What are the reasons people most often give for not voting? A. The parties are all the same B. What happens in DC doesn’t affect me. C. Voting won’t make a difference. But here’s the thing: trying to answer or argue against these reasons is a trap. As cognitive science clearly shows, arguing will simply reinforce people’s strongly held beliefs. What we need to do is change the ground of the conversation completely, to something that has personal emotional resonance.  Here are some suggestions for doing that job.

1. Start by asking what the person or group you are talking to cares about most right now. If it’s something that seems local, remark that their seemingly local item may actually be controlled by legislation made in state capitals or in D.C. If you can give an example of how the opposition voted against or filibustered or otherwise blocked the thing the person or group cares about, all the better. And if you can give examples of bills Democrats passed or tried to pass that would have helped that concern, share that too. (A short list of issues that will definitely be affected by the party that controls the next Senate can be found in note 1. below.)In a recent Democracy for America conference call, Ohio State Senator Nina Turner said, “The ballot box is linked to the bread box.” While this is a great line, I suggest you reverse it in your own conversations: “Your “bread box” (or whatever your audience cares about) is actually controlled by the ballot box, because legislators make the everyday rules you have to live by. And the ones who don’t share your concerns about .…… also have the power to take away the protections you need to be safe and get ahead in life. Say that voting is the best way to protect ourselves from that outcome.
2. If you still get resistance, and if it seems appropriate, say something like this: “If voting doesn’t matter, why is the Right working so hard right now to take the vote away from people of color, the elderly and the poor?” You don’t have to answer your own question. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. Just let that question hang in the air, wait, and, if you need to, simply walk away. If they don’t know about what the Right is doing to restrict voting rights, and they say, “What?” have a short rap prepared about what’s happening. (See link in note 2.) But keep it matter-of-fact and low key on your end. Youdon’t want to get upset. That’s a turn off. You want them to get upset!
3. Avoid passing along horror stories about the Right that contain ridicule, satire, irony, swear words, scandal, or obvious personal attack on particular politicians.That sort of thing makes ordinary, non-political-junkie type people unhappy, despairing, avoidant of anything political, and generally disgusted. This is exactly why the Right does it. They want to keep ordinary people from thinking about politics or voting. It failsus as persuasive framing or “meming.” When we try to do it as an electioneering tactic, it’s just ad hominem attack that either backfires or is merely time-wasting fun for the already convinced. I know you are mad. All of us on the left are mad. But now we have to take our republic to a whole new place. That requires a clear head, skill, and messaging self-discipline about doing real, feet on the ground framing.

Finally, always conclude by going positive about the good outcomes of what could happen, if the American public, and your audience in particular, votes in large numbers. Give some specific examples of what kinds of good things could happen that are connected to your audience’s concerns. Say how important it is to start moving forward together again to solve our nation’s problems. Say that we can help America get back on the right track again! And say that to make that happen, everyone needs to vote in November! Finish up with: This election really matters!

Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., is the Founder and Executive Director of The Metaphor Project, metaphorproject.org,  and author of our new book, Move Our Message: How to Get America’s Ear.  The Metaphor Project has been helping progressives mainstream their messages since 1997. Follow Susan on Twitter @SusanCStrong.

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1. Issues in play because of this election: In the same DFA call where I heard State Senator Nina Turner mention that great “bread box” metaphor, we heard Professor George Lakoff speak in detail about the way all progressive issues boil down to freedom issues—freedom defined as a progressive value. Making his message a bit more succinct, the progressive set of issues is an expression of two aspects of our freedom value:freedom from immoral blocks to equal opportunity and freedom to be “the best we can be,” without having to risk life and limb for it by joining the military!
Getting more specific, here’s Robert Reich’s list of issues this election will affect:

• Unemployment benefits will not be extended to the long-term unemployed
• No minimum wages—no living wages for that matter
• Continuing education cuts
• Continuing decay of our country’s infrastructure

Here’s another, longer list of issues that could be affected by the election:

Women’s equality issues
Universal background checks
Infrastructure spending (roads & bridges)
Oppose SNAP cuts
Increase minimum wage
Extend unemployment insurance
Reduce income disparity
Close tax loopholes for the 1%
Pathway to citizenship
Medicaid expansion
Public school funding
Contraception mandate
Limiting greenhouse gases
Overturn citizens united

2. For details about Republican vote suppression tries, see:
newrepublic.com/article/119807/voter-id-laws-republican-voter-suppression-needs-stop

Why is it still working? One reason is that mega-corporations have played a dirty trick on us all. Corporate lobbyists used a key element of the ideal American story as a front for their own lawless agenda.  Too many Congress members fell for it.   It’s the big one, for Americans: “freedom.”  Freedom from what?   “Government,” of course.  Well, “freedom” works for us too—freedom from the mega-corp mob and their attacks on us.

But there’s a second reason why the mega-corp coup is gaining on us so fast. It’s about names, frames and despair. Talk of the 1% and the 99% points to our growing inequality. But we need to get more specific about who is doing what to whom and how in an equally powerful way. Some have called the mega-corp mob the “dark state” or the “deep state,” “the shadow government,” or even the “corporate state.”  Those names evoke an abstract force that sounds metaphysically evil,  impossible to fight, defeat, or even find out about.  None of that is true.  So that’s why I am suggesting we talk about a “mega-corp coup” by the” mega-corp mob”.

