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

by George Lakoff

  Why don’t progressives take advantage of wedge issues?

  Conservatives have been thinking about the strategic use of ideas; progressives haven’t, but we could. We could perfectly well use wedge issues. They’re all around us. Take something like clean air and clean water. Conservatives want clean air and clean water. That can be made into a wedge issue.

  Imagine a campaign for poison-free communities, starting with mercury as the poison of choice, then going on to other kinds of poison in our air and in our water, around us in various forms. That could be made into an effective wedge issue, splitting the conservatives who care about their own and their children’s health from those who are simply against government regulation. The very issue would create a frame in which regulation favors health, and being against regulation endangers health.

  This is also a slippery slope issue. Once you get people looking at how and where mercury enters the environment—for example, from the processing of coal and many other kinds of chemicals—and you get people thinking about cleaning up mercury, and about mercury poisoning, and how it works in the environment, you can move to the next poison in the environment, and the poison after that, and the poison after that.

  This is an issue that is not just about mercury or about poisons in the environment, but about nurturant morality in general. Wedge issues are stand-ins for the whole of a moral system. Abortion is an issue that serves as a stand-in for the control of women’s lives and for a moral hierarchy that conservatives want to impose. Abortion, as we have seen, is a stand-in for strict father morality in general. Similarly, there are all sorts of wedge issues that can be stand-ins for progressive morality in general.

  Is religion inherently conservative? Are progressive ideals inconsistent with religious beliefs?

  Conservatives would have us believe that religions are conservative, but they’re not. Millions of Christians in this country are liberal Christians. Most Jews are liberal Jews. And I suspect that most Muslims in America are progressive, liberal Muslims, not radically conservative Muslims. However, the progressive religious community in this country is not well organized, while the conservative religious community is extremely well organized. One of the problems is that the progressive religious community, particularly progressive Christianity, doesn’t really know how to express its own theology in a way that makes its politics clear, whereas conservative Christians do know the direct link between their theology and their politics. Conservative Christianity is a strict father religion. Here’s how the strict father view of the world is mapped onto conservative Christianity.

  First, God is understood as punitive—that is, if you sin you are going to go to hell, and if you don’t sin you are going to be rewarded and go to heaven. But since people tend to sin at one point or another in their lives, how is it possible for them to ever get to heaven? The answer in conservative Christianity is Christ. What Jesus does is offer conservative Christians a chance to get to heaven. The idea is this: Christ suffered on the cross so much that he built up moral credit sufficient for all people, forever. He then offered a chance to get to heaven—that is, redemption—on the following terms, strict father terms: If you accept Jesus as your savior, that is, as your moral authority, and agree to follow the moral authority of your minister and your church, then you can get to heaven. But that is going to require discipline. You need to be disciplined enough to follow the rules, and if you don’t, then you are going to go to hell. So Jesus, with his moral credit that he gained from suffering, can pay off your debts—that is, your sins—and allow you to get into heaven, but only if you toe the line.

  Liberal Christianity is very, very different. Liberal Christianity sees God as essentially beneficent, as wanting to help people. The central idea in liberal Christianity is grace, where grace is understood as a kind of metaphorical nurturance. In liberal Christianity, you can’t earn grace—you are given grace unconditionally by God. But you have to accept grace, you have to be near God to get his grace, you can be filled with grace, you can be healed by grace, and you are made into a moral person through God’s grace.

  In other words, grace is metaphorical nurturance. That is, just as nurturance feeds you, heals you, takes care of you, just as a nurturant parent teaches you to be nurturant and allows you to be a moral being, just as you can’t get nurturance unless you are close to your parents, just as you must accept nurturance in order to get it, so all of these things about nurturance are true of grace in liberal Christianity. Nurturance comes with unconditional love—in the case of grace, the unconditional love of God. What makes a religion nurturant is that it metaphorically views God as a nurturant parent. In a nurturant form of religion, your spiritual experience has to do with your connection to other people and the world, and your spiritual practice has to do with your service to other people and to your community. This is why nurturant Christians are progressives: because they have a nurturant morality, just as progressives have.

  But at present nurturant Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others in this country are not organized. They are not seen as a single movement, a progressive religious movement. Worse, secular progressives do not see those with a nurturant form of religion as natural members of the same political movement. Not only do spiritual progressives need to unite with each other, they need to unite with secular progressives, who share the same moral system and political objectives.

  What is a strategic initiative, and how is it different from regular policy making?

  There are two kinds of strategic initiatives: The first is what I call a slippery slope initiative. The idea of a slippery slope initiative is to take a first step that seems fairly straightforward, but gets into the public eye an additional frame that you want to be there. The idea is that once the first step is taken, then it is easier and often inevitable to take the next step and the next step and the next step.

