This can be difficult to wrap your head around.  It may be helpful to have some context.  This is our story.

Humble Beginnings

Cognitive Policy Works (CPW) started out like so many things do, as a conversation among friends both old and new.  Some of us had met at the now-defunct Rockridge Institute where we came together with the lofty goal of empowering progressives to communicate deeply and powerfully through an understanding of political frames.  When Rockridge fell away in April of 2009, we grieved our loss and pondered how to continue doing the important work that was left undone.

During the summer of the same year, we began reaching out to others who were clearly new-friends-in-the-making.  We came together in a series of conference calls about filling the void where Rockridge had once been and taking our respective works to the next level through a strategic partnership.  We talked about the need to bring psychologists together with media experts; the challenges associated with incorporating insights about the political mind into organizational settings; and our shared vision of a world inhabited by people capable of applying deep insights into themselves to successfully manage the Great Transition that is the 21st Century.

These conference calls culminated in the design of a new organization that (we hope!) will result in a new professional class of highly-trained expert practitioners who understand the workings of the political mind and can skillfully apply their knowledge “in the trenches” where our current political culture is unable to function properly.

Cultivating New Practices

We were quick to distinguish the product emphasis of other organizations in our domain that focus their energy on producing articles and reports from the process emphasis that we embody through a focus on the implementation of new organizational practices and learning environments that make professional change agents more effective in their daily work.

Right away we set out to design new tools for practitioners to use.  We applied for and received a grant from the Arthur W. Page Center to partner with Tom Crompton at the World Wildlife Fund, UK and create an Identity Campaigning Framework that combines insights from social psychology with the deep frames discovered through George Lakoff’s work on the political mind.  Our framework is nearly complete and going through a design-to-implementation phase with several international NGO’s in the UK.  (More on this in the coming months!)

Alongside this “big picture” project, we also started offering workshops on political frames and values-based communication.  Topics covered so far include accountability in education, building a sustainable economy, and advocating for universal health care. Techniques that have emerged through this process include:

• Frame Breaking to jam problematic frames;
• Frame Shifting to draw the discourse back to your point of view;
• Values-Based Communication for authentically expressing your views in order to build trust with an audience;
• Polarity Management for recognizing different points of view and building relationships in the midst of potential conflict.

As we went about the difficult work of figuring out how to teach these key concepts and techniques, it became clear that people could benefit from having practical examples and ongoing opportunities to practice what they were learning.  This is why we are now developing our first framing workbook on universal health care to distill what we’ve learned so far into teachable practices and techniques.  Our first workbook is almost finished and will be made available soon.  Alongside its release, we will also unveil a series of online discussion forums and virtual “workplaces” where our students can work in groups to practice applying these techniques to real-world political and social challenges.

Building A Network, Building A Movement

Recognizing the limitations of traditional non-profits and businesses, we have worked to build a strong network of partners who share our vision of a better world.  One organization cannot bring about the scale of change that is needed on its own.  This is why we are forging partnerships – like the one mentioned above with WWF-UK – where visions are deeply aligned.

The most exciting example is Seattle Innovators, a project to catalyze the creative scene in Seattle and build a multi-decade campaign around the vision of becoming a carbon neutral city.  (Read the full story here)  This project is leading to a massive coalition among non-profits, social businesses, government agencies, and research institutions.

CPW is growing as a network hub for a global movement.  It won’t be the central piece, but neither will any other organization.  Yet it can be an important point of intersection for bringing people together around shared themes.  To get a sense of how this works, consider an example:

Finding Common Ground in a Mine Field

We are currently in conversations with six other organizations (Re-Vision Labs is a noteworthy co-creator in the process) around a framework that takes George Lakoff’s discovery of “biconceptualism” and creates a communication/outreach/community-building strategy for engaging communities with a history of conflict.  This framework is being developed with representatives of three key client bases – advocates for local food systems; social service professionals seeking to bring the marginalized into local political processes; and public relations firms encouraging local businesses to invest in transparent relationships with the communities they impact.

Such a framework could not come into being contained within the walls of a single organization.  It will take considerable amounts of trust and open sharing among service providers and potential clients to ensure that the framework is useful and effective by the time it is field tested in an advocacy campaign.

This is but one example of the kinds of collaborations we are setting in motion as a core tenet of our business paradigm.

Where We Are Now

Even though it’s been more than one and a half years since we began this journey, CPW is still in its start-up phase and is only now becoming operational (with its first newsletter and a coherent set of procedures for doing its work).  The systems we are building take a considerable amount of time to get up and running, so things may seem slow from the outside.

Hopefully by now it is clear that we are actually moving quite quickly.  It’s just that our vision is so big that our strides may seem small in the flurry of change happening in the larger world.

CPW working with many groups and growing a powerful network for bringing about social change.  In addition to the activities mentioned so far, we are also:

• Helping the Post Carbon Institute train their fellows (Joe Brewer – January, 2010)
• Advising the Center for Ecoliteracy on strategic communications (Joe Brewer – February 2010)
• Training the Alberta Teachers Association in educational reform (Eric Haas, March 2010)
• Introducing employees at the Environmental Protection Agency Region 10 to the power of values-based communication (Joe Brewer – April 2010)
• Building new tools for regional planning with Seattle Innovators (March 2010)

There’s a lot going on!

In Closing

I hope this story starts to bring clarity to our work at CPW.  We have been extremely busy these last few months and look forward to working with you in the days ahead.  We have now launched our monthly newsletter (if you haven’t done so, sign up here) and will be sharing more tools and techniques, educational resources, and new frameworks for social change in the days ahead.

In Solidarity

Joe Brewer
Founder and Director, Cognitive Policy Works

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The Science (Fiction) of Embodied Cognition – Very insightful breakdown of the movie Avatar through the lens of cognitive science.

Loss Aversion – Fascinating, accurate summary about recent developments in neuroscience and decision-making.

In Defense of Distraction – Exploration of attention in our information-saturated world and how to promote creativity.

Psychological Flow and the Plastic Rock – Intriguing discussion of being “in the zone” and lateral problem-solving.

Think ‘Network Structure’ not Networking -A powerful shift in thinking about how to use social networks to leverage power.

Easy = True – How ‘Cognitive Fluency’ Shapes What We Believe – Deep insights into how our brains make simple ideas appear to be true.

Does Gaming Have a Place in Government? – Exploration of how video games pave the way to massive-scale collaboration in a democracy.

Made to Stick: Jared, The Power of Story – Discussion of marketing, stories, and how to make an idea “sticky”.

Abstract Thoughts? The Body Makes Them Literal – A high-profile discussion of embodied metaphor in the New York Times.

Movement as Network – An oldy-but goodey, this article lays out how to think about social movements as networks.

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Tools for Frame Analysis

There are a number of tools for analyzing the frames we and others use automatically in thinking and communicating about issues that are important to us.  They can be used in situations that concern politics, such as health care, education and the role of government, or in our private lives, like how we feel our should children behave.

The broad categories of analytic tool types include:

• Direct participant response analysis where people are engaged directly to study their responses to different frames. Examples include opinion polls and focus groups in the context of an advocacy campaign, and;
• Text analysis where written text is analyzed to deconstruct meanings that appear in print media.  Examples are given below.

Text analysis can be broken down into two domains:

1. Large-scale analysis targets a large data set to find recurring patterns in public discourse.  Examples include looking for specific words or phrases across thousands of newspaper articles, TV shows or a year’s total of your organization’s press releases to identify competing narratives (in the press or internally within your organization) and measure how often they appear in the press or your publications over time.
2. Close-text analysis dissects the language use in one or a small number of important documents to identify how a key actor is framing an issue.  Examples include deconstruction of frames in the President’s State of Union address or prominent articles on an organization’s website.

