Happy Fourth of July!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Two hundred and thirty years ago today, the Declaration of Independence was signed, with those word written boldly at the top of the second paragraph. However, with my progressive political views, I can’t help but notice that these truths have become co-opted to represent a vision of liberty that doesn’t exactly reflect my own.

If you are a progressive like myself, I urge you to visit The Rockridge Institute and particularly the writings of George Lakoff. Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California and one of the most influential progressive writers that I have ever read. His expertise is language and in his books and essays he points out the methods by which the conservatives have framed the debate to their advantage. He does not make wild accusations, does not act in an extremist fashion, and does not go on rants that are embarrassing to the Democratic Party. (Michael Moore, for example) What he does do is point out how the conservatives have been successful in the way they’ve used the language to their advantage and what progressives can do to counter this trend. What follows is an excerpt from the Rockridge Institute website that gives his example of conservative framing:

On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words tax relief started appearing in White House communiqués to the press and in official speeches and reports by conservatives. Let us look in detail at the framing evoked by this term.

The word relief evokes a frame in which there is a blameless Afflicted Person who we identify with and who has some Affliction, some pain or harm that is imposed by some external Cause-of-pain. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, and it is brought about by some Reliever-of-pain.

The Relief frame is an instance of a more general Rescue scenario, in which there a Hero (The Reliever-of-pain), a Victim (the Afflicted), a Crime (the Affliction), A Villain (the Cause-of-affliction), and a Rescue (the Pain 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. Taxes, in this phrase, are the Affliction (the Crime), proponents of taxes are the Causes-of Affliction (the Villains), the taxpayer is the Afflicted Victim, and the proponents of “tax relief” are the Heroes who deserve the taxpayers’ gratitude.

Every time the phrase tax relief is used and heard or read by millions of people, the more this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced.

~Excerpt from “Simple Framing” by George Lakoff

His new book, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea presents his views about how the conservatives are slowly but surely changing the way most Americans view this most basic of American values. If you think like me, I urge you to follow up on the links I’ve provided in this post.

Tomorrow, it’s back to business as usual and I’ll talk about music, or travel, or sports and move back away from politics for a while.