Frames and Frame-Breaks

Linguist and philosopher George Lakoff, co-author of Metaphors We Live By and many other works, wants to help Democrats win elections. In a Salon interview with Paul Rosenberg, he explains the advantages conservatives have in American elections. Studying and doing business, he argues, is good training for political persuasion:

“If you’re a conservative going into politics, there’s a good chance you’ll study cognitive science, that is, how people really think and how to market things by advertising. So they know people think using frames and metaphors and narratives and images and emotions and so on. That’s second nature to anybody who’s taken a marketing course. Many of the people who have gone into conservative communications have done that, and know very well how to market their ideas.”

Lakoff also notes the difficulty of refuting opposing political positions: “if you negate a frame, you have to activate the frame, because you have to know what you’re negating. If you use logic against something, you’re strengthening it.”

This was the trap Clinton fell into: “The Clinton campaign decided that the best way to defeat Trump was to use his own words against him. So they showed these clips of Trump saying outrageous things. Now what Trump was doing in those clips was saying out loud things that upset liberals, and that’s exactly what his followers liked about him. So of course they were showing what actually was helping Trump with his supporters.”