Cognitive Policy Works (CPW) uses all these tools in its work, depending on an organization’s goals. For example, organizations can use an overview of the prominent understandings or different “common senses” around a specific political issue by society at large or among a target group, such as their state legislators, to determine the difference between these groups and their own understanding of the issue. Once they know this, then they can develop a strategy to effectively promote their positions to a large audience. To make this determination, CPW can do a large-scale text analysis of newspaper articles on the topic or analyze the websites and speeches of their state legislators. We might also combine one of these large-scale text analyses with a poll to compare the news or legislator results with the understandings of people in general.

Organizations are also interested in knowing the subtle structures of their own thinking and communications. This knowledge enables organizations to hone their thinking and more clearly present their ideas and positions to constituents. CPW can do a close-text analysis of a selection of an organization’s press releases or website content, to illuminate the implicit messages that their word choices reveal. We might then follow up on all these analyses with trainings to help the organization incorporate key insights into their everyday work, which often entails learning new techniques and – in some instances – subtle shifts in how the organization goes about its business.

We will describe more about the methods we use to serve clients in the coming months.  For now, let’s look at one tool used in close-text analysis to reveal a hidden agenda.

How Lists Expand A Particular Meaning

In our inaugural tool description, we want to focus on close-text analysis and one specific language device, the list. The list is both commonly used and powerful for its ability to emphasize a particular perspective while marginalizing others.  What is a list?  Here’s a working definition:

A list is the sequencing of words together so that they brain automatically places all of them into the same category, with a presumed set of shared features that make all of them similar to each other.

Here is an example about education, taken from an article in the Boston Globe:

Education policy in the United States treats Americans as too incompetent to provide for their children’s schooling. Unlike food or clothing or health care — where the market generates lots of options and parents are free to choose among them — education is mostly supplied on the Soviet model: Schooling is “free,” but the schools are owned and operated by the state. A small fraction of parents pay to educate their children privately, but the great majority simply take what the state supplies.

The public education system is essentially a monopoly, and like most monopolies, it wastes money, performs indifferently, and doesn’t much care if its customers — American mothers and fathers — are satisfied. But give those mothers and fathers the same freedom of choice when it comes to their kids’ education that they have when it comes to their kids’ shoes or dinner, and all of that would change. (Jacoby, 2004, p. D11, bold added)

Proponents of market policies for education often use the list. Why? Because a list triggers your brain to connect the dots between the objects placed together by the characteristic suggested by the communicator (in this case, the article writer). Proponents of market policies want to promote interactive, semi-social goods (like education and health care) as if they are nothing more than commodities that follow the laws of consumer transactions.  They seek to lump these public goods in the same category as shoes, televisions, and salad dressings (all of which are pretty interchangeable and it really makes no difference to the general prosperity which one is the rage).

Even more subtly, pro-market proponents want to present education as a purely individual decision: it’s not what choices society provides that matters, it’s what you choose to buy. The blame is on the parents, with no societal responsibility, for making bad parenting decisions. Following this logic further, the government would have little or no obligation to ensure that good schools were available to everyone, just like it has no obligation to ensure that good quality supermarkets are present in every neighborhood.

Of course, a long discussion like this is not enjoyable to read. It’s also unnecessary. Our brains do this automatically for us by reading the list: shoes + clothing + food +dinner + education.

So, what would a list look like that promotes strong government support for public schools in all neighborhoods?  What if we listed schools with roads, electric power lines, the internet, mass transit, fire fighters, and national parks: all things that we need for us to prosper (electricity sure comes in handy); things that benefit us when they help our neighbors (my drive to work is better when more people take buses and the subway); and each requires large scale cooperation to be effective (what if fire fighters returned to being privately contracted to some but not all houses?).

Which list you put public schools in says a lot about your thinking. Your list also promotes a subtle, but strong, difference about what you say public schools are about and how they should be supported.

References

Haas, E. (2006). Civil right, noble cause, and Trojan Horse: News portrayals of vouchers and urban education, pp. 439 – 450. In J. Kincheloe, K. Hayes, K. Rose, & P. M. Anderson (Eds.), The Praeger Handbook of Urban Education, Volume II. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Jacoby, J. (2004, May 30). Vouchers and equal education.  Boston Globe, D11. Available on the web at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/05/30/vouchers_and_equal_education/.

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For today’s engaged citizens, there’s no shortage of pressing concerns that demand attention: social and economic inequality, inadequate access to health care, persecution and violence on the basis of belief or group identity, assaults on civil rights and personal dignity, and profound environmental threats to the planet itself.

As president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (www.psysr.org), I work with fellow members – psychologists and non-psychologists alike – in a shared venture to confront many of these challenges. A central premise of our efforts is that psychology – the science of human behavior – offers a strong base of knowledge and practice for developing and implementing policies that promote peace, social justice, human rights, and an ecologically sustainable future. We pursue these goals through research, education, intervention, and advocacy.

Real-world application of psychological principles can be a valuable resource for positive social change in a surprisingly wide range of contexts. Such knowledge can:

• Help individuals and groups overcome “us-versus-them” mindsets and build bridges across perceived divides;
• Encourage us to focus on our future collective welfare and to prioritize the broader long-term consequences of our actions instead of short-term self-interest by engaging our pro-social tendencies and moral sentiments;
• Strengthen our capacity to use thoughtful analysis and empathy when evaluating alternatives, and to resist appeals to fear and anger that are designed to cloud our judgment;
• Address misunderstandings and miscommunication, thereby serving to prevent the escalation of conflict and bloodshed; heal the wounds of violence, trauma, and neglect; and avert the transmission of revenge and despair from one generation to the next.

Making meaningful strides in areas like these will require deep understandings of how psychology and politics are inter-related (as CPW consulting partner Sue Kerbel discusses here), as well as increased collaboration between psychologists and other social scientists. In this way, psychological knowledge can be used more effectively to identify key features of stubborn social problems and to illuminate potential pathways to progress. Here are several examples that spring to mind.

Overcoming Widespread Poverty

Over one billion people struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. To reduce chronic poverty, we must confront the prejudices, discrimination, and societal arrangements that promote inequality and limit opportunity for so many. Psychology also highlights the need to reduce the stigma associated with being poor. And since we tend to be most supportive of others when their concerns relate to our own, anti-poverty campaigns are more effective when they communicate how poverty affects us all.

Reversing the Escalation of Arms

Nuclear weapons could destroy all life on Earth, a horror so great that we bury it from awareness. To eliminate these weapons, it’s important to understand the psychology that motivates us to acquire and retain them. Paradoxically, the desire for greater security spurs countries to want weapons of mass destruction. Overcoming a common attribution error – “our weapons are for protection, but theirs are for aggression” – is therefore crucial for parties to negotiate in good faith toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

Promoting Peace

Mass killing, torture, gender-based violence, and other human rights violations are a worldwide tragedy. Perpetrators are often driven by psychological factors, including vengeance, blind obedience to authority, the intoxicating effects of power, and the dehumanization and demonization of those who are different. We can counter these abuses by confronting the psychological barriers that too often discourage individuals or nations from intervening. These include fear, apathy, denial, perceived helplessness, and the diffusion of responsibility.

Encouraging Pro-Environmental Behavior

Climate change, population growth, and rising consumption represent a looming ecological catastrophe that imperils all human life. Psychology offers key insights to confront this crisis. Policies can be made more effective by addressing our tendency to focus on the short-term and to disregard critical dangers that grow over time. Another promising strategy involves helping wealthier nations examine how their excessive consumption interferes with the pursuit of important goals and values. The behavioral sciences are directly relevant to the challenges of bringing about large-scale social change.

