Pacific Views

What Is Our Message?

[Aside: Wow! I go away for a business trip and I come home to a totally remodelled place. I'm impressed with how nice our new digs are. Thanks, Natasha! I really like our new home. :-) ]

I don't have enough time tonight to do this topic real justice, but I wanted to at least bring it up and tell you about the wonderful TOE (theory of everything) work being done by the Right Christians.

I found Allen Brill (the author of the Right Christians) through a comment thread and realized that he and I were both trying to find ways to defend a liberal point-of-view. We both found that George Lakoff had some very important insights about the the Liberal and conservative viewpoints in today's politics. Lakoff is a cognitive scientist studying how we (humans) think about things. Lakoff has found that our worldviews (liberal or conservative) map extremely well on particular metaphorical models of the family. He posits that the liberal point-of-view is healthier for society and for the individuals who live within that society.

One of the things that Allen points out in his series is that the radical right realized awhile ago the power of metaphors and started to use it extensively when talking about their issues. By using metaphorical language, conservatives have been able to convince people that it is just common sense to support the conservative point-of-view. The conservatives are very good at framing messages so that people accept the conservative response to problems. (For example: conservatives believe that harsh prison sentences make more sense than rehabilitative classes and therapy and they've sold this belief to many Americans.)

Since 9/11, the radical right has been even more successful at selling their point-of-view than they had been in the past. (And they had been very successful indeed, as witnessed by the fact that they were able to win the Congress and take the White House before September 2001.)

As Allen points out, the normal Democratic message, cobbled together by a number of seemingly independent interest groups, is losing badly. We need to find ways to make a coherent and cohesive message that sells our worldview. These would be ways that knit together the various interest groups in the Democratic tent and allows them to understand how their issues and policies fit within the larger liberal worldview.

Please do check out Allen's Theory of Everything. And provide some feedback of how we can contribute to this effort.