Next, we require equally visceral language to name our fight back strategies.   The latest entry into this effort is the Mayday Pac, a crowdfunding project to elect candidates committed to real campaign finance reform.  “Mayday” is universally understood to signify a life-threatening emergency. But we also need to pay attention to other levels of the problem.  According to Ralph Nader, in his new book,Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, many Congress members are well aware that bipartisan policy proposals they were willing to join got derailed by subtle parliamentary moves behind the scenes.(2)  These tricks were initiated by a few of their colleagues acting on behalf of the mega-corp mob.  In response, Nader calls for a special “convergence” project, independent of both parties, that would push for increased resistance to corporate “divide and conquer” tactics, protect those willing to fight back, and be in the game for the long haul. (I strongly recommend reading his action proposal,  laid out in Chapter 10 of his new book. Read the rest of the book too!) Nader also suggests that opinion leaders at every level should be publically calling for   more “statesmanship” and “patriotism” from leaders of the corporate world. (That’s a nice positive touch.)

In the meantime, there’s a lot we can do closer to the ground. Already some state legislatures in “red states” have resisted efforts by the Koch brothers to stop them approving alternative energy projects.  Those state representatives, red as they are, understood that the money from green energy stays home and creates jobs. (3) Even at the congressional level, there are now encouraging signs of bipartisan agreement about things like sentencing reform for low level, nonviolent offenders convicted of drug offenses. I’m sure the prison lobbies don’t like it, but Congress members of all stripes have finally got  that our overstuffed prisons are wasting tax payer money. Conservatives want to save government dollars, and liberals want to help the afflicted. This kind of agreement about outcome rises above differing reasons for support. That’s the true American way of solving problems and getting things done.   Nader suggests that there still are a great many other opportunities for this kind of bipartisan problem solving, if we can expose the secret spoilers.

Today, our survival as a people, an economy, and a nation depends on all of that becoming crystal clear to mainstream America.  It’s never been more true–we Americans are one big family, and the mega-corp wolves are at the door, with some very big feet already inside.  We need the rebirth of a vast and deep movement for political and economic reform, but it starts with just two ideas: l. a mega-corps mob is trying to seize complete control of our country and our economy, by hamstringing our governments at every level. 2. When the chips are down, we must all come together to protect our freedom from the biggest, most dangerous threat of all—the mega-corp coup.

Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., is the Founder and Executive Director of The Metaphor Project, metaphorproject.org,  and author of our new book, Move Our Message: How to Get America’s Ear.  The Metaphor Project has been helping progressives mainstream their messages since 1997. Follow Susan on Twitter @SusanCStrong.

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(1) If anyone reading this is puzzled about who is in the mega-corp mob and what they’re up to, here’s a short list: all members of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the Koch brothers, Monsanto, the fossil fuel industry, and almost every other major multinational corporation in the world. Many books and articles have been written about this subject by such noted authors as David Korten, Gar Alperovitz, Hedrick Smith, and others too numerous to name; there’s a great film about it, Who Stole the American Dream?,and the latest issue of YES! Magazine contains a handy chart and summary on pp.18-19 (Fall 2014).   The terms “megacorporations,”  “megacorp” or “mega-corp” are already out there in many other contexts, especially the action/dystopian fantasy/sci-fi/war video gaming world.  Hooking our message to popular mythology may be an important way to make it go viral.

(2) Nation Books, New York, 2014, 240 pp.

(3) See kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article364302/Green-energy-has-been-a-political-giant-but-a-threat-looms-in-Kansas.html

First of all, as my readers are probably all well aware, the struggle to hold on to and increase Republican control of the House of Representatives is still happening at the state level. State legislatures dominated by extreme conservatives are redistricting their states into safe jigsaw puzzles to protect their most radical Tea Party colleagues. In addition, with the Supreme Court’s gutting the most important piece of the Voting Rights Act, many of these same state legislatures are poised to pass increasingly restrictive voter access laws with new impunity. So “crime” and “public safety” are frames probably coming to your state sooner or later too.

With their new “public safety/crime” frames, some Republicans are clearly trying to ride to victory by coopting a recent mainstream frame that has gone viral in a very big way.  I’m speaking of the “gun safety” framing first launched in August 2012 on Twitter after the Sikh Temple Massacre in (Wisconsin): “Say: we need better gun safety laws, not gun control.”(5)  “Gun safety” and “preventing gun violence” are now being used by everyone from MoveOn head Anna Galland, the Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly of Americans for Responsible Solutions, to Vice President Biden and beyond. (The only people still using “gun control” are the NRA, because they know that Americans fear control. The media falls into their trap all too often.) Ninety per cent of the public favors better background check law, along with 85% of gun owners, and 74% of NRA members, because to them, true safety means prevention.  But some Republicans are still hoping they can coopt the “safety” frame to force a return to old style criminal justice policies that ignore prevention, feed the bloated “prison industrial complex,” and lead to massive taxpayer dollar waste. All of which just happen to reduce “true public safety” too. (Always use the italics!)

