Inside the Frame
http://www.alternet.org/story/17574
Linguist
George Lakoff speaks about the importance of language in the political realm,
and how the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot because they're
reactive, not active.
George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics
and cognitive science at the
Lakoff is also one of the founders of -- and
a fellow at -- the Rockridge
Institute, a progressive think tank in
People have different political outlooks
and they think, "I stand for this," or "I stand for that."
I stand for more taxes or less taxes. I stand for affirmative action or
non-affirmative action. But few people think to talk about the language of
politics and how politicians use language.
You are part of a group of people who use
a particular concept to understand what the conservative -- or we should say
right wing -- movement has done with language to influence public opinion. It
is something called framing. That's not exclusive to the right wing, of course,
but they use it. Can you explain what that concept is and why the right wing
and the Bush Republican Party use it so well?
Lakoff: The first thing to know about language is
that it expresses ideas and thoughts. Every word is defined with respect to
what cognitive scientists call a frame. A frame is a conceptual structure of a
certain form. Let me give you an example. Suppose I say the word
"relief." The word "relief" has a conceptual frame
associated with it. Here's the frame: In order to give someone relief, there
has to be an affliction and an afflicted party -- somebody who's harmed by this
affliction -- and a reliever, somebody who gives relief to the afflicted party
or takes away the harm or pain. That reliever is a hero. And if someone tries
to stop the person giving relief from doing so, they're a bad guy. They're a
villain. They want to keep the affliction ongoing. So when you use only one
word, "relief," all of that information is called up. That is a
simple conceptual frame.
Then there's metaphorical thought. We all think
metaphorically. When you add "tax" to "relief" to give you
the term "tax relief," it says that taxation is an affliction. That's
a new metaphor. Then, using the metaphor, anyone who gets rid of the taxation
-- the affliction -- is a hero, and anybody who tries to stop him is a bad guy.
On the first day that Bush came into office,
the language completely changed coming out of the White House. The press
releases all changed. One of the new expressions that came in was the term
"tax relief." It evokes all of these things -- that taxation is an
affliction that we have to get rid of, that it's a heroic thing to do, that
people who try to prevent this heroic thing are bad guys.
The press releases went out to all the TV
stations, all the radio stations, all the newspapers -- and soon the media
started using the term "tax relief." That puts a certain frame out
there: a conservative frame, not a progressive frame. Soon a lot of people are
using the term "tax relief," and, before you know it, Democrats start
using the term "tax relief," and shooting themselves in the foot.
That's a nice example of how language can
evoke a way of understanding society, the world, economic policy, and so on,
with just two words -- very, very simple. This happens all the time.
Is the use of the phrase "tax
relief" and all it evokes an example of framing an issue, so that cutting
taxes is seen as "tax relief"?
That's right. That is framing an issue. One
of the first things I teach about framing is this: I give my students an
exercise. I say, "Don't think of an elephant. Whatever you do, do not
think of an elephant." And of course, they can't do it. You have to think
of an elephant in order to not think of one. The word "elephant"
evokes an image and knowledge about that image -- it's a frame. Negating a
frame evokes the frame.
So if you go on Fox News -- "fair and
balanced" -- two liberals, two conservatives, and one commentator who is
asking the questions, and the question is, "Are you in favor of the
President's tax relief program or are you against it?" -- it doesn't
matter what you say. If you say, "I'm against tax relief," you're
still evoking that framing. You're still in their frame, and all that it
automatically brings with it: what kinds of policies are good, who is bad, and
so on. That's how Fox News works. It frames the issues from a conservative
perspective. Once the issue is framed, if you accept the framing, if you accept
the language, it's all over.
Howard Dean is being criticized because
it is considered political suicide to roll back tax cuts ("to roll back
tax relief," as the right wing and the Bush administration call it). Would
it be an example of good Democratic framing to say he doesn't want to roll back
tax cuts; he wants to promote community enrichment and community growth? And
that to do that, he's going to need more participation and support from members
of the American community.
Not good enough. You have to provide
another, progressive understanding of taxation. And you also have to make it
very, very clear that there's a basic problem here. Cognitive scientists call
it the problem of hypocognition. That means that you actually lack some of the
complex ideas that you need. Not every important idea is already out there,
with a name. Not every important idea has become normal and conventional.
Sometimes you have to talk for a while to explain what a particular idea is,
and you have to come up with language for it. By the way, this was also true of
conservatives. They have been working at it for 30 years to develop their
language.
