Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives by George Lakoff (2004)
Recommendation: High
Blurb:
Don’t Think of An Elephant! is the antidote to the last forty years of conservative strategizing and the right wing’s stranglehold on political dialogue in the United States.
Author George Lakoff explains how conservatives think, and how to counter their arguments. He outlines in detail the traditional American values that progressives hold, but are often unable to articulate. Lakoff also breaks down the ways in which conservatives have framed the issues, and provides examples of how progressives can reframe them.
Lakoff’s years of research and work with leading activists and policy makers have been distilled into this essential guide, which shows progressives how to think in terms of values instead of programs, and why people support policies which align with their values and identities, but which often run counter to their best interests.
Don’t Think of an Elephant! is the definitive handbook for understanding and communicating effectively about key issues in the 2004 election, and beyond. Read it, take action—and help take America back.
Bo’s Review:
The title of this book should ignite the frames of anyone familiar with positive thinking literature. When you want to succeed, you tell yourself “I’m a success” not “I’m a failure”. When you walk into a room and you don’t want to be awkward, you tell yourself, “I am calm, relaxed, and comfortable.” Why? Because if you say “don’t be awkward; don’t be awkward; don’t be awkward” you’re just presenting yourself with the idea of being awkward, and what’s more likely to happen? So, don’t use conservative frames and language when sharing your views – it only reinforces their frames and their prejudices.
Reframing, as we discuss it in this book, is about honesty and integrity. It is the opposite of spin and manipulation. It is about bringing to consciousness the deepest of our beliefs and our modes of understanding. It is about learning to express what we really believe in a way that will allow those who share our beliefs to understand what they most deeply believe and to act on those beliefs.
What Is Rationality? The brain and cognitive sciences have radically changed our understanding of what reason is and what it means to be rational. Unfortunately, all too many progressives have been taught a false and outdated theory of reason itself, one in which framing, metaphorical thought, and emotion play no role in rationality. This has led many progressives to the view that the facts—alone—will set you free. Progressives are constantly giving lists of facts.
Part I: Framing 101
We all use the family as a metaphor for our nation. But conservatives use a strict father model, and progressives use
The strict father model begins with a set of assumptions: The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good…Given opportunity, individual responsibility, and discipline, pursuing your self-interest should enable you to prosper.
You simply reward the good people (who have proven their goodness through their prosperity). In this view, the rich are more moral. And God has ordered it this way. Strict authoritarian worldview also teaches that everything is ok if you don’t get caught.
I think the biggest problem with this is (to make it work) you have to assume that everyone has the same opportunity. And that’s where many of our conflicts come in – race and affirmative action and race and poverty to mention a couple.
Progressives use the nurturant parent model:
Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. The assumption is that children are born good and can be made better. The world can be made a better place, and our job is to work on that. The parents’ job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others.
Interesting Myths:
People listen to facts. (Hint: they don’t)
People do things in their self-interest (Hint: they don’t)
These are reasons that progressives aren’t expressing their ideas very well. We tell people facts, and we tell people why our policies will help them – but this doesn’t convince anyone.
Part II: Framing 102
With framing, you have to look at the long game. This section has more great info on framing.
…just telling someone something usually does not make it a neural circuit that they use every day or even a neural circuit that fits easily into their pre-existing brain circuitry—the neural circuits that define their previous understandings and forms of discourse. It is difficult to say things that you are not sure the public is ready to hear, to say things that have not been said hundreds of times before.
One of our issues is systemic causation – it’s difficult to track and see the impacts of global warming, privatization of education, fracking, etc.
Our political divisions come down to moral divisions, characterized in our brains by very different brain circuitry.
This is difficult to overcome!!
This is fascinating. One of the ways that conservatives reinforce the framing is by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of government impotence:
Once in office, conservatives can not only say that government cannot work and has to be minimized and privatized, but by being in the government, they can also stop it from working, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. How? By cutting taxes, by cutting funding, by passing laws, and, in the Supreme Court, by reinterpreting laws.
So many people don’t understand the importance of funding public agencies: Public resources make private life possible.
It is a fact that the private depends on the public—perhaps the most central fact of American democracy—and yet strict conservatives either can’t see it or see it as a form of immorality so fundamental that it must be defeated at all costs.
Um. Wow. Mind. Blown.
Taxes for the wealthy have been cut by conservatives, who have defended huge tax loopholes, and have even drastically cut funding for the IRS so that there are not enough IRS workers or modern computers for the IRS to monitor tax evasion—mostly by the wealthy. Since the 1970s, the concept of taxation has shifted from the source of needed, and often revered, public resources to the idea that taxation is a burden—an affliction in need of “tax relief.”
