Framing The Issues: How Conservatives Use Language to Dominate Politics
An Interview with UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff, UC Berkeley News
But first, a brief note from Linda: I
wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that I have added a new
component to the left sidebar of Blog for Iowa. It's called Fight Media Bias, and it's divided into three sections: Iowa, National, and Tools.
Here you will find practical suggestions and information on how you can
join the fight against the GOP-controlled media, from organized letter
writing – courtesy of Rapid Response Network – Iowa – to a daily rebuttal of Sinclair Broadcasting's nightly op/ed hogwash, thanks to Iowa's Ted Remington over at The Counterpoint.
You'll also find tips on how to reframe the language used by
conservative factions to control perspective, and contact information
for almost every Iowa newspaper.
While
reading one of the articles I posted to the sidebar, I came upon this fascinating
excerpt from an interview with linguistics professor George Lakoff. It reminded me a
lot of the distinction made in the book “The Cultural Creatives” that Alta Price wrote up for Blog for Iowa some time ago.
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.
The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive.
Why do conservatives appear to be so much better at framing?
Because
they've put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years, their
think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In
1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the
National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are
becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed
to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy
conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and
off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative
business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole
thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the
Manhattan Institute after that. (There are many others, including the
American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford,
which date from the 1940s.)
And now,
as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the
Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show
hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their
own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they
understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their
research on how best to express their ideas.
Why haven't progressives done the same thing?
There's
a systematic reason for that. You can see it in the way that
conservative foundations and progressive foundations work. Conservative
foundations give large block grants year after year to their think
tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to
do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios,
hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them
on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their
intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV.
They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which
I analyzed in “Moral Politics,” has as its highest value preserving and
defending the “strict father” system itself. And that means building
infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.
Meanwhile,
liberals' conceptual system of the “nurturant parent” has as its
highest value helping individuals who need help. The progressive
foundations and donors give their money to a variety of grassroots
organizations. They say, 'We're giving you $25,000, but don't waste a
penny of it. Make sure it all goes to the cause, don't use it for
administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development.'
So there's actually a structural reason built into the worldviews that
explains why conservatives have done better.
(Click here to read the entire interview.)
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