This book is written for people like Penney Kolb. Progressives
are constantly put in positions where they are expected to respond
to conservative arguments. It may be over Thanksgiving dinner,
around the water cooler, or in front of an audience. But because
conservatives have commandeered so much of the language, progressives
are often put on the defensive with little or nothing to say
in response.
Progressive values are the best of traditional American values.
Stand up for your values with dignity and strength. You are a
true patriot because of your values.
Remember that right-wing ideologues have convinced half of the
country that the strict father family model, which is bad enough
for raising children, should govern our national morality and
politics.
This is the model that the best in American values has defeated
over and over again in the course of our history—from the
emancipation of the slaves to women’s suffrage, Social Security
and Medicare, civil rights and voting rights acts, and Brown
v. the Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Each time we have
unified our country more behind our finest traditional values.
Remember that everybody has both strict and nurturant models,
either actively or passively, perhaps active in different parts
of their lives. Your job is to activate for politics the nurturant,
progressive values already there (perhaps only passively) in
your interlocutors.
Show respect to the conservatives you are responding to. No one
will listen to you if you don’t accord them respect. Listen
to them. You may disagree strongly with everything that is being
said, but you should know what is being said. Be sincere. Avoid
cheap shots. What if they don’t show you respect? Two wrongs
don’t make a right. Turn the other cheek and show respect
anyway. That takes character and dignity. Show character and
dignity.
Avoid a shouting match. Remember that the radical right requires
a culture war, and shouting is the discourse form of that culture
war. Civil discourse is the discourse form of nurturant morality.
You win a victory when the discourse turns civil. They win when
they get you to shout.
What if you have moral outrage? You should have moral outrage.
But you can display it with controlled passion. If you lose control,
they win.
Distinguish between ordinary conservatives and nasty ideologues.
Most conservatives are personally nice people, and you want to
bring out their niceness and their sense of neighborliness and
hospitality.
Be calm. Calmness is a sign that you know what you are talking
about.
Be good-humored. A good-natured sense of humor shows you are
comfortable with yourself.
Hold your ground. Always be on the offense. Never go on defense.
Never whine or complain. Never act like a victim. Never plead.
Avoid the language of weakness, for example, rising intonations
on statements. Your voice should be steady. Your body and voice
should show optimism. You should convey passionate conviction
without losing control.
Conservatives have parodied liberals as weak, angry (hence not
in control of their emotions), weak-minded, softhearted, unpatriotic,
uninformed, and elitist. Don’t give them any opportunities
to stereotype you in any of these ways. Expect these stereotypes,
and deal with them when they come up.
By the way you conduct yourself, show strength, calmness, and
control; an ability to reason; a sense of realism; love of country;
a command of the basic facts; and a sense of being an equal,
not a superior. At the very least you want your audience to think
of you with respect, as someone they may disagree with but who
they have to take seriously. In many situations this is the best
you can hope for. You have to recognize those situations and
realize that a draw with dignity is a victory in the game of
being taken seriously.
Many conversations are ongoing. In an ongoing conversation, your
job is to establish a position of respect and dignity, and then
keep it.
Don’t expect to convert staunch conservatives.
You can make considerable progress with biconceptuals, those
who use both models but in different parts of their life. They
are your best audience. Your job is to capture territory of the
mind. With biconceptuals your goal is to find out, if you can
by probing, just which parts of their life they are nurturant
about. For example, ask who they care about the most, what responsibilities
they feel they have to those they care about, and how they carry
out those responsibilities. This should activate their nurturant
models as much as possible. Then, while the nurturant model is
active for them, try linking it to politics. For example, if
they are nurturant at home but strict in business, talk about
the home and family and how they relate to political issues.
Example: Real family values mean that your parents, as they age,
don’t have to sell their home or mortgage their future to
pay for health care or the medications they need.
Avoid the usual mistakes. Remember, don’t just negate the
other person’s claims; reframe. The facts unframed will
not set you free. You cannot win just by stating the true facts
and showing that they contradict your opponent’s claims.
Frames trump facts. His frames will stay and the facts will bounce
off. Always reframe.
If you remember nothing else about framing, remember this: Once
your frame is accepted into the discourse, everything you say
is just common sense.* Why? Because that’s what common sense
is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame.
Never answer a question framed from your opponent’s point
of view. Always reframe the question to fit your values and your
frames. This may make you uncomfortable, since normal discourse
styles require you to directly answer questions posed. That is
a trap. Practice changing frames.
Be sincere. Use frames you really believe in, based on values
you really hold.
A useful thing to do is to use rhetorical questions: *Wouldn’t
it be better if...? Such a question should be chosen to presuppose
your frame. Example:* Wouldn’t it be better if we had a
president who went to war with a plan to secure the peace?