Prevention actually does stop a lot of crime, and it saves a lot of taxpayer money in the long run too. Moreover, once people have committed a crime, seeing to it that they get education and credible job training while incarcerated, and real support services when released also has a proven track record of reducing follow up crime. A little money spent on these efforts saves a lot more money later.  Lifting the counterproductive legal constraints now existing that keep those released from getting housing or jobs or social services, including food stamps, also reduces follow up crime. (6) If you can’t find a job, a place to live, or enough food, what other options do you have than more crime just in order to feed your family? Preventing this kind of desperation is cost effective too. That’s  just plain common sense.

But these are just the facts. Long experience and modern cognitive science have shown that we need a better frame much more than we need facts or statistics. That’s why I propose that we counter-frame “public safety” right back to make it “true public safety means prevention.” Let’s make it the key to evoke an American story about how we are the “can do” people who have figured out how to prevent a lot of crime in practical new ways that work and save money too. That’s just being American “smart on crime.”  The same American stories that work on the national level apply to state level politics too, because, as every 4^th of July shows in the small towns of American, being American is a local story too.

Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., is the Founder and Executive Director of The Metaphor Project, metaphorproject.org, and author of  Move Our Message: How To Get America’s Ear.  The Metaphor Project has been helping progressives mainstream their messages since 1997.

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Notes:

1. Nicholas Riccardi, “Crime as a New Republican Political Tactic,” Associated Press, referenced in Politico’s Playbook for 7.06.13.
2. “Peace in Gangland,” by John Buntin, The New York Times Magazine, 7.14.13, p. 38.
3. Ibid., and also “How to Cut Prison Costs,” House editorial, The New York Times,” 1.30.2012.
4. See note 2 above re “Peace in Gangland,” p.44 especially. This section of the article includes a fascinating set of findings about the importance of the street’s perception of “fairness” and “legitimacy” in police work. It also includes a very interesting examination of why New York City’s “stop and frisk” tactic failed to stop murders.
5. Although I first launched the “gun safety” frame on my Twitter feed, @SusanCStrong, on August 14, 2012, it began to go viral in a big way after the terrible Sandy Hook tragedy, as I kept repeating it on Twitter and elsewhere.
6. “Unfair Punishments,” House editorial, The New York Times, 3.17.13.

As we all know, the first problem all the new gun safety proposals have is the same as ever. Congress members are afraid of the NRA, its lobbying power, its members, and the loss of its dollars. Of course, We the People are going to call our representatives and send a message to Walmart about their assault rifle sales too. But the media, along with some well-meaning advocates of gun “control,” are creating the second problem. They keep talking about gun “control,” in headlines, articles, on the air, on the web. Then the politicians and opinion leaders follow suit, because “control” seems like the dominant frame again.

As my regular readers already know, “control” is the NRA’s favorite frame. They like it because they can use it to scare. They know what it does to moderates who just like to hunt or shoot skeet. So everyone who really cares about new gun safety laws has to stop calling them “control.” Every newspaper or magazine editor, online media gatekeeper or well-meaning gun “control” advocate who cares about our poor bullet-ridden country must switch.  There are many ways to say it in a way that will draw support: sensible gun limits, sane gun rules, stricter gun rules, commonsense gun measures. Just avoid “regulation/s” (a G.O.P. bugaboo word), and be sure to talk about “safety” too. As for those gun “control” advocates who want to say “control” because they are just so mad, ask them to please recall that we need to keep our eyes on the prize. We must do what works, because lives are at stake.

Just in case you need to offer more explanation, here’s a bit about why the framing matters. We have to get massive, bipartisan grass roots lobbying power to move forward on gun safety. That means we have to stop the reborn “control” boogeyman again. It wasn’t always this way. As of January 8^th, 2013, the White House was using “gun safety” in its communications about Biden’s task force: Mike Allen’s Playbook reported the following:

“THE NEW AGENDA – ‘White House ramping up gun violence discussions,’ by AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace : ‘Biden will meet Wednesday with gun violence victims’ groups and gun safety organizations [emphasis mine]…”

This was followed on 1.10.13 by an item in the San Francisco Chronicle, p.A8,

[Headline] ‘Biden convenes gun task force, promises action.”

‘Biden told a group of gun safety {emphasis mine} advocates and victims of gun violence [that] the President and I are determined to take action.’

As far back as 12.23.12, I started getting reports from Metaphor Project Network members that our “gun safety” frame had gone viral. Key opinion leaders like Willie Nelson, Ed Schulz, and James Fallows were using the new language on the air.

Friends, we outran the gun “control” frame once. It’s time to put our shoulders to the wheel again. Lobby all the media sources and activist opinion leaders you follow about dropping “control.”  Tweet, facebook it, email it, write letters to the editor, call up the editorial or the station staff, write comments, demonstrate, threaten to cancel subscriptions or stop donating, etc.  If any of the people you contact protest, ask them just whose side they are on: Wayne LaPierre and the gun makers or We, the fed up People of America?

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Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., is the Founder and Executive Director of The Metaphor Project, metaphorproject.org, and author of the  new book, Move Our Message: How To Get America’s Ear.  The Metaphor Project has been helping progressives mainstream their messages since 1997.

