Issue Framing, liberals don't get it unfortunatly

[Rokenn]

Just read this very interesting and thought provoking article. It's a bit long but worth the read. Going to look for this guy's book when I hit the bookstore next...

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

By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 27 October 2003

excerpt:
BERKELEY – With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.

[Timber Loftis]

I like some of his ideas, especially the tack that there is no "free market" and that "real accounting" would include ecological accounting (such as the clean air you use to make your profits). The whole notion of framing the issue is, as any law student knows, central, and conservatives do excel at it where liberals do not.

He also accurately identifies why liberals do not excel at it, thinking people can look at simple facts and become outraged without someone putting a "spin" or "catch phrase" on it. WRONG. If you can't make it sound pithy and catch someone's attention in 5 seconds in this day and age, you've lost before you've begun.

There are some places where liberals have caught on to framing the issue. "Frankenfoods" for instance. Insults conservatives almost as much as "tax relief" insults liberals. And both phrases incorrectly depict the issue as one-sided.

He is wrong on his tax analysis, I will note. While it is true that liberals need to think of some spin on tax policy, as the bald fact that the richest 1% get 90% of the benefit from a tax cut is too raw a fact to insult us and incite us, he is nevertheless wrong on his "spin" and needs some help. His notion of thinking of paying taxes as dues to a Country Club, where the richest use the majority of the social benefits (e.g. 90% of the federal court docket is corporate-only cases), has problems. Yes, the richest use social services more, generally. BUT NOT WELFARE. In fact, when he tries to turn this into a "pay your dues" thing, he shoots himself in the foot (something he accuses other liberals of doing) by making it painfully obvious that the poor don't pay dues, yet take a lot of benefit out of the system. In his metaphor, why would any poor get to belong to the country club?

But, in the end, I must say he should be kept behind the scenes framing issues and not be put in front of a camera or have an interview. Having an overweight guy sit there sipping his $5.50 500-calorie mocha latte sugar-whip while telling me about taxes and the conservative "moral father" vs. the liberal "nurturing parent" philosophy just seems goofy. Take your own advice, dude. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Azred]

from the article: Also, within traditional liberalism you have a history of rational thought that was born out of the Enlightenment: all meanings should be literal, and everything should follow logically. So if you just tell people the facts, that should be enough — the truth shall set you free. All people are fully rational, so if you tell them the truth, they should reach the right conclusions. That, of course, has been a disaster.

Of course it has been a disaster. The average person doesn't care about the truth, the average person cares only about what will benefit them right now.

*****

Professor Lakoff is on the right track, but he is merely advocating that liberals progressives [img]graemlins/beigesmilewinkgrin.gif[/img] engage in our media-driven version of Newspeak. Any psychologist can tell you that if you change how you phrase something verbally you can change your feelings about that topic.

Used car? [img]graemlins/idontagreeatall.gif[/img] Certified pre-owned automobile.
Poor? [img]graemlins/idontagreeatall.gif[/img] Economically disavantaged.
White person? [img]graemlins/idontagreeatall.gif[/img] Melanin-deprived person. (ok, I made up that one [img]tongue.gif[/img] )

I don't like Newspeak. I always advocate calling something what it actually is (the colloquial phrase is "call a spade a spade"). [img]graemlins/erm.gif[/img] I sound like an Objectivist...but I digress.

On the subject of tax relief...excuse me "tax breaks"...people in the US are always complaining about how much income tax they have to pay the IRS; this is usually the source of tax cuts coming from Washington. Real tax breaks, and something which would help many more folks than the latest wave of cuts tried to help, would be to overhaul the Medicare and Social Security taxes. These two alone erode 7.65% of income (after first deducting items such as health coverage and retirement plan withholdings). Flat taxes are more harmful to those who earn less, because the relative amount being taken out is more. *sigh* Again, I digress....

I agree with Timber Loftis. This guy should consult with "progressive" think tanks, write articles/books, and give those mocha lattes to me. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]

By the way...children of "nurturing parents" are more likely to be spoiled, insensitive, and self-absorbed.

[Timber Loftis]

By the way...children of "nurturing parents" are more likely to be spoiled, insensitive, and self-absorbed.

