The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (20 page)

BOOK: The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

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• An opponent may be disingenuous if his real goal isn’t what he says his goal is. Politely point out the real goal, then reframe.
Example
: Suppose he starts touting smaller government. Point out that conservatives don’t really want smaller government. They don’t want to eliminate the military, or the FBI, or the Treasury and Commerce Departments, or the nine-tenths of the courts that support corporate law. That is big government that they like. What they really want to do away with is social programs—programs that invest in people, that help people to help themselves. Such a position contradicts the values the country was founded on—the idea of a community where people pull together to help each other. From John Winthrop on, that is what our nation has stood for.

• Your opponent may use language that means the opposite of what she says, called Orwellian language. Realize that she is weak on this issue. Use language that accurately describes what she’s talking about to frame the discussion your way.
Example
: Suppose she cites the “Healthy Forests Initiative” as a balanced approach to the environment. Point out that it should be called “No Tree Left Behind” because it permits and promotes clear-cutting, which is destructive to forests and other living things in the forest habitat. Use the name to point out that the public likes forests, doesn’t want them clear-cut, and that the use of the phony name shows weakness on the issue. Most people want to preserve the grandeur of America, not destroy it. Don’t you?

• Remember once more that our goal is to unite our country behind our values, the best of traditional American values. Right-wing ideologues need to divide our country via a nasty cultural civil war. They need discord and shouting and name calling and put-downs. We win with civil discourse and respectful cooperative conversation. Why? Because it is an instance of the nurturant model at the level of communication, and our job is to evoke and maintain the nurturant model.

Those are a lot of guidelines. But there are only four really important ones:

Show respect

Respond by reframing

Think and talk at the level of values

Say what you believe

★
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
★

Each morning, my wife, Kathleen Frumkin, gets to the morning paper before I do and homes in unerringly on the deep and often hidden implications of the main political issues of the day. Much of what appears in this book is a response to her insights.

Pamela Morgan edited the first version of the talk that appears as chapter 1. She also helped me work through many of the issues discussed throughout the first edition.

Don Hazen, editor of
AlterNet
, had the idea for the first version of this book and did a great deal to make it possible. He has been a constant source of important questions and of help, intellectual and otherwise, in many ways.

Elisabeth Wehling has helped me work through many ideas, both as student and colleague.

Many of the ideas discussed here arose in discussions with those connected to the Rockridge Institute: Larry Wallack, Peter Teague, Bruce Budner, Eric Hass, Sam Ferguson, Joe Brewer, Jason Patent, Dan Kurtz, Katherine Allen, Alyssa Wulf, David Brodwin, Fred Block, Carole Joffe, Jerome Karabel, Kristen Luker, Troy Duster, Ruth Rosen, Jessica DiCamillo, Melinda Franco, Jonathan Frank, Cathy Lenz, Jodi Short, and Jessica Stites.

Other friends who have contributed ideas in discussions include George Akerlof, Don Arbitblit, Paul Baer, Peter Barnes, Joan Blades, Wes Boyd, Tony Fazio, David Fenton, Paul Hawken, Arianna Huffington, Dan Kammen, the late Anne Lipow, Ted Nordhaus, Geoff Nunberg, Karen Paget, Robert Reich, Lee Rosenberg, the late Jon Rowe, Guy Saperstein, Michael Shellenberger, Steve Silberstein, Daniel Silverman, Glenn Smith, George Soros, Alex Steffen, Deborah Tannen, Adam Werbach, Lisa Witter, Rebecca Wodder, and Richard Yanowitch.

And finally, a toast to the Father of Frame Semantics, my longtime Berkeley colleague and one of the greatest linguists ever, the late Charles J. Fillmore, who first introduced me to the political importance of his work. His name should be honored by everyone who has become aware of the importance of framing.

★
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
★

George Lakoff
is the country’s leading expert on the framing of political discourse and one of the world’s most renowned linguists and cognitive scientists. He is the author of numerous books on politics—including
Don’t Think of an Elephant!, The Political Mind, Moral Politics, Thinking Points, The Little Blue Book
(with Elisabeth Wehling), and
Whose Freedom?
—as well as numerous books on language and the mind.

Lakoff has consulted with the leaders of hundreds of advocacy groups on framing issues, lectured to large audiences across the country, run dozens of workshops for activists, spoken regularly on radio talk shows and TV shows, addressed the policy retreats and the caucuses for both the Senate and the House Democrats, consulted with progressive pollsters and advertising agencies, been interviewed at length in the public media, and continues to do extensive research on the framing of public discourse.

Currently Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, Lakoff is a founder of the fields of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics and has previously taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. For more than two decades, he was codirector of the Neural Theory of Language Project at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley. He also spent more than a decade as senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, and has served on the international advisory board of Prime Minister José Zapatero of Spain, on the science board of the Santa Fe Institute, as president of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, and on the governing board of the Cognitive Science Society, where he is now a fellow of the society. He has lectured at major universities in dozens of countries around the world. His current technical research is on the theory of how the neural circuitry of the brain gives rise to thought and language.

His blogs appear regularly on his website (
www.georgelakoff.com
) and at
The Huffington Post
,
Truthout
,
AlterNet
,
Common Dreams
,
and
Daily Kos
.

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