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Of course, first up in the parade of economic metaphors will be the misleading “household budget” metaphor used by the G.O.P. to describe the federal budget. Advocates of “government stimulus” will resort to the traditional “priming the pump” metaphor. But there are big metaphorical glitches embedded in this predictable exchange:  If the “household budget” metaphor is applied only to the government’s budget, where is the rest of the “nation-family’s household budget?” Not mentioned. One way to counter it is to say that, in fact, the government is your better-off Uncle Sam, who will loan you the money for college, if your parents don’t have it. He knows it will help the “whole nation-family” if you get a good education.   As for the “priming the pump” metaphor, it describes a single action on the part of government with a fuzzy “water” metaphor, about which I will say more later.  But the “pump priming” metaphor also leaves out any description of the whole national economy and how it all works.

However, the G.O.P. does have a complete vocabulary of metaphors for the whole economy and how it acts. Unfortunately, most Democrats and even liberal economists also use that same tainted language, without thinking for a minute about how inaccurate and damaging their verbal behavior is. According to Anat Shenker-Osorio, author of Don’t Buy It: the Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy and a cognitive scientist who has done extensive field research on the subject; the G.O.P. describes the economy in one of several ways. (2) They suggest that the economy is a natural force or a body we cannot and should not “hurt” or try to control.  They also liken it to the weather, or to water flowing all by itself. Moreover, in their lexicon, the market is like your strict father or even God, rewarding and punishing behavior. But with everyone talking this way about the economy, it’s no wonder we’re in a mess today, because the economy is actually very much a human creation, with rules we make (or rig). Metaphor matters, friends, and the wrong metaphors can harm and even kill.

So what should we be saying instead? Here’s a second option. Through her research, Shenker-Osorio has noticed one very different progressive metaphor for talking about the economy. It’s one that does evoke the idea of something we create and control by “rules” we have set up ourselves: the economy as a vehicle or machine we build, drive, fix, tinker with, and so on. I like Anat’s suggestion about the “vehicle” metaphor. It’s vastly better than using the G.O.P.’s economic metaphors. But there is one thing about the vehicle metaphor that worries me: it’s a machine metaphor, and machines do not “grow.”

Yes, I know all about the problem of so-called “economic growth” (see my byline please!).  As currently measured, so-called “economic growth” is a doomsday machine bearing down on our planet’s ecosphere and us as a species. It treats as a plus the ever- increasing “growth” in money value that ends up destroying life. But in order to counter that dire future, we need “growth” in alternative energy use, sustainable farming practices, and many other areas of our economy. Moreover, despite modern ignorance of our economy’s roots in nature, there’s still a visceral sense that if plants and animals grow, we will thrive too.

So what economic metaphor system could evoke a healthy, life-fostering, in-balance growth we create and control by our own actions? If you’re guessing that option #3 is a garden metaphor, you would be right. Only this time we need to picture the national economy as a community garden, and the government as the community gardener we hire to coordinate our efforts. That job includes alerting us when some parts of the garden are getting too many weeds–unfruitful and unfair subsidies sopping up resources of sun, water, soil and fertilizer other plants need– or when other “plants” are getting too much or not enough sun or water. Making sure the weeding and other gardening work gets done if we are too busy ourselves is also part of the job description.  (A much more extensive exploration of the community garden metaphor for our economy, and even for our democracy itself can be found in the most recent book by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, The Gardens of Democracy.)(3) But to find a very current gardening metaphor, we need look no further than a recent New York Times article. In “Seeds That Federal Money Can Plant,” author Steve Lohr likens federal investments in basic scientific research to “seed corn” (October 7, 2012, Business Section, p.3). Those, he says, are seeds we must save and not eat now (as in “cut”), because private companies need that kind of basic public research to grow their own proprietary variations later on.

The backyard, community, or school garden, even the pot of herbs growing on an apartment window sill, is just as familiar an experience as a household budget. So “the garden” is a good place to start countering the G.O.P.’s disempowering economic metaphors.  Moreover, because the “growth” metaphor has long governed human thinking about survival, we must use it to talk about the economy in an accurate way. Otherwise, I fear we will fail to get far in our reframing efforts.

Above all, and whatever metaphor system you decide to use right now—whole national family, a vehicle or a garden–remember: avoid at all costs the Right’s “economic” metaphors of body, weather, natural force, father or God. Those words evoke a whole system of ideas about how the economy and the market work, a way that is absolutely wrong for the American future we progressives want.

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Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of The Metaphor Project, metaphorproject.org, and author of  Move Our Message: How to Get America’s Ear. Before starting The Metaphor Project, she was a co-founder of  The “Who’s Counting?” Project, an online vehicle for publicizing the film, Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies, and Global Economics. In the 1990’s she served as Senior Research Associate for six years at The Center for Economic Conversion, (Mountain View, CA), publishing “The GDP Myth: How It Harms Our Quality of Life and What Communities Can Do About It,” (The Center for Economic Conversion, Mountain View, 1995, 38 pp.). She also served as a co-founder of Peace Action’s original Peace Economy Campaign.  

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1) This scary metaphor refers, of course, to the crisis brought on by the 2011 Budget Agreement, which mandates automatic, draconian cuts to the federal budget, unless Congress and the President can agree to  another plan to reduce the federal deficit over a reasonable period of time.

