POLITICS
My Morals Are Stronger Than Your Morals
The claims of Democrats versus Republicans
During the presidential election of 2000 the country went from a Democratic to a Republican administration, from President Bill Clinton to President George W. Bush. Why had a successful and popular Democratic administration failed to leverage those successes into a continuation of its policies? What caused the flip to a Republican administration, which promptly made a 180 policy U-turn?
George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist (now emeritus), proposed a reason for the unexpected change. He wrote that it wasn’t so much about which party had the loftiest moral credentials, but which could best convince the electorate that it did.
Lakoff supposed that the Democrats, who were trying to elect Al Gore in 2000, had muffed the messaging. Gore’s campaign was focused on the dangers lying ahead, particularly in the worsening environmental picture and he proposed an impressive policy agenda, one he was not able to carry out. He did come close though. He won the popular vote, but lost to the dragon killers of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.
What could the Democratic campaign have done differently to avoid the nail-biting, disappointing conclusion of that election? Was it a matter of the campaign’s substance lacking teeth or was it the framing of the message that lacked teeth? Lakoff assumed the latter.
Lakoff was a formidable figure in cognitive linguistics, with a secure place up there in the pantheon. He made his professional reputation in the study of metaphor and framing, arguing that metaphors importantly, though not exclusively, shape our languages and cultures. People are creative in using metaphors to understand conventional realities in sensory experience. Concepts like “love, hate, grief, and happiness” depend for their cultural impact on metaphoric definitions.
To communicate these fuzzy concepts people rely on metaphors, where the most powerful of them are embodied in our biology and evolutionary history. Love is: “friendship on fire (Ann Landers),” “a transformational force (Martin Luther King),” “a beautiful garden (Rumi),” “a virus (Maya Angelou).” In the political arena, Lakoff reasoned that the Democratic party operated on the metaphor of the country as a nurturing family, while the Republican party looked on it as a strict parent.
Lakoff spun out this distinction between liberals and conservatives in his 1996 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Who would you rather have as a parent? Answer that and the pundits with some accuracy could predict how you’ll vote. Not infallibly, of course. People aren’t rigidly programmed.
So what if actual parenting involves both nurturing and discipline, which is closer to the reality? Do you come out of childhood with an appreciation for both? What if who wins elections depends on convincing the electorate that the country is not one or the other, but rather pivots more one way or the other, depending on policy area and circumstances. In that case the successful party has to frame its arguments, again with the help of metaphors, to make its case. Lakoff argued in subsequent books that the Republicans did this messaging better than Democrats. Much better!
As a for instance, I looked at the 2000 election where Bush faced Gore, and tallied the metaphors each candidate used in his respective announcement speech. I’ve separated these into Negative and Positive categories depending on my sense of the core intent of the metaphor. The Negatives are typically used to identify weaknesses of the opposition; the positives strengths in contrast to the opposition.
Bush’s metaphors invoked the following language:
Negatives: regulations strangle, struggling families, outskirts of poverty, world of terror, aging weapons, failing intelligence, the fearful build walls.
Positives or neutrals: prosperity economy, the heart’s dream, compassionate conservative, embrace free trade, break down barriers, the confident tear walls down, sharpened sword, iron policy, quiet river cutting through stone, compassionate armies, blow whistle on failure, private property as backbone, front porch campaign.
Gore’s metaphors in contrast:
Negatives: hoping for crumbs of compassion, hunger and thirst for goodness, time deficit, decency deficit, care deficit, empty tables, guns on the street too common, marketing of cruelty, degradation, undermining of Social Security, ducking issues, broken families, hatreds tear apart, foreign policy not a game, arena of politics.
Positives or neutrals: seeing with the heart, history as rudder, ideals and values as compass, neighbor as a moral term, faith lights, clean start, fresh century.
The pattern is pretty evident to my linguist eyes. The Democrat comes across as widely concerned, but vague on policy solutions; the Republican as bold and armored, ready to do battle, but not specific on the problems.
Lakoff cited evidence of this sort as proof that the Democrats had a message framing problem, one that they needed to correct to better appeal to the electorate. His diagnosis and prescription found a lot of positive reception among politicos and for a while Dr. Lakoff, PhD, became a kind of celebrity physician in Democratic circles.
He set up a non-profit called the Rockridge Institute in 1997 and in 2006 published a kind of progressive manifesto titled Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision. This book specified remedies to the framing problem.
But almost coincident with the election of 2008, Rockridge closed due to a lack of funding. It’s curious to me why the Democratic establishment decided not to continue funding a think tank that poked under the surface and seemed to be pushing out good advice. Lakoff’s insights had lost traction.
