An Interview with George Lakoff

Democrats and Republicans have different values and frame issues differently, and the difference is important.
Interview by Daniel Redwood

George Lakoff, Ph.D., is one of America’s leading progressive thinkers and most sought-after speakers. His book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (University of Chicago Press, 2002) has become the primary text for understanding the two very different value systems that drive American politics. Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the prime movers behind The Rockridge Institute, a progressive think tank.

He previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a Visiting Professor at the Ècole des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and at the Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico. He has been a member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, a Senior Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association. He has served on the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute and is co-director of the Neural Theory of Language Project at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley.

Lakoff is regularly interviewed in the public media and has appeared on such radio shows as Talk of the Nation (with Ray Suarez), Bridges (with Larry Josephson), To the Best of Our Knowledge, Forum (with Michael Krasny), and NOW (with Bill Moyers).

In this thought-provoking interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Lakoff describes the foundations of his theory: the Strict Father model that is the basis of conservatism and the Nurturant Parent model that is the foundation of liberalism. No one will finish this interview without a deepened understanding of the role of values in American politics.

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Daniel Redwood: Why have conservatives been more effective than liberals in framing American political discourse in recent years?

George Lakoff: First, they’ve been working at it and have invested in it for a lot longer. Conservatives have spent over $2 billion on 43 think tanks over the past 30 to 40 years and they have invested heavily in a language apparatus that’s very effective. Overall, the result is that they have been able to frame all the issues their way for some time, to get it out to the public and to control a great deal of the media, partly through ownership of the media.

Redwood: What do you mean by a “language apparatus”?

Lakoff: An organization that designs language. For example, [Republican pollster and consultant] Frank Luntz’s organization puts out a handbook each year about 600 pages long, on how to argue each issue, what words to use, what words not to use, how the other side argues, sample speeches, and so on. Then they have a system for training people who are in their think tanks, people who are running for office, officeholders, judges, and so on, in how to use conservative language and how to use these argument forms. That also includes reporters. So they have a large training apparatus that the Democrats don’t have.

In addition, there’s a problem within the conceptual system of liberals and progressives that has made it difficult for them to understand what has been happening to them. In their conceptual system, it’s assumed that you can simply talk literally, that you can just say what you mean, just state the facts, tell the facts to the public, and the public will come to the right conclusion. Conservatives have understood that you need to frame issues, and they’ve learned to frame them their way. Reasoning occurs within a given framing of the issues, and conservatives have learned how to do that very effectively. Democrats have not learned the same lesson.

In addition, through all of this, the conservatives have figured out what their system of values is and learned to articulate it very well, whereas the Democrats have a system of values, unconscious and implicit, but haven’t really learned to articulate it well.

Redwood: How does the conservative set of values differ from the liberal set of values?

Lakoff: It’s not simple, but here’s how it goes. We all have a metaphor that we use in everyday thought, in which the nation is a family. We speak of the Founding Fathers, for example, and of sending our sons and daughters to war. That metaphor, linking the nation to a family and understanding it that way, maps two very different conceptions of ideal family life onto political life: a Strict Father family and a Nurturant Parent family. The result is two utterly different moral systems for how the country should be run.

In a Strict Father family, there’s a background assumption that the world is a dangerous and difficult place; that there is competition; that there always will be winners and losers, and that this is a good thing; and that children are born bad and have to be made good. “Bad” meaning that they will just do what feels good rather than what’s right. The assumption is that the only way this situation can be dealt with is through a Strict Father who protects the family in the dangerous world, supports it in the difficult world, wins the competitions, and teaches his kids right from wrong.

Redwood: How does the Strict Father teach these lessons?

Lakoff: There’s only one way to do that, which is punishment when they do wrong -- painful punishment. The idea is that this will cause them to get internal discipline, so that they will discipline themselves to do right, not wrong, and that this internal discipline will serve in a secondary way to allow them to pursue their self-interest and become self-reliant. That is, to make their way in a difficult world.

What this does is to bring morality and prosperity together in the Strict Father family. It also defines two kinds of children: the good children who are the disciplined ones, who will be able to support themselves and be independent as well as moral, and the bad children who aren’t disciplined, cannot follow moral precepts, and are not disciplined enough to support themselves. The idea is that after these children have become old enough that they go out into the world, they either can take care of themselves or they are subject to the discipline of the world. That is, they get “tough love.”