The idea is this: If I were Howard Dean, I
would say taxes are what you pay to be an American, to live in this country
with democracy, with opportunity, and especially with the enormous
infrastructure paid for by previous taxpayers -- infrastructure like schools
and roads and the Internet, the stock market, the Securities and Exchange
Commission, our court system, our scientific establishment, which is largely
supported by federal money. Vast amounts of important, marvelous
infrastructure: all of these things were paid for by taxpayers. They paid their
dues. They paid their fair share to be Americans and maintain that
infrastructure. And if you don't pay your fair share, then you're turning your
back on your country.
One of the important things to know about
the way that this infrastructure works is that people who are very wealthy use
more of it than people who aren't. For example, nine-tenths of the use of the
court system is for corporate law. People should pay their fair share in being
Americans, and that's why we have a progressive income tax.
The phrase "tax relief" is two
words. The right wing and the Bush propaganda machine seem very good at two- or
three-word mantras that they then echo chamber through Fox News and the
The conservatives used to have a mouthful
too. But they started back in the '50s, and after the '64 election they really
got started. For the last 30 to 40 years, they have pumped $2 billion into
supporting all of their think tanks and media apparatus. They have built this
series of think tanks that started out after the Goldwater debacle, when
"conservative" was a dirty word, when the idea of tax relief could
not be introduced in two words. The phrase would have been meaningless. And
what they did was to develop these ideas with very great patience and
fortitude, in campaign after campaign, year after year, and invent the right
words as the ideas came into popular view. Their success didn't happen
overnight. They took a long-term view. I think we can do things a little faster
since we now understand the science of it a little better, but some things are
not going to happen overnight.
But I think the idea of paying your dues to
As you have pointed out before, the Bush
administration is incredibly skilled at using these framing phrases and
concepts. And the right-wing think tanks laid the groundwork for it. But it
seems to me that one characteristic of the framing phrases they use is that
they are positive-sounding. It's Medicare reform. It's saving the forests by
burning them down. It's clean air by allowing deregulation of the industry.
They're not negative. The Democrats tend to use negative phrases a lot.
Exactly. Don't think of an elephant, right?
The Democrats, by saying "stop this, attack that, overturn this," are
shooting themselves in the foot. They're being reactive, not active. And you
don't win by using the other guy's terms and putting a "not" in front
of it or a "stop" in front of it. The conservatives understand this.
They have a language machine in place -- a very well-supported machine run by a
man named Frank Luntz who uses all this think-tank research to come up with a
manual of how to talk about each issue. Not just how to talk about it, but how
to think about it, how to reason about it, what the arguments are from the
Republican point of view. There's an honest reasoning and talking part to what
he does, but then there's also a way to twist words, to use propaganda. That's
what you're talking about.
For example, you have the "Clear Skies
Initiative," which is getting rid of all the anti-air pollution laws. They
use words like "healthy, clean and safe" for things like nuclear
power plants or coal plants. They issue advisories that say when you're talking
to women, use words that women like, like "love" and "from the
heart" and "for the children." Those things are propaganda uses.
There are propaganda uses on the right, but that's not most of what they do.
Most of it is successful framing of the things they really believe.
But the way they frame them isn't
necessarily what is actually implemented.
That's right. When it's propaganda, it's a
form of lying. And they do have frames that lie. There are a certain number of
them -- "compassionate conservatism" is one of them. So yes, there
are quite a number of cases where they're using frames and basically telling
lies, but that's not everything. There's a lot of what they're doing that
honestly expresses the system that they believe in.
Could you give me an example? Is
"family values" an example?
I think so. "Family values" is a
case where they honestly express certain things they believe in. However, there
are also liberal family values -- but the progressives are not expressing these
progressive family values, which, in fact, have been shown to be better at
raising children. I have a book called Moral Politics," where I go
through this in very great detail. It turns out that family values are
important in both cases because the moral systems of both liberals and
conservatives are based on models of the family. But most liberals don't
understand this. Conservatives understand the link between their family values
and their politics, but liberals tend not to.
Before we get into that, because I think
that's fascinating, let me just run a couple things by you and get your
reaction. When Clear Channel, a right-wing-owned radio conglomerate -- the
owner is a big contributor to Bush-Cheney -- ran the series of
"rallies" called "Support our Troops," was that framing?
They were putting people in a position where if you oppose the war, you don't
support our troops. Is that an example of framing?
Yes.
Do you have any suggestions to a person
who says, "I do support our troops. That's why I think they shouldn't be
in
It's difficult. During the Vietnam War,
people tried "Support our troops; bring them home," but it didn't
work that well. The reason it's hard is that the groundwork hasn't been laid.
