These videos by Roy Eidelson examine several ways that American conservatives manipulate public opinion – and how this psychological warfare can be countered and resisted. Not flashy at all – he should probably have someone else do the voiceover – but nicely argued.

“Dangerous Ideas: How Conservatives Exploit Our Five Core Concerns” (above) describes how today’s conservatives have used appeals to our core concerns about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness in order to further a narrow ideological agenda that actually benefits very few while leaving most of us worse off.

Here he examines these same psychological framings as they apply to war-mongering (special emphasis on Iraq).

“Resisting the Drums of War” describes how the misguided and destructive war in Iraq was promoted by targeting our concerns about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. The continued occupation of Iraq–or an attack on Iran–will likely be sold to us in much the same way.

I’m a Phd today! Woo-hoo!!!!! Here’s the abstract.

Imagining the Virus: A Discourse Analysis of Contemporary Fiction

This study seeks to apply the insights of discourse analysis to the epidemic of signification surrounding the virus, marking out the traits and terrain of an emerging discourse. The confluence of biological and technological viral language interacts with articulations of health and sickness, literal or metaphorical, already active in other discourses. The virus has rhetorically metastasized across referential domains. The study takes as its starting point concrete examples of viral figuration, and is structured around contemporary novels concerning HIV/AIDS, vampires, the villains and plots of suspense thrillers, and science-fictional transformations of the human.

Imagining the Virus traces the terrain of the virus along two basic strands: the virus as a figure of the other and the virus as a postmodern placeholder for ambiguity. A comparison of their relative weight and functioning attempts to discern the kinds of relationships that occur between these two strands as they play out in different fictions. An examination along such lines unearths dominant cultural tropes and their attendant anxieties. Particular kinds of metaphors influence our attitudes and judgments by selectively focusing on certain aspects of a concept while suppressing other aspects. This study finds examples of reframings of the virus that resist the more destructive of these, either by refusing to be complicit with them, or simply as a function of imagining new constructions and possibilities. As a mutating viral terminology circulates through a diverse American culture, it draws models of horizontal structures and networks, maps clusters of referential associations, and speculates on newly-emergent adaptations and ecologies.

I was happy that I stayed awake last night to watch Bill Moyer’s Now on PBS. The linguist George Lakoff was on. He did an absolutely marvelous piece on the framing of language in politics, which he has been publishing quite a bit about recently.

He argues that Republicans understand framing better than the Democrats. The Democrats, a bit ironically, are still in thrall to a notion of rationality in which you simply speak truth to power and reasonable people are persuaded. The Republicans know better.

An example that Lakoff uses is the mental frame evoked by the oft-repeated phrase "tax relief."

"The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero. The term tax relief evokes all of this and more. It presupposes a conceptual metaphor: Taxes are an affliction, proponents of taxes are the causes of affliction (the villains), the taxpayer is the afflicted (the victim) and the proponents of tax relief are the heroes who deserve the taxpayers’ gratitude. Those who oppose tax relief are bad guys who want to keep relief from the victim of the affliction, the taxpayer. Every time the phrase tax relief is used, and heard or read by millions of people, this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced." – from "Framing the Dems : How conservatives control political debate and how progressives can take it back"

How should progressive democrats REFRAME? As an issue of membership and patriotism, says Lakoff. "Taxes are what you pay to be an American, to live in a civilized society that is democratic and offers opportunity, and where there’s an infrastructure that has been paid for by previous taxpayers. Wealthy Americans use that infrastructure more than anyone else, and they use parts of it that other people don’t. Are you paying your dues, or are you trying to get something for free at the expense of your country?"

Republicans spent millions every year on thinktanks to strategize on such issues. Frank Luntz puts out "a 500-page manual every year that goes issue by issue on what the logic of the position is from the Republican side, what the other guys’ logic is, how to attack it, and what language to use."

Last night Lakoff pointed out that the common sense Healthy Forest act was framed as a conscious opposite. It is "common sense" so experts (ecologists, environmentalists, biologists, etc) are not needed. It will make forests "healthy" – a conscious and Orwellian obliteration of the reality. Lakoff says the strategy is not simply to negate and to say that it is NOT a healthy forest initative. That has about as much power as Nixon saying "I’m not a crook." Rather, it needs to be reframed – perhaps as The Forest Destruction Act, The Razing Act, The Slash and Burn Act.

I think he’s right. Progressives (he says we won’t be able to use the word "liberal" again for years) have to learn this strategy of reframing and repetition. It may be sad, but this is in fact the way people think.

Lakoff is part of the Rockridge Institute (as well as being a professor), where you can read more about reframing and political discourse.