Building on Local Successes

Poverty, nuclear weapons, human rights violations, and climate change are global problems. But psychologically informed strategies have also proven successful when used in local initiatives. For instance, conflict management training for leaders in deeply-divided communities has curtailed sectarian violence. Intergroup contact and dialogue strategies have also been used effectively to reduce prejudice among participants in community youth programs. Carefully framed public service messages targeting HIV/AIDS prevention in under-served areas have led to sizable decreases in risky behavior. Correcting student misperceptions about the prevalence of heavy drinking has substantially reduced alcohol consumption on college campuses. Programs that provide comparative feedback on residents’ home energy consumption have lessened overall neighborhood energy use. And efforts to foster trust and a sense of shared identity have helped activists and advocacy organizations build broader and more effective coalitions.

But while psychology offers great promise in these spheres and many others, we must also recognize that there are those who regrettably misuse their understanding of human behavior for selfish or destructive purposes. In particular, political, media, and corporate elites at times engage in manipulation to promote everything from unhealthy lifestyles to greater inequality to war. The consequences are often tragic. The members of Psychologists for Social Responsibility believe that bringing greater psychological knowledge to the widest possible audience – policymakers, activists, educators, students, news media, and the general public – is crucial for empowering all of us to pursue socially responsible solutions to the many challenges we face today.

My role at Cognitive Policy Works is to provide professional psychologists with opportunities to inform advocacy efforts and facilitate progressive social change. I’ll keep you up-to-date on our efforts at Psychologists for Social Responsibility and share stories about psychologists addressing social ills, techniques for effectively managing conflicts, and opportunities to get involved as we bring our insights into the human condition to the change arena.

Roy Eidelson, Ph.D., is President of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and a consulting partner at Cognitive Policy Works.  His “Five Dangerous Ideas” framework reveals how core psychological concerns motivate political behavior in social settings.

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It’s always satisfying for a scientist to see his or her predictions proved right experimentally (which happens often), and actually discussed in the press (which happens rarely). As a cognitive scientist and linguist, it’s been a good couple of weeks for me and my colleagues, especially in The New York Times. Experiments are hard to do, and I celebrate all the experimenters cited. Experiments are also hard to report on, and I praise the journalists at the Times for a fine job.

Metaphor and Embodiment

Back in 1980, Mark Johnson and I, in “Metaphors We Live By”, demonstrated the existence of metaphorical thought and argued that metaphor and other aspects of mind were embodied. That book, and our 1987 books, my “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things” and Johnson’s “The Body in the Mind,” helped to start a cottage industry in the study of embodied cognition.

The experimental results confirming our theories of embodied cognition have been coming in regularly, especially in the area of metaphorical thought. Natalie Angier, on February 1,  summarized some of the recent research very clearly:

* A University of Amsterdam study showed that subjects thinking about the future leaned forward, while those thinking about the past leaned backward. This was predicted by the 1980 analysis of common European metaphors in which the future is ahead and the past is behind. This is not just a matter of language, but of thought, as Johnson and I showed.

• At Yale, researchers found that subjects holding warm coffee in advance were more likely to evaluate an imaginary individual as warm and friendly than those holding cold coffee. This is predicted by the conceptual metaphor that affection is warmth, as in, She gave me a warm greeting.
• At the University of Toronto, subjects were asked to remember a time when they were either socially accepted or socially snubbed. Those with warm memories of acceptance judged the room to be five degrees warmer on the average than those who remembered being coldly snubbed.
• Subjects asked to think about a moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth after the experiment than those who had thought about good deeds. The well-known conceptual metaphor morality is purity predicts this behavior.
• Students told that that a particular book was important judged it to be physically heavier than a book that they were told was unimportant. The conceptual metaphor is important is heavy.
• In a parallel study with heavy versus light clipboards, those with the heavy clipboards were more likely like to judge currency to be more valuable and their opinions and their leaders more important.
• And in doing arithmetic, students who used their hands to group numbers together had an easier time doing problems that required conceptual grouping. This is predicted by the analysis of mathematics in “Where Mathematics Comes From” by myself and Rafael Núñez, where we show how mathematics from the simple to the advanced is based on embodied metaphorical cognition.

These results don’t happen by magic. How can these results be explained?

Johnson’s and my 1999 book, “Philosophy in the Flesh,” incorporated a neural theory of how embodied metaphorical thought works. What a child is regularly held affectionately by its parents, two distinct brain areas are activated simultaneously – one for temperature and one for affection. The synapses in both areas are strengthened and activation spreads along existing pathways until the shortest pathway between the areas is found and a circuit is formed. That circuit is the neural realization of what is called a “primary metaphor” that is embodied. Hundreds of such cases are formed unconsciously and automatically in childhood.

My Berkeley colleague, Srini Narayanan, has shown what computational properties such circuits must have. In still unpublished work, he has shown that the relative timing of first spikes across a synapse predicts the directionality of elementary metaphors in all known cases. The very idea that such low-level phenomena at the level of neurons can result in the vast range of metaphorical thought is truly remarkable.

A crucial part of the story of embodied cognition comes from the neuroscience of the 1990s, which showed that the same brain regions used in actually moving and perceiving are used in imagining and remembering moving and perceiving. These results led Jerome Feldman to the crucial idea that meaningful thought expressible in language is mental simulation that uses the neural structures of the sensory-motor system to imagine what is embodied, usually below the level of consciousness.

These are experimental findings and theories based on considerable evidence. Taken together, they explain the results of the experiments: Primary metaphorical thought arises when a neural circuit is formed linking two brain areas activated when experiences occur together repeatedly. Typically, one of the experiences is physical. In each experiment, each subject has the physical experience activating one of the brain regions and another experience (e.g., emotional or temporal) activating the other brain region for the given metaphor. The activation of both regions activates the metaphorical link. Thus, if the metaphor is future is ahead and past is behind, thinking about the future will activate the brain region for moving forward. If the metaphor is affection is warmth, holding warm coffee will activate the brain region for experiencing affection.

Angier did not seek out the theoretical studies that allow these explanations – and led to the performance of the experiments in the first place. That’s too much to ask of a New York Times article. But it was nice to see some of the relevant experiments reported on in The New York Times, even if the explanations were left out.

These cases don’t have any direct political implications in themselves, but they are indirectly important, as we shall see.

Words and Polls

The past week in The New York Times was also pretty good for me with respect to predictions.

There was a CBS/New York Times poll that showed support for ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” varied considerably depending on whether “homosexuals” or “gay men and lesbians” was used in the question. “Gay men and lesbians” got a lot more support – in the ball park of 15 percent more, which is a HUGE difference on a poll.

Those of you who’ve read my “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” and “The Political Mind” will be familiar with the basic results of frame semantics, developed by my Berkeley colleague Charles Fillmore and others within the cognitive and brain sciences.

The first basic result: The meaning of every word is characterized in terms of a brain circuit called a “frame.” Frames are often characterized in terms of the usual apparatus of mental life: metaphors, images, cultural narratives – and neural links to the emotion centers of the brain. The narrow, literal meaning of a word is only one aspect of its frame-semantic meaning.

The second basic result is that this is mostly unconscious, like 98 percent of human thought.

On the inherent link between semantic and emotion, see my discussion in “The Political Mind,” (chapter one) and the excellent books by Antonio Damasio (”Descartes’ Error”) and Drew Westen (”The Political Brain”).

“Homosexual” is simply defined via a different frame than “gay men and lesbians.” Professor Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago, writing in the Huffington Post on February 13, described the difference:

“Homosexual” conjures up dark visions of filthy bodily acts that arouse deeply-rooted feelings of disgust and ancient fears of Sodom and Gomorrah and hell and damnation. “Gay men and lesbians,” on the other hand, increasingly reminds us of people we know – sons and daughters, cousins and classmates, nieces and nephews, coworkers and neighbors.

In short, there is a big difference in meaning – the framing difference between the thought of gay sex and the idea of the civil rights of people in your community. The consequences are political, as Professor Stone observed:

When we hear religious leaders or politicians referring to “homosexuals in the military,” “homosexual marriage,” or “special rights for homosexuals,” we must recognize what they are doing. Especially for the 15 percent of Americans who react so viscerally to the term “homosexual,” they are trying to chew their way into the worst parts of our psyches in order to manipulate our beliefs and values and make us worse people than we really are.