2) For a lot more in this excellent vein, I suggest that you run right out and get a copy of Shenker-Osorio’s book yourselves (Public Affairs, New York, 2012, 222 pp

3) Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2011, 173 pp.

Although you can’t always guess in advance what kind of people will be on the other end of your phone bank call or on the other side of the door, the first step in learning to speak American is thinking hard about your potential audience. You need to do this before you pick up the phone or approach a single door. Think about who those people might be, how they are feeling, and how they would talk about the issues right now. Pay particular attention to the second point: how they would talk. That’s a bit different from what their opinions might be. It’s about exactly what words, images, or metaphors they might use. Jot down a few of these specific words and phrases. (Stumped? Think about what G.O.P. candidates repeatedly say these days about “smaller government,” “government spending,” “regulatory relief,” “government going broke,” and “tax relief that creates jobs.” ) Your job is to stay calm when you hear these and have something useful to say later on.

Next, plan to acknowledge peoples’ feelings in an empathic way, at the beginning of your conversation. A great deal has been said in recent years about empathy being a progressive value. You can model empathy by giving the person you approach the feeling that you understand his or her concerns. It doesn’t matter if you don’t agree with their ideas about the solution to their worries. Establishing common ground over being worried about our country is your first goal, and these days, that shouldn’t be a hard job for any of us!

After you have adopted that stance, the next two steps in your preparation for actual contact should come easier: Commit to using simple, feeling-toned, story-telling language yourself. Avoid abstract, multisyllabic words, complex arguments, statistics, insider language, jargon, and long strings of talking points. Recent findings in the field of cognitive science have demonstrated definitively that those verbal tactics don’t work when you are actually in conversation with people. Moreover, simply negating the opponent’s sound bites fails too (as in “money is not speech,” for example), because you are just reinforcing the same “frames” people are used to hearing from our opponents, instead of countering them with something new. It turns out that the brain deals with the negative version only after it has already recognized the implied positive version.(1) By then it is too late; the reinforcing damage has been done. (To learn how to counter with something totally different, see my recent blog post, “Counter-frame it! How to Stop Using Their Words,” reposted on our website.)

The simple, feeling-toned story you are getting ready to tell should also be one that conveys ideal American values (which are actually progressive values) in a short but smart format, like a proverb or a sound bite. “Fair rules enforced fairly protect us all,” is an example of how to do that. To get ideas about which well known American cultural metaphors or story elements would best express your message, consult free Metaphor Project resources like the American Story Elements list and the American Metaphor Categories list posted on http://www.metaphorproject.org. (Look for these under the Resources link or just scroll down to the bottom of our home page to the quick links.)

Of course, there’s a lot more to effective American Framing than this; you can find out all about that on the site too. And Professor Lakoff is right in saying that you need to be clear about what your own moral values are first, and then about what ideas would convey them.(2) That’s all work that precedes getting down to the nitty-gritty of deciding exactly how you are going to say it. That final step requires saying it in language your audience can actually hear. It’s a big challenge, especially now, when the pressure mounts daily, and the situation is in radical flux. But with the right preparation and the right tools, we progressives can all speak American to the other Americans we meet this fall, whether on the phone, when the door opens, or everywhere else.

I hope this simple “first aid” version of how to do American Framing will help with all of that. So good luck to you all and to us all in this country we so fervently wish to save on November 6, 2012! Let’s hope that 2013 will be the year we Americans start to spiral up again, all together again.

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Susan C. Strong is the Founder and Executive Director of The Metaphor Project, , and author of our new book, Move Our Message: How To Get America’s Ear. The Metaphor Project has been helping progressives mainstream their messages since 1997.

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1. In the question and answer period after a talk given at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in early September, 2012, George Lakoff reported that recent cognitive science research had now proven this point.
2. This statement is my summary of the gist of George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling’s newly published work, The Little Blue Book.

Some Counter-framing Rules of Thumb

If their sound bite or phrase evokes a familiar American story, one that implies a commonly accepted set of moral or social values (among some quarters anyway), you can do one of two things:

1. Come up with your own phrase or metaphor to evoke a different, but equally familiar American story, one that implies your set of moral values.
2. You can tweak their phrase in a meaningful way, by changing it just enough to evoke a different but equally familiar American story. It should be one that implies a set of moral values that will carry your message. This technique is a bit riskier, because the tweak must create a genuinely different feel in the sound bite or slogan. Too close to the original and you are just helping the Right by reminding everyone of what they already said, not what you want to convey.
3.  The third method involves creating a dramatic new sound bite of your own, useful for calling attention to issues still outside public awareness.

Some Examples of These Counter-framing Tactics

In January 2010, just as the fight over financial reform was getting started, I could see the Right’s  “regulations destroy business/jobs etc.” frame coming.  I feared that Democrats especially would also start talking about “regulation,” in which case the fight would already be lost.  So I sent out, blogged, and tweeted a “different, but equally familiar” counter frame:  “Say ‘rules,’ not regulation.” Although some folks might have already been saying “rules” before this suggestion got out there, the use of “rules” instead of “regulation” went viral on our side after that. The story “rules” tells, of course, is about everybody “playing by the same rules,” even “playing by the rule of law.” It may start as a sports metaphor, but it’s one the Left can love, because of the moral values it implies.

