Nicholas F. Benton

The Wallis &
Lakoff Effect

In response to the alleged role of “values” in the November 2004 Republican presidential and other victories, two new books have climbed onto the Best Seller lists this spring offering to correct the problem.

Both offer valuable insights not significantly present in the American political discourse until now. At least, that is, not since the days of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, when social progressives and civil libertarians last held the moral high ground.

Jim Wallis, editor of The Sojourner magazine, is author of the new God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at U.C. Berkeley, is author of the new Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.

Wallis appeared on Meet the Press shortly after the November election and presented an impressive model for how the progressive and mainstream religious communities in the U.S. could have done a much better job countering the religious right’s claim to a monopoly on moral values in the election.

He demolished the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s fatuous arguments during that memorable show, causing this columnist to wish the exchange had occurred on national television a year or two earlier, before so much of the American electorate had come to equate Falwell’s special form of bigotry with God’s will. Wallis effectively demonstrated that issues of social justice and peace are far more central to the core message of the Bible than Falwell’s fixations against abortion and gay marriage.

Lakoff wrote his short treatise prior to the 2004 election, but not in time to give it the kind of widespread exposure it is now getting. With a brief introduction by Howard Dean, the new chair of the Democratic Party, the book is now serving as the basis for serious discussions within Democratic and progressive groups nationwide.

Virginia Democratic Congressional candidate Al Weed spoke on the book at a Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Falls Church this month, and has created an organization aimed at implementing its message in campaigns and elections. The Fairfax County Democratic Committee’s central committee is slated to screen a video interview with Lakoff at its monthly meeting this week. Lakoff, himself, helped create a think tank, the Rockridge Institute (www.rockridgeinstitute.org), to apply his linguistic solutions to the way in which conservatives have dominated the political debate the last 25 years.

While he’s written more scholarly books on his core concepts, such as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (second edition), his Don’t Think of an Elephant primer is more of a how-to paperback that’s barely 120 pages long.

But it identifies a number of important realities. First is the fact that, indeed, conservatives have a “stranglehold on political dialogue” in the U.S. This has not been a level playing field for a lot of years now. In recent decades, conservatives have invested heavily in the brainstorming and the think tanking that has paid dividends in the political discourse by providing them the language forms and mental frameworks that are critical to advancing their agenda within the general public.

Progressives have been blindsided by this, failing to recognize that it is the language contexts in which discussions occur that frame the way the public responds, and not mere facts or statistics. Conservatives have been ingenious in their ability to create frameworks favorable to them.

That’s how conservatives captured “moral values” in the electoral process. Lakoff says that the solution is to “reframe” arguments and to stop arguing within frameworks defined by the political opposition.

Ingenious use of phrases like “tax relief” (instead of tax cuts) and “permission slips” from the U.N. (instead of multilateralism) are examples at how conservatives gain control of contexts in which debates occur.

It is Lakoff’s insight that the conservative world view is rooted in a “strict father family model,” and everything that derives from it, instead of a “nurturant parent family model” from which progressive values and models flow. Ultimately, these two core paradigms define a range of policy differences inclusive of family values, economic policy, national defense and foreign affairs.

It’s a key notion, digging deeper into the American psyche than perhaps even Wallis does, forming the core of both self-realization and a fresh appreciation of what makes conservatives and progressives, alike, tick.

Ultimately, it’s a clarion call to move beyond red and blue, to concede nothing of value while replacing, both mentally and strategically, flight forward with a formula to flank and envelop.

Nicholas F. Benton may be emailed here.