I believe it’s clear from the 2008 election that the Democrats had learned something, at least, about successful framing because their candidate, Barack Obama, went on to win that election and the next as well. So maybe the Democrats thought about Lakoff, “Lesson learned, thanks, we’ll take it from here.”
But that might not be all of it. It turns out that the politicos got a second opinion from another doctor in the person of Jonathan Haidt, also PhD, a psychologist interested in morality and happiness.
In 2006 Haidt published the Happiness Hypothesis and then six years later in 2012 followed it up with The Righteous Mind. Both books emphasize that emotions are the primary driver of the actions we take, which may or may not result in success or happiness. Our rational functions serve the emotions; they do not as such control them. They’re not unimportant, but their importance is secondary. More like an editor or a judge. This, by the way, is entirely congruent with Lakoff’s thinking.
Haidt analyzed his way to this conclusion based on experimental research, including fMRI scanning, which can show what areas of the brain light up when triggered by different kinds of moral and ethical propositions. His field is moral psychology, rather than linguistics, so his focus is aimed at a higher mental and social construct than Lakoff’s. There is, nevertheless, a significant overlap in their thinking in respect to politics. Both speculate on the differences between progressive liberals and conservatives and come up with similar diagnoses. (Haidt also gives special attention to libertarians, not to be confused with liberals.)
In keeping with our American tendency to prefer this morning’s coffee over yesterdays dregs, the Democrats switched to Haidt from Lakoff. But it was not just because Haidt was the new kid on the block.
The switch I believe happened in part because of the following quote in Lakoff’s Thinking Points.
Effective campaigns must communicate the candidates’ values and use issues symbolically — as indicative of their moral values and their trustworthiness.
It’s that mention of “moral values,” that came back to bite Lakoff. As Haidt’s research shows — and remember that Haidt specializes in moral psychology — Democrats operate with a more limited, less expansive set of moral values than Republicans.
Haidt postulates six foundations for morality: caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. His empirical research finds statistical evidence that Democrats are heavy on the first three, especially caring, but light on the last three. Republicans, by contrast, are more or less equally weighted on all six. This being the case, Republican messaging can hit on more points that click with more voters than can Democratic messaging.
If you go back to the talking points for the Bush and Gore campaign launch speeches, you can see the truth of this generalization. Gore is mostly about righting wrongs (caring and fairness). While Bush admits to some wrongs (some caring), he emphasizes toughness and duty (loyalty and authority).
On balance, then, the Republicans have more opportunity than Democrats to use metaphors across a wider range of psychological constructs. In other words they could take Lakoff’s own work and use it against the political goals he was aiming for. So, according to Lakoff’s research, Republicans would be more amenable to metaphor as a credible explanatory system for their base, than, say, the fright statistics coming from the Democrats — their base whose moral core is more centered on authority (military defense) and sanctity (religion).
Sophia Rosenfeld in her book Democracy and Truth (2018) captures the reality of this idea for todays conservatives:
Populists … tend to reject science and its methods as a source of directives, embracing in many cases emotional honesty, intuition, and truths of the heart over dry factual veracity and scientific evidence, testing, and credentialing.
So here we are. The facts are the facts. Majorities believe racism is systemic, majorities want guns off the street, majorities want access to abortion, majorities want a living wage, majorities want affordable housing, etc., etc. If you’re a 21st century Republican, you reject these facts and construct counter arguments using appropriate metaphors: allude to dangerous Black people, affirm that life begins at conception not birth, suggest that poor people benefit from staying poor, reimagine history to say slaves liked being slaves, don’t get scammed by welfare queens, etc., etc. Statistics after all lie, don’t they? Trust your gut.
If you’re a Democrat what do you do? Haidt’s solution published in an article in The Atlantic in 2022 is not to deny the facts, but his solution is kind of weak tea. He suggests engaging with Republicans to benefit from the wider value system they operate under across the whole moral foundation spectrum.
The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.
My own feeling though is that there’s a big hole in that recommendation. The Republican party is manufacturing facts and lying about real facts and then perpetuating those lies. How do you argue productively with conspiracy theorists and information contortionists?
I believe that it would be a better course to go back to Lakoff, say we’re sorry, and tune up the messaging with metaphors that are less dry, dull, and gloomy. Make them appeal to people who are not yet sunk in their own MAGA convictions. Make caring and fairness more appealing by invoking connections to loyalty, authority, and even sanctity. There’s nothing wrong in principle with those moral foundations, as Haidt makes clear. It’s just that having a monopoly on them, as the Republicans mostly do, gives them license to control the particulars for their own purposes.