I’ve been writing for years about how effective the right wing has been at framing, and how progressives often use right-wing language, even in polls. I have had numerous discussions with well-known pollsters who did not get the point and could not distinguish commonplace language from commonplace language that activated right-wing frames.

The cognitive science matters here. The CBS/New York Times poll results were to be expected given our current understanding of how words get their meaning by being neurally linked to frame-circuits.

Blinks, Worms and Spankers

• Nick Kristof, in his February 14 column, discussed three experiments distinguishing conservatives from liberals:
• In one experiment, the strength of blink reflexes to unexpected noises was measured and correlated with degrees of reactions to external threats. Conservatives reacted considerably more strongly than liberals.
• Another experiment was based on the fact that disgust reactions create glandular secretions that change skin conductance. Subjects were shown disgusting images (like some eating a handful of worms). Liberals reacted mildly, but conservative reactions went off the charts.
• A third study showed a strong correlation between attitudes toward spanking and voting patterns: spanking states tend to go Republican. The experimenters correlated spanking preferences with what they called “cognitive styles.” As Kristof reported it, “Spankers tend to see the world in stark, black-and-white terms, perceive the social order as vulnerable and under attack, tend to make strong distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and emphasize order and muscular responses to threats. Parents favoring timeouts feel more comfortable with ambiguities, sense less threat, embrace minority groups – and are less prone to disgust when they see a man eating worms.”
• All three results follow from a cognitive science study called “Moral Politics,” which I published in 1996 and was reprinted in 2002. There, I observed that conservatives and liberals had opposite moral worldviews structured by metaphor around two profoundly different models of the ideal family: a strict father family for conservatives and a nurturant parent family for liberals. In the ideal strict father family, the world is seen as a dangerous place and the father functions as protector from “others” and the parent who teaches children absolute right from wrong by punishing them physically (painful spanking or worse) when they do wrong. The father is the ultimate authority; children are to obey, and immoral practices are seen as disgusting.

Ideal liberal families are based on nurturance, which breaks down into empathy, responsibility – for both oneself and others, and excellence: doing as well as one can to make oneself better and one’s family and community better. Parents are to practice these things and children are to learn them by example.

Because our first experience with being governed in is our families, we all learn a basic metaphor: A governing institution is a family, where the governing institution can be a church, a school, a team or a nation. The nation-as-family version gives us the idea of founding fathers, Mother India and Mother Russia, the Fatherland, homeland security etc.

Apply these monolithically to our politics and you get extreme conservative and progressive moral systems, defining what is right and wrong to each side.

There is no moral system of the moderate or the middle. Because of a neural phenomenon called “mutual inhibition,” two opposing moral systems can live in brain circuits that inhibit each other and are active in different contexts. For a nonpolitical example, consider Saturday night and Sunday morning moral systems, which coexist in the brains of many Americans. The same is true of “moderates,” who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others, though there may be variations from person to person.

Kristof doesn’t mention “Moral Politics,” though he got a copy at a Democratic Senate retreat in 2003, at which we both spoke. If “Moral Politics” is still on his bookshelf, I suggest he take a look. I also recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the difference between conservative and progressive moral systems.

Conservative Populism and Tea Partiers

After the Goldwater defeat of 1964, conservatism was a dirty word and most Americans wanted to be liberals, especially working people who were highly unionized. Lee Atwater and colleagues, working for the 1968 Nixon campaign, had a problem: How to get a significant number of working people to become conservative enough to vote for Nixon.

They intuited what I have since called “biconceptualism” (see “The Political Mind”) – the fact that many Americans have both conservative and progressive views, but in different contexts and on different issues. Mutual inhibition in brain circuitry means the strengthening of one weakens the other. They found a way to both strengthen conservative views and weaken liberal views, creating a conservative populism. Here’s how they did it.

They realized that by the late ’60s many working people were disturbed by the antiwar demonstrations; so Nixon ran on anti-communism. They noticed that many working men were upset by radical feminists; so they pushed traditional family values. And they realized that, after the civil rights legislation, many working men, especially in the South, were threatened by blacks. So, they ran Nixon on law and order. At the same time, they created the concept of “the liberal elite” – the tax-and-spend liberals, the liberal media, the Hollywood liberals, the limousine liberals and so on. They created language for all these ideas and have been repeating it ever since.

Even though liberals have worked tirelessly for the material benefit of working people, the repetition of conservative populist frames over more than 40 years has had an effect. Conservative ideas have spread in the brains of conservative populists. The current Tea Party movement is an attempt to spread conservative populism further.

Sarah Palin may not know history or economics, but she does know strict father morality and conservative populist frames. Frank Rich, in his February 14 New York Times column, denied David Broder’s description of Palin as “perfect pitch populism” and called it “deceptive faux populism” and a “populist masquerade.” What Rich is missing is that Palin has a perfect pitch for conservative populism – which is very different from liberal populism. What she can do is strengthen the conservative side of biconceptual undecided populists, helping to move them to conservative populists. She is dangerous that way.

Rich, long one of my heroes, is a perfect-pitch liberal. He assumes that nurturant values (empathy, social and personal responsibility, making yourself and the world better) are the only objective values. I think they are right values, values that define democracy, but unfortunately far from the only values. Starting with those values, Rich correctly pointed out that Palin’s views contradict liberal populism and that her conservative positions won’t materially help the poor and middle class. All true, but … that does not contradict conservative populism or conservatism in general.

This is a grand liberal mistake. The highest value in the conservative moral system (see “Moral Politics,” chapter nine) is the perpetuation and strengthening of the conservative moral system itself!! This is not liberal materialism. Liberals decry it as “ideology,” and it is. But it is real; it has the structure of moral system, and it is physically part of the brains of both Washington conservatives and conservative populists. The conservative surge is not merely electoral. It is an idea surge. It is an attempt to spread conservatism via the spread of conservative populism. That is what the Tea Party movement is doing.

False Reason and Real Reason: The Obama Mistake

It was entirely predictable a year ago that the conservatives would hold firm against Obama’s attempts at “bipartisanship” – finding occasional conservatives who were biconceptual, that is, shared some views acceptable to Obama on some issues, while keeping an overall liberal agenda.

The conservatives are not fools. Because their highest value is protecting and extending the conservative moral system itself, giving Obama any victory at all would strengthen Obama and weaken the hold of their moral system. Of course, they were going to vote against every proposal and delay and filibuster as often as possible. Protecting and extending their worldview demands it.

Obama has not understood this.

We saw this when Obama attended the Republican caucus. He kept pointing out that they voted against proposals that Republicans had made and that he had incorporated, acting as if this were a contradiction. But that was to be expected, since a particular proposal that strengthens Obama and hence weakens their moral view violates their highest moral principle.

Such conservative logic explains why conservatives in Congress first proposed a bipartisan committee to study the deficit, and then voted against it.

That is why I don’t expect much from the president’s summit with Republicans on February 25. Why should they do anything to strengthen Obama’s hand, when it would violate their highest moral principle, as well as weakening themselves electorally? If Obama thinks he can shame them in front of their voters, he is mistaken, again. Conservative voters think the same way they do.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama used framing perfectly and articulated the progressive moral system (empathy, individual and social responsibility, making oneself and the world better) as well as it has ever been done.

But he changed after the election. Obama moved from real reason, how people really think, to false reason, a traditional view coming out of the enlightenment and favored by all too many liberals.

We now (finally!) come to the point of going through all those experiments in the cognitive and brain sciences. Here are the basic differences between real and false reason, and the ways in which all too many liberals, including Obama during the past year, are wed to false reason.