This family model then maps onto politics in a very important way. It says, for example, that all social programs are immoral because they make people dependent. They give people things that they haven’t earned and therefore make them dependent. It says that in foreign policy, the president is the moral authority and doesn’t have to ask any neighbor countries or allies what to do, or to ask for advice. He knows what’s right and wrong and will do what’s right. And other people should just follow suit. It says many more things about political policy, which are in my book, Moral Politics.

Redwood: What about the liberal model?

Lakoff: The liberal model of the family, the progressive model, is what I call the Nurturant Parent model, in which there are two parents equally responsible, whose job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturing of others. They assume children are born good and can be made better. Nurturance means two things: empathy (meaning you connect with your child and figure out what your child needs and what all those cries are when babies cry at night) and responsibility. You can’t take care of anybody else if you’re not responsible to yourself. That means self-responsibility as well as teaching responsibility for others.

From these two values, empathy and responsibility, a whole complex of values follows. If you empathize with your child, then you’ll want to protect your child. In progressive politics, this turns into consumer protection, environmental protection and so on. If you empathize with your child, you want your child to be treated fairly. This comes out in politics as a desire for equality and fairness in social life. In the family, if you empathize with your child, you’ll want your child to be fulfilled in life. So fulfillment becomes a progressive value. There’s no fulfillment without opportunity, and no opportunity without prosperity, so opportunity and prosperity become progressive values.

Then, any child is raised in a community -- as Hillary Clinton says, it takes a village -- and you don’t function in the community without serving that community, so public service becomes a progressive value. And in any community, you have to cooperate, and there’s no cooperation without trust and no trust without honesty. So cooperation, trust, and honesty become progressive values, as does open communication, which is required in any community. So what you find is that there is a progressive understanding of how to responsibly raise children, for both parents, and that this maps onto politics.

Now there’s a misrepresentation of this by the right. In the Strict Father model, there’s mommy as opposed to daddy. And mommy is not strong enough to protect the family, not able to support the family, and not disciplined enough to teach the kids right from wrong. So there’s the phrase, “Wait ‘til daddy comes home,” which is from such families. They then caricature the Nurturant Parent model as if it were a “weak mommy” model, which it isn’t, because any nurturant parent is going to raise his or her child to be responsible. You have to be strong to be a nurturant parent. Parenting isn’t for weaklings.

Redwood: I’d like to mention certain key issues that are at the center of this year’s political campaign, and ask you to give a brief sense of how Republicans have framed them and how Democrats might reframe them. Let’s start with taxes. How have the Republicans framed that?

Lakoff: They have framed it in terms of the phrase “tax relief.” The word “relief” comes with a conceptual frame: that is, a conceptual structure in which there is an affliction, an afflicted party who suffers from the affliction, and some hero who takes the affliction away. And if someone wants to stop the hero from doing that, they’re a villain, a bad guy. If you add “tax” to “relief,” then you get the metaphor that tax is an affliction. Now this fits the conservative model very well, because in the conservative model the good citizens are the citizens who have succeeded. They’re the people who have sufficient discipline to become independent, win those competitions, and so on. They deserve rewards and taxation is taking those rewards away. So it’s a kind of punishment or affliction. So the idea of taxation as an affliction fits their model very well.

Redwood: What’s a good way to reframe taxes?

Lakoff: For progressives, taxation is a very different thing. First, it’s paying your dues. It’s what you pay to be an American -- to have freedom, to have opportunity, and to have access to the American infrastructure. Taxes are also essential investments, national investments, that companies and individuals could not make and that provide dividends to society as a whole that are extremely important. Examples of such investments are the interstate highway system, the Internet, the investment in computer chips. These were all taxpayers’ investments. Also the investment in our satellite system that permits telecommunications, the investment in the entire science apparatus, and the training of scientists in the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, which has led to all our medical advances. These are taxpayer investments that have led to major taxpayer dividends.

Now if you look at who benefits from these investments, it turns out that those who benefit most are large corporations and people who own stock in them. Among the taxpayer investments is the entire financial system. Nine-tenths of the judicial system is about corporate law: the whole Departments of Treasury and Commerce, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission. These are taxpayer investments that are mainly for corporations and stockholders. And since they benefit the most, they have an obligation to pay more than the ordinary taxpayer, so that we will keep having these investments and the benefits will keep coming.

That’s a very different way to think about taxation. Another way to think about it is as investments again, but this time in people. When you invest in education, you’re investing in people. An educated citizenry, which is important in a democracy, as well as an educated work force, are absolutely essential for an advanced industrial country. So investments in education are important for business as well as for the rest of the country. Then there’s investment in health and health care. A quarter of the people of this country don’t have health care, and it’s extremely important if their children are to grow up to be educated and functional that they get health care. So investments in child health, for example, are very important investments in the nation. So these are the ways that Democrats and progressives inherently understand taxation. And they’re very different ways than conservatives do.