A dramatic example of counter-framing a Right wing slogan by tweaking it comes from an earlier era. Back in the summer of 2006, the Right’s Iraq War mantra, “stay the course,” seemed stuck in everyone’s brains. We couldn’t seem to fight our way out of it, so to speak. One or two attempts by Democrats to launch a tweak of it about six months earlier had failed. But in the summer of 2006 we got lucky. Along with a large coalition of peace organizations that was getting ready to launch a fall campaign, I put out a web essay/blog that called for using the phrase “change course.” I also invited people to come up with their own versions of it. Many did, as that frame started to go viral as well. It suddenly spread like wildfire through the punditry, the press, and the politicians. In the end, it gave Petraeus cover to change his strategy in Iraq, from shooting Iraqi chieftains to paying them to help us, a better idea in the middle of a really bad idea of a war, anyway.  This example also illustrates another principle of counter-framing: getting lucky with the moment you launch your tweaked phrase. A lot of factors combined to make the first week in July 2006 the right moment.

The third example, creating a dramatic new sound bite to call attention to an unfamiliar issue, comes from the world of GMO resistance  back in 1992. That example is “frankenfood,” of course. By now it has not only gone viral, it has led to dozens of variations like frankenfish, frankenforests, frankenbugs, and the most recent one I’ve seen, “frankenapples,” for apples that  won’t turn brown when you cut them. The original “frankenfood” was the creation of an angry English professor, Paul Lewis, writing a letter to the New York Times in 1992. As is often the way, in a moment of enraged inspiration, he combined “Franken” with ‘food” and the rest is history.

Some Warnings about Left Framing Traps

There are four big slogan framing traps the Left falls into on a regular basis.

1. 1. Using the “x is not y” formula. Examples of this formula are “Corporations are not people,” and “Money is not speech.”  First of all, modern cognitive science has shown that people seldom hear or take in the “not.” So what you are doing is actually reminding them that “corporations are people,” and “money is speech.” This is what Professor Lakoff meant when he wrote Don’t Think of an Elephant. Moreover, the “x is not y” formula is a dangerous void for two more reasons: a) it is negative and doesn’t suggest another idea or what to do instead, and b) it uses the verb to be, which is just an equals sign–no action, no life, no color, no effectiveness and no leadership either.
2. Measly tweaks that just remind hearers of the original phrase. For a long time I have watched in horror as the Left repeats “Obamacare” over and over, perhaps rebelliously oblivious to the fact that the word actually calls up strong resistance in many Americans. More recently, some on the Left have been saying “Obama cares” instead. But just try saying that out loud at normal conversational speed. Can you tell the difference? No, you can’t. This is a measly tweak that does more harm than good.  Much better is a new phrase out there now: “I love Obamacare.” (It’s stronger than ‘I like Obamacare.’) That format makes a clear change in the meaning.
3. Turning a tin ear to the public sense of a word or phrase, and talking only to ourselves, in “Leftspeak.” My best example of this is “single payer.” Lately when people ask me about this phrase after I give a talk or do a workshop, my answer is simply “You mean ‘unmarried’ payer?” They get it when I say that; I don’t have to say anything more. Another much more dangerous example still in play is the phrase the ‘No on Proposition #32’ campaign in California is using: ‘Stop special exemptions.’ Every grass roots California Democrat I know is horrified by this slogan, because they know the general public won’t understand it. The stakes couldn’t be higher, because this proposition is in fact another union-busting move by big corporations. There is still time for the ‘No on 32’ people to come up with something better, and I certainly hope they do. (Try looking at the free American Framing resources on The Metaphor Project website, guys!)
4. Believing that the words of a slogan or sound bite don’t matter, because the talking points will do all the heavy persuading. After so many years of being beaten by Right wing sound bites that evoke strong emotions, it’s amazing that anybody on the Left still holds this idea. But there’s abundant evidence that many do. Instead, if you are very, very lucky, your smart, emotionally effective Left sound bite will awaken rational curiosity in some Americans, and they will actually be open to hearing your talking points too. But as former President Clinton once said, “If they can’t say it in a phrase, we’re sunk.”

It’s time for all of us, Democrats, liberals, progressives, and yes, even radicals, to smarten up, get off our comfy Left couches, and create the truly dynamic American counter-frames we desperately need now.

While “motivated reasoning” has deep roots in human history and may have led to our survival in the past, today Left groupthink and “groupspeak” are actually threatening our survival–our ability to fight back against the plutocratic coup now nearly complete in our country. The plutocrats don’t talk like plutocrats, of course. They hire very savvy spinmeisters, who figure out how to speak American to the American public, so they can sell them a fatal bill of goods. Unless we can quickly get to the point where we can outframe the Right, we’re in for a very long bad spell from which our country may never recover. Understanding that we ourselves are actually sick with a bad case of groupthink and “groupspeak” might help us get on the road to recovery now.

Having just spent several weeks on the East Coast going to progressive and liberal conferences, I’ve noticed plenty of Left “groupspeak.” But I’ve also heard and read a few really good suggestions about how to get over the problem. First though, let’s look at some of the most important “groupspeak” examples I heard, and how they could be fixed. In one of the saddest moments I witnessed, at one conference I heard Professor Paul Krugman describing the way his new book, End This Depression Now!, revolves around the central metaphor of what to do about a dead car battery. So far so good.