Real reason is embodied in two ways. It is physical, in our brain circuitry. And it is based on our bodies as the function in the everyday world, using thought that arises from embodied metaphors. And it is mostly unconscious. False reason sees reason as fully conscious, as literal, disembodied, yet, somehow fitting the world directly, and working not via frame-based, metaphorical, narrative and emotional logic, but via the logic of logicians alone.

Empathy is physical, arising from mirror neurons systems tied to emotional circuitry. Self-interest is real as well, and both play their roles in real reason. False reason is supposed to serve material self-interest alone. It’s supposed to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?,” which President Obama assumed that all populists were asking. While Frank Luntz told conservatives to frame health care in terms of the moral concepts of freedom (a “government takeover”) and life (”death panels”), Obama was talking about policy minutia that could not be understood by most people.

Real reason is inexplicably tied up with emotion; you cannot be rational without being emotional. False reason thinks that emotion is the enemy of reason, that it is unscrupulous to call on emotion. Yet, people with brain damage who cannot feel emotion cannot make rational decisions because they do not know what to want, since like and not like mean nothing. “Rational” decisions are based on a long history of emotional responses by oneself and others. Real reason requires emotion.

Obama assumed that Republicans would act “rationally,” where “rationality” was defined by false reason – on the logic of material self-interest. But conservatives understood that their electoral chances matched their highest moral principle, strengthening their moral system itself without compromise.

It is a basic principle of false reason that every human being has the same reason governed by logic – and that if you just tell people the truth, they will reason to the right conclusion. The President kept saying, throughout Tea Party summer, that he would just keep telling the truth about policy details that most people could not make moral sense of. And so he did, to the detriment of all of us.

All politics is moral. Political leaders all make proposals they say are “right.” No one proposes a policy that they say is wrong. But there are two opposing moral systems at work in America. What moral system you are using governs how you will see the world and reason about politics. That is the lesson of the cognitive science behind “Moral Politics” and all the experiments since then. It is the lesson of all the research on embodied metaphor. Metaphorical thought is central to politics.

Finally, there is the lesson of how language works in the brain. Every word is neurally connected to a neural circuit characterizing a frame, which, in turn, is part of a system of frames linked to a moral system. In political discourse, words activate frames, which, in turn, activate moral systems. This mechanism is not conscious. It is automatic, and it is acquired through repetition. As the language of conservative morality is repeated, frames are activated repeatedly that, in turn, activate and strengthen the conservative system of thought – unconsciously and automatically. Thus, conservative talk radio and the national conservative messaging system are powerful unconscious forces. They work via principles of real reason.

But many liberals, assuming a false view of reason, think that such a messaging system for ideas they believe in would be illegitimate – doing the things that the conservatives do that they consider underhanded. Appealing honestly to the way people really think is seen as emotional and, hence, irrational and immoral. Liberals, clinging to false reason, simply resist paying attention to real reason.

Take Paul Krugman, one of my heroes, whose economic sense I find impeccable. Here is a quote from a recent column:

Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings – savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

He is following traditional liberal logic, and pointing out a literal contradiction: they denounce “cuts in Medicare,” while wanting to eliminate Medicare and have proposed bigger cuts themselves.

But, from the perspective of real reason as conservatives use it, there is no contradiction. The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system – a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned. It is a system where some people are paying – God forbid! – for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

Indeed, one of the major findings of real reason is that negating a frame activates that frame in the brain and reinforces it – like Nixon saying that he was not a crook. Dan Pfeiffer, writing on the White House blog, posted an article called “Still not a ‘Government Takeover’,” which activates the conservative idea of a government takeover and hence reinforces the idea. Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe. Facts matter. But they have to be framed properly and their moral significance must be made manifest. That is what we learn from real reason.

The New York Times is home to a lot of traditional reason, often based on false principles of how people think. That is why the reporting of those experiments brightened my day. Perhaps the best way to The New York Times’ mind is through the science of mind.

Kudos once more to the Times’ science reporting on those experiments.

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When I arrived in Seattle 18 months ago, I quickly realized two things.  First, this city is bustling with so much creativity that it is on the verge of becoming the next Silicon Valley.  Seattle has the cultural capacity to become a leading innovation center for the world, especially around participatory government and social technologies as they play out in a burgeoning green economy.  And we’re on the verge of taking things to an entirely new level.

The second thing I noticed was that I kept meeting people who should already know each other, but didn’t.  I’d sit down with Sarah Jaynes of the Washington Progress Alliance – an organization dedicated to building infrastructure for the progressive movement – and have a chat a few days later with Jeni Krencicki Barcelos at the Three Degrees Project only to learn that she had helped build the Progressive Ideas Network – another organization dedicated to building infrastructure for progressives.  Yet, they hadn’t met each other.  I found dozens of people like this with a wide range of backgrounds and interests.

So much potential collaboration untapped.

Some might think of this as a problem.  I saw it as an incredible opportunity.  The prospect that we could unleash the talents, insights, and experiences of the Seattle scene riveted me.  How could we effectively bring people together and catalyze this awesome creative scene?

Then, in early November, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging gave a two-part lecture series at Town Hall Seattle.  He galvanized a room full of innovators with his call to make Seattle the first carbon neutral city in North America by 2030.  The buzz was so intense that you had to lean close and yell to be heard 10 inches away.  The hair stands up on my arms when I think about the enthusiasm in that room!

During the same week, I was thrown into a slurry of amazing conversations because the Sightline Institute and Climate Solutions had brought me in to give a workshop to environmental communicators throughout the region about framing and values-based communication.  In the span of four days I met 70 talented innovators who could leverage a substantial amount of change in the world.

Conversations percolated about idea incubators for social entrepreneurship, investments in communications infrastructure, and the fervor we all felt about Alex’s call-to-action.  Without hesitation, I went to work turning this energy into momentum.  During the months of November and December, I had four or five meetings a day with people who could take our city and the region to the next level.  These conversations created a lot of great ideas, some of which were captured in a prospectus we wrote to build an innovation engine for Seattle. (download the PDF!)

What is an innovation engine?  Here’s our working definition:

A set of social practices and organizational structures that promote ongoing stimulation of new ideas, combined with mechanisms that can reliably and effectively channel those ideas into a flourishing network of collaborative projects.

We talked about mapping out our movement and developing tools for community engagement.  We considered other models for innovation that had worked successfully in the past.  And we pulled together a set of functional elements that, if combined thoughtfully, could change the world:

• The cultural values so pervasive in the Pacific Northwest (free thinking, pragmatic, down-to-earth, explorers who are comfortable taking risks);
• A sense of our shared identity as “Seattle Creatives”;
• A shared vision that organizes us into a coherent movement across time;
• A powerfully structured collaboration network built on an open architecture that encourages us to see what others in our community are doing and combine our efforts;
• An open architecture that allows us to work in parallel, find synergies, and share our practices with others around the world;
• A movement map that identifies who the movers and shakers are in all the important roles of a social movement;
• A pressure cooker for applying leadership through collective action that pressures our local officials to act boldly around our vision;
• The creation of world-class idea incubators to hatch new ideas and implement them (artistic communities, research centers, social entrepreneur labs, etc.);
• And a comprehensive planning process that creates neutral ground across governmental, business, and non-profit sectors to (a) bring convergence to our  strategies around regional efforts and (b) provide consistency across sectors with our long-term vision of becoming a carbon neutral city.

At this point in the story, we’re turning momentum into action.  The list of collaborators continues to grow as emails are passed around and social events are staged to bring us together.  We are setting about the exciting work of building a dynamic, engaged, and ever-expanding community to envision our collective future and bring about the best of possible worlds. Potential partners include Sustainable Seattle, Re-Vision Labs, Sustainable Wallingford, SCALLOPS, ICLE, Seattle’s Climate Partnership, Great City, Cascade Land Conservancy, Undriving, Front Seat, Guenther Media, Groundwire and many more.

