Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

Of the three books I've recently read on political messaging and tactics, this is by far the best. It doesn't have the snarky cynicism of Frank Luntz's book, and avoids the “Ends Justify the Means” attitude of Saul Alinsky. Instead, Lakoff recommends that progressives focus on values they truly believe in, and stop responding to the debates in ways that conservatives have framed.

He believes that progressives have “lost” the culture wars because of their inability to properly frame their arguments, and instead have only responded with truth and facts. “It is a common folk theory of progressives that ‘the facts will set you free.' If only you get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope.”

Instead, progressives should do four things to win the culture wars: “Show respect. Respond by reframing. Think and talk at the level of values. Say what you believe.” 

It is interesting in that it mirrors much of what Jonathan Haidt argues in “The Righteous Mind.” But where he loses me is in defining which moral models of the family progressives and conservatives adhere to. Progressives use the nurturant family model,  where they believe “the world can be made a better place, and our job is to work on that. The parents' job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others.” But conservatives use the strict father model, where “what is required of the child is obedience, because the strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong.”

He does an effective job at explaining how these models define adult world views, but a less than adequate job of proving these moral models to be true. His idea that “preserving and extending the strict father model is the highest moral value for conservatives” is a bit of a straw man.

Overall worth a read, though, as it does give a different perspective of why people cannot seem to agree about important issues.

I should start by saying I'm neither a liberal nor a conservative. I was born in Sweden, moved to the US as a child, then back to Sweden. I went to high-school in Belgium, and did my Bachelors of Engineering in the UK, and later moved back to the US. Basically I've been exposed to several ideologies and systems of government.

There's really a lot to pick on on this book. I learned next to nothing about how to frame things. Repeating things endlessly until people believe it seemed to be the only bit in there, but I'm not sure about this strategy. It's not going to convert anyone.

The author's credentials is in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics but this book is about politics and economy to a larger part than the topics he has credentials in.

I felt that conservatives were misrepresented quite often, and the book was clearly biased when it didn't need to be. For example, I'm sure conservative parents also nurture their children, and that not everyone believes in this strict father model. The way conservatives are portrayed comes out pretty evil and as child beaters while liberals are loving and caring.

He talks about Bush and how Bush started war etc. but he fails to mention that Obama threw far more bombs than Bush did in Pakistan (http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/). This bias mentioning only the bad on one side, and not pointing out faults with their own side is intellectually dishonest.

There's not a single reference for any of his claims in this book. I'm used to reading book with factual research, but while the author makes a lot of claims, not a single one is backed up by any reference materials. Why should I believe what he just casually throws out there?

He talks about poor people are not free, sick people are not free etc. I'm going to tell you why I don't buy in to this definition of freedom. The argument is that poor people are not free, because they have limited options because of their economic status. There will always be options that are limited to people, for whatever reasons. But if having limited options means you're not free, then we're never free, because options will always be limited by one way or another. For example, can we say an ugly person is not free? It's a fact that beautiful people are treated better, and get hire salaries etc, so does it mean that ugly people are not free? No, this definition of free makes no sense to me at all. There is no link between freedom and limited options. They're two different things. Being free is being able to pursue those options, and having those options isn't freedom.

He had a lot of comments about Economics but really, I like this quote by Rothbard:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
–Murray Rothbard

And since I read a lot of economics, I'm going to say I was not impressed by what he had to say on the matter.