"Why Conservatives Consistently Win Messaging Battles", where he writes:
In the US, conservatives have set up an elaborate messaging system. It starts with an understanding of long-term framing and message experts who know how to use existing their long-term frame systems. Then there are think tanks, with experts who understand the high-level frame system and how it applies to the full range of issues. There are training institutes that teach tens of thousands of conservatives a year to think and talk using these framing systems and their language and argument forms. There are regular gatherings to consolidate messaging and policy around a contemporary issue that fits the conservative moral system. There are booking agencies that book conservative spokespeople on tv, talk radio, etc. There are lecture venues and booking agencies for conservative spokespeople. There are conservative media going on 24/7/365.
As a result, conservative language is heard constantly in many parts of the US. Conservative language automatically and unconsciously activates conservative frames and the high-level framing systems they are part of. As the language is heard over and over, the circuitry linking the language to conservative frames becomes stronger. Because the synapses in the neural circuits are stronger, they are easier to activate. As a result, conservative language tends to become the normal, preferred "mainstream" language for discussing current issues.
And...
Lakoff continues:
This messaging system has existed and has been extended and strengthened over many years. Democrats have a few of these elements, but they are relatively ineffective, since they tend to view messaging as short-term and issue-based, rather than long-term and morally based. Democrats tend not to understand how framing works, and often confuse framing (which is deep, long-term, systematic, morality-based, and conceptual) with messaging (which is shallow, short-term, ad hoc, policy-based, and linguistic).
This situation puts Democrats at a messaging disadvantage relative to conservatives, which leads to conservative victories. Hence the regular need for disaster messaging.
There are various reasons why Democrats have failed to develop a counter to conservative hegemonic warfare. Here Lakoff raises one of the deepest reasons, which bears a little further scrutiny: Democrats, under the sway of a pre-scientific Enlightenment model of reason, haven't a clue about how framing works, because they see it as a subversion of their ideal notion of disembodied reason. This underlies the Versailles delusion of objectivity and expert opinion on the one hand, but also dogmatic "left" attacks as well, such as Booman's tirades that lead me to leave Booman Tribune.
The idea of reason as a transcendent, disembodied process capable of arriving at absolute truth is deeply intoxicating, particularly when one is surrounded by oceans of irrationalist madness. But that idea simply fails the test of scientific inspection. One of the earliest attacks on it came from William James, arguing in the aftermath of Darwin that so-called "analytical truths" beloved by idealist philosophers were actually empirical in origin. Specifically, he he called them products of "backdoor empiricism", since they come not from the direct perception of empirical facts, but rather from how the empirical facts of our evolutionary past shaped our nervous system, and thus the very architecture of how we think. This is the origin of the scientific theory of embodied reason, whose implication Lakoff explored with co-author Mark Johnson in Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.
At another level of explanation, liberalism and conservatism come out of different cultural traditions: liberalism out of bourgeois civic culture versus conservatism out of military and religious culture. The former is much more concerned with practical matters, solving problems, establishing social harmony, etc. The later is much more concerned with imposing its will bolstered by codes immune to empirical criticism. The former, in short, are problem-solvers, the later warriors. It's hardly surprising that problem-solvers should initially fail to understand how fundamentally different warriors are. What's truly baffling is that they still haven't figured it out after all this time: it does not speak well of their problem-solving abilities.At yet another level of explanation, liberal/Democratic politics is still basically structured by the achievements of the New Deal Party System. The structure of liberal political organizations not only reflects an ideal of Enlightenment rationalist problem-solving, itself a particular expression of bourgeois culture, it also reflects a now-vanished political world in which problems got identified, impacted constituencies got mobilized (but not too much!), experts came up with solutions, and politicians mediated acceptable public policy adjustments to achieve a good fit of solving new problems without altering too much of other policies created to solve earlier problems. The logic of all three levels tended to produce limited-scope, issue-based organizations, top-down organizations focused primarily on passing legislation, enforcing regulation, and litigation where and when legislation and regulation failed.
<snip>
Link: same as OP
:shrug:
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