The Little Blue Book

The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic

George Lakoff, Elisabeth Wehling

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781476700014
• eBook ISBN: 9781476700038
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The indispensable handbook for Democrats Voters cast their ballots for what they believe is right, for the things that make moral sense. Yet Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. The Little Blue Book demonstrates how to make that connection clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time: the economy, health care, women's issues, energy and environmental policy, education, food policy, and more. Dissecting the ways that extreme conservative positions have permeated political discourse, Lakoff and Wehling show how to fight back on moral grounds and in concrete terms. Revelatory, passionate, and deeply practical, The Little Blue Book will forever alter the way Democrats and progressives think and talk about politics.

PART I

THE BASICS

1

Politics and Morals

All politics is moral. So part of the job of every political leader is to show how everyday values link to policies. This is necessary in a democracy, which depends on citizen commitment to the political process. A failure to use language linking values to policies is a failure of the democratic process.

One of the problems we see for liberal democracy is that conservatives use language more effectively than liberals in communicating their deepest values. Liberals assume their own values are universal values, and then further assume that all they need to do is present the facts and offer policies that support these universal values.

But values are not universal. Conservatives have a very different sense from liberals of what is moral, and a difference in fundamental morality is a deep difference. It is a part of your personal identity, part of who you are and what is sacred to you. A liberal will thus never persuade a thoroughgoing radical conservative, because moral differences that determine personal identity are deep, residing in brain circuitry that is long-lasting or even permanent. Luckily there are fewer thoroughgoing conservatives than you might think.

Moral Complexity

Most people are morally complex; that is, they have complex combinations of conservative and liberal moral values. So-called moderates are mostly one and partially the other. Thus moderate conservatives will use conservative values on most issues but use liberal values on others. They may support Social Security and Medicare for seniors if they care deeply about old people, or they may support public education for children if they care deeply about children and their future. So-called swing voters use both conservative and liberal moral systems and swing to one side or the other depending on what candidates or issues regularly get their attention. The same is true of many independents.

Why does moral complexity matter? Because it determines elections.

To address moral complexity, you have to understand something basic about how the brain works. Each moral system is represented in the brain by neural circuitry. A complex moral system has neural circuitry for two conflicting moralities, which are usually applied to different issues and situations. How can conflicting moralities exist in the same brain? When the brain circuit for one inhibits the other. When one is turned on, the other is turned off. You may not even notice the switch.⁵

A swing voter’s conservative morality will tend to be activated by conservative language; similarly, liberal language will tend to activate a swing voter’s liberal morality. The repeated use of conservative or liberal moral language is often the decisive factor in whether an independent uses a liberal or conservative moral system for a given election.

Language Is Political

Language is not neutral. Every word is defined in the brain through frame-circuits. These characterize both moral values and the particular issues that make sense only in terms of moral values. Moreover the frame-circuits are not simply logical. They are connected to emotions, governing our gut intuitions about political issues and limiting how issues—and even facts—can be understood. And they come with powerful images. This is how reason really works: through framing, metaphors, emotion, narratives, and imagery.

Frame-circuits come in hierarchies, and political frames are part of a hierarchy dominated by moral frames. Thus any political message about policy can be understood only in terms of moral values.

Before we turn to what moral values are, we should say a bit about what moral values are not.

• Moral values are not the same as policies. Policies follow from both moral premises and facts. Voters care primarily about moral perspective and only secondarily about specific policy details. Medicare and Social Security, for example, are policies, morally based policies to be sure, but not moral values in themselves.

• Issue areas—global warming, health care, women’s rights, integration, and so on—arise from moral values, but they are not the values themselves.

• Great abstract ideas like freedom, justice, fairness, equality, and unity are also not moral values in themselves. Indeed they are each “contested concepts,”⁶ with utterly different conservative and liberal versions arising from differences in moral values. If you are going to talk about these ideas, make the underlying values clear from the start.

Let us now turn to what moral values are.

2

What Are Moral Values?

Your values govern your everyday life—the decisions you make, how you treat yourself and others, and what you think about the world: about nature, business, culture, religion, family life, and so on. In American politics, your values also determine what you think democracy is.

For progressives, democracy begins with citizens caring about each other, taking responsibility both for themselves and for their fellow citizens. Individual responsibility is thus inseparable from social responsibility. The basic moral values here are empathy and responsibility, for both oneself and others.

