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

by George Lakoff

People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.

Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money. He did not make his money alone. He used taxpayer infrastructure. He got rich on what other taxpayers had paid for: the banking system, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and the judicial system, where nine-tenths of cases involve corporate law. These taxpayer investments support companies and wealthy investors. There are no self-made men! The wealthy have gotten rich using what previous taxpayers have paid for. They owe the taxpayers of this country a great deal and should be paying it back.

In psychopaths, empathy is controlled: Psychopaths can sense what someone else is feeling, not be affected themselves, and then manipulate the other for their own benefit or enjoyment.

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.

Conservatives like to speak of wealthy company owners and investors as “job creators,” that they “give” people jobs, as if they just create jobs as gifts for people who are out of work. That is nonsense. The truth is that workers are profit creators, and that no one gets hired unless they contribute to the profit of owners and investors. It is basic truth. Workers are profit creators. But who says it?

When you take a job and a pension comes with it, that pension is part of your pay, part of your conditions of employment. It is common for workers to forego higher current pay if there is a significant pension, since the pension is money to live on when you can no longer work. It is part of the employment contract.

If the company is unionized, then all the workers as a group have bargaining power that a solitary worker does not have. The alternative—taking whatever the company offers to the individual—might well be called corporate servitude or wage slavery. As the power of unions has declined, the wages of resource-workers have not gone up in thirty years. Over the same time, the wealth of wealthy investors and corporations has skyrocketed without more being produced.

The private depends on the public, but conservatives are drastically cutting funds for public resources while successfully promoting privatization. They say that government doesn’t work, and by cutting funds they can make government cease to work. And by cutting government resources for all, they can make democracy cease to work.

The wealthier corporations get, the more power they have to use their political influence to avoid regulations. As a result, they can pass along to others the costs of doing business—and thus increase profits even more. The fancy name for this is “externalization of costs.”

Consider what happens when fracking companies dump pools of polluted water on the landscape, or tear up the land in the fracking process and then leave it torn up, or inject vast amounts of poisonous chemicals in the porous shale rock next to the water table, thus creating polluted drinking and agricultural water. The burden is shifted away from the private corporations and to the public. The prime example, of course, is of corporations emitting the greenhouse gas pollution that has caused global warming. The costs get dumped onto you—whether you’re paying more taxes to mitigate climate change or to clean up after severe storms or you’re paying more for vegetables during severe droughts.

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.

Foreign policy and domestic policy are inextricably linked. Guns made for war will be sold at gun shows and used to kill children. Drones and computer technology developed for the surveillance of enemies abroad will be used for surveillance of civilians at home. And money spent on war abroad will be drained from public resources at home.

Traditional power relations are taken as defining a natural moral order: God above man, man above nature, adults above children, Western culture above non-Western culture, America above other nations. The moral order is all too often extended to men above women, whites above nonwhites, Christians above non-Christians, straights above gays.

Regulation is bad; it gets in the way of the free pursuit of profit. Wealthy people serve society by investing and giving jobs to poorer people. Such a division of wealth ultimately serves the public good, which is to reward the disciplined and let the undisciplined be forced to learn discipline or struggle.

Conservative thought

Same-sex marriage does not fit the strict father model of the family; it goes squarely against it. A lesbian marriage has no father. A gay marriage has “fathers” who are taken to be less than real men. Since preserving and extending the strict father model is the highest moral value for conservatives, same-sex marriage constitutes an attack on the conservative value system as a whole, and on those whose very identity depends on their having strict father values.

Conservative thought

God has given man dominion over nature. Nature is a resource for prosperity. It is there to be used for human profit.

Strict father morality defines what a good society is. The very idea of a conservatively defined good society is threatened by liberal and progressive ideas and programs. That threat must be fought at all costs. The very fabric of society is at stake.

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.

We envision an America where people care about each other, not just themselves, and act responsibly both for themselves and their fellow citizens with strength and effectiveness.