VIDEO: Explicit GOP appeals to emotion and unreason: 'Leadership Institute's' Steve Sutton

[ProgressiveEconomist]

shows future Lee Atwaters the ropes, and C-SPAN is there.

Its 1979 founder (Morton Blackwell) is most often remembered for the hundreds of "Purple Heart bandaids" delegates wore to mock John Kerry at the 2004 Republican Convention (see http://articles.cnn.com/2004-08-30/politics/gop.purple.hearts_1_purple-hearts-kerry-backers-swift-boat-veterans?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS ).

But Steve Sutton is much more serious about effective ways Republican extremists can spread lies, divisiveness, fear, rage, self-pity, racism, xenophobia, scapegoating, and all the other hallmarks of Republican politics over the past generation.

Ever wonder whatever happened to rational debate of political issues? Republicans scrapped it in favor of outright lies that hit the "hot buttons" their ongoing research identifies among their base of gullible Caucasians over age 30, among whom McCain/Palin and every other Republican presidential ticket since 1964 have won landslides. Issues don't matter, logical consistency doesn't matter, and practical economics doesn't matter anymore. Why? Republican leaders and strategists left all these rational processes behind decades ago. Only RAW EMOTION matters to them now, despite the danger of overstimulating a Tim McVeigh or a Jared Loughner.

The 'Leadership Institute' has created such political monsters as Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, James O'Keefe (the ACORN terminator), and Joe wilson (R-SC--"You LIE'),
In a "campaign-training institute" held at American University last month (see http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/event.php?id=188844 ), Steve Sutton articulated ten "values" to at least one of which all Republican advertising impressions should appeal. I was STUNNED when I saw Sutton's talk on C-SPAN. It explains much, such as hysterical over-reaction to a cellphone-recorded audio of President Obama's depiction of economically-stressed voters "clinging to their guns and their religion". (Much more on these ten "values" in my first reply to this OP.)

Now, after mass murders and maimings in Tucson last Saturday, I think Sutton's instructions for crafting Republican appeals to emotions need to be re-interpreted, focusing on the effect of thousands of such emotional messages on the armed deranged who are seeking outlets for their undifferentiated generalized hostility.

In a syndicated column today, right-wing extremist "Journalist" Byron York outlines a crucial Republican need-- to make the public connect the Tucson mass-murderer to the Virginia Tech shooter rather than to Oklahoma City terrorist Tim McVeigh. I believe Sutton's talk contains chapter and verse on exactly how Republican politics creates Timothy McVeighs and Jared Loughners to paralyze Progressives with fear of violence, while giving Republican leaders plausible deniability (They're NUTS!)

WHAT'S YOUR OPINION? Has any other DUer seen Sutton's talk? Are my video links working for you?

Which specific Republican advertising messages and campaign stunts in the past few years do you think might particularly have overstimulated psychotics?

How can voters be persuaded to start THINKING FOR THEMSELVES again, rather than just responding to cynical manipulation of their emotions by thousands of Republican advertising impressions?

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C-SPAN broadcast and archived the full hour and a half of Sutton's "lesson". I would recommend viewing minutes 35 to 59, ESPECIALLY minutes 35 to 40, at

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Framet :

"American University Political Campaign Training Class - Day 1 ...

Part 5: Framing the Campaign Message - Steve Sutton, Vice President of Development and Campus Programs at the Leadership Institute, discussed using issues to frame a message."

SUTTON VIDEO: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Framet

All 15 American U Political Campaign Training Videos: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/event.php?id=188844

[ProgressiveEconomist]

1. Please reply with other examples: Republican base 'values" and associated lies to enrage the base

and deliver them to the polls at election time:

01 HEALTH: "death panels", "government takeover", "one-size-fits-all government solution"
02 FINANCIAL SECURITY: "wasteful stimulus spending" "it's not the government's mony--it's YOUR money"
03 CLOSER RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD: "discrimination against people of faith"

04 BETTER RELATIONSHIP WITH FAMILY: "government bureaucrats rob you of time with your children"
05 PLANNING FOR YOUR RETIREMENT: "Social Security is unsustainable"
06 ENJOYMENT OF YOUR SCARCE LEISURE TIME: "prevent you from going hunting with your son"

07 BETTER JOB: "job-killing Obamacare"
08 COLLEGE EDUCATION FOR YOUR KIDS: "what does affirmative action affirm?"
09 HOME OWNERSHIP: "who's helping those who pay their mortgage on time every month?"

10 TRAVEL: "invasive and unnecessary airport procedures"

[ProgressiveEconomist]

4. Kick!

[ProgressiveEconomist]

5. Kick!

[ProgressiveEconomist]

7. Kick!

[ProgressiveEconomist]

16. Kick!

[alfredo]

2. This is a lot to take in. I will try to kick this after I've had

the chance to go over the videos.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

3. Thanks for the kick. Is the video link working for you?

[ProgressiveEconomist]

6. Thank you, anonymous recommender. I'd thought about posting this early last week,

but the Tucson massacre inspired me to post NOW, with a new "angle" on Sutton's cynical political campaigning "lesson"

[ProgressiveEconomist]

8. Thank you, second ananymous recommender

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. Off to the greatest with you

and yes this is for real. This is what has been identified for a while in academia.

The media would have to start talking of this, but they won't

[ProgressiveEconomist]

10. 'This is what has been IDd dir a while in academia'/ Any citations you'd like to share?

Which academic journals deal with this phenomenon?

