NOTE: This is Book Week at MORE TO COME. As we come to the end of the year, I will have one post each day to close out my reviews and to showcase the 60 books I read during 2024. Today’s entry returns to a book I first read more than a decade ago. It still has resonance today.

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When he was eleven years old, John Quincy Adams was protesting to his mother that he did not want to make the hard voyage across the Atlantic with his father. Abigail Adams wasn’t having it.

“These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.”

Since the election many are saying that everything is awful and they want to totally disengage from politics and governance. I understand that impulse but want to suggest a different way than total abandonment of the field. Smart thinkers—from historic figures like Marcus Aurelius to modern-day writers like psychologist Oliver Burkeman—have long suggested that making thoughtful choices about where to focus one’s attention is the way to live a productive and useful life. Thoughtfulness and focus are key.

Yes, we need to work to get better at choosing the right things to value, the right things to think, the right things to focus on, the right response to difficult situations. No, we should not give up or give in.

I would go so far as to suggest that these are also times in which a genius would wish to live.

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WHAT ARE OUR VALUES?

The day after my post on right-wing disinformation, Paul Waldman asked a fundamental question looking at the other side of the coin: “What are the essential things Democrats believe?” The “vagueness of Democratic identity is something its candidates at every level struggle to overcome. Just imagine if its identity was a wind at their backs and not in their faces.”

Waldman makes the point that for a long time Republicans could summarize what they believed in four bullet points:

1. Small government
2. Low taxes
3. A strong defense
4. Traditional values

What they meant and how it was translated by the public differed, but every politician in the party could say it in their sleep. Now, of course, that has changed. “The foundations of Trumpism, which have now become the foundations of the GOP, are about who and what it hates.” This aligns with Adam Serwer’s thesis that “the cruelty is the point,” and it can be seen most recently in Trump’s invitation of Jordan Neely’s killer Daniel Penny to the Army-Navy game.

Knowing our values and being able to articulate them in ways to frame the debate and counter the hate is difficult. Democratic messaging experts come up with ten-point lists of values that no one will remember. When it comes to values statements, shorter is better. Leaders and supporters have to be able to quickly recite them and, most importantly, the public has to remember them.

We’ve seen effective messaging on values from Democratic leadership in the past. In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took a stance against the calls for isolationism to issue a call “to preserve the fundamental freedoms that defined life in a free, democratic society.”

Those four freedoms were:

• The freedom of speech.

• The freedom to worship in one’s own way.

• The freedom from want.

• The freedom from fear.

These freedoms—of speech and worship, and from want and fear—gave those who went to war a clear purpose and a clear set of values.

All of which brought me back to a book I first read several years ago.

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FRAME THE DEBATE

Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate (2004) by George Lakoff is about framing messages. “Framing is about ideas—ideas that come before policy, ideas that make sense of facts, ideas that are proactive not reactive, positive not negative, ideas that need to be communicated out loud every day in public.” Don’t use the language that the right-wing wants you to use, Lakoff asserts, because their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame we want. Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview—your values. And yet it goes beyond language. Ideas are core. Language simply “carries those ideas, evokes those ideas.”

Donald Trump’s recent Meet the Press interview gave examples of how he frames ideas to his advantage. Truth doesn’t matter, because Donald Trump is lying when he opens his mouth. But he specifically famed one issue—fear of others—to fit his worldview and that of his supporters. Trump lied about the specifics, even when the moderator called him out on it. That’s who he is.

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VOTING FOR VALUES, NOT NECESSARILY INTERESTS

It has been pointed out that Trump supporters voted against their self-interests. Lakoff insists that this line of thinking is a problem. Democrats think voters are rational and will be persuaded by facts. However, people vote against their self-interests all the time. “They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.”

Many of us are paying our taxes at this time of year, and one could argue that I regularly vote against a purely selfish interest—i.e., “lower taxes”—on this issue. Republicans have taught the country to believe that “taxes are bad. The government is stealing your hard-earned money.”

When I heard this comment recently, I responded with “taxation is what you pay to live in a civilized country.” It is an investment. Lakoff uses this frame. Our parents invested in the future and gave us everything from a safe and fair financial system to the social safety net. From the interstate highways to the internet, the space program, and more. We are reaping the benefits of their tax investments and we need to do the same for our children.

Taxation is paying your membership fee in America.

For that idea to work, we have to get back to Waldman’s basic question about what Democrats value. I value a government of us, “working together to make and carry out decisions about what kind of society we want to live in.” Not turning it over to the oligarchs to plunder and ruin.

In his FrameLab Substack newsletter, Lakoff and co-author Gil Duran are updating their analysis for the years ahead. Noting that Orwellian language points to weakness, they have shown how to effectively reframe the dishonest and silly framing of Elon Musk’s task force (don’t call it a department) to dismantle government.

“Musk has named his project after a meme, DOGE, a crypto scam . . . He’s treating the whole thing as a joke . . . Let’s call this project what it really is: Destruction of Government by Elon.”

No matter how it all plays out, understanding values and being able to articulate ideas for the country based on those values is the only way we begin to really change the debate. And we all need to participate.

Let the genius in you step forward and shine.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash