Early in my cognitive pyschology studies, I came across George Lakoff.
The first book I read by the Berkley language expert was Metaphors We Live By, which suggested that we build our internal models of the world out of frameworks driven by concepts about reality that we’ve absorbed, and expand our understanding by assigning meaning sitting in one frame to the new frames we build.
Put another way, when I hear or experience something new, I will subconsciously push toward an understanding of it by dropping it into a frame I already possess.
Example:
Argument is war
This metaphor takes the concept of argument and drops it into the war frame I possess. If I take this metaphor on board, then I will assign the features of war to my understanding of argument: war is conflict; there is a winner and a loser; the idea is to defeat the other person. Argument, in this metaphor, becomes conflict, and the objective is to defeat the other.
Then again:
Argument is dance
This metaphor works the same way, but in assigning a different frame, it imbues argument with different features: when two people dance, there is move and countermove; there is cooperation; there is synchronization, in varying degrees; and there is a shared goal. Viewed within the dance frame, argument becomes altogether different.
Lakoff isn’t just a language expert; he’s also a political activist, authoring The Political Mind and Don’t Think of an Elephant!, two books that bring this framing concept into the realm of politics, where it is leveraged to high heaven. Political rhetoric oozes framing language, and it is used to steer our thinking without our realizing it.
Example, from Lakoff:
“Take "tax relief," a phrase used by the current White House [Bush II]. The word relief evokes a conceptual frame of some affliction - an afflicted party, and a reliever who performs the action of relieving. So taxes are an affliction, a reliever is a hero, and anyone who wants to stop him from the relief is a villain. You have just two words, yet all of that is embedded. If you oppose reducing taxes and you use that phrase - tax relief - you’ve already lost.”
Put another way,
“For there to be relief, there must be an affliction, an afflicted party, and a reliever who removes the affliction and is therefore a hero. And if people try to stop the hero, those people are villains for trying to prevent relief. When the word tax is added to relief, the result is a metaphor: Taxation is an affliction. And the person who takes it away is a hero, and anyone who tries to stop him is a bad guy. This is a frame. It is made up of ideas, like affliction and hero.”
And here’s another Lakoff example quoting Bush II:
Another example Lakoff mentions in his book is when Bush proclaimed in his State of the Union address in January 2005 that “we do not need a permission slip to defend America.” Consider what Bush is saying here. Sure, he could have said, “we won’t ask permission,” but saying “permission slip” evokes the adult-child metaphor, which aligns with conservatives’ strict father worldview, according to Lakoff.
The Republicans weren’t always so savvy about framing. Lakoff is fond of pointing out that when Nixon got on television and stated, “I am not a crook!”, he was foolishly invoking a frame that doomed him: now Americans could see him as nothing but a crook.
In the years since, Republicans have come to understand framing thoroughly; they not only actively practice it incessantly (and have for decades), but write playbooks about it.
Newt Gingrich, for instance, when planning his conservative resurgence in Congress in the early Nineties, he wrote a memo that was distributed to Republican officeholders entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”.
“In it, he carried on from Joseph Goebbels, who had repeatedly asserted that in order to control a society, one must first take control of that society’s language. Gingrich gave Republicans a list of words to describe anything having to do with Democrats,” wrote Thom Hartmann in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:
decay, failure (fail), collapse(ing), deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, “compassion” is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend (ing) shame, disgrace, punish (poor . . .), bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, patronage.
“Gingrich told Republicans that it was as important to characterize themselves in a positive light as it was to trash-talk Democrats. His list of words to apply to themselves and their policies was as follows,” Hartmann continued:
share, change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, active(ly), we/us/our, candid(ly), humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, principle(d), unique, duty, precious, premise, care(ing), tough, listen, learn, help, lead, vision, success, empower(ment), citizen, activist, mobilize, conflict, light, dream, freedom, peace, rights, pioneer, proud/pride, building, preserve, pro-(issue): flag, children, environment; reform, workfare, eliminate good-time in prison, strength, choice/choose, fair, protect, confident, incentive, hard work, initiative, common sense, passionate.
“When tyranny begins to emerge, shifts in language become obvious, and it’s important to pay close attention to how language is used, especially when certain phrases or memes are used repeatedly,” Hartmann wrote. “Tyrants understand that it’s more important to control the news than to control the army; armies will follow what they believe to be true, but only when first convinced of its truth, and that requires control of or substantial influence over the news.”
So blatant is this usage that it is now a standard practice among Republican lawmakers to simply name things the opposite of what they really are, in order to have them accepted: The Clear Skies Initiative. No Child Left Behind.
Both Lakoff and Hartmann have spent years trying to get Democratic leaders to take this message seriously and to realize that they are only hurting themselves by submitting to the framing used by their opponents, rather than developing their own.
Bill Clinton was the exception, Lakoff noted: he understood framing and how to make it work, not just for him, but against his opposition.
“He stole the other side’s language,” Lakoff wrote. “He walked 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.”
Overtures to both the Obama team and Hillary Clinton team were dismissed, Lakoff has lamented. Either the psychology itself wasn’t being taken seriously, or the use of framing as a method of political persuasion was being interpreted as manipulation.
But is it? Doesn’t every effective speechwriter, regardless of their political leaning, employ exactly these techniques? Didn’t Lincoln? Didn’t JFK and King? Framing is simply science; it’s how human brains work. Is it out-of-bounds to employ it in accurately get one’s message across?
Lakoff summarizes frames as “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” They are neither left nor right; they’re simply there. And we are all carrying around many frames, often covering the same domain; it isn’t manipulation to take care to use words that steer your message into the frame you intend. It’s stupid, in fact, not to.
A final point, this one from Hartmann: liberals try to engage the mind, while conservatives try to engage emotions; liberals talk facts, conservatives tell stories. The intuitive advantage of the conservative messaging is that human brains become emotionally engaged first, intellectually engaged thereafter; and the human brain’s ancient roots are in storytelling, while recitation of fact is relatively new in history.
Liberals, then, are employing a losing strategy when they fail to learn from how conservatives communicate.
It’s not tough to learn these principles and commit to them; and it’s long past time the left got its act together, and started truly using their words...
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