  The conservative Supreme Court works by slippery slope decisions, one step at a time. Consider the following progression. First, the court allowed corporations to contribute to ballot initiatives as a limited form of the First Amendment right of free speech. Then, their Citizens United decision gave corporations the ability to contribute as much as they want in elections, as a form of free speech. Then their Hobby Lobby decision extended the First Amendment freedom of religion to corporations so that they do not have to provide contraception to women employees as specified by the Affordable Care Act, opening the door to a wider use of freedom of religion by corporations to avoid various fair treatment laws.

  Let’s take another example. It used to be the case that conservatives tried to cut social programs one by one, and then they figured out how they could cut them all at once: through tax cuts. Cutting taxes is a strategic initiative, not of the slippery slope variety but of a deeper variety, one that has wide effects across many, many areas. If you cut taxes and create a large deficit, then when any social program comes up—it could be health care for poor children, or services for paraplegics, or whatever—there won’t be enough money for it. So you end up cutting social programs across the board in health, in education, in the enforcement of environmental regulations, and so on. At the same time you reward those who you see as the good people, namely the wealthy people—those who were disciplined enough to become wealthy.

  There are other kinds of strategic initiatives as well. Take the example of same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage contradicts large parts of the strict father model. If it’s a lesbian marriage, there’s no father at all, and in a gay marriage, where there are two fathers, neither of them fits the traditional view of the male strict father. Opposing same-sex marriage is thus reinforcing and extending strict father morality itself, which is the highest calling of the conservative moral system. Same-sex marriage is therefore a stand-in; it evokes the larger issue, namely what moral system is to govern our country.

  The same is true of the issue of abortion. Allowing women to decide for themselves on whether to end a pregnancy flies in the f
ace of the whole idea of a strict father family model. In the strict father model, it is the father who decides whether his wife or daughter should have an abortion. It is the father who controls his daughter’s sexuality; when the daughter takes a lover, then the father loses control. If the father is to maintain control over his family, then the women in the family cannot freely control their own sexual behavior and their own ability to reproduce. Abortion is therefore not inherently a political issue, but only a political issue when it comes to whether strict father morality is to reign in American life. Abortion is a stand-in for the larger issue: Is strict father morality going to rule America?

  So all I have to do to reframe my issue is think up some sound bite–worthy terms and use them in place of the conservative terms?

  No! Reframing is not just about words and language. Reframing is about ideas. The ideas have to be in place in people’s brains before the sound bite can make any sense. For example, take the idea of “the commons”—that is, our common inheritance, like the atmosphere or the electromagnetic spectrum (bandwidths). These are the common inheritances of all humanity, and most people who discuss them in this way refer to them as “the commons.” Yet the idea of a common inheritance and of using it for the public good is not yet part of the frame structure that most people use every day. For this reason you can’t just make up a sound bite about the commons and have most people understand it and agree with it.

  If Republicans have such a huge infrastructure, how do we catch up?

  Progressives know that they have to make investments in media. What they tend not to know is that they have to make investments in framing and in language. The big advantage we have is this: Whereas it took more than thirty years, billions of dollars, and forty-three institutes for conservatives to reframe public debate so the debate occurs on their turf, we have the advantage of having science on our side. Through cognitive science and through linguistics, we know how they did it. And we know how we can do the equivalent for progressives in a much shorter time and with many fewer resources. We also know how they’ve done their linguistic training, and we know how to do it ourselves.

  Unfortunately, many progressives think this can be done through ad agencies and through pollsters. That’s a mistake. You really do need linguists and cognitive scientists, platforms for in-depth and sustained discussion, and well-honed plans for keeping meaningful dialogue consistently before policy makers and the public.

  What was the difference between the Rockridge Institute and other progressive think tanks? Are there any other think tanks that are dedicated to research on framing?

  Rockridge was entirely dedicated to reframing the public debate, both from a policy perspective and from a linguistic perspective. Other progressive think tanks have other primary functions: responding to the initiatives of the right, answering conservative charges, telling the truth when there are conservative lies, and constructing specific policies that progressives can use. All of these are important functions, but they do not replace the framing function, a function that is absolutely necessary.

  To my knowledge, there is now only one think tank devoted to the overall framing of issues from both a policy perspective and a communicative perspective—the Forward Institute in Wisconsin. The Forward Institute is dedicated to empowering the progressives of Wisconsin to frame state issues from a progressive viewpoint. They have studied the framing of Wisconsin issues and have trained trainers to work with a full range of progressives—from political leaders at all levels, to union leaders, to teachers, to Native Americans, to environmentalists, to citizen-volunteers all willing to speak around the state using progressive frames. The institute has just started. Only time will tell if they will get the funding they need to succeed.

