularity. They were the familiar ones: no preconditions, no caps, your college-age child can be on your plan, and so on. These became the main provisions of the plan. The assumption was that if all the main provisions were popular, the whole plan would be popular. In other words, the popularity of the plan should depend on the popularity of the provisions of the plan.

  No conservatives attacked those popular provisions. There was no conservative movement in favor of preconditions or caps, or against having your college-age child on your plan.

  Instead, conservatives understood that politics is a matter of morality and decided to attack the plan on moral grounds. They chose two moral domains: Freedom and Life. On Freedom, they attacked it as a “government takeover.” On Life, they said it contained “death panels.” And they repeated “government takeover” and “death panels” over and over, month after month. And every time the president said “It is not a government takeover,” he used the words government takeover, which activated the idea of a government takeover in the brains of listeners, thus reinforcing the conservative attack.

  The conservatives also never used the name Affordable Care Act. Instead, they invented their own name—Obamacare, taking the emphasis off the affordability of health care and associating Obamacare with government takeover and death panels. The press, quoting the attacks, used the term Obamacare and not the clunky name Affordable Care Act. Obama eventually tried, in vain, to turn this to his advantage—saying it meant “Obama Cares.” But it was too late. The conservatives had given the name the meaning they wanted by frequent enough repetition.

  The president and members of the administration counterattacked with lists of facts: the provisions of the plan. It didn’t help. The president went on TV with a laundry list of provisions. It didn’t help. His adviser, David Axelrod, sent a memo to Organizing for America’s email list, roughly 13 million supporters strong, asking them to speak to their friends and neighbors in support of the president’s plans. He said there were twenty-four things to remember, but just to make it “easier,” he divided the list of facts into three groups of eight!

  Any cognitive scientist could have told him no one was going to remember the three groups of eight, and I have never met anyone who has.

  The conservatives won the framing war of 2009, and it helped strengthen the nascent Tea Party movement as Tea Partiers were deployed to go to town meetings around the country that summer and repeat government takeover, death panels, and Obamacare.

  If the president had understood the conservative framing tactic, he could have undercut it in a simple way. He could have adopted the same two moral issues, Freedom and Life, from a progressive perspective.

  If you have cancer and you don’t have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die (a Life issue). If you are in a car accident and suffer multiple injuries and don’t have health care, you are not free—you may be disabled for life, or die. Even if you break your leg, do not have access to health care, and cannot get it set, you are not free. You may never walk or run freely again.

  Ill health enslaves you. Disease enslaves you. Even cataracts that rob your vision and can easily be healed by modern medicine will enslave you to blindness without health care.

  Healthy food is also a freedom issue. Much of big agriculture produces unhealthy food, especially processed food, sugary food, food with unhealthy additives, meats with hormones and antibiotics from animals raised on pesticide-treated feed, and so on. Access to healthy food is a freedom issue.

  And when conservatively run states turn down funds for Medicaid, that is a freedom issue—both for the people who are being denied health care, and for everyone else to whom a curable disease can spread when health care is denied to a significant number of the people they interact with every day.

  Freedom issues are powerful issues.

  Education

  Conservatives want to eliminate public resources as a moral issue. In their view, they are given for free and therefore take away personal responsibility and the incentive to work. Education is a main example. In conservatively run states, like Wisconsin, funding for public education has been severely cut.

  The conservative movement against public school education offers the alternative of charter schools, religious schools, and private schools. Charter schools are schools paid for publicly but run privately—very often by for-profit corporations.

  The CREDO study at Stanford in 2013 found that about 75 percent of charter schools have results that are worse than, or no different from, traditional public schools. A small percentage of charter schools do have better results. But since funds for charter schools are taken from public school budgets, charter schools tend to drain money from public schools and make public education worse on the whole, even for the best public schools.

  Moreover, charter schools have no accountability to local school districts or the public. A consequence in Texas, for example, is that charter schools tend to debunk evolution and science and teach creationism. In Michigan, 80 percent of schools are now charter schools, and they are doing no better at educating children in poverty than public schools.

