Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language

UC Berkeley ^ | 27 Oct 2003 | Bonnie Azab Powell

[petty bourgeois]

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

[Admin Moderator]

Restored. Please use original article titles only. Thank you.

[El Laton Caliente]

This is the one I like: Well, the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics. Utopian...

[Hunble]

I agree with you Physicist!

Taxes are your dues — you pay your dues to be an American.

It is way past time that all Americans pay for the programs that they have forced upon us. No exemptions!

[x]

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good.

What's in question here isn't linguistics or framing. It's the nature of the world. There will be periods when the conservative view best sums up reality, and periods when the liberal view looks more plausible. Because of scarcity and the complexities of human feeling the liberal view doesn't last for long, and we have to return to conservative values -- to Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings."

Nurturing parents are fine and necessary, but we can't all be nurturing all the time, and we can't be parents to each other forever. It looks to me like Lakoff's scheme is itself caricatured and childish -- the "Mommy Party" vs. the "Daddy Party." The sphere of adult interactions can't be paternalistically coddling. I can't devote myself to nurturing people who are in competition or combat with me. We have to expect that people will grow up and shoulder their share of the burdens. And that adult world shouldn't be tyrannically authoritarian either (whether the conservative view really is "authoritarian" also remains to be resolved).

Fully adult relations and are left out of Lakoff's picture. Maybe the adult world where we can't run people's lives for them forever is reflected in the libertarian view. That view can't characterize all situations we find ourselves in, no more than the authoritarian or nurturing models can, but it shouldn't simply be ignored.

"Framing" plays an important role in politics. So does positioning. Conservatives frame the situtation as they do, because they have positioned themself in a place that gives them something close to the view of the average citizen/voter/taxpayer. When they don't find that place to stand, their characterizations of events are less convincing. When liberals choose to take a point of view opposed to the average citizen/voter/taxpayer, they fail, and no amount of framing will save them. When they take populist positions in bad times, they can come off rather well, because many in the public come to think of themselves as victims and have moved to a place where liberal framings seem to make sense.

I don't quite think Lakoff is on target about "framing" as a tactic liberals haven't mastered. Take a look at the evening news, or listen to NPR. It's done there all the time. Whether it works -- whether the networks can convince people that liberal framing reflects reality and provides a point of view that they can share -- is another question, but conservatives learned most of what they needed to know about framing from CBS and the other networks.

Lakoff's thinking is characterized by simplistic black and white oppositions of the sort more common to political combattants than political thinkers. You can make a case that taxes are the price we pay for civilization (though sometimes it looks like they are the price we pay for barbarism). But that doesn't justify any level of taxation no matter how high. Ruination or spoilation isn't justified. So liberals can make the argument, but people aren't obligated to accept it in any given situation. That is what democratic freedom is all about -- the right of voters to accept or reject impositions on them by the government.

[RightWingAtheist]

Actually, Lakoff's psycholinguistics are intended to counter Chomsky's theories of generative grammar (although it's nothing that John McCarthy and Terry Winograd hadn't already made clear earlier). Whereas Lakoff is merely a psycholinguist, Chomsky is a psychotic linguist :)

[RightWingAtheist]

He's married to rhetorician Robin Lakoff, who herself has made similar disparaging comments about "the way conservatives think" in some of her own works.

[RightWingAtheist]

More to the point-how are people supposed to get the money to pay the taxes to run society if they are being strangled by a big government which limits industrial productivity and wealth creation?

As usual with the left, there's a failure to distinguish between utopian libertarianism, and true conservatism, which is based in a system of checks and balances and a recognition that government is necessary, but that it is also necessary that government be limited in certain powers in order to keep things in healthy working order. Lakoff has done important work in cognitive linguistics (his Where Mathematics Come From, written with Rafael Nunez, has influenced me profoundly), but he obviously hasn't studied basic economics much...if at all.

[mollynme]

"So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones — those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant — and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it. "

He is correct there. But of course he finds this view anathema.

[ChewedGum]

Ping to Self (Gotta blog on this one...very juicy article!)

Gum

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

"Taxes are what you pay to be an American, to live in a civilized society that is democratic and offers opportunity, and where there's an infrastructure that has been paid for by previous taxpayers. This is a huge infrastructure. The highway system, the Internet, the TV system, the public education system, the power grid, the system for training scientists — vast amounts of infrastructure that we all use, which has to be maintained and paid for. Taxes are your dues — you pay your dues to be an American. In addition, the wealthiest Americans use that infrastructure more than anyone else, and they use parts of it that other people don't. The federal justice system, for example, is nine-tenths devoted to corporate law. The Securities and Exchange Commission and all the apparatus of the Commerce Department are mainly used by the wealthy. And we're all paying for it."

