How Democrats and Progressives Can Win DVD; Solutions from George Lakoff

How Democrats and Progressives Can Win DVD
Solutions from George Lakoff
by Haydn Reiss

If you want to understand the November elections and you'd like to see a change in the future, then watch this DVD!

Featuring a lively interview with George Lakoff, television news clips, and illustrative graphics, this is a must-see media tool for everyone who wants to better understand and communicate the progressive agenda. Includes "How to Debate a Conservative," "Know Your Values," and much more. Each DVD includes a summary card of key points.

Produced by Educate the Base, LLC.

Editorial Reviews

This DVD captures George Lakoff's entire point of view in an extraordinarily concise and powerful way. The editing is tight and the accompanying support graphics help make his thoughts even clearer. For all progressives who wonder why the right has been so successful at framing their "conservative" agenda and winning so many elections in the last 12 years here is your answer. The DVD gives the progressive movement the linguistic tools to communicate our values and vision more effectively than ever before. This DVD is a great gift to anyone who seeks to make this a better world.

The Way for Progressives to be Politically Effective and Win
September 23, 2004
By Robert Bostick

This DVD captures George Lakoff's entire point of view in an extraordinarily concise and powerful way. The editing is tight and the accompanying support graphics help make his thoughts even clearer. For all progressives who wonder why the right has been so successful at framing their "conservative" agenda and winning so many elections in the last 12 years here is your answer. The DVD gives the progressive movement the linguistic tools to communicate our values and vision more effectively than ever before. This DVD is a great gift to anyone who seeks to make this a better world. Buy it and pass it around. It is something really positive to do.

Framing a New Progressive Agenda
October 23, 2004
By William Hare

George Lakoff has broken interesting new ground at the Rockridge Institute. The linguistics professor at the University California at Berkeley has led the movement in helping shape a new progressive political agenda after conceding that conservatives had achieved a big lead in the important realm of establishing message as a means of prevailing in ongoing debate.

Lakoff explains at the beginning of this informative DVD how Louis Powell, shortly before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon in 1970, launched the movement to establish an effort to seize the political agenda in American for conservatives. Some 43 think tanks were created in the better than three decades since Powell launched his effort. Progressives found it difficult to match the level of financial expenditures of conservatives assisted by corporate largesse, but are now in a position to claw their way back into the game and ultimately win.

The area where Lakoff contends that the major momentum was established in promoting the conservative political agenda resides generally in the message field and specifically through framing issues by the shrewd and repetitious use of language. A strong case in point was Bush's first move after assuming the presidency. On day one of Bush's term he sought to reward the corporate donors who had provided him with the chance to win the presidency, which ultimately occurred not through the ballot box but by a one vote Supreme Court majority, by advocating what he called "tax relief."

Lakoff explains that the word "tax" has a negative connotation to Americans, but by creating a positive metaphor such as "tax relief" a negative is converted to a positive. The term conjures up a doctor providing just the right medication for a patient to feel better. Burdens are diminished through relief.

Another area where Lakoff credits conservatives with gaining a rhetorical advantage is by using the term "abortion" repeatedly. Opponents are seen as involved with killing whereas, with different framing, by referring to a woman's reproductive rights or stressing a woman's "right to choose" the concept of individual liberty is envisioned rather than a negative connotation. He points out that, while conservatives extol a "pro life" agenda they fail to follow through in vital areas such as pre-natal care and guaranteed health care for children. Progressives can make their case, however, only by rephrasing the labels conservatives seek to apply to a political issue.

The environment is an area where Lakoff cites a shrewd effort by conservatives to use positive language to frame a negative position that, with proper citizen reflection, he feels will redound in the favor of progressives and against Bush and his right wing adherents. Bush repeatedly refers to his clear skies initiative, which he sought as a substitute for the Clean Air Act passed and extended by Congress for decades. The Bush measure allows corporations to buy credits from each other for the legal permission to pollute. Lakoff states that it is a losing proposition to accept the term of clear skies advanced by conservatives in debate.

A positive brought about through framing needs to be reversed by calling Bush's concept a dirty skies proposal, which conjures up a negative image. To George Lakoff success is all in the framing through which the progressive presentation is made.

The terms conservatives employ in seeking acceptance for proposals must be challenged by immediately invoking alternative terms. If the conservative uses a negative term in attempting to paint the progressive into a corner the progressive must then respond by invoking a positive term. The same applies concerning a positive term that to liberals embodies a negative program. Lakoff advocates reversing the terminology in favor of the progressive position.

Lakoff is optimistic about the ability of progressives to prevail as long as a winning game plan is followed, that of taking control of the agenda through framing issues in the proper winning verbal context. The right words connote the right images, putting citizens in the mood to embrace the progressive agenda.

March 13, 2006
By William J. Parmenter

What every Progressive candidate or backer needs to know. This short video should be required viewing before each time any progressive candidate speaks in public. How to express positions in a frame that reflects progressive values. For example, talk about "tax fairness" or "investment in the future". The phrase "tax relief" evokes the notion that taxes are an affliction which needs to be relieved: who could support continued infliction of such suffering? On the other hand, the tax reduction in 2003 was $400 for an average wage-earner and 1000 times that for a CEO getting 200 times the average wage.

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George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute. He is one of the world's best-known linguists. His expertise is in cognitive linguistics, the scientific study of the nature of thought and its expression in language.

Since the mid-1980s he has been applying cognitive linguistics to the study of politics, especially the framing of public political debate. He is the author of the influential book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (2nd edition, 2002). Since 2002, he has consulted with the leaders of hundreds of advocacy groups on framing issues, lectured to large audiences across the country, run dozens of workshops for activists, spoken regularly on radio talk shows and TV shows, spoken twice at the Democratic Senators' Policy Retreat, consulted with progressive pollsters and advertising agencies, been interviewed at length in the public media, served as a consultant in major political campaigns, and done extensive research for Rockridge.

In addition to his work on political thought and language, he has been active in his academic discipline. He has lectured at major universities in dozens of countries around the world. He is currently on the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute (1995-01), has served as President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association and on the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, and is co-director with Jerome Feldman of the Neural Theory of Language Project at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley.

He is the author of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About The Mind (1987) and co-author of Metaphors We Live By (1980; 2003) [with Mark Johnson], More Than Cool Reason (1989) [with Mark Turner], Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge To The Western Tradition (1999) [with Mark Johnson], and Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being (2000) [with Rafael Núñez].