  Isn’t tax relief the natural way to talk about taxes? I’m a progressive, but I have to admit, they do seem burdensome sometimes.

  Homework in school is burdensome too, but you have to do it if you’re going to learn anything. Exercise is burdensome, but you have to do it if you’re going to be in good physical shape. Taxes are necessary if we are going to make wise investments in our national infrastructure that will pay off for all of us years and years in the future. That includes investments in things like education and health care for those who can’t afford them. Education and health care are investments in people. They are wise investments because they give us an educated citizenry, an educated workforce, and a healthy and efficient workforce. Those are the practical reasons for taxes. Other reasons for taxes are public services—like police and fire, disaster relief, and so on.

  There are moral reasons for taxes as well. Education and health are important factors in fulfillment in life, and this country is about fulfillment in life. There is a reason why the Declaration of Independence talks about the pursuit of happiness and links it to liberty. The reason is that they go together. Without liberty, there can be no fulfillment in life. Thus there are practical reasons why it makes sense to understand taxation as investment, and there are moral reasons to understand taxation as paying your dues in a country where you can pursue happiness because there is liberty and freedom.

  How do you respond or reply directly to a Republican strategic initiative?

  You can’t, and that’s why they’re clever. Tax cuts are not about tax cuts. That’s why you can’t reply directly to tax cuts so easily. They are about getting rid of all social programs and regulations of business. Vouchers and school testing are not ultimately about vouchers and school testing; they are about conservative control of the content of education and the elimination of public resources. To respond you have to put the individual issue into a much larger framework that fits your understanding of the situation. Tort reform is not about tort reform; it is about allowing corporations to act without restraints, and about taking funding away from the Democratic Party, since trial lawyers are a major source of Democratic funding.

  Instead of trying to reply to strategic initiatives, you need to reframe the larger issues at stake from your point of view. You can discuss the strategic initiative, or at least some parts of it, from your framework. Take tort reform. Trial lawyers are really public protection attorneys, and tort law is law that allows for public protection—it’s public protection law. When tort law tries to cap claims and settlements, its effect is to take claims out of the hands of juries—that is, to close the courtroom door, to create closed courts instead of open courts. In open courts, where there are juries, the jury can decide whether a given claim is a matter of public protection. Large settlements often have to do with issues of public protection—that is, they go beyond the case at hand. And open courts are the last defense that the public has against unscrupulous or negligent corporations or professionals. When conservatives talk about the lawsuits, you don’t just say, “No, no, the lawsuits weren’t frivolous,” you talk instead about public protection, about open courts, about the right to have juries decide, and about the last line of defense against unscrupulous or negligent corporations.

  If facts that don’t fit frames are rejected, does that mean we should stop using facts in our arguments?

  Obviously not. Facts are all-important. They are crucial. But they must be framed appropriately if they are to be an effective part of public discourse. We have to know what a fact has to do with moral principles and political principles. We have to frame those facts as effectively and as honestly as we can. And honest framing of the facts will entail other frames that can be checked with other facts.

  How do progressive values differ from traditional American values?

  They don’t differ. Progressive values are traditional American values, all the values we are proud of.

  We are proud of the victories for equality and against hierarchy: the emancipation of the slaves, women’s suffrage, the union movement, the integration of the armed forces, the civil rights movement, the woman’s movement, the environmental movement, and the gay rights movement.

  We are proud of FDR’s conc
eption of government “for the people” and his rally for hope against fear.

  We are proud of the Marshall Plan, which helped to erase the notion of “enemies.”

  We are proud of John Kennedy’s call to public service, of Martin Luther King’s insistence on nonviolence in the face of brutality, of Cesar Chavez’s ability to bring pride and organization to the worst-treated of workers.

  Progressive thought is as American as apple pie. Progressives want political equality, good public schools, healthy children, care for the aged, police protection, family farms, air you can breathe, water you can drink, fish in our streams, forests you can hike in, songbirds and frogs, livable cities, ethical businesses, journalists who tell the truth, music and dance, poetry and art, and jobs that pay a living wage to everyone who works.

  Progressive activists—for living wages, women’s rights, human rights, the environment, health, voter registration, and so on—are American patriots, working with unselfish dedication toward making a better world, a world that fits fundamental American values.

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  How to Respond to Conservatives

  The earlier chapters are meant to explain what framing is and how it works through language and communication systems, what conservative and progressive worldviews are, what biconceptualism is, and what the deep issues are in framing. But sooner or later, you are on the front line called the dinner table. As my students regularly ask, “Thanksgiving is coming and I’m going to be eating dinner with my conservative relatives, and I am going to get in a row over politics with my grandfather or my aunt. It’s always painful. What can I do?”