  The conservative framing is that public schools are “failing” and that vouchers for religious or private schools give parents “choice.” Those vouchers tend not to pay for high-quality schools, so that poor families that receive them tend not to get high-quality education for their children. But for wealthy parents, the vouchers represent public support for the wealthy and a cut in support for those who lack wealth.

  The conservative attack on public education is being felt drastically in higher education. Conservatives in state legislatures are cutting funding for higher education, with two horrendous consequences. State-run colleges and universities used to be the gateways to education for poor and lower-middle-class students. As conservatives cut state university budgets, the schools, to stay in business, have had to raise their tuition, pricing higher education out of reach for a great many of these students. Students’ only alternative has been to borrow money, which raises the second problem: student debt. At a time when banks can borrow money at 1 percent interest, students have to pay 8 percent interest on their loans, which burdens them with many years of loan payments after they graduate. That makes it harder for them to afford getting a post-graduate education or starting a family. Present calculations are that if the government forgave all student loans, it would boost the nation’s economy far more than the cost of the loans. Non
etheless, conservatives are against both loan forgiveness and dropping the interest on student loans to the same rate that banks pay.

  Whether at the level of pre-school, K–12, or higher education, the conservative move is to reduce or end public education—as part of the move to end public resources in general.

  Education is a freedom issue. But that is not now being said in public discourse. Without education you are not free in many, many ways. Education tells you about the world and the possibilities in life. If you don’t know what is possible, you cannot even set goals. Education isn’t just about filling your head with facts; it’s about teaching you to think, to notice, to be critical, to act rationally, to be practical, and to get access to facts for yourself. Education gives you skills, the ability to do things you couldn’t do otherwise. Yes, educated people have more economic potential—and money can make you free in many ways—but the freedom education offers goes well beyond money. It opens the possibilities for connections to the natural world, for an aesthetic life, for a life of ideas, for an understanding of what is going on around you, and for an understanding of yourself. And it gives you the knowledge and the opportunity to be a productive citizen, to contribute to your own freedom and the freedom of others via political and social engagement.

  If education in general is a freedom issue, public education, on the whole, is an even more powerful freedom issue, with two important components:

  •Public education is publicly accessible. It gives educational access to more people, and so increases their freedoms. It also allows individuals to understand the full range of people, and therefore opens up human relationships and the possibility of empathizing with and understanding more people.

  •Public education is publicly accountable education. It prevents the narrowing of what is taught when private interests determine what is taught.

  Moreover, systemic causation further makes education a freedom issue, because many of our major educational issues are due to poverty.

  Poverty all too often means that parents who have to hold down multiple jobs cannot properly raise their children—not reading to them, not raising them to respect education, not being able to get them out of unhealthy environments. Poverty means children going to school hungry in the morning and not able to concentrate on classes. And poverty and lack of education replicate themselves. In a large range of cases, the failure of students to learn has mainly to do with a national economic failure and not with inadequate teachers or schools.

  Poverty

  Poverty is a freedom issue. It is obvious. People who are poor have a lot less freedom than people who are rich.

  As we have seen, people who are poor have less access to health care and education than people who are rich.

  But there are many more freedoms eroded, or altogether lost, due to poverty. Housing is better for the rich than the poor. There is no homelessness among the rich. Neighborhoods are better for the rich than the poor. The ability to relocate or travel is far easier for the rich than the poor. Food is better for the rich than the poor. Social connections are better for the rich than the poor. Better jobs are available for the rich than the poor.

  All of these are freedom issues: If you are homeless or cannot find a decent place to live for yourself and your family, you are oppressed and limited, you are not free. If you cannot relocate or travel when you need to, or want to, you are limited in your freedom. If you cannot eat properly, you are not free. If you are not able to connect with people, you are not free. If you are not free to find a job and work, you are not free.

  In virtually every dimension of life, being in poverty without being able to escape it is a freedom issue.

  Yet many people in poverty often vote for measures that make their lives worse, not better, because continual conservative framing has activated a conservative worldview even in those whose lives could be essentially ruined by it.