And thanks for the crucial KICK. This thread wenf from 2 recs on Page 6 to the Greatest Page in 6 minutes.

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. Look at linguistics

and at Political Science...

I came to be familiar with it with the work of Goerge Lakoff

Some videos

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=the+political+mind#q=the+political+mind&hl=en&prmd=ivnsb&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=2iIuTZqFLYL0tgOy94HeBg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=5&ved=0CFgQqwQwBA&fp=82b2276fb7f759eb

[ProgressiveEconomist]

13. Here are some citations and links from Lakoff's Wiki entry. Do you especially recommend any

of these references? Which ones?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

"***Works***

1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.

1989. with Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226468129

1996. Moral politics : What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226468051

2001 Edition. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226467719

1999 (with Mark Johnson). Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

2000 (with Rafael Núñez). Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-03771-2. l 2003 (1980) with Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. 2003 edition contains an 'Afterword'. ISBN 978-0226468006

2004. Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 978-1931498715

2006. Whose Freedom? : The Battle over America's Most Important Idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-15828-6

2008. The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, ISBN 978-0670019274

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***Videos*** How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff DVD format. OCLC 315514475

C-Span program online, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th Century http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=9511&SectionName=Politics&PlayMedia=No

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***References***

"George Lakoff". Rockridge Institute. http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/lakoff. Retrieved 2007-06-13.

John Brockman (03/09/99), Edge.org, "Philosophy In The Flesh" A Talk With George Lakoff <1>

The New York Review of Books, Chomsky Replies, 1973 20;12 <2>

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html

ed. Anthony Sanford, T & T Clark, 2003. Summary at giffordlectures.org by Brannon Hancock.

"Block that Metaphor!", New Republic.

When cognitive science enters politics", rockridgeinstitute.org, 12 October 2006.

"Frame Game"

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***Further reading***

Harris, Randy Allen (1995). The Linguistics Wars. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509834-X. (Focuses on the disputes Lakoff and others have had with Chomsky.)

Haser, Verena (2005). Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics (Topics in English Linguistics), Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110182835 (A critical look at the ideas behind embodiment and conceptual metaphor.)

Kelleher, William J. (2005). Progressive Logic: Framing A Unified Field Theory of Values For Progressives. La CaCañada Flintridge, CA: The Empathic Science Institute. ISBN 0-9773717-1-9.

McGlone, M. S. (2001). "Concepts as Metaphors" in Sam Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms. Oxford Psychology Series 36. Oxford University Press, 90⠍107. ISBN 0195111095.

O'Reilly, Bill (2006). Culture Warrior. New York: Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-2092-9. (Calls Lakoff the guiding philosopher behind the "secular progressive movement".)

Renkema, Jan (2004). Introduction to Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 1588115291.

Rettig, Hillary (2006). The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way. New York: Lantern Books. ISBN 1590560906. (Documents strong parallels between Lakoff's nurturant parent model of progressive thought and psychologist Abraham Maslow's model of the self-actualized individual. Also discusses framing in the context of marketing and sales with the aim of bolstering progressive activists' persuasive skills.)

Richardt, Susanne (2005). Metaphor in Languages for Special Purposes: The Function of Conceptual Metaphor in Written Expert Language and Expert-Lay Communication in the Domains of Economics, Medicine and Computing. European University Studies: Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 413. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. ISBN 0820473812.

Soros, George (2006). The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror. ISBN 1586483595. (discusses Lakoff in regard to the application of his theories on the work of Frank Luntz and with respect to his own theory about perception and reality)

Winter, Steven L. (2003). A Clearing in the Forest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-90222-6. (Applies Lakoff's work in cognitive science and metaphor to the field of law and legal reasoning.)

Dean, John W. (2006), Conservatives without Conscience, Viking Penguin ISBN 0-670-03774-5.

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***External links***

University of California, Berkeley department of Linguistics page on George Lakoff http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/fac/lakoff.html

Edge bio of Lakoff http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/lakoff.html

"Metaphor and War" (1991) http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Scholarly/Lakoff_Gulf_Metaphor_1.html

"Metaphor and War, Again" (2003) http://www.alternet.org/story/15414

"Thinking of Jackasses: the grand delusions of the Democratic Party", a critical review by Marc Cooper in Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200504/cooper

"Politics and Cognitive Science" Radio interview on Philosophy Talk http://philosophytalk.org/pastShows/PoliticsandCogSci.html

"Empathy is the New Black" Radio interview with Dr. George Lakoff on Liberadio(!) with Mary Mancini an Freddie O'Connell http://www.liberadio.com/2008/06/22/liberadio-podcast-empathy-is-the-new-black-an-interview-with-george-lakoff/

"The Political Mind" a talk by George Lakoff recorded June 28, 2008 in Sacramento, CA http://www.archive.org/details/sglGreatSpeechesandInterviews_UnderstandingProgressivevs.Conservative

George Lakoff Proposes Ballot Measure to End 2/3 Rule in State Legislature - video report by Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/18/amidst_california_fiscal_crisis_and_political

Biography and summary of Gifford Lectures (University of Glasgow, 2001) by Brannon Hancock fordlectures.org/Author.asp?AuthorID=247

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Yes, Think of an Elephant is an extremely easy intro

then go here

2001 Edition. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226467719

[ProgressiveEconomist]

15. Thanks. I'm going to look for fhose books when I go to the library tomorrow.

[hootinholler]

12. kick to find later n/t

[alfredo]

17. The the strategy video looks like it will be interesting.