This leads to a view of government as having certain moral obligations: providing protection and empowerment for everyone equally. This in turn requires a vibrant commitment to the Public: public infrastructure (roads, buildings, sewers), public education, public health, public parks, public transportation, public policing, an energy grid, public access to water and an adequate food supply, and the regulation of commerce. No private business and no entrepreneur can prosper without such public provisions. There is no prosperity and no sense of a civilized and decent life without these things that we have provided together. The private depends on the public.

These progressive public values commonly follow from certain ideal progressive family values, projected to larger institutions. The progressive family has parents of equal authority. Their central moral role requires empathy with each other and their children; it requires self-responsibility and responsibility for the well-being of other family members. Respect for parents comes not from fear of punishment but from admiration and a sense of cooperation. Behavioral standards and limits play a crucial role in this model. They are always subject to questioning and explanation, but parents have the last word because they are ultimately responsible. This requires open communication, transparency about family rules, shared decision making, and need-based fairness. The outcomes of family life require the cooperation of the whole family, working together as a family system. (The fact that nurturance requires standards and limits of behavior is sometimes overlooked by those who mistakenly see the openness of nurturance as indulgence and an “anything goes” attitude, which is in fact anathema to real nurturance.)

This is an idealized view. Because our first acquaintance with being governed is within our families, we come to understand ideal governing institutions (e.g., religious organizations, schools, teams, and nations) in terms of ideal families. The notion of what is ideal is key. You can learn about family ideals in your own family but also in the families of others and in your culture and community. Thus the issue is not just how you happen to be brought up but what you understand about how an ideal family should function.

When this idealized family is projected onto other institutions, we get nurturant versions of religions and schools, rehabilitation in prisons, a foreign policy that cares about the “family of man,” and a market in which the role of business is to provide for consumers, workers, and communities as well as business owners and stockholders.

The idealized conservative family is structured around a strict father who is the natural leader of the family. Because the world is a dangerous place, and evil a force in the world, he has to be strong to protect his family. He is moral and knows right from wrong. Because children are born just doing what feels good rather than what is good, he has to teach them right from wrong by punishing them when they do wrong so they will do right in the future. Because he knows what to do, his authority is absolute and unchallengeable. He sets the rules and is, in short, the decider. Physical discipline is necessary to produce moral discipline. The enforcement of rules must be strict or they will cease to be followed. Love is tough love; discipline is a form of love. Toughness is important and a measure of moral strength. Better to discipline too often than too little. The role of the mother is to uphold the authority of the father. If she does not, she may have to be disciplined as well.

From this, certain things follow for one’s outlook on society. To be prosperous, one must be fiscally disciplined. Thus if you are not prosperous, it must be because you are undisciplined—which is itself a form of immorality—and so you deserve your poverty. In this form of direct causation, effects can be traced to a single and straightforward cause.

The strict father family commonly, but not always, involves in-group nurturance. That is, spouses and children who are obedient are loved, cared for, and rewarded. When children become adults they become their own strict parents, and no outside authority should meddle in their lives.

When this idealized family model is projected onto various governing institutions, we get conservative religion with a strict father God, a view of the market as decider with no external authority over it (such as government, unions, or the courts), and strictness in other institutions, such as education, prisons, businesses, sports teams, romantic relationships, and the world community.

For conservatives, democracy is about liberty, individual responsibility, and self-reliance—the freedom to seek one’s self-interest with minimal or even no commitment to the interests of others. This implies a minimal public system and a maximal private system. It is assumed that it is natural and moral to seek one’s own self-interest, that it is natural to compete when there are scarce resources, that it takes discipline to succeed in a competitive world, and that there should be no interference with such a natural mode of life, especially from government. What makes society possible are laws and moral standards, which should be followed strictly. The good things in society are provided by private individuals and entrepreneurs who are seeking their own interests.

Before going further, we should emphasize what values do: Values provide the moral premises for policy, the concern with issue areas, and the interpretation of abstract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• About George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• A Note About this Book
• Introduction: The Importance of Moral Frames
• Part I: The Basics
• Part II: The Epidemic of Extreme Conservatism
• Part III: Ideas We Need
• Part IV: A Phrasebook for Democrats
• Afterword
• Notes
• Acknowledgments