Whose Freedom? Democrats claim the key moral frame

It’s official: The Democratic Party has finally figured out the freedom frame. Freedom was the official theme of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and it’s the theme of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign.

Readers of FrameLab know that Dr. George Lakoff has been urging Democrats to adopt this framing for decades. And now the rest of the nation is noticing. From a Washington Post piece headline “How Democrats snatched ‘freedom’ back from Trump and the Republicans”:

In 2006, the linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff published a book to address a striking political development: The quintessentially American concept of “freedom” had recently been commandeered by the right.
“There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews,” he wrote. The traditional view of freedom, as he saw it, was inherently progressive, all about broadening and upholding opportunities and rights for a growing range of Americans. But in the second view, freedom was a way of describing the case against this expansion, casting it as an imposition by government against an older libertarian, imperialist, pro-Christian way of life to which we needed to return.

Click here for a gift link to the piece by Amanda Katz.

Meanwhile, over at DC Report, Mark Karlin writes:

You wouldn’t consider George Lakoff a likely candidate to save democracy. But what the Harris-Walz campaign owes him is immeasurable.

The repetitive use of the image and message of “freedom” in the Harris-Walz campaign, including in Harris’s video announcing her candidacy, comes directly from Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea.

Lakoff’s book, published in 2007 and republished this year, turns the GOP’s repetitious “patriotic” justification of reactionary policies on its head.

Read: The Savvy Scientist Helping Democrats Become the Party of Freedom.

It’s great to see Dr. Lakoff’s work finally breaking through. The main purpose of FrameLab has been to keep his ideas front and center. But it’s crucial that Democrats continue to grasp the principles of framing — because there’s a lot more to it than just the freedom frame.

But the freedom frame is very important! This week, we’ll be recording a special episode of the FrameLab podcast to discuss it. Do you have any questions for Dr. Lakoff about freedom, framing and the 2024 election? Leave them in the comments (or send them to gil@theframelab.org) and we’ll pick a few to answer.

Thanks for reading!