At the same time, we are reaching out to others around the world who are doing similar work.  Natural allies include Post Carbon Institute, Transition Towns, Common Current, Identity Campaigning, Carbon Neutral Stirling, and many others both locally and dispersed through our social networks.

Soon we will have our first strategic planning session (March 13th) and really get to work.  Things are just getting started, yet the profound feeling of history is upon us.  This project is growing organically throughout the community.  It is fundamentally empowering and exciting.  And it asserts itself into the world as an example of change arising through local networks and accomplishing big things in the spirit of openness and collaboration.

And the story isn’t finished.  In fact, it’s just beginning… now is your chance to help build the future.  Join us and help tell the story of change.  Make yourself a central character in this unfolding drama of creation.  Be the change you wish to see in the world.

We don’t have a website up for the project yet, so Cognitive Policy Works is providing a temporary forum for discussions as we continue the birthing process.  Please add comments, pose questions, offer ideas, and let us know who else should be involved.

Working with you for the common good,

Joe Brewer

Project Coordinator, Seattle’s Innovation Engine

(Write me a note if you want to speak directly about this exciting movement)

Update 2-9-10: Stay connected to this project as it unfolds.  Follow us on Twitter.  We’ll have a website up soon too!

Update 2-11-10: Sign up here to receive announcements, event invitations, and opportunities to collaborate with other Seattle innovators!

As long as we’re taking the measure of the country this week, let’s look in on the far (and not so far) fringes of the right wing. What’s up with them? And how worried should we be?

For the past several months, I’ve been trying to get a bead on the actual numbers of the far-right movement. To that end, I accrued a motley little collection of surveys, studies, and sociological research pulled together from here and there. I’ve been sort of walking around this pile, kicking at it, figuring out which pieces fit together, in the hope of getting a handle on exactly how many really scary people there are out there right now. It seemed like an important question to get answered.

Finally, I did what I should have done on Day One. I picked up the phone and called Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, who knows more about the hard research on the far right than anyone else in the country.

“Chip, how many far-right wingers are there in the United States?”

I knew the question was vague. I figured, based on our past conversations, that I’d have to carefully define “far right” and qualify who belonged in that group. And then we’d have a discussion about how you slice and dice the various factions and their relationships to the whole, and….

But that’s not what happened. Chip didn’t even skip a beat.

“Ten percent of the population.” He declared this with a jaunty certainty that’s uncharacteristic of Chip, who usually has a sociologist’s inbred caution about putting caveats around his claims.

“Ten percent? That’s it? Flat out?”

“Ten percent. That’s it. It’s been the same number for most of our history, and it doesn’t change much.” He went on to explain that sociologists and social psychologists have spent decades doing on a large scale what I was doing with my little clutch of studies. And invariably, he said, no matter how they define “far right” or “authoritarian,” no matter how they count up the fundamentalists and nationalists and proto-fascists, the numbers always come up somewhere between 7 percent and 12 percent. Or, on average, about 10 percent. Always. And it’s been that way going back as far as they can go.

So there you have it: the answer to the question, “How many really hardcore conservatives are we dealing with here?” It’s thirty million people, give or take.

Still: the number seemed small. Intuitively, it just seems like the crazy is running a lot deeper than that these days. Chip confirmed this: it is, in fact, deeper than that.

“There’s another group of people that are actually more interesting right now,” Chip explained. Dr. Robert Altemeyer, who did the original research on right-wing authoritarian followers, found that there’s a second slice of the American populace—about the same size as the first one, or slightly bigger—who are conservative by temperament, but don’t live full-time in that same overwrought, hyper-vigilant, paranoid space that the ultra-right wing authoritarian 10 percent do. This group, Chip said, usually hews closer to the political center-right, keeping themselves at some distance from the really wild-eyed True Believers in the next cohort farther out.

But according to Altemeyer, I pointed out, these people tend to move away from the center and embrace hard-line conservatism if they’re under extreme social or economic stress, right? Exactly right, said Chip. It’s happened several times before in American history. (One example: In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein documented how, back in the mid-1960s, conservative suburban homeowners were driven into the arms of the far right by their fear of neighborhood integration in the wake of fair housing laws. The political careers of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan where launched on the resulting tide of rage). And it’s precisely what’s happening again now.

This faction’s rightward march is being driven by the Tea Party movement, which is organizing the core of this second slice. It’s actively decoupling itself from the center-right position of the GOP’s mainstream, and forming stronger alliances with the ultra-right 10-percenters—creating a super-right-wing faction that includes upwards of 25-30 percent of the country.

A lot of progressive strategists who are unfamiliar with the factions within the right wing are looking at this newly congealed group as one contiguous bloc. That’s a grave mistake. Despite the growing overlap, the two groups retain essential differences we need to keep our eyes on if we’re going to deal with this new fusion effectively. A few examples:

• The ultra-right clings to racism as an all-purpose explanation for what’s wrong with America. The Tea Party folks (as I explained last week) have largely moved past racism. Not to say you won’t find it (especially among the elders); but it’s a mistake to say — as some progressives do — that it’s a universal motivating force.

Which isn’t to say that hate won’t figure prominently in their politics. Conservative politics literally, structurally cannot function without an “us-versus-them” narrative to keep voters on the barricades. But this alliance will be less grounded in racism against the usual black and brown groups, and more deeply rooted in mutual tribal agreements on the evils of socialism, liberalism, and Islam (the only acceptable racism left). We should also keep our eyes on a faint but already growing strain of anti-Semitism within the combined movement, as both groups begin to identify “Jewish bankers” as both the cause of the nation’s current economic distress and the main proponents of socialism and liberalism in America.

• The ultra-right includes a higher-than-average number of people who live lives that can only be described as marginal. Their lack of attachment to family, careers, or community often feeds their rage, and stokes their persecution fantasies. It also makes them far more likely to resort to violence than the Tea Party members.

This isn’t nearly as true of people in the second slice, who have generally made considerable investment in family, community, business and church ties, and are seeking to protect those investments at all costs. Those commitments keep them tethered a bit more closely to reality, and so they’re typically far less willing to break the law to achieve their ends.

However, when this group joins forces with the far right, the dynamics change. Sometimes, their very presence can embolden the violence-prone radicals in the first slice, who feel an increased sense of permission (they’ll be heroes to millions more people if they act), and who may actually receive more widespread community cover if they do commit a crime. Other times, they act as a sort of ballast, anchoring the more radical members back into society in ways that discourage violence as a tactic throughout the movement.

• The ultra-right is in this fight for life. Many of them were raised in families which have clung to extremist beliefs for generations. But for those joining the new Tea Party movement, their activism is more situational. They haven’t done anything like this before. They’re only stepping up now because they’re worried and frustrated (as we all are) about the way power is being used in Washington and Wall Street. There’s no telling how strong their commitment to this new alliance is, or how long it will last.
• The Tea Party congealed due to significant funding from GOP lobbyists, with a huge assist from Roger Ailes at Fox. You occasionally find the odd antediluvian fat cat giving money to ultra-right racist, nationalist, and militia groups, too; but it’s been a long while since this faction got the kind of concentrated corporate fertilizer that’s being lavished on the teabaggers.

There are more points of differentiation, but you get the point. There are two groups here: one comprising our perennial crop of evergreen wingnuts, and another that’s only recently decamped from the center right and moved hard right to join them.

And it’s the combination of the two that’s worrisome. On their own, the far-right wingnuts can’t elect a dogcatcher (and even trying to do that much would no doubt cause a schism that would wind out for years in court. It’s just how they are.) But controlling 25 to 30 percent of the American electorate — while not enough to take over the country in straight numeric terms — is enough for the combined group to win limited but serious victories here and there. And, of course, their power is further magnified by the vagaries of the electoral college and the way we choose senators. In real terms, the system is set up so that this 30 percent can wield the political clout of 50 percent. That’s where we are now — and it’s one reason we’re running into so much gridlock in trying to govern the country.