There's that ever-present hatred of the rich, based on jealousy.

[LeftiesBinWhinin]

It even begs a further question:

If this is the case, then why doesn't every American pay the same amount of tax? Don't we all use than infrastructure?

[only1percent]

The "strict father" vs. "nurturing parents" paradigm proposal is actually quite a useful one, most of all in that both conservatives and liberals tend to see >themselves< well described in the category to which he assigns them.

What's interesting to me is that each tends >not< to agree with that framework's description of the >other< side. In other words, I disagree that liberalism is particularly nurturing a way to bring up children, or society, in that it tends to strand people in dependency or degeneracy, without the lodestar they need to live happily and reasonably, and thrust upon society at large the costs of dependent and degenerate conduct. Liberals, similarly, don't credit conservatives with the altruism, self-sufficiency and egalitarianism which runs through the "strict father" framework's description. They prefer to believe that conservatives are animated by xenophobia and greed, and that conservative tendencies to authority are driven by a desire to dominate rather than a desire to be a loving provider and enforcer of guidance and standards.

The best and most useful frameworks are those with 360 recognition: useful for everyone to identify both themselves and everyone else. They provide a natural common ground, or at least rationalize issues down to a clear argument.

His "framing" argument is obviously true, as well, although less original (many of his observations are staples of rhetoric), but his suggestion that the left is systematically less competent at it seems unlikely to me. Liberals have successfully defended some fairly noxious policies (affirmative action, denying school choice to poor kids, state-enforced multiculturalism) with adept framing.

[mollynme]

I agree. Nurturing is not exclusive to liberals. Both groups can be "nurturing" but liberals err on the side of enabling while conservatives insist that behavior must have consequences.

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

I don't quite think Lakoff is on target about "framing" as a tactic liberals haven't mastered. Take a look at the evening news, or listen to NPR. It's done there all the time.

I agree with you. I always thought Liberals were the masters of framing - not using that term, of course, but using the terms "liberal spin", "liberal buzz words", "liberal agenda". This guy takes that concept to a whole other level. What Lakoff is worried about is that Conservatives are catching up to the Liberals in terms of think tanks, framing our political identity, TV&radio political programing, books published, etc. Our very existence impinges upon his world view as a liberal/progressive.

It's obvious that the Conservative presence is catching up to the Liberals (in some cases even surpasssing it, e.g. think tanks), and he is clearly worried. Apparently, the current Democratic candidates aren't using as much framing as Lakoff would like.

With this guy studying us, the Conservatives had better not slack off.

In 2000 Lakoff and seven other faculty members from Berkeley and UC Davis joined together to found the Rockridge Institute, one of the only progressive think tanks in existence in the U.S.

Surprised, but pleased, to hear that there's only one. :)

[Bob]

Link is for a totally different story.....

The portion excerpted above is quite a way down into the article.

[whereasandsoforth]

Ok, I read the article. I burst out laughing a few times. This nonsense about "framing" exposes this guy for the intellectually dishonest snob he is. Why can't he spit out what he really means: Conservatives invest a lot of time and intelligencia and money to try to keep political discourse somewhere near the truth. Liberals have lied and fooled for so long they think they still have a monopoly on the discourse. It turns out they don't, so they need to invest a lot of time and their version of intelligencia and money to learn how to turn their lies around so they will sound believable again.

The truth is non-negotiable. Liberals will forever be on the wrong side trying to bargain with the truth.

[cornelis]

Lakoff's thinking is characterized by simplistic black and white oppositions of the sort more common to political combattants than political thinkers.

My take is that Lakoff thinks his opponents succeed because of procedure. And so framing is just one more word for administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development. No doubt procedure helps the propagandist, but the succesful marketing of a stupid idea is but torquing an old line from the People's Daily.

[davidtalker]

This guy can't be serious. I have said for years the Left controls the language of political debate. Don't believe me? Here are some examples.

Gay
Fairness
Diversity
Compassion
Tolerance
Entitlement
Star Wars
Choice

[Dan Evans]

I have said for years the Left controls the language of political debate

Not just the language but the major media infrastructure. I wonder how he thinks conservatives induce those TV and newspaper reporters to phrase everything in the conservative "framework".