But then he went on to say that the Right uses very simple language, ideas, and morality tales (“debt is immoral”) to push their agenda, but we can’t do that, because our policy ideas are too complex and nuanced. I felt like jumping up to the mike right then to say, “Professor Krugman, you just wrote a book organized around a powerful metaphor! We can and must try harder to find the other metaphors that can carry our message to the American public! Don’t give up, man! Especially, don’t give up in front of an important gathering of progressives.” That’s already what too many on the Left believe. It may tickle our egos to think we are too complex and nuanced to do the job, but it’s going to end really badly for us if we don’t get beyond that idea.

The next frustrating example of “groupthink/groupspeak” I’ll quote was a remark made by someone commenting on the cut to food stamps embedded in the Farm Bill. It pointed up one of our most problematic issues: framing the positive nature and role of government. The speaker remarked that it was terrible to have this cut in food stamps, because it was the government’s job to “deliver goods and services to people who needed them.” Again, I was twitching in my chair: defining government as “delivering goods and services” makes it sound like a market; this is exactly the wrong framing.

What the government does is “buy goods and services with public money,” making purchases that protect our democracy and help create the jobs that jumpstart economic upturns.(1) A specific reframe for the idea of keeping current food stamp levels would be that it would protect Americans, especially children, who are threatened with starvation by undemocratic and unfair economic conditions. It also would keep our American ideal of economic opportunity alive. You can’t learn, work or even look for work if you are too hungry to do it!

Coming in third after that in terms of tragically “off” framing was the suggestion by a pollster that all Democrats should be talking about helping/and protecting the middle class. True, right now too many are falling out of the middle class. But there are a lot of others in our country who also need to hear that they are on our leaders’ minds—so the framing should be something like, “help get the middle class back on its feet and everyone else too.”

These are just a few examples of typical Left “groupspeak” I happened to notice; but I also heard some really good ideas for getting out of our own “groupspeak” trap. On the positive side, Nation columnist Illyse Hogue said that we need to make much more explicit links between the policy ideas we promote and what the concrete outcomes for voters would be, as in “we need to tax the rich so we can use the money to create jobs,” (or, I’d reframe as, “. . .so we can use that public money to jumpstart new job creation, because ‘private money’ refuses to do it.”).

Political consultant Drew Westen also had a good suggestion; the formula he recommended was this: start your sentences with a clause that contains a premise shared with your audience, then introduce the conclusion you want to make: “If CEO’s can bargain for higher compensation packages, then workers should be able to do it too.” That is another very useful way of connecting the dots. Both Hogue and Westen urged us to call immorality on the Right by name, saying things like “inequality is immoral and inefficient,” or calling the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United “corrupt; here again I’d add: “this decision was downright un-American and immoral. It’s the most serious threat to our democracy yet.”

But hands down, the most important thing for outframing the Right on a daily basis is learning how to translate our own ideas into “American truthbites” If we won’t learn to “speak American” now, when so much is at stake, and when the resources, tools, and methods are so readily available, what, I ask you, is the matter with us? Is it an intellectual form of stupidity, lazy arrogance, or an all too easy cave-in to despair? Fragmented, siloed thinking, about what we believe as a political group? Illyse Hogue spoke of our “blind spots.” Are they willful blind spots? A refusal to learn? Better dead than speak to be heard?

Maybe George Lakoff’s and Elizabeth Wehling’s new Little Blue Book can help us out on the macro groupthink level, because we need a lot of help there too. Once again, they urge us not to use the Right’s language or ideas ourselves, not to repeat and then negate their arguments, and they show how to set up our own liberal moral premises first, a step that must always precede the creation of specific “American truthbites.”

Moreover, in the book’s center there is excellent analysis of the crucial struggle of our time: for a public democracy that protects and empowers everybody equally against a metastacizing corporate dictatorship that acts only for the profit of the few and harms the American public. Embedded in the Little Blue Book’s list of generic talking points about this fight are even a few interesting “American truthbite” suggestions: pro-family (to replace pro-choice), family freedom, pregnancy prevention (to replace birth control), the Food Bill (to replace the Farm Bill), sun food vs. oil food, eternal energy (from sun, wind, water, waves etc.), undertaxing.

But no framing expert can be at everyone’s elbow all the time or come up with the best everyday language for every issue. There is no expert, top-down substitute for everyone, the Left and the Democrats, buckling down and doing their own American Framing homework, to make our ideas comprehensible to the mainstream public. As Van Jones has repeatedly said this summer, “it’s time we put on our thinking caps ourselves.” In fact, it’s very long overdue. Let’s “crowdframe” our messages right, now before it’s too late.

Susan C. Strong is the founder and executive director of The Metaphor Project, , and author of our new book, Move Our Message: How To Get America’s Ear. The Metaphor Project has been helping progressives mainstream their messages since 1997.

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(1) I use the phrase “public money” and “private money” to apply Lakoff and Wehling’s abstract concepts of “The Public” and “The Private” to real life situations. Unfortunately, if one goes around talking about “The Public” in everyday language, it will come across as “the American Public,” or “the public—as in “public opinion” or “the people” in general. But, for example, “public money” can be described as the lifeblood of our democracy; it keeps the living body of our democracy whole. So let’s try using “public” and “private” as contrasting adjectives for all the things we want to say now. Another example: “Public democracy (or public funding) protects freedom and opportunity for all. Our growing corporate dictatorship secretly destroys both.”

