George Lakoff: The moral frames behind American political language

In the UCTV lecture George Lakoff: Moral Politics, cognitive linguist George Lakoff discusses moral metaphors, family models and American political communication. He argues that words summon structures of thought, and that political disagreements can rest on different understandings of what is moral.

Take moral accounting. When someone does me a favor, I say, “I owe you one.” If I cause harm, I can make restitution; someone can pay me back in kind, or take something good away from me. Forgiveness resembles forgiving a debt. For Lakoff, the metaphor organizes how people think about morality as well as how they talk.

A frame, he says, is a mental structure that organizes what we know. A cup is a container usually held in one hand, filled with liquid and used for drinking. His classroom exercise is shorter: “Don't think of an elephant.” In his account, negating the word still evokes the frame.

His political example is “tax relief.” Relief suggests an affliction, a person suffering it, a hero who removes it and an adversary who obstructs the hero. Add “tax,” and taxation becomes the affliction. Lakoff argues that even an opponent repeating the phrase can evoke that same frame. It is a surface frame, he says, supported by deeper views of the world.

Lakoff dates his inquiry to the 1992 Republican convention. Dan Quayle, arguing against progressive income tax, asked, “Why should the best people be punished?” Lakoff understood each word but could not see why the sentence was an argument against the tax, even as the audience applauded.

He also could not see what opposition to abortion had to do with a flat tax, environmental regulation or guns. Interviewing people, he heard liberals call it irrational to oppose abortion and support the death penalty, while conservatives called the reverse positions irrational. He treated that disagreement as a question about different moral worldviews.

A student had written about the nation as a family: Americans speak of founding fathers and sending sons and daughters to war. Lakoff worked backward from political positions and proposed two idealized family models, the strict father and the nurturing parent. These are his interpretive models, not an empirical rule describing every conservative or progressive household.

In Lakoff's account, the strict father protects the family from evil and wins in a competitive world. Children need to learn right from wrong. He points to James Dobson's Dare to Discipline as a parallel to the model he constructed, describing punishment as a way to make children develop internal discipline to avoid external punishment.

That discipline, in the model, also enables self-reliance and prosperity. A person who remains poor can consequently be judged insufficiently disciplined. Lakoff connects this to a popularized version of Adam Smith's invisible hand: pursuing one's own profit benefits everyone. He adds that Smith himself was a more complicated thinker.

Read through that logic, taxes and regulation interfere with the pursuit of self-interest. Social programs can be portrayed as harmful because giving people what they have not earned fosters dependence and weakens discipline. This is Lakoff's reconstruction of a moral argument, not a finding that these policies have those effects.

He also describes a hierarchy linking moral authority and power. Among the versions he lists are male over female, white over nonwhite, straight over gay and Christian over non-Christian. He explicitly says some conservatives hold those four views and others do not. Most strict conservatives, he adds, see themselves as moral people.

The second model begins with equal responsibility for raising children. Nurturing requires empathy and responsibility: understanding a child's dreams, caring for the child and also caring for oneself. Parents raise children to care for others and take responsibility for themselves and others. Lakoff insists this is the opposite of permissive parenting.

From that model he draws a political vocabulary. Care includes protection from crime and drugs, but also unsafe cars and environmental poisons. He links it to environmental, worker and consumer protections and safety nets, as well as fairness and equality.

He also connects a fulfilled life to the freedom to pursue dreams, and freedom to opportunity and general prosperity. A nurturing community needs cooperation; cooperation needs trust, and trust needs honesty and openness. These are the values he associates with progressive politics, not a claim that every progressive family follows one pattern.

Lakoff says people can understand both models, even if one is only passive. Someone who lives in a nurturing way can understand an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; a conservative can understand an Oprah program without living by or liking its outlook.

The political middle, in his account, is not a single point halfway between two positions. People may use strict morality in one domain and nurturing morality in another. He describes Reagan Democrats as blue-collar workers who were strict fathers at home but nurturing in union politics, and argues that Reagan deliberately brought home metaphors into politics. That characterization is his interpretation.

Lakoff recounts meeting Reagan strategist Richard Wirthlin, who told him that surveyed voters opposed Reagan's positions yet liked him. In Wirthlin's account, they identified with and trusted Reagan's values. Lakoff uses the story to argue that identity matters alongside policy and material interest; this one recollection cannot establish a general rule about voting.

He criticizes the assumption that facts alone will lead everyone to the same political conclusion. His broad contrast between Democratic and Republican polling practices is also a partisan interpretation. He acknowledges that identity and material interests can coincide, in which case candidates appealing to both may win.

Lakoff's account of conservative influence goes beyond individual phrases. After Barry Goldwater's 1964 defeat, he says, conservatives invested in intellectual infrastructure. He singles out a 1971 Lewis Powell memo and describes support for university positions, research institutions, journals, publishers and media.

At the time of the lecture, he estimated annual spending on conservative think tanks at about $400 million. That figure and his causal history are his claims in the talk. He describes religious, libertarian, fiscal and social conservatives as distinct groups with real tensions, while arguing that aspects of strict morality helped connect them.

He describes Frank Luntz's training materials as a channel from ideas to messages. Some of their arguments, he says, are legitimate; he accuses other environmental language of misleading the public. His claims about the effects of the Clear Skies and Healthy Forests initiatives are political assessments, not policy findings established by this lecture.

Words matter in his account, but a substitute phrase is not enough. Behind surface language are broader frames: his examples include individual initiative, an unregulated market and government as an obstacle. He says he found these recurring assumptions in arguments about Social Security.

Lakoff uses Hurricane Katrina to show how he thinks the same event can enter competing frames. He describes the suffering and poverty visible in New Orleans, Louisiana and Mississippi, and argues that human decisions contributed to the disaster's consequences.

He cites warming waters, federal emergency management policy and money for levees in making that case. These are his causal and policy claims from the lecture, not independently verified conclusions here. He criticizes Democratic leaders for failing to make the contrast he wanted between using common resources for the common good and an individual “sink or swim” outlook.

He also says conservatives framed the disaster as proof that government had failed and favored private enterprise in rebuilding. His own conclusion is that framing is more than finding a slogan: it concerns how people honestly understand events and express what they believe. The values must be real to the speaker; changing the words alone does not supply them.

Adapted from University of California Television's George Lakoff: Moral Politics.