Democratic Snowflakes and Republican Ice Crystals

During the presidential election of 2000 the country went from a Democratic to a Republican administration, from President Bill Clinton to President George W. Bush. For the six elections preceding the year 2000, West Virginia voted Democratic (with one exception). For the six elections from 2000 on, it has voted Republican. And the margin of votes for the Republican candidate has increased in each of those six elections. We are now more solidly Republican than any other state, Wyoming maybe excepted.

Why had a successful and popular Democratic administration prior to 2000 failed to leverage those successes into a continuation of its policies? What caused the flip to a Republican administration, one that promptly made a 180 u-turn in policy. The eight years of the Bush administration saw the September 11, 2001 assault on our country, the Iraq war, a massive transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, and the Great Recession of 2008. It was all enough to send the country back to a Democratic presidency, but one which West Virginia did not endorse.

George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist (now emeritus), proposed a reason for this unexpected change in administrations. He wrote that it wasn’t so much about which party had the loftiest moral credentials, but the one which could best convince the electorate that it did.

Lakoff supposed that the Democrats, who were trying to elect Al Gore in 2000, had muffed the messaging. Gore’s campaign was focused on the dangers lying ahead, particularly in the worsening environmental picture and he proposed an impressive policy agenda, one he was not able to carry out. He did come close though. He won the popular vote, but lost to the dragon killers of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. If West Virginia had given its electoral votes to the Democrats, Gore would have been president, not Bush. 

What could the Democratic campaign have done differently to avoid the nail-biting, disappointing conclusion of that election? Was it a matter of the campaign’s substance lacking teeth or was it the framing of the message that lacked teeth? Lakoff assumed the latter.

Lakoff is a formidable figure in cognitive linguistics, with a secure place up there in the pantheon. He made his professional reputation in the study of metaphor and the framing of ideas, arguing that metaphors importantly, though not exclusively, shape our languages and cultures. People are creative in using metaphors to understand conventional realities in sensory experience. Concepts like “love, hate, grief, and happiness” depend for their cultural impact on metaphoric definitions.

To communicate these fuzzy concepts people rely on metaphors, where the most powerful of these are embodied in our biology and evolutionary history. Love is: “friendship on fire (Ann Landers),” “a transformational force (Martin Luther King),” “a beautiful garden (Rumi),” “a virus (Maya Angelou).” In the political arena, Lakoff reasoned that the Democratic party operated on the metaphor of the country as a nurturing family, while the Republican party looked on it as a strict parent.

Lakoff spun out this distinction between liberals and conservatives in his 1996 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Which metaphor would you ascribe to as a parent: (1) give a child the wings to fly or (2) spare the rod, spoil the child? Answer that and similar questions and the pundits with some accuracy can predict how you’ll vote. Not infallibly, of course. After all, people aren’t rigidly programmed to always behave predictably.

So, what if parenting actually involved both physical nurturing and moral instruction? Do you come out of childhood with an appreciation for both Republicans and Democrats, and end up as an Independent? In that case, does who gets your vote depend on who better convinces you that the country will be better served by them, rather than the opposition? Under that supposition, the successful party has to frame its arguments—again with the help of metaphors—to make its case. Lakoff argued in subsequent books that the Republicans did this messaging better than Democrats. Much better.

As an example, I looked at the 2000 election where George W. Bush, the Republican, faced Al Gore, the Democrat. I’ve listed below the metaphors each candidate used in his respective announcement speech. I’ve separated these into Negative and Positive categories depending on my sense of the core intent of the metaphor. The Negatives are typically used to identify weaknesses in the opposition; the Positives strengths in contrast to the opposition.

Bush’s metaphors invoked the following language:

Negatives: regulations strangle, struggling families, outskirts of poverty, world of terror, aging weapons, failing intelligence, the fearful build walls.

Positives or neutrals: prosperity economy, the heart’s dream, compassionate conservative, embrace free trade, break down barriers, the confident tear walls down, sharpened sword, iron policy, quiet river cutting through stone, compassionate armies, blow whistle on failure, private property as backbone, front porch campaign.

Gore’s metaphors in contrast:

Negatives: hoping for crumbs of compassion, hunger and thirst for goodness, time deficit, decency deficit, care deficit, empty tables, guns on the street, marketing of cruelty, degradation, undermining of Social Security, ducking issues, broken families, hatreds tear apart, foreign policy not a game, arena of politics.

Positives or neutrals: seeing with the heart, history as rudder, ideals and values as compass, neighbor as a moral term, faith lights, clean start, fresh century.

The pattern is pretty evident to my linguistic eyes. The Democrat comes across as deeply (maybe overly?) concerned, but vague on policy solutions; the Republican as bold and armored, ready to do battle, suggesting at the kind of solutions needed.

Lakoff cited evidence of this sort as proof that the Democrats had a message framing problem, one that they needed to correct to better appeal to the electorate. His diagnosis and prescription found a lot of positive reception among politicos and for a while Dr. Lakoff, PhD Linguistics, became a kind of celebrity “political physician” in Democratic circles.

He set up a non-profit called the Rockridge Institute in 1997 and in 2006 published a kind of progressive manifesto titled Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision. This book specified remedies to the framing problem.

But almost coincident with the election of 2008, Rockridge closed due to a lack of funding. It’s curious to me why the Democratic establishment decided not to continue funding a think tank that poked under the surface and seemed to be pushing out good advice. Lakoff’s insights had evidently lost traction.

I believe it’s clear from the 2008 election that the Democrats had learned something, at least about successful framing, because their candidate, Barack Obama, went on to win that election and the next as well. So maybe the Democrats ‘osmosed’ some of Lakoff.  “Lesson learned, thanks George, we’ll take it from here.”