It's very important: this is, again, the issue of hypocognition, of liberals
not having the concepts they need, not getting them out there, not getting the
language set up. As a result, when there is something like the Gulf War or 9/11
or the Iraq War, there's silence.
Now, protection is a very, very important
part of the progressive vision. You want to protect the environment. You want
to protect your children. You want to protect investors. I do want to protect
the country as well. But liberals and progressives haven't developed a powerful
language of protection. They haven't put the effort into doing that. They
haven't put the research into doing that. This takes research. And the right
wing knows it. They support that research for their side.
So you can't just come up with a two-word
phrase. You're saying you have to develop the infrastructure and do your
homework before the framing phrase will have its resonance.
That's correct.
The idea of protection seems very close
to what might be a central framing device. Since 9/11, the Bush Administration
has been talking about "security" -- I imagine Frank Luntz might be
behind that -- and it seems that the Bush Administration is confident of
reelection because the "soccer mom" has become the "security
mom," and the Bush Administration positions itself as providing
"security." Now maybe some of that has been shifting, due to a
growing perception that we're "losing the war" in
There are several factors involved, and you
have to sort them out. To do this, we have to talk about the conservative
worldview. In the conservative world view, which starts with a model of the family
I call a "Strict Father" family, there's an assumption that the world
is a dangerous place, that there is competition, there will always be winners
and losers, that children are born bad and have to be made good.
What is needed to deal with all this is a
strict father who supports and protects the family, who raises children to know
right from wrong, who raises his children to be able to take care of themselves
in the world. He does it in only one way -- by strength and punishment. Only
punishment works. Only shows of strength work. That is part of the family model
that's involved, and it's also part of the politics involved. When you have
fear in the country, fear evokes a strict father model. It's to the
conservatives' advantage to keep people afraid, to keep having orange alerts,
to keep having announcements that they have secret information that there might
be a bombing somewhere in the country. As long as you keep people afraid, you
reinforce the strict father model.
The opposite of fear in all of this is hope
and joy. It's important for liberals to stress the hope and promise of
Can you explain a little bit more of the
nurturing model of the Democrats, which is consistent with going back to the
New Deal: that we are part of a larger community, a national community. Hillary
Clinton's use of the phrase, "It takes a village" -- is that a good
or a bad framing? Is that the essential concept of the nation as a community
where we nurture everyone in our community, all Americans?
It's part of it. The "Nurturant
Parent" model goes like this: It assumes that there are two parents
involved and in charge of the family. And it has a set of background
assumptions: that the world can be a better place, that it's our job to make it
a better place, that children are born good and need to be made better, and
that the job of a parent is to nurture his or her children, but also to turn
those children into nurturers themselves -- nurturers of others.
Now what does it mean to be a nurturer?
Well, two fundamental things. First, empathy. The parent has to know what all
those cries mean when a baby cries. Does he need his diaper changed? Does she
need to be fed? Second, responsibility. A parent has to be responsible to a
child. And you can't be responsible to someone else if you're not responsible for
yourself. You have to be able to take care of yourself to be able to care for
someone else. Being responsible means being strong, being competent, being
educated -- taking your role very, very seriously. If you want to turn your
child into a nurturer, then you want to make that child responsible to others,
strong, capable, educated, competent, and so on. Then there are other values
that follow from empathy and responsibility. One of them is protection. If
you're responsible for a child, and you care about the child, you want to
protect her or him.
Some of the things that liberals want to
protect children from are things like pollution and smoking, and cars without
seatbelts, and unscrupulous businessmen -- the same things they want the
government to protect citizens from. But they also want to protect children
from other things like terrorists and invasions and so on. In fact, protection
in general -- protection of the environment, for example -- is a major part of
the progressive worldview.
Another "Nurturant" value that's
extremely important is fulfillment in life. If you empathize with someone, you
want him or her to be a happy, fulfilled person. If you're an unhappy,
unfulfilled person yourself, you're not going to want other people to be happier
and more fulfilled than you are. So it's important -- morally important -- to
be a happy, fulfilled person in order to properly empathize with other people.
Happiness and fulfillment in life are a moral responsibility for progressives.
In addition to that, community building is
extremely important because Hillary is right: It does take a village. Children
do react to how their peers live and what their peers' values are, and you
can't do it alone. You have to be in a community where people take care of each
other. Other values that follow are things like fairness and freedom. If you
empathize with someone, you want to be fair to them. If you want them to have a
fulfilled life, you want them to be free and have maximal freedom to carry out
their dreams. So there are values like fairness, freedom, fulfillment, trust,
cooperation, building communities. These are important progressive values that
come out of nurturing families.
