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

by George Lakoff

The private depends on the public. Public resources make private life possible. It doesn’t take much to see this. The evidence is all around us every day. There used to be signs on public projects: “Your tax money at work!” But such signs appear no more and the most basic truth of our democracy goes largely unspoken. Why? Progressives take it for granted, as part of their moral and practical assumptions, like breathing or noting that the sky is blue. This is an important fact about how brains work. Some ideas and some knowledge are so deep that they rarely if ever even come to consciousness. Nobody goes around saying things like, “People breathe,” or “You have a nose.” But for conservatives, the very idea that the private depends on the public is anathema—immoral. Conservatives have a different view of responsibility. Whereas progressives believe centrally in empathy (caring about their fellow citizens), both personal and social responsibility, and a commitment toward doing their best toward those ends, conservatives believe only in personal responsibility.

This yields a completely different view of democracy, that democracy provides what they call “liberty”—the ability to seek one’s own interests without the responsibility of others to help them, without any responsibility to help their fellow citizens, and without interference from the government. This is a moral conviction, as deep in the conservative brain as the progressive moral vision is in the progressive brain.

Your moral identity is as much a physical part of you as your lungs or your nose. You can only make sense of what your brain allows. If the facts don’t fit what your brain physically allows, the brain circuitry stays and facts are either ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, or seen as a form of immorality to be fought against. 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.

a voter’s implicit sense of morality is absolutely central to a voter’s identity. Since biconceptual voters have both moral systems—mostly one but partly the other—conservatives need to keep their voters and attract the partly conservative moderate Democrats. Conversely, progressives need to keep their voters and attract partly progressive moderate Republicans. There is an honest strategy for achieving this goal, and also an Orwellian one. The honest strategy is to use only your language and avoid using the other side’s language. That will maximally activate your moral system in the moderates on the other side. The Orwellian strategy involves using the other side’s language in an attempt to “reach” those with moderate or opposing views. But if you use Orwellian language, you will be activating the other side’s moral system, making it stronger, and shooting yourself in the foot.

The more a brain circuit is activated, the stronger its synapses get. 2. The stronger its synapses get, the more likely it is to fire and the stronger the firing is. 3. When two circuits inhibit each other, the stronger one circuit gets, the weaker the other gets. 4. Suppose two mutually inhibitory circuits apply to different issues. As one gets stronger and the other gets weaker, the more likely it is the stronger one will start applying to more issues and the weaker one to fewer issues. 5. Language changes the strength of those circuits. Conservative language activates circuitry for the conservative worldview; progressive language activates circuitry for the progressive worldview. 6. Imagery fitting one worldview or the other matters as much or more. 7. Frequency of language use and imagery matters. The more frequent the language use or imagery, the more strengthening occurs. 8. Journalists are trained to use the most frequent language in public discourse. 9. The conservative turn in America has come from the constant use of conservative language in public discourse. So much so that progressives have often adopted conservative language, thus helping the conservative cause. 10. Because of the effect of language and imagery on the brain, the constant use of one ideology’s language over the other’s has an enormous effect on our politics.

The constant talk of taxation as an affliction and a burden has led biconceptuals to “switch” to viewing taxation as a burden rather than something that makes our private lives possible or that creates a base from which corporations prosper. While conservatives drive these frames home, progressives don’t realize that they have to drive their own frames home—and only later realize that the conversation has completely changed. “Suddenly” not just conservatives are talking about the burden of taxes instead of the value of public services, but so are the media, so are moderates, and, eventually, the “tax relief” language works its way into even progressive discourse. The term Tea Party was chosen to make it sound patriotic to oppose taxation.

The only progressive who has succeeded in getting across the idea that the private depends on the public is Elizabeth Warren, who has argued it repeatedly, and did so with special success when she was running for the Senate in 2012.

