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

by George Lakoff

  Before 1819, the commonplace conceptual metaphor that Institutions Are Persons began to be applied to corporations and was limited to such matters as goals, finances, responsibilities, privileges, and so on. But there is a difference between this very common and limited view of corporate personhood and a view that gave corporations constitutional rights! That took the Corporations Are Persons metaphor out of range of normal conceptual metaphor and into the power of the courts.

  In 1819, the Supreme Court made a fateful decision in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Before the American Revolution, King George III granted a corporate charter to Dartmouth College, giving it land in New Hampshire and giving the trustees the right to administer the college. In 1819, the trustees deposed the college president. The New Hampshire legislature was outraged and passed legislation taking away the college’s charter from King George, putting the state in charge, and in effect, making Dartmouth a state college. The trustees brought a case against the state, with Daniel Webster arguing their case passionately before the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Marshall. The court ruled that, even though all political ties had been severed with King George, the charter still constituted a “contract” with King George, the person. The court held that this contract fell under the Contracts Clause of the Constitution, which forbids a state to pass laws overturning contracts. Though the provision in the Constitution applied to contracts among persons, the court held that it applied to corporations as well. Dartmouth remained private and under the control of the trustees. Meanwhile, a line had been crossed. A constitutional clause granting rights of contract and property to persons now applied to corporations. And an institution, the British monarchy, called metonymically the British Crown, was now taken literally to be a person, King George.

  In 1868, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, making slaves free, giving them equal protection under the law, and guaranteeing them the right to vote. The first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment reads:

  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

  In the years leading up to these amendments, large industries, banks, and railroads took corporate form, and became rich and powerful. Many states set about regulating them and restricting their powers. With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment intended as protection for former slaves, railroads saw a way around these restrictions.

  They assumed the opposite of the Pluralities Are Groups metaphor, which separated the properties of group entities from the individual properties of their members. The new Groups Are Pluralities metaphor identified the properties of the group with properties of the members. They began arguing that corporations were persons and had as one of their properties the same constitutional protections as persons had. They argued this for nearly twenty years and kept losing. But they got the idea into public discourse, especially among people employed by the railroads.

  Then, in 1886, they got a break. The railroads had brought four cases concerning taxes to the Supreme Court, including Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In Santa Clara County, there was a tax provision that allowed persons paying mortgages on their property to deduct the amount of their mortgages from their taxes. Southern Pacific Railroad had a huge mortgage and wanted its mortgage costs deducted from its taxes, which would make a lot of profit for the railroad and cost Santa Clara County a lot of tax money.

  The case was argued in the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Morrison Waite presiding. Waite had earlier been a railroad lawyer. The court recorder was J. C. Bancroft Davis, formerly president of a small railroad.

  The precedent of corporate personhood came out of this case. But the precedent did not come from any argument in the case or anything written in favor or against by any of the justices. The precedent came from an oral remark by Chief Justice Waite that was taken down by court reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis. The remark appeared in the headnotes for the case and nowhere else. The headnote quoted Waite as saying:

  The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids any state to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are of the opinion that it does.

  That set the precedent, which was then cited in succeeding cases.

  Bear in mind, as we go through the list of cases, that British common law defined corporations and their shareholders in such a way as to legally separate the properties of the shareholders from the properties of the corporation, so that the shareholders were free of certain liabilities of the corporations—hence the LLC, the limited liability corporation. Each of the following court decisions violated this essential property of corporations, by automatically attributing to corporations certain of the constitutional rights held by shareholders—namely, constitutional rights of due process, free speech (seen as money contributed to political campaigns and spent on the media), freedom of religion, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and double jeopardy.

  Bear in mind the Mitt Romney quote from the 2012 presidential election: “Corporations are people, my friend. . . . Everything corporations earn eventually goes to people.” He neglected to say which people.

  In 1889, the court overtly granted due process protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations; in 1893, it was Fifth Amendment protections of double jeopardy; in 1906, Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure; and in 1978, the First Amendment right to make contributions to ballot initiative campaigns.

  In the latter case, the metaphor was extended: Though a corporation could not go to the polls and vote, as a “person” it has the right of free speech since its shareholders have the right of free speech. Then a further metaphor: Speech as Money going to campaigns—not for candidates (real people) but for policies affecting corporations. It was a step toward Citizens United.

  Interestingly, Citizens United is not directly about corporate personhood and does not depend on that general metaphor. It depends instead on two other metaphors.