What does that mean in terms of framing?
Clearly the Bush Administration and Karl Rove have all the right language, the
right code words and the right framing, because Bush is the strong parental
father figure. They've driven that one straight down the road, without any
detours, and are still projecting that. What do the Democrats do, or Independents,
or Greens, to create an attractive framing for the nurturing model?
Well, let's look at foreign policy. In
foreign policy, the Bush administration uses a strict father model, and it says
that only force works. Only punishment works. Moreover, it says that the strict
father -- in this case, Bush -- is the moral authority. The
On the other hand, the progressive model
looks at foreign policy very, very differently. In a progressive model, you
apply the moral world view that you have, and you say that what's important here
is both to empathize with other countries and be responsible to yourself, to
care about your own interests and their interests, and to cooperate with them.
And you build trust. How do you build trust? By making treaties and keeping
them, where you cooperate with other people. What does cooperation mean? It
means understanding what they need and helping them get it, as well as their
helping you get what you need. So you build cooperation. That means building
diplomacy and diplomatic relationships, and person-to-person relationships
around the world, having people know each other's languages and visit each
other's countries.
What is building community about? That's
building international organizations, and, moreover, caring about people means
giving more power to the international organizations that we already have that
are not now usually considered part of foreign policy. For example, we have
organizations that are concerned with poverty around the world. But poverty is
usually not considered part of foreign policy.
Also, women's rights and women's education.
The most important thing for population control in the world -- and population
control is a major issue -- is women's education. Where women get educated,
population rates become controlled automatically. And women's rights are
crucial. Women are treated abominably around the world. This is an extremely
important issue if you care about people and you care about other countries.
Then you make it part of foreign policy.
Labor issues -- labor rights around the
world are terrible. Our trade policies don't bring those issues in. It's very
important that we bring in labor rights around the world. Children's rights are
very important in this. International ecology, global health -- all of these
are issues of caring about the world, about its people, and about other
countries.
When other countries see that we have a
foreign policy that is only about our national interest, or our national
interest is defined only in terms of money and power and nothing else, then
they say: "The U.S. doesn't get it. The U.S. is really an enemy of world
peace. The U.S. is trying to dominate everybody else for its own
interests." That is not a way to build trust. It's not a way to get
cooperation. And it's definitely a way to have lots of people thinking that the
U.S. is an enemy.
How do you translate those political
concepts that grow out of the nurturing model into a framing that is reassuring
to a public that is being told by the Bush Administration, "You're under
siege"? They've eased up for a while, but between now and the election,
I'm concerned there are going to be many more fright fests and alerts, to get
people into the fear mode and to run to the strict father model.
Even if people feel that they've been
screwed around, lied to -- abused in a public policy sense by the Bush
administration -- they know Bush is going to go bomb the hell out of anyone
that's really or allegedly trying to hurt us. Therefore, they'll run to him.
How does a Democrat break through that and say, "We can provide the
security"?
Wrong. Wrong way to talk and wrong way to
think. The first way to break through that is to talk about the promise of
America, the hope of America -- what is powerful and loving about the country
-- to be positive, to break through the fear, because the fear is what evokes
it. You have to project an image of love and warmth, and happiness and hope.
That's the first thing. You don't feed the fear. Safety is a part of that, and
you can point out that the Bush administration has betrayed its trust in not
attending to making us safe. The PATRIOT Act doesn't make us safer. They're
cutting money for firefighters and police officers. They're not making our
harbors safe. They're not making chemical plants safe. Safety and protection
are important. Protection is part of a "Nurturant model," and you
have to be a strong, protective parent if you're a nurturer, and you have to
come across as a strong protector.
You say, "You know, they've betrayed
our trust. They're not really protecting us. Have we been protected in Iraq?
There were no weapons of mass destruction there in the first place. They
weren't protecting us from that, and they lied to us. They betrayed our trust
there. And here's why."
Then you say why they really went into Iraq,
which is largely on the basis of their self-interest, and why they got into
this mess. Have they really made us safer? The answer is no. We're not safer
than we were before.
You're critical of the Democratic Party,
saying they don't have a clue about framing, haven't laid the groundwork, don't
understand it even now. And you say right now the Democratic Party is into
marketing. They pick a number of issues, like prescription drugs and Social
Security, and ask which ones sell best across the spectrum, and they run on
those issues. What do you mean by that? Isn't the Republican Party into
marketing? They're into brand identity, selling Bush as a brand. They use all
sorts of marketing tools in addition to framing. So what's wrong with the
Democrats being into marketing?
