Yesterday I discussed “framing” a concept in political terms, using one interpretation of the pioneering work of Professor George Lakoff to briefly highlight how “abortion” should be presented as freedom of choice.

If you ask Americans about abortion they are queasy because of the imagery. If you ask them about “pro-life” they respond affirmatively. And yet, if you ask them about “pro-choice” they are adamantly affirmative. (Damn right! That’s what made America great. I get to choose my partner, choose my life, choose where I work, and where I live, and where my kids go to school. I don’t want anyone making these decisions for me”) We should be framing “abortion” and “pro-choice” but of course the ideologues at the DLC are clueless, as usual.

Create an intellectual argument that pushes the unconscious emotional buttons in the electorate. Seems like a simple idea – one a simple man should be able to understand.

A new blog online magazine “The Echo Chamber” announces today that Professor Lakoff was right. Don Hazen moves the ball forward a bit more:

Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.

Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study, to be presented Saturday at meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif.

Ah HAH! So, now there is scientific data to prove why the braindead zombies of the winger base are fact-proof. They get off on rejecting reality. They take pleasure from ignoring what doesn’t fit in with the spoon-fed propaganda and lies of Fox News. (Now that “got wood” meme Mr Bush floated last year makes more sense.)

Lots of us liberals and progressives stubbornly believe that if you present people with the facts, they will make the right decision -- do the right thing. But Lakoff has argued, and not always getting a receptive audience, that that notion is false."It's in our inheritance from the enlightenment. Where, in the enlightenment that everybody is a rational person, all you have to do is just tell them the facts, they'll reason to the right conclusion." But that is wrong.

Well, yeah. It’s a generally accepted historical fact that our Founding Fathers created the
Nation on concepts taken directly from the Enlightenment, that generic term for the slow, sometimes painful, advance of rationalist thought that sought to find an explanation for the universe independent of myth and superstition. Not all humans seem to have achieved that development, sadly. Some of us are still too deeply mired in that superstition thing. They think all men are not equal (and definitely women aren’t.) They think progress is usually not a good thing. They seem to believe we were better off sitting in the dark, mumbling prayers to some vague super-deity, imploring that deity to make the current tribulation (Mongols, hurricane, hailstorm, flood, drought – pick your own example) go away.

Anything other than thinking your way through a problem. Those of us on the left side of the nation have a problem. It’s a problem the other side created for us. They’ve got game, and we’re not playing it right.

Lakoff adds: "And of course the Republicans have learned that it's false. They've set up a frame, they set up a narrative, and they set it up in terms of their values. And they get it as part of normal, everyday language and normal everyday thought. Once they've done that, the facts are irrelevant unless the Democrats can learn to re-frame the issues from their point of view, and then make the facts fit other frames. Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary -- and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas."

I sure wish the Democratic Party would wake up and smell the coffee and stop relying on the DLC insiders for bad advice. These guys haven’t won an election in a long time. The election of President Clinton was an anomaly in some ways. A dramatically poor economy, several false steps by George Bush (no – the other one. The competent one) all combined to let Clinton “triangulate” his way into the White House. It’s not going to happen again, because in the last dozen years the Republicans have changed the landscape. If we’re going to survive as a political and cultural force for good we have to stop looking back over our shoulders, sighing because we miss the good times of yesterday.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man” Job, 38: 1-3

Time to tell the DLC “Adios, MF,” gird said loins, pick up our (figurative) guns and get into the knife fight to save America.