George Lakoff on Communication: "Liberals Do Everything Wrong"
http://www.alternet.org/culture/george-lakoff-communication-liberals-do-everything-wrong
"The progressive mindset is screwing up the world. The progressive mindset is guaranteeing no progress on global warming. The progressive mindset is saying, 'Yes, fracking is fine.' The progressive mindset is saying, 'Yes, genetically modified organisms are OK', when, in fact, they're horrible, and the progressive mindset doesn't know how to describe how horrible they are. There's a difference between progressive morality, which is great, and the progressive mindset, which is half OK and half awful."
George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this precis: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."
Lakoff is affable and generous. In public meetings he greets every question with: "That is an extremely good question." But he cannot keep the frustration out of his voice: the left, he argues, is losing the political argument – every year, it cedes more ground to the right, under the mistaken impression that this will bring everything closer to the centre. In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves. The reason is that conservatives speak from an authentic moral position, and appeal to voters' values. Liberals try to argue against them using evidence; they are embarrassed by emotionality. They think that if you can just demonstrate to voters how their self-interest is served by a socially egalitarian position, that will work, and everyone will vote for them and the debate will be over. In fact, Lakoff asserts, voters don't vote for bald self-interest; self-interest fails to ignite, it inspires nothing – progressives, of all people, ought to understand this.
When he talks about the collapse of the left, he clearly doesn't mean that those parties have disintegrated: they could be in government, as the Democrats are in the US. But their vision of progressive politics is compromised and weak. So in the UK there have been racist "Go home" vans and there is an immigration bill going through parliament, unopposed, that mandates doctors, the DVLA, banks and landlords to interrogate the immigration status of us all; Hungary has vigilante groups attacking Roma, and its government recently tried to criminalise homelessness; the leaders of the Golden Dawn in Greece have only just been arrested, having been flirting with fascism since the collapse of the eurozone. We see, time and again, people in need being dehumanised, in a way that seems like a throwback to 60 or 70 years ago. Nobody could say the left was winning.
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we need to find some way to make them realize they agree with the issues. They don't even know it. I've told this story before: during the 2008 primaries I was on a non-political message board but sometimes politics was discussed. Someone posted a quiz from a reputable source that said something like, "find out which presidential primary candidate most agrees with you on the issues". A bunch of hard core FAR right republicans then posted shit like, "hey, does anybody know who Dennis Kucinich is? That's who I got." It was pretty funny when we explained who DK was. 
MOST people on the site ended up with DK. The funniest was this one super religious fox-brainwashed republican who got Hilary. Omg, was she pissed. "this quiz is stupid" 
Pretty much NO ONE ended up with an actual Republican.
So yeah, most people agree on the issues - but they don't KNOW it. It's up to the Democrats to let them know who they REALLY agree with and why. This needs marketing.
Yes, the right frames everything because they use marketing to do it. They are marketing experts. It's time for the left to deploy some marketing experts of our own. Marketing helped the NDP (a 'socialist' party) here in Canada become official opposition. The ads were phenomenal. And they convinced a lot of people with those ads. It can be done quite easily - the Dems just want to have to do it, and that's another conversation for another day.
Last edited Sun Feb 2, 2014, 10:45 AM - Edit history (1)
… is that Big Money continues to successfully buy pre-selected Democrats that they run in primaries and fund with astronomical amounts of money compared to any candidate that might actually allow for the pendulum to BEGIN to shift back to the left.
We here at DU are very effective at stating facts in clear, passionate ways that WOULD resonate with a majority of Americans. It is "our" elected Democratic officials who enjoy being bi-partisan and propping up a thoroughly corrupt Republican Party instead of fighting for the values they supposedly want to implement that effectively prevent the masses of people from seeing things clearly.
Then, some of us cry out that someone needs to TELL them up in D.C. how to frame issues because they're just so bad at it.
Or, "If only someone would tell Democrats how to negotiate effectively!!!" 
No, we will need to change the way we elect "our" congress critters before we can prevent the corruption that's currently going on within Washington (including the Democratic Party).
Big Money will continue to try and put highly charismatic individuals into Democratic slots. Their charm will have to be incredibly high in order to get (some/most?) people to think that he/she really doesn't want to implement the neo-liberal, right-wing policies that they inevitably implement.
We need to take their ability to legally finance aka BRIBE politicians away or else it's going to get very, very, very ugly in this country.
with the part. It is no accident that our politicians frame things badly. I don't agree with this gentleman that they are doing so because they are trying to show voters where their self interest lies. If they were, it WOULD be effective with many voters. But they would have to do so boldly, simply, and clearly. They don't effectively show voters where their self interest lies because they don't want to. To me, it's obvious why they don't want to.
This is what he believes it would take to refashion the progressive mindset: the abandonment of argument by evidence in favour of argument by moral cause; the unswerving and unembarrassed articulation of what those morals are; the acceptance that there is no "middle" or third way, no such thing as a moderate (people can hold divergent views, conservative on some things, progressive on others – but they are not moderates, they are "biconceptual"
Even if the working class is not ready for the solution and call to action, I always conclude with that. All of our comrades and writers do.on the consciousness of the reader. But thanks!
www.workerspower.net. Check it out for yourself.
. . .and work on an actual campaign to help get Democrats and progressives elected to office. Test his own theories, doncha know?
When it comes real-life campaign management and candidates, I don't want somebody with a "comprehensive political analysis": I want street fighters; people who are not afraid to get in there and kick the GOoPers' and Teabaggers' balls to hamburger.
Enough said.
English is such a simple language in many ways, and a very complex one in others. The ways need to be reversed. Why is almost every word for a part of a computer something else. Don't we know how to create words for new things? How are we supposed to know if we should touch a mouse or trap a mouse, see out the window or see in the window? Why is a computer a "system unit" instead of a new word? Well, that's how language grows mindlessly, with metaphors easing the way. And it keeps language both simple (easy to learn to name new things) and makes it more complicated (difficult to discern what is meant).
Give the NSA something useful to do with all that data, police metaphor use! No new metaphors without a bill in Congress. 
