Thinking Points Quotes

“Liberals: Liberty-loving liberals founded our country and enshrined its freedoms. Dedicated, fair-minded liberals ended slavery and brought women the vote. Hardworking liberals fought the goon squads and won workers’ rights: the eight-hour day, the weekend, health plans, and pensions. Courageous liberals risked their lives to win civil rights. Caring liberals have made the vulnerable elderly secure with Social Security and healthy with Medicare. Forward-looking liberals have extended education to everyone. Liberals who love the land have been preserving our environment so you can enjoy it. Nobody loves liberty and life more than a liberal. When conservatives say you’re on your own, we liberals know we’re all in this together. “Liberal”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“If you believed in rationalism, you would believe that the facts will set you free, that you just need to give people hard information, independent of any framing, and they will reason their way to the right conclusion. We know this is false, that if the facts don’t fit the frames people have, they will keep the frames (which are, after all, physically in their brains) and ignore, forget, or explain away the facts. The facts must be framed in a way to make sense in order to be accepted as a basis for further reasoning. If”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“The authentic pragmatist realizes you can’t get everything you think is right, but you can get much or most of it through negotiation. The authentic pragmatist sticks to his or her values and works to satisfy them maximally. The inauthentic pragmatist, on the other hand, is willing to depart from his or her true values for the sake of political gain. There”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Universal health care: Health is the foundation of a full, productive, meaningful life. Without good health, you cannot be what you want to be; you cannot enjoy life to the fullest or be a productive member of society (moral value). Our country was founded on the principle that all Americans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (fundamental principle). Illness can interfere with all of them—it can bankrupt a family. Illness does not affect only the weak or the aged—illness touches everyone. No one can afford not to have adequate health care. It is our job—as a free, civilized, and wealthy nation—to ensure that our citizens are free from want and needless suffering. A prosperous First World country can afford to guarantee all citizens the right to basic health care and preventive medicine (commonplace frame). Other First World countries do. Health care is not a privilege for those who can afford it (fundamental principle). Because our fundamental freedoms include freedom from want, health care is a basic right. And it is our responsibility as a nation to secure that right for all (moral value). Minimum”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Incidentally, conservatives are attempting to destroy this system via “tort reform,” the capping of damages at levels so low that the attorneys could no longer afford to function as police and prosecutors and the whole system would break down. Their motivation is to make the market “free” from the loss of profit through lawsuits for harming or defrauding the public. THE”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Author and former labor secretary Robert Reich identified what he calls the “four essential American stories.”2 The first of these narratives, “The Triumphant Individual,” tells the story of the self-made man. With courage, responsibility, and determination, anybody can pull himself up by his own bootstraps. This is the overcoming-obstacles narrative. Next, “The Benevolent Society” portrays a collective we’re-all-in-this-together effort to better the community. Here society is either a collective hero or the helper to the hero. A more negative story, “The Mob at the Gates,” places America on the top of a moral hierarchy and advocates the urgency of defending the nation against the threats that other nations and peoples pose. Here America is the victim to be protected or rescued. Finally, “Rot at the Top” warns against the evils of powerful elites who abuse their power to the detriment of the common good. Here there is often a collective villain to be fought, though the villain may be a powerful leader. These”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Prototype frames. Among the most important of the commonplace frames are the prototype frames, where you reason about a category on the basis of some subcategory (real or imagined). The best known is the social stereotype. For instance, both conservatives and progressives use stereotypes of immigrants, though very different ones.”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Bad apple frame. Consider the saying “A bad apple spoils the barrel.” The implication is that if you remove the bad apple or some small number of bad apples, the others will be fine. The rot is localized and will not spread. Rot here is a metaphor for immorality. In a case where there is immoral behavior, it points blame at one person or a few people—and not to any broader systemic immorality, an immoral policy, or an immoral culture. This”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“The main concern of the frame is that money be kept in the common wealth (or the hands of the government) in order to be used for the common good. HOW”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Finally, Obama’s remarks are carefully constructed to undermine the arguments of conservatives, who frame the social programs funded by taxation as government handouts to the undeserving. Obama flips the taxes-as-handouts frame on its head, to yield a frame in which tax breaks are handouts to the rich, and the estate tax is a transfer of wealth from ordinary taxpayers to wealthy individuals—a frame that tells a vital truth. It”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Obama’s statements also use a narrative structure, complete with heroes and villains: Ending the estate tax is a threat to the most vulnerable people—taking away money for what they desperately need. They are the victims. The villains are those who would take it from them—conservative legislators and some of the nation’s wealthiest families, who have spent tens of millions to lobby for the repeal of this tax. The hero, the rescuer, is you, the voter, who can change the course of the nation. Persuade your legislators to vote for what is moral, and turn them out of office if they refuse to do the right thing. The”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Transit-for-all is about values. Improving public transportation is about giving all Americans the freedom of equal access to social and economic opportunities that enhance our quality of life. Investing in alternative transportation is using the common wealth for the common good. It is an expansion of freedom, creating more diverse transportation. Transit-for-all is a progressive strategic initiative to advance many of our goals at once. It’s an economic issue. It would increase mobility of goods and labor. It would revitalize neglected neighborhoods. And it would spur growth and attract development. It’s a labor issue.”