The Political Mind: Q&A with Dr. Lakoff
In today's edition of FrameLab: First, a link to a thoughtful piece by Antonia Scatton, who writes a
Donald Trump is waging war on Earth and its people — but the people mostly don’t know it.
Summary: Drawing on over 50 years as a communications strategist, FrameLab contributor David Fenton outlines how to help Americans grasp the threat of Global Heating. In this three-minute read, he explains how the climate movement is losing the information war, and lays out ideas for how to win.
“If progressives lose the future, it will not be due to a lack of good policy ideas. If we lose the future, ceding democracy to authoritarians or bad corporate actors, it will be due mostly to a stunning failure to communicate with people in simple language that connects with them on the level of their moral values. And it will be due to a stubborn rejection of tried-and-true scientific methods of mass communications—methods that conservatives have repeatedly deployed to winning effect.”
Dr. George Lakoff wrote these words in the introduction to my book, The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator. Unfortunately, his words precisely describe our current predicament.
Democrats and progressives ceded the narrative propaganda war to Trump. We failed to communicate at the level of people’s values or daily struggles — if we communicated at all. We built no lasting mass or digital media institutions or even a corps of social media influencers to counter the right. We suffer from what Lakoff has dubbed “the Enlightenment fallacy” — that great ideas sell themselves. They don’t. We are now seeing, in real time, the consequences of this failure across almost every issue of importance.
The good news is that we still have time to fix these issues and reclaim power for the public good. However, we must act quickly to protect democracy and ensure that Earth remains a livable planet.
Trump is waging war on Earth and its people — but the people mostly don’t know it. Trump is putting oil and chemical lobbyists in charge of dirtying our air and water while claiming to be for “clean air and water.” The oil, coal, and gas industries are now effectively running all branches of government. Trump is propping up their collapsing markets by opposing electric cars and even sun and wind power, our cheapest and most abundant forms of energy.
Unfortunately, the public generally doesn’t know that more drilling means more destruction. They don’t yet associate fossil fuel burning with wildfire smoke in their lungs, asthma in their children, or the heat waves, droughts, storms, and floods affecting them now. Fully two-thirds of the American public reports that they “rarely or never” even see or hear anything about climate change in the media or from their friends. Most people can’t tell you what causes climate change or how to solve it. Clean energy is the cheapest energy on Earth, but most people think the opposite is true.
Sadly, this is the collective failure of the climate movement.
But it isn’t too late. We can still save a livable Earth, but only if the public rises against the extinction profiteers. That is the only antidote to the corrupt takeover of our government by oil, coal, and gas. Only a mass movement can save us — but that requires an educated public that fully grasps what is at stake for their families. We must make this the priority of the climate movement.
On the bright side, we have most of the data we need to apply linguistics, framing, metaphor, and cognitive science to solve the public knowledge deficit. Our community has all the resources we need to build the infrastructure to transform the political and public will on climate. But we are spending most of it on science, policy, and law instead of public knowledge, urgency, and mobilization.
Meanwhile, the extreme right has built up a network of digital media institutions and influencers. This is how Trump won. The pro-democracy, pro-planet side has mostly not done this. The extreme right has a unified echo chamber to stay on message relentlessly. We have a progressive Tower of Babel. The right prioritizes simple messages and images — and the means to deliver them repetitively, as cognitive science teaches. We tend to love complexity and hate repeating ourselves.
We can change, and doing so is an urgent moral necessity. We can build influencer networks, content production studios, media war rooms, and mobilization platforms with broad public appeal. We can micro-target specific audiences and geographies just as much as the Republicans do. We can unify our own truth-based amplification chamber.
Plus, we have a significant advantage: the weather will keep speaking ever louder, unleashing disasters that will awaken tens of millions of Americans, but only if we tell them what’s happening. If we don’t reach the public with a simple conceptual framework to explain why it is happening and which special interests are intent on making it worse out of pure greed, we will lose the future.
I remain steadfastly optimistic and am working full-time to find a solution. When the public realizes what is truly at stake for their health, prosperity, safety, and security, they won’t say, “Go ahead, kill my children. Destroy their future.” Instead, they will demand change and never again vote for candidates who threaten their children’s future. Because they will understand what’s at stake.
Let’s speed up this inevitable cognition while we still have time.
David Fenton is the author of “The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator.” He works on climate public and media education. Connect with him on Bluesky, Twitter, or Facebook. Or you can contact him at https://davidfentonactivist.com/
David spoke with George and Gil on the FrameLab podcast in 2018:
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