Stay away from set-ups. Fox News shows and other rabidly conservative
shows try to put you in an impossible situation, where a conservative
host sets the frame and insists on it, where you don’t control
the floor, can’t present your case, and are not accorded
enough respect to be taken seriously. If the game is fixed, don’t
play.
Tell a story. Find stories where your frame is built into the
story. Build up a stock of effective stories.
Always start with values, preferably values all Americans share
like security, prosperity, opportunity, freedom, and so on. Pick
the values most relevant to the frame you want to shift to. Try
to win the argument at the values level. Pick a frame where your
position exemplifies a value everyone holds — like fairness.
Example: Suppose someone argues against a form of universal health
care. If people don’t have health care, he argues, it’s
their own fault. They’re not working hard enough or not
managing their money properly. We shouldn’t have to pay
for their lack of initiative or their financial mismanagement.
Frame shift: Most of the forty million people who can’t
afford health care work full-time at essential jobs that cannot
pay enough to get them health care. Yet these working people
support the lifestyles of the top three-quarters of our population.
Some forty million people have to do those hard jobs — or
you don’t have your lifestyle. America promises a decent
standard of living in return for hard work. These workers have
earned their health care by doing essential jobs to support the
economy. There is money in the economy to pay them. Tax credits
are the easiest mechanism. Their health care would be covered
by having the top 2 percent pay the same taxes they used to pay.
It’s only fair that the wealthy pay for their own lifestyles,
and that people who provide those lifestyles get paid fairly
for it.
Be prepared. You should be able to recognize the basic frames
that conservatives use, and you should prepare frames to shift
to. The Rockridge Institute Web site will post examples from
time to time. Example: Your opponent says, We should get rid
of taxes. People know how to spend their money better than the
government. Reframe: “The government has made very wise
investments with taxpayer money. Our interstate highway system,
for example. You couldn’t build a highway with your tax
refund. The government built them. Or the Internet, paid for
by taxpayer investment. You could not make your own Internet.
Most of our scientific advances have been made through funding
from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute
of Health — great government investments of taxpayer money.
No matter how wisely you spent your own money, you’d never
get those scientific and medical breakthroughs. And how far would
you get hiring your own army with your tax refund?
Use wedge issues, cases where your opponent will violate some
belief he holds no matter what he says. Example: Suppose he brings
up abortion. Raise the issue of military rape treatment. Women
soldiers who are raped (by our own soldiers, in Iraq, or on military
bases) and who subsequently get pregnant presently cannot end
their pregnancies in a military hospital, because abortions are
not permitted there. A Military Rape Treatment Act would allow
our raped women soldiers to be treated in military hospitals
to end their rapeinduced pregnancies. The wedge: If he agrees,
he sanctions abortion, in government-supported facilities no
less, where doctors would have to be trained and facilities provided
for terminating pregnancies. If he disagrees, he dishonors our
women soldiers who are putting their lives on the line for him.
To the women it is like being raped twice — once by a criminal
soldier and once by a self-righteous conservative.
An opponent may be disingenuous if his real goal isn’t what
he says his goal is. Politely point out the real goal, then reframe.
Example: Suppose he starts touting smaller government. Point
out that conservatives don’t really want smaller government.
They don’t want to eliminate the military, or the FBI, or
the Treasury and Commerce Departments, or the nine-tenths of
the courts that support corporate law. It is big government that
they like. What they really want to do away with is social programs
— programs that invest in people, to help people to help
themselves. Such a position contradicts the values the country
was founded on — the idea of a community where people pull
together to help each other. From John Winthrop on, that is what
our nation has stood for.
Your opponent may use language that means the opposite of what
he says, called Orwellian language. Realize that he is weak on
this issue. Use language that accurately describes what he’s
talking about to frame the discussion your way. Example: Suppose
he cites the “Healthy Forests Initiative” as a balanced
approach to the environment. Point out that it should be called
“No Tree Left Behind” because it permits and promotes
clear-cutting, which is destructive to forests and other living
things in the forest habitat. Use the name to point out that
the public likes forests, doesn’t want them clear-cut, and
that the use of the phony name shows weakness on the issue. Most
people want to preserve the grandeur of America, not destroy
it.
Remember once more that our goal is to unite our country behind
our values, the best of traditional American values. Right-wing
ideologues need to divide our country via a nasty cultural civil
war. They need discord and shouting and name-calling and put-downs.
We win with civil discourse and respectful cooperative conversation.
Why? Because it is an instance of the nurturant model at the
level of communication, and our job is to evoke and maintain
the nurturant model.
Reprinted with permission from Chelsea Green, publishers of
"Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame
the Debate".