The president and every progressive candidate, office holder, and public figure of any kind can start now: say it right, over and over. Connect the private-depends-on-the-public concept to something that conservatives will understand: freedom. Public resources allow for freedom in case after case, opening up all kinds of opportunities in life. It is the freedom that public resources afford that make them central to democracy. Saying it right—and saying it over and over—is advice that can be applied to issue after issue.

Connect the private-depends-on-the-public concept to something that conservatives will understand: freedom. Public resources allow for freedom in case after case, opening up all kinds of opportunities in life. It is the freedom that public resources afford that make them central to democracy. Saying it right—and saying it over and over—is advice that can be applied to issue after issue.

the word freedom means very different things to progressives than to conservatives. As I pointed out in Whose Freedom?, freedom is a contested concept. Conservatives and progressives use the word to opposite effects.

If the president had understood the conservative framing tactic, he could have undercut it in a simple way. He could have adopted the same two moral issues, Freedom and Life, from a progressive perspective. If you have cancer and you don’t have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die (a Life issue). If you are in a car accident and suffer multiple injuries and don’t have health care, you are not free—you may be disabled for life, or die. Even if you break your leg, do not have access to health care, and cannot get it set, you are not free. You may never walk or run freely again.

Conservatives want to eliminate public resources as a moral issue. In their view, they are given for free and therefore take away personal responsibility and the incentive to work.

In virtually every dimension of life, being in poverty without being able to escape it is a freedom issue.

Conservatives see being poor as a personal failure, a failure of individual responsibility. But the reality is that poverty curtails freedom. There is a reason why people speak of being “trapped” in poverty. They are.

The War on Women works for feminist progressive women, who correctly see their values as under attack. But it doesn’t work so well for conservative or biconceptual women. Freedom, on the other hand, allows women to decide for themselves, whatever their views on abortion, contraception, and sex education.

When a company tells its employees that they can no longer afford such “generous benefits” and will have to cut them, it is a framing lie. Either there has been theft or misinvestment or mismanagement. “Benefits” are earnings, period.

The issue for Americans is empathy: Do we care for those fellow human beings who are functioning as our fellow citizens? Or do we treat them as lesser beings, not worthy of the freedom they are earning day by day? The issue for those who have come here to escape the brutality of oppression and poverty is freedom.

He points out that political change can bring the runaway accumulation under control, say, via a wealth tax. He also suggests that traditional liberal measures—like raising lower- and middle-class wages, lowering corporate management wages, closing tax loopholes, increasing access to education, and so on—can help bring about such a reversal. But there are systemic effects that act against a political solution. Greater wealth leads to many things, including:

Global warming is the greatest moral issue facing our generation. Accelerating wealth accumulation by the wealthy is a close runner-up. Together, they present a clear and present danger, not just to the United States, but to the world.

Framing is about thought, about understanding at the deepest levels, about circuitry in your brain with strong synapses that last, about changing unconscious, automatic, effortless understanding—in other words, about changing common sense. Frame change itself is a systemic effect. There are a lot of frames to be changed. How can such overall change be effected?

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.

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 government by corporations.

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.

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.

It has long been right-wing strategy to repeat over and over phrases that evoke their frames and define issues their way. Such repetition makes their language normal, everyday language and their frames normal, everyday ways to think about issues. Reporters have an obligation to notice when they are being taken for a ride, and they should refuse to go along. It is a duty of reporters not to accept such a situation and not to simply use right-wing frames that have come to seem natural. And it is the special duty of reporters to study framing and to learn to see through politically motivated frames, even when those frames have come to be accepted as everyday and commonplace.

The reaction from liberals and progressives was far different: Justice is called for, not vengeance. Understanding and restraint are what is needed. The model for our actions should be the rescue workers and doctors—the healers—not the bombers.

Progressive/liberal morality begins with empathy, the ability to understand others and feel what they feel. That is presupposed in responsibility—responsibility for oneself, for protection, for the care of those who need care, and for the community.