Redwood: How should Democrats and progressives reach out to people who do not share their progressive model, to connect to them within their own current frameworks, so as to expand the progressive base?

Lakoff: I oversimplified my account of the two models and it’s an important oversimplification. The real complexity arises because everybody has both models, either actively or passively. Anybody who can understand an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie at least has a Strict Father model passively, whether they live by it or not. Anybody who can understand Oprah at least has a Nurturant model, whether they live by it or not. And many people live by both models in different parts of their lives. These are the swing voters. The idea in reaching swing voters is to have those folks use your model for politics. But the fact is that everybody does have both models, at least passively, and that you can appeal to your model when talking to anybody, if you do it in the right way.

Redwood: I want to go back to the framing of specific issues. Could you talk about environmental protection as framed by conservatives and as reframed by progressives?

Lakoff: The very term environmental protection is a kind of progressive term. It has to do with the notion of protection that comes up in a Nurturant model. However, the way that, say, the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is used by conservatives is very different. They see nature as a resource, a resource for people who want to succeed and make money. They believe that resources should be exploited fully. And therefore, any attempt to stop them from doing so is interference in business. [From the conservative perspective] it’s going against human values and placing other values above people values, where people values are mainly about making money and becoming powerful. That is seen by conservatives as a moral view.

Redwood: Please explain what you mean by “placing other values above people values?”

Lakoff: “Are you in favor of people or owls?” That’s seen as a moral question. From the conservative perspective, any attempt to keep the environment from being exploited by people who are trying to succeed is an immoral thing to do.

From a progressive perspective, nature is Mother Nature. It’s a nurturer. It’s nature that gives us everything that we have. And nature is inherently important, not only sacred but crucial to our lives, to our joy, to our fulfillment in life, to our spiritual life. Connection to nature is empathy and it is a moral necessity, so preserving the environment is a moral thing to do for progressives. And business should function within that constraint, should find ways to thrive without destroying the environment.

Redwood: The Republicans have passed a number of laws with names that reflect very conscious efforts to frame the issues in ways I find profoundly misleading. Ones that come to mind are the USA Patriot Act, the Clear Skies Initiative, and the Healthy Forests Initiative. How can Democrats respond to those without strengthening the Republican framing of the issue each time we repeat the name of the law?

Lakoff: The first thing to do is not repeat the name. But let me talk a bit about the use of those names. There are two very different uses of language by conservatives. There’s one use of language that really fits what they believe. For example, they really do believe in “tax relief.” They really do believe that taxation is an affliction.

However, [Republican pollster and consultant] Frank Luntz is very clear on the issue of other uses of language. For example, last year he put out a [confidential] discussion of global warming. He basically said look, we’re losing on global warming. The Democrats have the science on their side and if Republicans are going to win, we’re going to have to do it through language. Then he points out that there are certain words that all environmentalists like because they contain environmental frames. The words are “healthy,” “clean,” and “safe.” And he says whenever you’re talking about the environment, use the words healthy, clean, and safe. That will get the environmentalists on your side. Even if you’re talking about nuclear power plants, coal plants, use these words. And, in fact, they do.

This is a use of language that is Orwellian: that is, it says the opposite of what it means. What Luntz teaches us here [unintentionally] is that you use those words when you’re weak. That is, you use language that is the opposite of what you really mean when the public is not supporting you. So, for example, they could not have called the act that increased pollution the Dirty Air Act. However, progressives can do that. The way they point to the weakness is by changing the name. Call it the Dirty Air Act! Call it the Loosening of Liberties Act. Call it the Forest Destruction Act or the Leave No Tree Behind Act. Or the Dead Billionaires Payback Act. You want to change the name to fit the reality and make an issue of it because the Republicans are actually weak there.

Redwood: How about the use of religion, and in particular Christianity, by conservatives and progressives? One of the major changes in the past 10 or 20 years has been the rise of the so-called religious right. How are they framing things and what’s a possible alternative frame?