They don't use it right. They don't have a
central vision. The Republicans do. The Republicans understand what they're
about, and everything they do evokes what they're about. So they know how to
talk and think as conservatives. They know how to build a conservative brand.
The Democrats don't have a brand. They don't have a vision that they can
articulate clearly and say what that vision is. What they have is a long list
of programs. You say: Okay, what is your vision? And they'll give you 50
programs. That's not a vision, because the programs change from year to year.
They are always going to be adjusted and fixed, and compromised, and so on.
What you want to know is what progressives
are about morally -- what they stand for. That's the crucial thing. Then you
can go to particular Congressional districts and see if there are issues where
taking a stand on one of these issues will evoke that vision. But you have to
have that progressive vision in the first place. They have a conservative
vision, and it's very clear what that is. Their language evokes a conservative
vision, and they can talk about that vision. They can talk about the kind of
country they want and so on. It's very important that the Democrats learn to talk
about the kind of country they want in general, what their moral vision is and
how it differs from the conservative moral vision, why they think the
conservatives have betrayed American values. Then you can do your marketing on
top of that. But you don't just do marketing.
You close in an interview
on the UC Berkeley website by bringing up your new governor out there, Arnold
Schwarzenegger. And this was before he had assumed office. You're saying that
Democrats have no branded moral perspective, no general values, no clear
identity, and that people vote their identity. They don't just vote on the
issues. And Democrats don't understand that.
Look at Schwarzenegger, who said nothing
about the issues in his campaign. Democrats ask: How can anyone vote for this
guy? Your answer is that they did it because he put forth an identity. Voters
know who he is. Can you explain what you meant by that? Does identity trump
issues? Do people vote because he had a sense of personhood? They felt
confident he knew who he was, whereas the Democrats seemed all mushy? What
exactly did you mean by saying that he has an identity, but the Democrats
didn't?
The conservative worldview depends on a strict
father view of the world. This has to do with building discipline, with showing
strength, with punishing your enemies, with pursuing your self-interest to
become self-reliant. Those are the values. What you're doing is functioning in
a dangerous and difficult world, and you're learning how to cope with that
dangerous and difficult world. That's how that works. Davis, the Democratic
governor, had no clue about how to get his values across. And the result was
people didn't like him. He couldn't communicate well.
Schwarzenegger had an identity, which was
"The Terminator." He was Mr. Discipline, a bodybuilder. No one could
question his discipline. He had a movie role that everybody identified with,
and he was a hero that people wanted, fitting exactly the conservative strict
father mold. The Republicans recognized this years in advance. He has been
primed to be the candidate for governor for years. Most people in the country
didn't know this, but those who knew about California politics knew that this
was a long-standing thing. He didn't come out of nowhere. They brought him
along. As soon as he announced that he was going to run, the entire Republican
machine was behind him. They knew what was going on, and he had an identity
straight out.
There were polls and focus groups where they
asked people who were, let's say, Hispanic. These were Bustamante [Cruz
Bustamante, the lieutenant governor, who was running against Schwarzenegger]
supporters. They asked them: Do you think you will be better off if Schwarzenegger
is governor? Or: Schwarzenegger has the following policies, and Bustamante has
these policies -- which ones will you be better off with? They said: The
Bustamante ones. Who are you voting for? Schwarzenegger. The pollsters didn't
understand it because they thought that people voted on the issues and on
self-interest. Well, sometimes they do. But mostly they vote on their identity
-- on persons that they trust to be like them, or to be like people they
admire.
Many Democrats, many Progressives,
Independents, Greens -- whatever differences there are among them -- pride
themselves on being committed to ideas, and are, as you point out, contemptuous
of the notion that people would vote on an image and an identity -- even, in
the case of Schwarzenegger, outweighing the value of voting on specific ideas.
Is there a basic conundrum for Democrats because they believe ideas should
trump identity? And, therefore, since they think you should win on the issues,
they're in a sort of cul de sac because they're so contemptuous of putting
people out there who can win on identity and character?
The issues are not the ideas. Democrats and
liberals in general don't support their intellectuals, for example. They assume
that the issues are about self-interest, and that there can be group
self-interest. There are interest groups -- ethnic groups and so on. But that's
not how people vote. People vote on their morality and their identity.
Occasionally they vote on their self-interest when it's important, but mostly
they vote for what they believe in and who they are. That's something that
Democrats don't understand. And they haven't been attentive enough to ideas and
to understanding how the mind works. They focus instead on self-interest and
issues, issue by issue. As long as they go issue by issue, they're going to
lose.
George, thank you very much.
Thank you.