What we need people to understand :
Public resources allow for freedom in case after case, opening up all kinds of opportunities in life.
Without taxes, we wouldn’t have the freedoms we have.
Remember when Obama said, “do you have a small business? You didn’t build that?” It was a huge mis-step. What he was trying to say is that you didn’t build it all by yourself. All the infrastructure that taxes pay for – roads, Internet, mail, etc, etc, helped you build it. And taxes is a way to support that infrastructure. But conservatives didn’t care what he meant. They took it out of context and ran with it to turn people against him. This is framing.
Part III: Framing for Specific Issues
One of the major mistakes made by the Democratic Party is to focus on election campaigns but not on the constant framing of public discourse. All politics is moral.
So true!
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.
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. Nonetheless, conservatives are against both loan forgiveness and dropping the interest on student loans to the same rate that banks pay. Or, conservatives are assholes. (I mean, come on! This would help everyone, wouldn’t it?)
If you give rich people more money, they will save and invest it – not boost to the economy. If you give middle and poor people more money, they will spend it – there’s an immediate boost to the economy. It’s not rocket science.
All these are freedom issues – and life issues. How do we successfully frame that without the right immediately saying that “you are free to make all the money you want” – making all of these non-issues??
(Interesting: one thing Lakoff doesn’t want is slogans, but then says stuff like “workers are profit creators”.)
So what’s the solution? I can talk about this with my friends. I can post about it on social media – until all my friends turn a deaf ear because they’re annoyed by my politicizing. But what beyond that?
It begins by strengthening the framing for the progressive moral system and for the progressive view of democracy based around empathy and the responsibility flowing from that empathy. In other words, we have to care about others—fellow citizens of the world we have never met and never will meet—and recognize the fact that the private depends on the public. That in turn depends on another systemic effect—the effect of language and the brain on public discourse, and the failure in universities to teach that effect.
Oh, is that all??? No prob!
But if the ones in power – who have the wealth and own the media and own the politicians are controlling all the frames, what chance do we have? If money is speech, Why is it fair that the ultra rich get a billion times the free speech than I do?
And corporations governing us is chilling! What do we do??
I’m really looking forward to the “From Theory to Action” section (Part V)!
Part IV: Framing: Looking Back a Decade
This part does well in reframing current domestic and international issues. For some reason, I didn’t put down any thoughts or quest from this section – only that I thought it had some great examples.
Part V: From Theory to Action
Ok – so is Lakoff going to get down to the meat of this? Kind of.
He talks about what conservatives really want. A lot of this really resonated with me – and we need to understand to keep going forward.
Conservatives who are “pro-life” are mostly, as we have seen, against prenatal care, postnatal care, and health care for children, all of which have major causal effects on the life of a child. Thus they are not really pro-life in any broad sense.
Yes! We need to be communicating this!
Both same-sex marriage and abortion are stand-ins for the general strict father values that define for millions of people their identities as conservatives. That is the reason why these are such hot-button issues for conservatives. To understand this is not to ignore the real pain and difficulty involved in decisions made by individual women to terminate a pregnancy. For those truly concerned with the lives and health of children, the decision to end a pregnancy for whatever reason is always painful and anything but simple. It is this pain that conservatives are exploiting when they use ending pregnancy as a wedge issue in the cultural civil war they have been promoting.
…to stay in power, conservatives need the support of the conservative poor. That is, they need a significant percentage of the poor and middle class to vote against their economic interests and for their individual, social, and religious interests. This means that what appears to be a division among conservatives on the basis of domains of interest actually constitutes strength for conservatism on the whole. Conservatism in all those domains of interest is required for conservatism to reign.
And then he talks about how liberals can unite. And at the end of these progressive values, says:
Don’t just read about these values here and nod. Get out and say them out loud. Discuss them wherever you can. Volunteer for campaigns that give you a chance to discuss these values loud and clear and out in public.
Not exactly a plan of action, but I guess it’s a start.
At the end, he reiterates the integrity of this approach.
The reframing I am suggesting is neither spin nor propaganda. Progressives need to learn to communicate using frames that they really believe, frames that express what their moral views really are. I strongly recommend against any deceptive framing. I think it is not just morally reprehensible, but also impractical, because deceptive framing usually backfires sooner or later.
He also talks about the way to respond to conservatives; I think it’s great. It’s a paradigm shift but I think it makes sense. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy.
Those are a lot of guidelines. But there are only four really important ones:
- Show respect
- Respond by reframing
- Think and talk at the level of values
- Say what you believe
So, there aren’t any simple or short solutions. It’s going to take some time. It’s going to take some work. But if we really want to change the world, it’ll be worth it.
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