When I teach framing in Cognitive Science 101, I start with an
exercise. I give my students a directive:
Don't think of an elephant. It can't be done, of course, and that's
the point. In order not to think of an elephant, you have to think of an
elephant. The word elephant evokes an image and a frame. If you negate the
frame, you still activate the frame. Richard Nixon never took Cognitive
Science 101. When he said,
I am not a crook, he made everybody think of him as a crook.
If you have been framed, the only response is to reframe. But you can't do
it in a sound bite unless an appropriate progressive language has been
built up in advance. Conservatives have worked for decades and spent
billions on their think tanks to establish their frames, create the right
language, and get the language and the frames they evoke accepted. It has
taken them awhile to establish the metaphors of taxation as a burden, an
affliction and an unfair punishment – all of which require "relief." They
have also, over decades, built up the frame in which the wealthy create
jobs, and giving them more wealth creates more jobs.
Taxes look very different when framed from a progressive point of view. As
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, taxes are the price of civilization.
They are what you pay to live in America – your dues – to have democracy,
opportunity and access to all the infrastructure that previous taxpayers
have built up and made available to you: highways, the Internet, weather
reports, parks, the stock market, scientific research, Social Security,
rural electrification, communications satellites, and on and on. If you
belong to America, you pay a membership fee and you get all that
infrastructure plus government services: flood control, air-traffic
control, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control
and so on.
Interestingly, the wealthy benefit disproportionately from the American
infrastructure. The Securities and Exchange Commission creates honest stock
markets. Most of the judicial system is used for corporate law. Drugs
developed with National Institutes of Health funding can be patented for
private profit. Chemical companies hire scientists trained under National
Science Foundation grants. Airlines hire pilots trained by the Air Force.
The beef industry grazes its cattle cheaply on public lands. The more
wealth you accumulate using what the dues payers have provided, the greater
the debt you owe to those who have made your wealth possible. That is the
logic of progressive taxation.
No entrepreneur makes it on his own in America. The American infrastructure
makes entrepreneurship possible, and others have put it in place. If you've
made a bundle, you owe a bundle. The least painful way to repay your debt
to the nation is posthumously, through the inheritance tax.
Those who don't pay their dues are turning their backs on our country.
American corporations registering abroad to avoid taxes are deserting our
nation when their estimated $70 billion in dues and service payments are
badly needed, for schools and for rescuing our state and local governments.
Reframing takes awhile, but it won't happen if we don't start. The place to
begin is by understanding how progressives and conservatives think. In
1994, I dutifully read the "Contract with America" and found myself unable
to comprehend how conservative views formed a coherent set of political
positions. What, I asked myself, did opposition to abortion have to do with
the flat tax? What did the flat tax have to do with opposition to
environmental regulations? What did defense of gun ownership have to do
with tort reform? Or tort reform with opposition to affirmative action? And
what did all of the above have to do with family values? Moreover, why do
conservatives and progressives talk past one another, not with one another?
The answer is that there are distinct conservative and progressive
worldviews. The two groups simply see the world in different ways. As a
cognitive scientist, I've found in my research that these political
worldviews can be understood as opposing models of an ideal family – a
strict father family and a nurturant parent family. These family models
come with moral systems, which in turn provide the deep framing of all
political issues.
Lakoff goes on to describe "The Strict Father Family" as well as "The
Nurturant Parent Family," and he tells how they express themselves as
policy values to be used in promoting a progressive frame.