Lakoff: It’s important to understand that there are many more liberal Christians than conservative Christians. However, the conservative Christians have two advantages. They understand and can articulate their theology, and they understand how their theology fits their politics. And that allows them to organize. So there is a Strict Father version of Christianity. It says that God is a strict father, that if you sin you will go to hell, and if you don’t, you will go to heaven. However, Jesus is there and he has suffered so much for humanity that he can pay off the debt that you have incurred by sinning. But he doesn’t do this just for anybody, anytime. Anybody can accept Jesus, but after that they have to be disciplined. That is, they have to live as their minister and their church tells them, in order to go to heaven. Otherwise, they will go to hell. So it’s basically a Strict Father interpretation of the Bible.

Liberal Christians have a very different interpretation. And it’s an interpretation that goes back and was discussed very widely in the 19th century by figures like Bushnell and Theodore Parker. Bushnell wrote about Christian nurturance, and the issue there was whether God was a benevolent God and whether God was both the father and mother, whether it was gender-neutral or whether God was a punishing male father. This continues today in liberal Christianity, although there isn’t a lot of discussion of it in the theology. The central concept there is grace, which is metaphorical nurturance. That is, grace is something that you get by being close to God. You can be filled with grace, you can be fed by grace, you can be healed by grace. You become a moral being only through grace. And you can’t earn grace; you must accept grace in order to get it. It’s basically metaphorical nurturance, and that’s what liberal Christianity is about. It sees Jesus as a nurturant being and as following a nurturant way of life. And it doesn’t talk about going to hell and so on.

The connection, of course, is that if you have that view of Christianity, it fits with a nurturant morality and progressive politics. And so you have most Christians in America today being liberal Christians. But they’re unable to express very clearly what their theology is, what’s its connection to politics is, and they haven’t been organized. And this is a major issue for Democrats, who ought to be out there organizing liberal Christians.

Redwood: It occurred to me recently that the political figures who influenced me most when I was growing up in the 1960s -- people like Martin Luther King and César Chavez -- very consistently and consciously put forward a moral basis for their calls to political action. How and why did progressives lose that focus? Are we getting it back?

Lakoff: They lost it after Robert Kennedy was assassinated. He was another who put forth a moral focus. I don’t know the exact details of the history, but here’s what I have been able to piece together. There came into politics around that time, especially in Democratic politics, the idea that a presidential campaign, or any political campaign, is a marketing campaign where the candidate is the product. The idea is to sell the product on the basis of the product’s properties, which are the positions on the issues, marketing it by understanding market segmentation. You want to segment the market and appeal, by your statements on positions, to different people in different places. People are assumed to vote their self-interest. So this is part of the reason.

The other was a misunderstanding of what the New Deal was about. The New Deal was a social movement, one that said government is for the people -- of the people, by the people, but especially for the people. In order to carry this out, Franklin Roosevelt had to put together coalitions of union leaders and churchmen and women and so on. This was reinterpreted to mean that the New Deal was about coalitions. So the apparatus of politics, which was about putting together the coalitions, became the ideal of politics, which was that liberal politics was to be about coalitions and self-interest. This was a disaster. It was a complete misunderstanding of the New Deal, a complete misunderstanding of the message of leaders like Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. And the remnants of it are with us today.

Redwood: Republicans have sought to tar John Kerry with the charge of flip-flopping, with tens of millions of dollars pumped by Bush into an ad campaign seeking to destroy Kerry’s candidacy. How does one most creatively deal with the flip-flopping issue?

Lakoff: By speaking about values. Kerry has already begun to do this and the campaign has understood this. If your values are constant, and you know what they are, and you can express them clearly, then what your values say about particular issues at different times may be different things. People will understand that. So there really isn’t a flip-flop from Kerry as far as I can see. He seems to have consistent values and he needs to express those values very clearly.

Redwood: I have been an active volunteer with the Kerry campaign for several months. I’m a member of the Democratic Platform Committee, and I’ve just been reading the platform draft. After hearing you speak in Washington at the Take Back America conference, I’ve been very attuned to looking for a focus on moral values within it. And it’s really there, very well integrated both in the platform and in Kerry’s speeches. That’s been very heartening to me.

Lakoff: It’s very good. It’s something that I’ve been writing about for a long time. I’m very heartened that the campaign is doing this.

Redwood: I also heard you mention in your talk that within the Strict Father model there are certain ways to frame one’s criticism of Bush’s behavior so that the criticism has a chance to connect with people who come primarily from the Strict Father model. One example was to point out that he has demonstrated weakness rather than strength.

Lakoff: There are certain things that a good strict father cannot be. One is weak. He cannot cause weakness; he cannot make the family weak. If a strict father is weakening the family or acts weak, then he’s not a good strict father. A second thing that a good strict father can’t be is irresponsible, not paying attention, AWOL.