But that might not be all of it. It turns out that the politicos got a second opinion from another doctor in the person of Jonathan Haidt, also PhD, a psychologist this time,  interested in morality and happiness.

In 2006 Haidt published the Happiness Hypothesis and then six years later in 2012 followed it up with The Righteous Mind. Both books postulate that emotions are the primary driver of the actions we take, but that alone they can’t predict success or happiness. Outcomes, favorable or not, depend on people’s rational sense. However, rationality comes into play to serve the emotions; it does not control the emotions. Its importance is secondary, it’s more an editor or a judge. This interpretation, by the way, is entirely congruent with Lakoff’s thinking.

Haidt based his conclusion about the lead role of emotions in decision making on experimental research, including fMRI scanning. This brain imaging tool shows which areas of the brain light up when triggered by different kinds of moral and ethical propositions, for example, “Guns are killing school children at their desks.” 

Haidt’s field is moral psychology, rather than linguistics, so his focus is aimed at a higher mental and social construct than Lakoff’s. There is, nevertheless, a significant overlap in their thinking in respect to politics. Both speculate on the differences between progressive liberals and conservatives and come up with similar diagnoses. (Haidt also gives special attention to libertarians, not to be confused with liberals.)

In keeping with our American tendency to prefer this morning’s freshly brewed coffee over yesterday's dregs, Democrats switched to Haidt from Lakoff. But it was not just because Haidt was the new kid on the block.

The switch I believe happened in part because of the following quote in Lakoff’s Thinking Points.

Effective campaigns must communicate the candidates’ values and use issues symbolically — as indicative of their moral values and their trustworthiness.

It’s that mention of “moral values,” that came back to bite Lakoff. As Haidt’s research shows — and remember that Haidt specializes in moral psychology — Democrats operate with a more limited, less expansive set of moral values than Republicans.

Haidt postulates six foundations for morality: caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. His empirical research finds statistical evidence that Democrats are heavy on the first three, especially caring, but light on the last three. Republicans, by contrast, are more or less equally weighted on all six. This being the case, Republican messaging can hit on more points that click with more voters than can Democratic messaging.

If you go back to the talking points for the Bush and Gore campaign launch speeches, you can see the truth of this generalization. Gore is mostly about righting wrongs (caring and fairness). While Bush admits to some wrongs (some caring), he emphasizes toughness and duty (loyalty and authority).

On balance, then, the Republicans have more opportunity than Democrats to use metaphors across a wider range of psychological constructs. In other words, they could take Lakoff’s own work and use it against the political goals he was aiming for. So, according to Lakoff’s research, Republicans would be more amenable to using metaphor as a credible explanatory system for their base, than, say, the fright statistics coming from the Democrats. The Republican base centers its moral core more on authority (military defense) and sanctity (religion).

Sophia Rosenfeld in her book Democracy and Truth (2018) captures the reality of this idea for today's conservatives:

Populists … tend to reject science and its methods as a source of directives, embracing in many cases emotional honesty, intuition, and truths of the heart over dry factual veracity and scientific evidence, testing, and credentialing.

So here we are. The facts are the facts. Majorities believe racism is systemic, majorities want guns off the street, majorities want access to abortion, majorities want a living wage, majorities want affordable housing, etc., etc. If you’re a 21st century Republican, you reject these statistics and push counter arguments using appropriate metaphors: allude to dangerous Black people, affirm that life begins at conception not birth, suggest that poor people benefit from staying poor, reimagine history as slaves liking being slaves, we’re scammed by welfare queens, immigrants are a scourge, etc., etc. Statistics after all lie, don’t they? Trust your gut.

If you’re a Democrat what do you do? Haidt’s solution published in an article in The Atlantic in 2022 is not to deny the facts, but his solution is kind of weak tea. He suggests engaging with Republicans to benefit from the wider value system they operate under across the whole moral foundation spectrum. The most reliable way to confront the emotion driven bias of Republicans is to interact with them, even though you don’t share your beliefs. You confront them with counterevidence and counterargument. 

Yeah, good luck with that!

My own feeling is that there’s a big hole in Haidt’s recommendation. The Republican party is manufacturing facts and lying about real facts and then perpetuating those lies. How do you argue productively with conspiracy theorists and information contortionists?

I believe that it would be a better course to go back to Lakoff and say, “We’re sorry, George, we were wrong to abandon you. Help us tune up our messaging with metaphors that are less dry, dull, and gloomy. We want it to appeal to people who are not yet sunk in their own MAGA convictions. We want to still emphasize our caring and fairness, but also show our loyalty, respect for authority, and even sanctity.” 

There’s nothing wrong in principle with those moral foundations, as Haidt makes clear. It’s just that having a monopoly on them, as the Republicans mostly do, gives them license to reach a broader audience and to control policy for their own purposes. So, Democrats, intercept that football and carry it over your own goal line. Metaphor!

Now, finally, a short afterword regarding West Virginia. We here in the state have been saturated with the Republican metaphor of the so-called “war on coal.” Coal is embedded in the positive image of a hard-working, resilient people fueling the industry and progress of much of the country. Democrats bemoaning the negative consequences of our coal culture have come to be seen as disrespectful of those resilient people. That disparaging attitude focused on the negatives of carbon based fuels lost environmentalist Gore West Virginia, lost Democrats the presidency in 2000, and cemented the state as solidly Republican. 

The Lakoff approach would have Democrats stop spelling out in gruesome detail all the negative forces at play in the state and emphasize instead the positive forces that will turn around our dismal economic and social statistics.