Agreed. And, I think many people agree -- perhaps most. And, on a larger scale, wouldn't you say it works out that way with communities "nurtured" by "progressive" "liberal""left" (or whatever)governmental handouts. Don't they become a theory of entitlement? The people I know who do the least and appreciate the least are those who live "on the dole," both in the literal sense and the figurative sense.

[Azred]

It doesn't have to be only governmental handouts, but those certainly lead people to think of what was initially a program to help folks in need as their right, as if they were entitled to it simply because of who they are. [img]graemlins/erm.gif[/img] Did that make sense? I don't feel too well this evening.... I have heard people speak about a Social Security check as if they deserved it for some reason, not because they might be classified as someone in need of the check.
The same phenomenon has been seen in our area (as well as others, I'm sure). One woman told Belle that "it is his job to make enough money to let me spend however much I like whenever I like". Very spoiled.

[Skunk]

Is this a clear example of "carefully choosing the language with which to present [issues], and building an infrastructure to communicate them"?

Eyes Wide Shut
WASHINGTON — In the thick of the war with Iraq, President Bush used to pop out of meetings to catch the Iraqi information minister slipcovering grim reality with willful, idiotic optimism.

"He's my man," Mr. Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, a k a "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob," who assured reporters, even as American tanks rumbled in, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and, "We are winning this war, and we will win the war. . . . This is for sure."

Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob.

Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," he said.

In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

The war began with Bush illogic: false intelligence (from Niger to nuclear) used to bolster a false casus belli (imminent threat to our security) based on a quartet of false premises (that we could easily finish off Saddam and the Baathists, scare the terrorists and democratize Iraq without leeching our economy).

Now Bush illogic continues: The more Americans, Iraqis and aid workers who get killed and wounded, the more it is a sign of American progress. The more dangerous Iraq is, the safer the world is. The more troops we seem to need in Iraq, the less we need to send more troops.

The harder it is to find Saddam, Osama and W.M.D., the less they mattered anyhow. The more coordinated, intense and sophisticated the attacks on our soldiers grow, the more "desperate" the enemy is.

In a briefing piped into the Pentagon on Monday from Tikrit, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno called the insurgents "desperate" eight times. But it is Bush officials who seem desperate when they curtain off reality. They don't even understand the political utility of truth.

After admitting recently that Saddam had no connection to 9/11, the president pounded his finger on his lectern on Tuesday, while vowing to stay in Iraq, and said, "We must never forget the lessons of Sept. 11."

Mr. Bush looked buck-passy when he denied that the White House, which throws up PowerPoint slogans behind his head on TV, was behind the "Mission Accomplished" banner. And Donald Rumsfeld looked duplicitous when he acknowledged in a private memo, after brusquely upbeat public briefings, that America was in for a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No juxtaposition is too absurd to stop Bush officials from insisting nothing is wrong. Car bombs and a blitz of air-to-ground missiles turned Iraq into a hideous tangle of ambulances, stretchers and dead bodies, just after Paul Wolfowitz arrived there to showcase successes.

But the fear of young American soldiers who don't speak the language or understand the culture, who don't know who's going to shoot at them, was captured in a front-page picture in yesterday's Times: two soldiers leaning down to search the pockets of one small Iraqi boy.

Mr. Bush, staring at the campaign hourglass, has ordered that the "Iraqification" of security be speeded up, so Iraqi cannon fodder can replace American sitting ducks. But Iraqification won't work any better than Vietnamization unless the Bush crowd stops spinning.

Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Bright Shining Lie," recalls Robert McNamara making Wolfowitz-like trips to Vietnam, spotlighting good news, yearning to pretend insecure areas were secure.

"McNamara was in a jeep in the Mekong Delta with an old Army colonel from Texas named Dan Porter," Mr. Sheehan told me. "Porter told him, `Mr. Secretary, we've got serious problems here that you're not getting. You ought to know what they are.' And McNamara replied: `I don't want to hear about your problems. I want to hear about your progress.' "

"If you want to be hoodwinked," Mr. Sheehan concludes, "it's easy."