According to George Lakoff, what do we need to do to build a true progressive movement?

"Democracy is about empathy -- caring about your fellow citizens, which leads to the principles of freedom and fairness for all. Empathy requires both personal and social responsibility. The ethic of excellence means making the world better by making yourself better, your family better, your community better, and your nation better. Government has two moral missions: protection and empowerment for all. To carry them out, government must be by, for, and of the people."

-- Barack Obama, as quoted by George Lakoff
in "Where's the Movement?"

"We have a triple disaster on our hands: the administration’s failure at deal-making in the name of pragmatism and bipartisanship; the Tea Party victory in Massachusetts fueling and propelling ultra-conservatism; and the anti-democratic 5-4 ruling of the Roberts Court. We can no longer sit on our hands and just criticize the President, or give him advice and hope he can do it alone. We have to provide the answer to his question: Where’s the movement?"

-- George Lakoff, conclusion of the above piece

by Ken

Much lip service is paid to the need for building progressive "infrastructure," and finding funding that, if not comparable to what happens on the Right (which is simply never going to be possible), at least enables us to progress toward a progressive program that can withstand the blitz from the super-moneyed Right over the last 40 years.

As I am frequently reminded, even in this penurious climate there is a good deal of good work going on, to which we don't pay anywhere near enough attention. I'm as gulty of this as anyone, and my first new year's resolution is to try to rectify it. We're not talking here about screaming back and forth about hot-button issues; we're talking about laying the groundwork for a movement that can provide workable solutions to our problems over a period of decades.

From that standpoint, it's hard to measure the disaster of the Apriil 2008 suspension of operation of George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute. Of course Lakoff didn't disappear, and he remains one of the most eloquent and insightful thinkers on our team. Yesterday I called attention to a new piece he has written for the Dog Canyon blog, "Where's the Movement?"

Late in the piece he quotes the above paragraph from Barack Obama, to which he has already made frequent allusion. He continues:

It’s only a paragraph. The principles apply to all issues. That’s the basis of a democracy movement. That’s what separates a movement from a coalition. Coalitions are based on interests. Movements are based on principles. We need a movement that transcends interests and goes beyond coalitions.

Movements also transcend particular policies. The framing of moral principles comes first and the policies elaborate on the principles. The way to unite a movement is to form policies that carry out the principles in ways that everyone can understand.

I'm far from an expert on the thinking of George Lakoff, but I do get the sense of considerable frustration that much of what he has said and written has been misunderstood. It's my impression that one of the chief sources of irritation is the misunderstanding of his basic idea of "framing" of messages. As he makes clear in "Where's the Movement?," his work is based on understanding the underlying beliefs of groups to whom political pitches may be directed. Instead, his idea of framing seems to have been hijacked into a system for crafting better slogans to trick people into supporting ideas or candidates you want them to support.

The conservatives are winning the framing wars again -- by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has.

But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal-making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner, assuming it would be “pragmatic” to court corporations and move to the right, in the false hope of bipartisan support. A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand, and that made ordinary folks feel they were being bamboozled. And in many cases, they were.

Lakoff points out:

Democrats still have the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate, but the momentum is on the conservative side. Their victories in the framing wars have inevitably led to a crucial electoral victory and to a Supreme Court death threat to democracy itself, framed as free speech.

Democrats have electoral power, but progressives have not created an effective movement to take advantage of that power.

Now we come to the heart of the piece:

“Where’s the movement?”

In the emerging Obama mythology, this is the question attributed to President Obama whenever he is asked to take the lead on a progressive issue. It is not an idle question. Leaders can only lead if there is a pre-existing movement for them to get in front of.

Moreover, there are other conditions. The idea behind a movement, and the language expressing its goals, must also pre-exist in public discourse. In other words, the movement must already have:

• a popular base;
• organizing tools;
• a generally accepted morally-based conceptual framing;
• an overall narrative, with heroes, victims, and villains;
• a readily recognizable, well-understood language;
• funding sources;
• and a national communication system set up for both leaders and ordinary citizens to use.

The base is there, waiting for something worth getting behind. The organizing tools are there. The rest is not there.

That is the present reality. Expecting Obama to be FDR was politically unrealistic. And complaining that he isn’t doesn’t move anything forward.

Howard Dean was right when he said, “YOU have the power.” What is needed is an organized activist public with a positive understanding of what our values are and how to link them to every issue. Barney Frank was only half-right when he said that the public gets active only when it is angry. That may be true for isolated issues — he was talking about regulating Wall Street. But anger is directed at isolated negatives. An effective movement must be positive, organized, and long-term, where an overall positive understanding defines the isolated negatives. And it must have all of the above.

As I pointed out yesterday, Lakoff's immediate project is the California Democracy Movement, which aims to restore governance of the state to the people of the state by amending the state constitution to include the simple proposition: "All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote." As he explained, this is going to require creating a genuine movement.

No, although messaging is indeed crucially important, this truly isn't a matter of crafting catchy slogans.

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