  •Money Is Speech

  •Nonpersons Have the Right to Speech

  These two metaphors form a logic: People have a right to as much speech as they want. Since money is speech and nonpersons have the right to speech, it follows that nonpersons have the right to spend as much money as they want on elections.

  This 5-to-4 vote by a conservative court was politically motivated. Corporations have much more money to spend on political campaigns than do unions. This ruling gives a huge amount of money to conservatives and hardly any to progressives. Speech, as we have seen, is not just sounding off. If framed and targeted carefully, Citizens United allows conservatives to change the brains of biconceptuals, and win a lot of elections for conservatives and move the country radically to the right.

  The Hobby Lobby and Wheaton cases were conservative victories as well. The Hobby Lobby verdict granted First Amendment freedom of religion rights to corporations that are tightly held and operated by a family or small group (more than half controlled by at most five persons). The right given is a new right: to ignore a provision of a law applying to a corporation if the small group of individuals owning or controlling the corporation feel that the law violates their religious principles.

  This is a new, and very different, metaphorical extension of Corporations Are Persons to First Amendment rights and it opens the floodgates to a huge range of claims to be exempt from provisions of the law on grounds of religious principle as self-defined. In short, it puts corporations above the law. It is a step toward legalizing governme
nt by corporations.

  This is a radical conservative political decision. Why? Because radical conservatives want to eliminate public resources and public aspects of government—that is, government by laws passed by human legislators. At once, this shifts government from the public to the private sphere and from the human to the nonhuman sphere.

  This brings us to another truth unframed in public discourse.

  •Corporations govern our lives.

  There have been many great innovations made by corporations when they have invested their exponentially accumulated wealth in innovations that improve people’s lives—in useful computer technology, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, transportation—in area after area.

  To my knowledge, in all cases, these innovations that have improved our lives were ultimately made possible by public resources: Government-sponsored research and university training made possible computer science, satellites, medical research and training, and so on in case after case. Every great corporate innovation story simply burnishes the truth that the private depends on the public.

  But what is left conceptually unframed and therefore unspoken are the negative effects of the runaway accumulation of corporate wealth. Here is a short list.

  •Increasing corporate lobbying and political contributions. These effects work largely against the public interest on a huge range of issues—even to the extent that corporations write laws introduced by the legislators they contribute to. The Citizens United decision greatly exacerbated this effect.

  •Increasing externalization of costs. The wealthier corporations get, the more power they have to use their political influence to avoid regulations. As a result, they can pass along to others the costs of doing business—and thus increase profits even more. The fancy name for this is “externalization of costs.”

  A prime example is the dumping of hazardous waste that taxpayers will pay to clean up—or will suffer with. Consider what happens when fracking companies dump pools of polluted water on the landscape, or tear up the land in the fracking process and then leave it torn up, or inject vast amounts of poisonous chemicals in the porous shale rock next to the water table, thus creating polluted drinking and agricultural water. The burden is shifted away from the private corporations and to the public. The prime example, of course, is of corporations emitting the greenhouse gas pollution that has caused global warming. The costs get dumped onto you—whether you’re paying more taxes to mitigate climate change or to clean up after severe storms or you’re paying more for vegetables during severe droughts.

  But even when you have to spend your time searching a company website or waiting on the phone to talk to a customer service representative, costs are being externalized: Your time is being spent while the company profits by hiring too few people in customer service. Various forms of “self-service” at gas stations, supermarkets, and big box stores are made to sound like conveniences for you, but they are really ways of making you work for the company for free.

  •Increasing costs to consumers due to monopoly ownership. For example, some Internet providers with no competition may overcharge and provide minimal service, leaving the customer to bear the burden of exorbitant costs and poor service.

  •Limitations of size options by clothing manufacturers. Many clothing manufacturers will only make sizes that fit the most normally sized people because it is more profitable than providing sizes for the full range of customers.

  •Increasingly unethical business practices. For example, General Motors sold cars with known defects that caused deaths, while people in the company knew of the dangers and kept silent.

  •Increasing corporate inefficiency. Anyone who has worked in a large company is familiar with corporate inefficiency (see the Dilbert comic strip). Health insurance companies, for example, have inefficiency costs that are very high compared with Medicare. Those inefficiency costs are transferred to consumers whenever possible.