One thing one can do is point out Bush’s weaknesses, that he is making the country weak, and that he is a weak leader. For example, either he ordered torture, or if he didn’t order torture and he knew that it was happening, then he wasn’t a strong enough commander-in-chief to stop it, if he really wanted to stop it. So either he was immoral in ordering torture or not stopping it, or he was too weak to stop it. But either way, it’s damnation to a strict father. Being AWOL on the issues, AWOL on education by taking the money away, AWOL on health for children, AWOL on issue after issue, such as the environment, is a very good way to point out Bush’s irresponsibility. So irresponsibility is one way that you can get at a strict father.

Redwood: What are some others?

Lakoff: Another way is by getting at his integrity. People who think Bush has character think he has integrity. But what is the opposite of integrity? It’s betrayal. Bush has, in fact, betrayed many people. He betrayed all of our soldiers in Iraq in many ways. First, by not telling them the truth about why they were there, telling them they were going there to defend their home towns and their families against terrorism, when he knew perfectly well that Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda and nothing to do with 9/11. He told them they were going to get the weapons of mass destruction to stop them from being used against the U.S. Those are betrayals. To put people in harm’s way and not tell them the real reason why they’re there. Putting them there without adequate flak jackets is a betrayal. Taking away funds for their children’s education while they’re there is a betrayal. Taking away funds for veterans’ hospitals is a betrayal. So there are many ways in which he’s betrayed our troops. And one can find similar ways in which he’s betrayed children: for example, by having an education bill saying that he would put a certain amount of money into it and then taking the money out. That’s a betrayal. Betrayals are important ways to puncture the strict father.

Then there’s dishonesty. A lot of people think he’s honest and that he doesn’t flip-flop. And if you look at his statements, you can find not only dishonesty but also a very important pattern of going back and forth on the issues. First, he would never go to the UN, then he goes to the UN. There’s case after case of saying one thing, and either doing something else or later changing his mind and doing something to be politically expedient. There are many cases like this that one can point to.

Redwood: I recently wrote a flier for our Kerry volunteers, “Answers to the Top 10 False Charges Against John Kerry,” in which at one point I listed about a dozen Bush flip-flops. To name just a few: Bush promised not to touch the Social Security surplus and then committed over $1 trillion of it to other purposes; he promised to go to war in Iraq only as a last resort and reneged on that promise, halting weapons inspections before they were completed; he inherited an economy with a surplus, promised fiscal discipline, and then ran up the highest budget deficits in history; he opposed creating a Department of Homeland Security, then supported it and took credit for it; he opposed creation of a 9/11 Commission and then supported it; he opposed a time extension for the 9/11 Commission and then supported it; he said gay marriage was a state issue and then proposed a constitutional amendment banning it. The list goes on and on. Are there any other necessary reframings that you’d like to mention?

Lakoff: There’s one, which is that Bush makes use of his image as a strict father to appeal to poor conservatives. There are a lot of poor conservatives out there that vote for Bush because they believe he shares their values and that he’s like them, that he’s like a NASCAR dad and a regular guy. But there’s a very interesting little film clip in Fahrenheit 9/11 of Bush at a fundraising dinner, where he says, “Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

Redwood: Yes, the people that a moment earlier, Bush called “the haves and the have-mores.”

(I like that metaphor, by the way. Conservatism tastes good, but is bad for you. Just like sweet, sweet candy!)

Clinton was elected because he was as left wing as my right testicle. The man was content to go on randomly bombing, but not solving the issue of Iraq (by removing the bastard), to build up the military, to talk about but never ratify Kyoto, and worst of all, to popularise the bullshit-with-a-smile gesture politics which gave Britain the horrors of New Labour.

American leftism (and British leftism) needs to stand up and give itself a good, hard kick in the arse, and stop fooling around. If the conservative scaremongers were right, and left-wing politics (even my preferred model, that of moderate and sensible socialist ideas combined with the tried, tested and true framework of a liberal democracy)is weak and economically stifling, then how do you explain the success of countries like Canada and Sweden, veritable havens of progressive governmental thought? There needs to be a revolution of sorts among the American left - to show that sensible, leftist social democracy can benefit BOTH the little guy and the big guy at the same time. But that isn't going to happen with John Kerry, nor would it have happened with Al Gore, neither of which have the balls to stand up and actually offer a progressive alternative to the Enron-loving, "compassionate" (since when was fucking everyone's welfare, job security and civil liberty in the ass on a regular basis "compassionate"?) conservatives who, at this rate, will continue to dominate American politics for the forseeable future.

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