I’ve also noted before that even though this 28 percent is a minority in straight democratic terms, the history of revolutions is that it’s also more than enough to take over an entire country if the combined group should decide to resort to violence. (The Nazis are the case I use most often here.) Two or three guys with guns can subdue and terrorize entire city blocks full of unarmed citizens. Strength in numbers is irrelevant —just as democracy is irrelevant—if you’ve got superior firepower and are willing to use it.

And this brings us down to the real driver that will determine which way this plays out. The ultra-right has steadily ratcheted up its calls for violence as the Obama administration unfolds and the economic stress drags out.

Will the “second slice” Tea Party folks follow them down that path?

Or will their strong attachments to the larger community keep them on the side of civilization?

Or, perhaps, will the ultra-right overplay their hand by launching a run of domestic terror that sends their new allies scurrying back toward the center, ending the coalition? (It’s happened before.)

Much of the future of the conservative movement in America is riding on these questions. And there are other variables at play that will also affect how they’ll be answered. One is Fox News — which, according to a poll last week, really is now the most trusted name in news. (Fortunately, those numbers are easily disputed; one of the rules of thumb when dealing with the right is that conservative groups of all types always grossly inflate their numbers, which is why figuring out how many of them there really are can be so fraught.)

Still, the Fox effect is out there. My newly-retired parents took a long road trip last week, during which they stayed with several friends. In every house they stayed in, their hosts — all of them educated professionals in their 60s and 70s, most of whom had been liberal-to-centrist all their lives — had stopped taking a daily paper, and were watching Fox exclusively. Whatever this says, it’s not good. Given the constant stream of overtly eliminationist hate speech that flows from Messrs. Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, and the rest, Fox may well be the biggest influencer determining which direction the Tea Party slice decides to go.

Another driver is the Democrats’ continued fecklessness in clearly communicating the coherent moral values at the heart of the progressive worldview; and their extreme reluctance to support any kind of progressive populist agenda. Everybody knows now that there’s a rising populist tide in America. Average Americans, left and right, are uniting behind an implacable fury at the big banks — and at Congress and Obama, who seem determined to enable criminal behavior rather than make any serious attempt to control it.

You don’t need me to tell you that the tide is rising. We’re seeing the signs of political climate change all around us. But most of the Village still regards any kind of populism as a dangerous (and avoidable) impulse. “Responsible” consultants are cautioning Democrats not to get out front of that wave and ride it. In 20 years, historians will record this as a mistake on the same magnitude as the one they made in 1972 when they started backing away from the unions. It’s going to be the biggest missed opportunity since….oh, damn, it’s hard to say, since the Democrats have already missed so many big ones that it’s hard to keep track. But this one could, in the end, trump them all.

Even though the odds against the newly amalgamated Tea Party/ultra-right hybrid controlling Congress or electing their own president are slim to none, this group will continue to be GOP’s main base as long as the populist wave crests and they can avoid succumbing to schisms. And though they won’t change the way the other 70 percent of us vote, they’ll probably hold onto enough power for the next while to keep doing serious damage to our democracy.

Any progressive strategy to weaken the right should begin by finding a way to peel the second slice back off from the ultra-right, and bring it back toward the center. That alliance is the keystone on which the entire strength of the conservative movement is resting right now; pull that stone, and the rest of it crumbles. Reviving a vital progressive populism is the best wedge and sledge we’ve got right now. And that’s why we shouldn’t hesitate to reach back to 1910 to inform the kind of politics we’ll need to win in 2010.

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• Saddam Hussein is linked to the 9/11 attacks.
• Environmental action destroys jobs.
• Regulations hurt markets.
• Government is wasteful.

Each of these claims is based on an underlying belief about the world.  In the case of Saddam Hussein, most Fox News viewers consider the linkage to 9/11 as incontrovertible regardless of the evidence presented to the contrary.  Similarly, economists from the most prestigious universities have ardently declared that markets should be “free” from intrusion by government in order to create wealth and prosperity.  This implies that regulations are harmful and restrictive to the workings of markets.  It further inculcates the implicit belief that markets are inherently good and will always behave in the interest of public welfare, even in the face of a mountain of hard facts that contradict this view.

Why do I begin presentations with this strange assertion?  Because it tells us something very important about how our minds work.

Many of us were taught that there is a single objective reality.  We take as given the notion that our thoughts correspond with the external world in a straightforward manner, what mathematicians call a one-to-one correspondence.  This is sometimes called the Literal Correspondence Theory because it asserts that all of our thoughts are literal and that they are true only if they accurately map onto the world.

Research conducted back in the 1970’s abolished the Literal Correspondence Theory, as documented in the groundbreaking book Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.  They turned 2500 years of philosophy on its head by demonstrating the widespread and pervasive role of metaphors in everyday conceptual thought.  (For another read on this fascinating topic, check out Raymond Gibbs’ The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding published in 1994)

Here are two examples:

More is Up

It is quite common to conceptualize quantity as a vertical level, with sayings like “housing prices dropped” and”watch the stock market rise.”  This metaphor provides a logic to the concept for magnitude that is intuitive and easy to grasp.  It arises through the experience of stacking things such that a greater magnitude results in a higher level of the stack – be it a stack of books or the level of a liquid in a glass.

Knowing is Seeing

We often conceptualize the acquisition of knowledge as a visioning act, with sayings like “I see what you mean” and “that idea is a little unclear.”  This metaphor arises through the experience of coming to know things when they appear in our line of sight.

More than 200 conceptual metaphors like these have been documented so far.  (A sample can be found here.)  The existence of conceptual metaphors tells us that our understandings are not tied directly to the world in a one-to-one fashion.  We can reason with more than one metaphor about the same topic.  So it is possible that we may think of a market as a tool  – the Markets as Tools metaphor – when discussing how to “create a market” that reduces air pollution.  At the same time, another person may think about a market as a self-directed person – the Market as Autonomous Agent metaphor – when suggesting that we should “let the market decide” how best to increase human well-being.

What’s a Worldview?  Look for a System of Metaphors

The tendency to reason with a particular set of conceptual metaphors is indicative of a particular mental model for how the world works, sometimes referred to as a worldview.  George Lakoff, in his effort to discover how political thought works, revealed that a specific metaphor is commonplace in political discourse.  The Nation as Family metaphor – with examples like “founding fathers” and “send our sons and daughters off to war” – plays an essential role in organizing progressive and conservative political thought around coherent moral worldviews.

This metaphor arises with one of two idealized models for the family.  For conservative thought it is the Strict Father Family with its authoritarian structure and an emphasis on discipline and order.  Progressive thought arises through the Nurturant Parent Family with its egalitarian structure and an emphasis on empathy and shared responsibility.  Each of these models brings with it a moral lens for understanding right and wrong, good and bad.  (Get the full-blown coverage of this discovery in Lakoff’s book Moral Politics published in 1996 and 2002)

Each conceptual model represents a set of beliefs and understandings that is often contradictory with the other.  Conservatives tend to believe markets can fix any problem.  Progressives generally believe markets are capable of doing harm as well as good.  While conservatives believe that nature is separate from and competes with the economy, progressives believe a fundamental interdependence exists.  A long list of discrepancies like these are discussed in Moral Politics and its smaller companion Don’t Think of an Elephant!.

Our beliefs arise through coherent worldviews that differ from one another.

Beyond “Only the Facts” Strategies

A common mistake in political strategy is the notion that people are motivated by the facts of a situation.  Any social scientist worth their salt will tell you that what a person knows in any particular context is grounded in a mesh of beliefs, value-judgments, and information that supports a particular viewpoint.  It’s not simply a matter of getting the facts straight.