  •Increasing corporate management pay and the pressure for short-term profits. When the very rich get exponentially richer and everyone else exponentially loses access to wealth, there is an inevitable pressure for short-term profits. When corporate managers are in charge of managing corporate wealth, there is an incentive for them to acquire exponentially growing wealth.

  To a large extent, corporations govern us and run our lives—for their profit, not ours. The list could go on and on.

  To a large extent, the runaway expropriation of wealth pointed out by Thomas Piketty is a result of government by corporation. Piketty points out that a political solution is necessary, but when our politics is governed significantly through lobbying by corporations rather than the public, the possibility of this is greatly reduced.

  Conservatives like to rail against “government” as taking away their liberty. But government by corporations probably does far more to take away such “liberty.”

  Government by corporation is a major unframed reality. It is systemically linked to the runaway accumulation of our wealth by the very wealthy. Because of the systemic effect of runaway personal and corporate wealth on our politics, both are systemically linked to the threat of global warming to the future of our planet, and to the fundamental split in our politics that is systemically threatening democracy in ways that are not obvious, and are therefore also unframed in public discourse.

  ★ ★ Part IV ★ ★

  Framing: Looking Back a Decade

  ★ 10 ★

  What’s in a Word? Plenty, If It’s Marriage

  —February 18, 2004, with some updates in 2014—

  The original version of this chapter was written over a decade ago, before the major advances in the acceptance of gay marriage. The successful strategy used what was recommended in this chapter in the first edition of this book: the stress on love and commitment and the generalization to everyone, not just gays.

  More than half of Americans now support gay marriage. It is legal in nineteen states. But there is still a long way to go in the other thirty-one states. The conservative framing has not changed: It’s against the Bible; it threatens the very definition of marriage; it’s a lifestyle choice; children will be lured into it; it’s all about sex. Conservatives these days repeat the word homosexual, which contains the word sex and the slur homo.

  For example, Texas Governor Rick Perry was reported as saying, “Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that . . . I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.”

  For all of that, conservatives are fighting a losing battle against love and commitment, family and community. The younger generation is overwhelmingly accepting.

  President Obama entered the presidency not being in favor of gay marriage but being open to “evolving” on the issue. He has now “evolved.” The evolution metaphor suggests an adaptation to the changing political context.

  What’s in a word? Plenty, if the word is marriage.

  Marriage is central to our culture. Marriage legally confers many hundreds of benefits, but that is only its material aspect. Marriage is an institution, the public expression of lifelong commitment based on love. It is the culmination of a period of seeking a mate, and, for many, the realization of a major goal, often with a buildup of dreams, dates, gossip, anxiety, engagement, a shower, wedding plans, rituals, invitations, a bridal gown, bridesmaids, families coming together, vows, and a honeymoon. Marriage is the beginning of family life, commonly with the expectation of children and grandchildren, family gatherings, in-laws, Little League games, graduations, and all the rest.

  Marriage is also understood in terms of dozens of deep and abiding metaphors: a journey through life together, a partnership, a union, a bond, a single object of complementary parts, a haven, a means for growth, a sacrament, a home. Marriage confers a social status—a married couple with
new social roles. And for a great many people, marriage legitimizes sex. In short, marriage is a big deal.

  In arguing against same-sex marriage, the conservatives are using two powerful ideas: definition and sanctity. We must take them back. We have to fight definition with definition and sanctity with sanctity. As anthropological studies of American marriage have shown, they got the definition wrong. Marriage, as an ideal, is defined as “the realization of love through a lifelong public commitment.” Love is sacred in America. So is commitment. There is sanctity in marriage: It is the sanctity of love and commitment.

  Like most important concepts, marriage also comes with a variety of prototypical cases: The ideal marriage is happy, lasting, prosperous, and with children, a nice home, and friendships with other married couples. The typical marriage has its ups and downs, its joys and difficulties, typical problems with children and in-laws. The nightmare marriage ends in divorce, due perhaps to incompatibility, abuse, or betrayal. It is a rich concept.

  None of the richness we have just discussed requires marriage to be heterosexual—not its definition, its sanctity, its rituals, its family life, its hopes and dreams. The locus of the idea that marriage is heterosexual is in a widespread cultural stereotype.

  In evoking this stereotype, language is important. The radical right used to use gay marriage; now it’s homosexual marriage. One reason, I believe, is that marriage evokes the idea of sex, and most Americans do not favor sex that isn’t heterosexual. The stereotype of marriage is heterosexual. Gay for the right connotes a wild, deviant, sexually irresponsible lifestyle.