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“It’s about protection: The government should make sure we have healthy food. It’s about equality: Good and healthy food should not be a luxury reserved for the rich. It’s about diversity: having a polyculture system and distinctive varieties of food. It’s an expansion of freedom: Everyone should have access to good food. It’s using the common wealth for the common good to promote public health and increase quality of life. The”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“This initiative requires one major change in government policy: Shift the massive subsidies that currently find their way to agribusiness and use that taxpayer money to create the infrastructure for a healthy, affordable food system. This will not happen overnight; it is a long-term initiative that could eventually bring us a sustainable agricultural system. Let’s”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“The idea is simple: Provide full public financing of elections for qualified candidates. That is, give candidates who have established a broad base of community support a grant to run their campaigns. If candidates accept public funds, they must agree to forgo any private contributions. Clean elections grants equal opportunity to run for public office. It ensures that elections are fair by stripping away the corrosive influence of money. Elections are a public good and should be supported by the common wealth. Clean”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“While there are many progressive strategic initiatives we can all rally behind, we will look at four possibilities by way of example: clean elections, healthy food, ethical business, and transit-for-all.”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“One way for progressives to counter such hidden agendas is to discuss them openly. We need to get beyond how conservatives are framing the issues publicly and point out their real goals. And”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“On the progressive side, investment in renewable energy is a multifaceted strategic initiative for better environmental policy, increased security, job creation, Third World development, and economic stimulation.”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“it’s not enough just to say “equality” or “responsibility” in a speech, because conservatives and progressives each have their own understanding of what these values mean. You have to talk about your understanding of each of these words.”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“The “common good principle” requires that secure communities come from having a well-funded infrastructure. This means funding not only police and fire departments but also departments like FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Weather Service, and a public health infrastructure—as well as good schools and universal health care. Thus, a strong infrastructure is crucial to security. So”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“The uncontested core of security is providing protection through strength. But”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man. We know the causes are complex and subtle … . First, Negroes are trapped—as many whites are trapped—in inherited, gate-less poverty. They lack training and skills. They are shut in, in slums, without decent medical care. Private and public poverty combine to cripple their capacities … . We are trying to attack these evils through our poverty program, through our education program, through our medical care and our other health programs, and a dozen more of the Great Society programs that are aimed at the root causes of this poverty. But there is a second cause—much more difficult to explain, more deeply grounded, more desperate in its force. It is the devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice. For Negro poverty is not white poverty … . These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. The”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“That is, if there were an equality of opportunity, there should be the same number of doctors, lawyers, scientists per capita in the African-American community as in the population at large. Or the median income in African-American households would be the same as in the population at large. But this is not the case. Given the assumption of the same range of abilities, this indicates that there must not be real equality of opportunity. The “same range of abilities” frame is commonplace among liberals. It has a crucial use in classic liberal arguments. First, it defines the boundaries of racism: To deny it, to say some races have a greater range of abilities than others, is de facto taken as racist. Second, given this frame, it follows that different outcomes are de facto evidence of the effects of racism, past or present or both. The outcomes are documented in statistics—the rational presentation of a laundry list of statistical facts regarding infant mortality rates, income disparities, unemployment rates, and so on. To”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 speech at the Howard University commencement: It is not enough to open the gates of opportunity; all our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates … . We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result … . To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough.8 Because”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“To get a sense of how equality is contested in politics, consider the constant struggle between liberals and conservatives over what equality means: equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Conservatives”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Conservatives take the opposite approach. They start from the idea that self-discipline is fundamental. A lack of property to conservatives indicates a lack of discipline, and hence a lack of morality. Therefore, giving people things they haven’t earned creates dependency, which traps people in welfare programs and poverty and thus robs them of their freedom. Not only that, but the taxes that pay for programs like Social Security and universal health care infringe on the freedom of the taxpayer, since taking his money is imposing on his freedom. What”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Acting on empathy for people who are down and out requires that we have a social safety net to secure their freedom. So progressives see Social Security, welfare, and universal health care as increasing freedom. Conservatives”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“Affirmative action is about fairness, for redressing widespread unfairness. Conservatives”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“This contrasts sharply with the progressive view that markets must respect human dignity and serve the common good while pursuing profit.”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook

“On issue after issue, the counterpoints to the conservative principle of the free market are the progressive principles of human dignity and the common good. We are interested in a market that serves human values, not humans who serve a market. Take”
― George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision: A Progressive's Handbook