People are actually motivated by core beliefs about the world, deeply felt concerns they have, aspirations that call upon them to grow and thrive, and the connection of personal identity with people who share their values.  Political strategists ignore these motivations at their peril, as has occurred over and over again in failed campaigns to elect candidates (John Kerry come to mind?), pass key legislation (Will we ever get universal health care?), and cultural change agendas (How do we nip rampant consumerism in the bud?).

Unfortunately, advocates of progressive social change are all-too-often not aware of conceptual metaphor and worldview as influences on social behavior.  Perhaps this isn’t surprising.  Few among us keep up with the latest research in human semantics.  Yet, discoveries like these will be vital for practitioners in the advocacy world to understand and incorporate into their practices if they are to engage their audiences at the deepest levels – where behaviors emerge from.  It will be vital that we recognize the role of beliefs and worldviews in political thought in order to engage the populace in meaningful ways.

At Cognitive Policy Works, we’re dedicated to converting discoveries like these into learnable practices so that it becomes possible to communicate effectively in our rapidly changing world.

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My hope is that advocates for progressive social change will learn how to do this successfully.  We have to change the stories of our culture in order to make headway on the great challenges confronting us.

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In forming his administration, President Obama abandoned the movement that had begun during his campaign for deal-making and a pragmatism that hasn’t worked. That movement is still possible and needed now. Here is look at what is required, and how a version of it is forming in California.

We begin with this week’s triple whammy.

Freedom vs. The Public Option

Which would you prefer, consumer choice or freedom? Extended coverage or freedom? Bending the cost curve or freedom?

John Boehner, House Minority Leader, speaking of health care, said recently, “This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen in the 19 years I have been here in Washington. . . It’s going to lead to a government takeover of our health care system, with tens of thousands of new bureaucrats right down the street, making these decisions [choose your doctor, buy your own health insurance] for you.”

This is exactly what Frank Luntz advised conservatives to say. They have repeated it and repeated it. Why has it worked to rally conservative populists against their interests? The most effective framing is more than mere language, more than spin or salesmanship. It has worked because conservatives really believe that the issue is freedom. It fits the conservative moral system. It fits how conservatives see the world.

The Democrats have helped the conservatives. Their pathetic attempt to make any deal to get 60 votes convinced even Massachusetts voters that government under the Democrats was corrupt and oppressive, not just inept, but immoral.

All politics is moral

All political leaders argue that they are doing the right thing, not the wrong thing, that their policies are moral, not evil.

Conservatives understand this, liberals tend not to. Conservatives know a morality tale when they see it: Greedy Wall Street bankers, who have cost people their homes, their jobs, and their savings get billion-dollar bailouts from the government, while those honest hard-working people get nothing. Corruption. Oppression. A threat to freedom.

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.

Even the language was a disaster. Liberals thought that conservatives would like consumer choice. That’s why they used “public option.” As Harry Reid said, “It’s public and it’s an option – a public option.” But what did a conservative hear in the words “public option?” Say “public” and he hears “government.” “Option” is a policy-wonk term, from the language of bureaucracy. Say “public option” and the conservative hears “government bureaucracy.”

The results of deal-making in the name of pragmatism have been considerably immoral, as documented thoroughly by progressives like Drew Westen, Matt Taibbi, Robert Kuttner, and many others. Advice on what to do instead has not been lacking from other progressives. Advice is all over the blogs. Guy Saperstein is an excellent example.

We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestion – and ridicule. Rachel Maddow is one of the best, and her popularity is well-deserved. What’s more fun than ridiculing Tea Party-ers, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the like, by showing the factual errors, the flaws in their logic, and the cruelty of their positions.

But we have been dealt a triple blow. A year of failed deal-making by our side, the Tea Party win in Massachusetts, and worst of all, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to turn our democracy into a corporate plutocracy. This is serious.

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.

“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 links 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.

The California Democracy Movement

We have the beginning of such a movement in California.

The central issue in California is basic democracy. California is the only state in America where the legislature is controlled by a relatively small conservative minority. Because it takes a 2/3 vote in both the Senate and Assembly to pass a budget or any tax, 1/3 plus one – 34% – in either house can control the vote by saying no to measures that would finance public needs.

Conservatives exercise that control for the simple reason that they don’t believe that government should serve public needs, that instead government should be privatized and shrunk to fit in a bathtub, as if governing would disappear with government.

But governing doesn’t disappear when government shrinks; instead corporations come to govern your life – like HMO’s, oil companies, drug companies, agribusiness, and so on, with accountability only to maximizing profit, not to public needs.

An overwhelming majority of Californians – over 60% – disagree. They believe that government should serve public needs, and they have elected sensible legislators. But they don’t quite make up 2/3. And so an extreme right-wing minority – about 37% – controls the state, its present and its future.

Luckily, there is a way out for the majority in California. The initiative process that created this situation can get us out. I have proposed The California Democracy Act as an initiative in the November 2010 election. It changes two words in the California Constitution – “two-thirds” becomes “a majority” in two places. It can be described in one simple sentence: All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote. That ballot initiative needs only a majority to pass. It would return majority rule to the legislature on everyday economic issues, bringing democracy back to California. Those interested can join the campaign by clicking on www.CaliforniansForDemocracy.com

Democracy is the central issue, and that is what our movement is about. We are setting up an infrastructure in California, with a statewide organization and a speakers’ bureau, for those who want to continue democratizing the state after the election.

Democracy is The Issue

The majority vote campaign gives us a chance to talk not only about this particular issue, but about democracy as it affects all issues. The clearest articulator of what democracy is about has been Barack Obama – the campaigner we cheered for, campaigned hard for, and voted for.

Democracy, he has observed, is based on empathy – on citizens caring about one another. That’s why we have principles like freedom and fairness, for everybody, not just for the rich and powerful. True empathy requires responsibility, not just for oneself, but also for others. And since we, as individuals and as a nation, are far from perfect, empathy demands an ethic of excellence, of making oneself better, one’s family and community better, and one’s nation better.

That view of citizenship in a democracy comes with a view of government. Government has two sacred moral missions: protection and empowerment.

Protection goes well beyond police and the military and the fire department to consumer protection, environmental protection, worker protection, health care, investor protection, social security, and other safety nets.

Empowerment is what the stimulus package was about: building and maintaining roads, bridges, public transportation, and public buildings; systems for communication, electricity, water; education, from pre-school through graduate and professional schools; scientific research and technological development; a banking system that works; a stock market that works; and a judicial system that works.

No one earns a living or lives well without protection and empowerment by the government. That is what taxes pay for. And the more you make from what the government gives you, the more you should contribute to keeping it going

Tax Shifts

When you cut taxes that pay for public needs, you are actually shifting taxes. You are taxing others. In California tax cuts for corporations last year led to cuts in the support for public universities, which led to 32% higher tuition and a drastic cut in the number of students educated. That 32% constituted a tax on those students and their parents, and when they had to borrow the money for college, interest payments on the loan effectively double the cost of the loan. That’s a very high tax shift. But an even higher tax is shifted onto students who cannot afford the higher tuition: the tax of a lost education lasts all one’s life and its cost is not only monetary, but a cost in human potential. It is also a cost to employers, who get less educated workers, and to society, which gets less educated citizens.

The Movement

We will be talking about all of this and more. Take economic democracy. California is the world’s seventh richest economy. It is ludicrous to say that there is no money in California. If the money for public needs is there, where is it? In California, the richest one percent owns more assets than the bottom 95 per cent. The money is concentrated at the top.

Just about every issue comes down to the issue of democracy. That is why we are starting with the California Democracy Act, which would finally end the rule of the state by a small minority of ultra-conservative legislators. It would finally give the voters of the state a voice in their own future and the future of their children and grandchildren.

If you live in California (one out of eight Americans does), then join the California Democracy Movement. If you live elsewhere, form your own democracy movement and unite with us. The principles are simple, and they are Obama’s:

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.

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.

The time is now

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?