If you are to deal responsibly with terrorism, you must deal effectively with all its causes: religious, social, and enabling.

Strict father morality applies to all the domains—individual liberty and self-interest, world power, business, and society. These domains of interest characterize libertarian, neocon, financial, and Tea Party conservatives.

Morality comes in the form of rules, or commandments, made by a moral authority. To be moral is to be obedient to that authority. It requires internal discipline to control one’s natural desires and instead follow a moral authority. What that authority is depends on your domain of interest: the individual, governing institutions—both public and private, Wall Street, conservative society. Discipline is learned in childhood primarily through punishment for wrongdoing. Morality can be maintained only through a system of rewards and punishments.

There are also those who are genuinely pro-life, who believe that life begins with conception, that life is the ultimate value, and who therefore support prenatal care, postnatal care, health insurance for poor children, and early childhood education, and who oppose the death penalty, war, and so on. They also recognize that any woman choosing to end a pregnancy is making a painful decision, and empathize with such women and treat them without a negative judgment. These are pro-life progressives—often liberal Catholics. They are not conservatives who use the question of ending pregnancy as a political wedge to gain support for a broader moral and political agenda.

But 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.

many working people and evangelical Protestants have a strict father morality in their families or religious lives. Conservative intellectuals have realized that these are the same values that drive political conservatism. They have also realized that people vote their values and their identities more than their economic self-interests. What they have done is to create, via framing and language, a link between strict father morality in the family and religion on the one hand and conservative politics and business on the other. This conceptual link must be so emotionally strong in those who are not wealthy that it can overcome economic self-interest.

They faced a massive framing problem, a problem that required a change in everyday language and thought. But strict father morality gave them an important advantage: It suggests that the wealthy have earned their wealth, that they are good people who deserve it—and that those who govern, both in the public and private sphere, should maintain the right moral order in society. It is a kind of conservative social contract.

Through language they have branded liberals (whose policies are populist) as effete elitists, unpatriotic spendthrifts—using terms like limousine liberals, latte liberals, tax-and-spend liberals, Hollywood liberals, East Coast liberals, the liberal elite, wishy-washy liberals, and so on. At the same time they have branded conservatives (whose policies favor the economic elite) as populists—again through language, including body language. From Ronald Reagan’s down-home folksiness to George W. Bush’s John Wayne–style “Bubbaisms,” the language, dialects, body language, and narrative forms have been those of rural populists.

The hated liberals are threatening American culture and values, and have to be fought vigorously and continuously on every front. It is a threat to the very security of the nation, as well as morality, religion, the family, and everything real Americans hold dear. Their positions on wedge issues—guns, babies, taxes, same-sex marriage, the flag, school prayer—reveal the “treachery” of liberals. The wedge issues are not important in themselves, but are vital in what they represent: a strict father attitude to the world.

Democracy means acting on that care and responsibility through the government to provide public resources for all—from the needy to the average citizen to those running businesses, great or small. In short, the private depends on the public. And if you used those public resources to become wealthy on the basis of taxes paid by others for the resources you used, then fairness requires that you pay a higher share of your wealth in taxes so that others may benefit as well.

In the nurturant parent model, discipline arises not through painful physical punishment but through the promotion of responsible behavior via empathetic connection, the example of responsible behavior set by the parents, the open discussion of what the parents expect (and why), and, in the case of noncooperation, the removal of some of the good things that go with cooperation. A child raised through nurturance is a child who has achieved positive internal discipline without painful physical punishment. It is achieved through praise for cooperation, understanding the privileges that go with cooperation, clear guidelines, open discussion, and the example of parents who live by their nurturant values.

Fourth, there are three natural dimensions of variation for applying a given model: an ideological/pragmatic dimension, a radical/moderate dimension, and a means/ends dimension.

Both a progressive and a conservative can be unyielding ideologues, or they may be pragmatic—willing to compromise on a proposal either for reasons of real-world workability or political viability.