Of course, as we all know, the Supreme Court cannot actually make laws or federal regulations (except by destroying them). Their having reaffirmed the requirement for disclosure might seem just pitiful, given what’s going on in political advertising now. However, if even a conservative majority of the Court felt the need to explicitly uphold disclosure in political ads, maybe there’s some hope. Perhaps some other brave campaign finance veterans besides Senator McCain will back a new Senate DISCLOSE bill. According to a May 20th, 2012 New York Times house editorial, McCain has shown interest in Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D, RI) new DISCLOSE bill, which requires “timely public disclosure of donors writing checks of $10,000 and more.” The bill also includes “‘stand by your ad’ identifications from the five biggest donors.”(4) Even though it has little chance to pass in this poisonous pre-election period, the attempt to create a new DISCLOSE bill would spotlight the issue anew.

As for other approaches to the Citizens United problem, no matter what the Supreme Court decides about the state of Montana’s right to outright ban corporate political contributions, the closely related issue of federal disclosure should remain up. Though the effort to get a constitutional amendment about who really has the right to free speech is vital, it is a long term project.(5) A vigorous “disclose” campaign now could call even greater attention to the pressing need for such an amendment.

So let’s all say “cards on the table” again, as loudly as we can! We Americans must stop gambling with our country’s future. Let’s call the “cardsharks’” bluff!

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l. The New York Times, 4.02.2012, “A Judge Turns on the Light.”
The FEC had ruled that only money that was explicitly contributed for political purposes had to be disclosed, creating a general “donations” loophole that became a superhighway, for deceptive, so-called “issue ads” that actually mentioned candidate names. Although it is probable that the federal court ruling will be appealed, it is also likely that it will be upheld.

2. The New York Times, 5.20.12, mentioned the court’s opinion on disclosure in its house editorial, “Bring Back the Real Maverick.”

3. Spring 2012, p. 38.

4. See note 2 above.

5. Let’s also say “Corporations are things people made up,” and “Free speech is for honest people.” Getting the “not” out of our slogans will make them more effective.
‘Stand by your ad’ is nice, but we need to highlight the dishonesty aspect more than that, in my view.

But there’s a preliminary step we need to take. To create a big enough progressive story about what we want and how to get it, we should go deeper. That means refreshing our memories about one of our most fundamental American identity stories. It’s the one the Tea Party is trashing the most. I call this story “the one big family frame.”  Here’s an updated version of it:

“It’s an historic American National Family metaphor, one that is larger than the  “strict father” or “nurturing parent” frames.    The American National Family frame says our country is like any real extended family–fractious but in the end functional. There are people in it who aren’t just like you, but they are still family, and we still have to try to solve our problems together, despite our differences.

The story of this extended American family frame also implies a specific, historical American way of communal problem solving: nationally the operative descriptive words are ‘pragmatic,’ ‘solution-oriented,’ ‘common sense,’ ‘practical,’ ‘pulling together,’ and ‘teamwork.’ Many of these terms also apply at the local level too, along with ‘community building’ and ‘finding common ground.’

The most important thing about this ‘one big family’ frame is the way it pictures people focusing on real problem solving together. It’s about looking at what really works and what doesn’t, and emphasizing agreement, not disagreement. It also means having a shared goal everyone is working toward, even if their reasons for wanting the same result differ. It suggests working out a ‘rough consensus,’ and yes, compromising here and there if the potential results are worth it. It includes tolerating each other’s differences as part of the traditional American respect for variety, individuality, and difference of views.

A vital part of this frame is also the way it acknowledges that we all hold, at least in principle, the same set of basic American Public Moral Values– fairness, honesty, equal opportunity, democracy, freedom, and compassion–drawn from both religious and secular ethics.”[1]

Sounds like pie in the sky right now? Well, maybe not. The Tea Party is going too far way too fast, and public opinion polls are starting to run against them. The “one big family frame” is deeply embedded in the American psyche. As a people we don’t like extremists of any kind, despite the pockets full of crackpots we tolerate.  What the Tea Party has created is a series of crackpot budget cuts. If all are enacted, together they will force America to crash and burn. And that’s nothing to what will happen if the Republicans refuse to raise the debt limit next month. Their plan is un-American, “can’t do” policy making. The “Poison-Tea” Party had better back off, because our “one big American family” wants a socially responsible democracy, not a stripped bare carcass.

No one sane tries to pay off their home mortgage debt in a few years. No one sane panics if they can’t do that and then starts slashing other people’s wrists. No one sane spends their mortgage money on even more Pentagon waste, fraud, and abuse.

Our national family wants a good solid house that stands. In due time we’ll pay it off. Scare tactics on this topic are just crackpot talk or worse—deliberate treachery meant to drive everyone’s wages down on the back of a lot more public misery.

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[1] The first piece I wrote about the “One Big Family Frame” was published on Common Dreams in 2005. I have revisited this frame several times in the last six years. To find more recent examples, search The Metaphor Project’s Blog Archive