  Conservatives see being poor as a personal failure, a failure of individual responsibility. But the reality is that poverty curtails freedom. There is a reason why people speak of being “trapped” in poverty. They are.

  Again, in our democracy, the private depends on the public. Do we care about whether our fellow citizens are free, or not?

  Discrimination: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

  By now, our history has made clear that racism is a freedom issue. It can impose poverty, lack of education, ill-health, and worse. As we saw with Trayvon Martin, it can get you killed in some states.

  Our recent history has made it clear that homophobia is a freedom issue. It is as normal to be gay as it is to be left-handed. Freedom to marry for people who happen to be gay is as much a matter of love and commitment as it is for people who happen to be straight, and a denial of marriage or other rights on the basis of whether you are straight or gay is a freedom issue. That is becoming clearer all over America.

  The first edition of this book played a role in the adequate framing of the deepest reality of gay rights. The prior arguments were about rights of inheritance, of hospital visitation—discrimination in monetary and social matters. These were practical issues. What this book made clear was that the issue was fundamentally moral—a matter of love and commitment. All people should be free to marry whoever they love and want to be committed to for life. Progressives began using that message more and more frequently beginning a decade ago, and we have seen the right to marry progress by leaps and bounds.

  Framing the truth at the deepest moral level matters.

  What have been called “women’s issues” are also freedom issues, and these have not been adequately framed as such. In general:

  •Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue.

  •Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.

  Women are human beings and have a right to control their own bodies. When that is denied, they are not free. Control over a woman’s body arises in a wide variety of cases:

  •Sex education. For women especially, sex education is required for control over one’s body, since women need education about menstruation, sexually transmitted diseases that can affect future childbirth, how sex can lead to pregnancy, and how reproduction can be controlled.

  •Control of reproduction. Reproduction occurs through women’s bodies and affects those bodies in a great many ways. Women need to be in control of whether or when they reproduce. Thus access to family planning advice, birth control methods, and abortion are issues of control of a woman over her body.

  •Forced ultrasounds and attacks on family planning. Forcing a woman to undergo humiliation in order to exert control over her own body is a freedom issue. For example, forcing a woman, as in Texas, to have a mostly male-administered ultrasound twenty-four hours before an abortion, or allowing anti-abortion advocates to hound her on her way to a clinic, is a freedom issue for women. Passing laws that make it impossible to keep family planning clinics open is also a violation of women’s freedom.

  •Humiliating victims of sex crimes. A free woman has control over her own body. Sex that violates that control includes rape, drugging a woman in order to have sex, exerting physical or psychological force to have sex, and so on. Police and courts who humiliate a woman who has been raped are violating her freedom.

  These are all freedom issues. They are rooted in circumstances that apply to women, but they are special cases of the freedom of all human beings to control their own bodies.

  There are also circumstances where women are not being treated like other human beings on an institutional level—in significant ways:

  •Equal pay for equal work. This is not just an equality issue. It is an issue of whether women are being treated like any other human being would, or should, be treated.

  •Equality in the rating of ability for a position in an institution. In a free society, gender should make no difference in whether or not a person ge
ts a job, a promotion, admission to an academic program, nomination for political office, and so on.

  These, too, are freedom issues. You are not free when you are not treated like other human beings with respect to how you function in an institution.

  Equality and freedom are not separate issues. Discrimination is a denial of freedom. Freedom is more general. It has to do with a clear path (no one standing in your way or placing obstacles) or with possessions you have a right to. It is freedom that is at the heart of democracy. And it is freedom that concerns everyone who has needs, dreams, and goals.

  The present Democratic framing is the War on Women. I don’t know if it is a good money-raising tactic. But it is not effective framing beyond strong feminist progressives. Strict father morality is partly about preserving male authority over women by claiming protectiveness and support of women—anything but a war against them. Conservative women, too, tend to see male authority as protectiveness, or support for motherhood as the basic female function.

  The War on Women works for feminist progressive women, who correctly see their values as under attack. But it doesn’t work so well for conservative or biconceptual women. Freedom, on the other hand, allows women to decide for themselves, whatever their views on abortion, contraception, and sex education.