Breaking Frames
Framing Power: How Political Metaphors Shape Democracy
In today's newsletter: First, a short (3 minute) analysis of how the New York Times used a troubling
'The main battlefield is the brain': Saturday reading and book club update
4 min read
Here's a quick reading and an update (and reader poll!) for our FrameLab Book Club members.
From The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics by Dr. George Lakoff:
"Radical conservatives have been fighting a culture war. The main battlefield is the brain. At stake is what America is to be. Their goal is to radically change America to fit the conservative moral worldview. The threat is to democracy and all that goes with it. Not just here, but wherever American influence extends.
"American values are fundamentally progressive, centered on equality, human rights, social responsibility, and the inclusion of all. Yet progressives have, without knowing why, given conservatives an enormous advantage in the culture war. The radical conservatives seek and have already begun to introduce: an authoritarian hierarchy based on vast concentrations and control of wealth; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken government; no balance of power; priorities shifted from the public sector to the corporate and military sectors; responsibility shifted from society to the individual; control of elections through control of who votes and how the votes are counted; control of ideas through the media; and patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics, and the market. The future of democracy is at stake, now.
"Social change is material (who controls what wealth), institutional (who runs what powerful institutions), and political (who wins elections). But the main battlefield of the culture war is the brain, especially how the brain functions below the level of consciousness. Progressives have accepted an old view of reason, dating back to the Enlightenment, namely, that reason is conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied, and serves self-interest. As the cognitive and brain sciences have been showing, this is a false view of reason. Oddly enough, this matters. It may sound like an academic issue, but this assumption about the nature of reason has stood in the way of an effective progressive defense and advancement of democracy. Progressives have ceded the political mind to radical conservatives."
FrameLab Book Club
In 2008, Dr. George Lakoff published The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. It predicted the rise of an authoritarian Republican Party and urged Democrats to take the threat seriously. It explained how Republicans were manipulating the brains of American voters and argued that Democrats needed to counteract this.
This month, the FrameLab Book Club will read the book in its entirety, and Dr. Lakoff will answer reader questions via this newsletter and the FrameLab podcast.
Over 500 readers have signed up to participate! With so many participants, we'll have to be creative in how we structure a meaningful conversation.
The Important Book Club Info:
Here's our plan for week 1: Read the introduction, as well as chapters 1 and 2. Beginning Friday and Saturday Jan 10-11, we'll start taking reader questions on these sections (via email, the comments section, social media, and possibly even a Zoom meeting led by a special guest).
If you plan to participate in the book club, please fill out this quick poll so we have a better idea of how to interact with you:
FrameLab Book Club: Political Mind questions
If you haven't gotten your copy of the book yet, it's time! Check your local library or buy your book or audiobook from one of the links below:
- East Bay Booksellers (Just reopening after a fire!)
- Powell's Books (Portland's "City of Books")
- Better World Books (Buy books, do good in the world)
- FrameLab is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, and if you order the book from this link , you can support independent bookstores and FrameLab.
(And, of course, the book is available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon)
2025 FrameLab surge
Our list of ways to "Keep Democracy Alive in 2025" has gone viral and resulted in new surge in FrameLab subscribers. Welcome all! Below is a three-minute episode of the FrameLab podcast in which I go through the top 10 points from our list:
27. Keep Democracy Alive in 2025
In this mini-episode of the FrameLab podcast, Gil Duran talks about the viral “Keep Democracy Alive in 2025” list of tips that he and Dr. George Lakoff published on the FrameLab newsletter.
http://www.theframelab.org
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