“Political ground is gained not when you successfully inhabit the middle ground, but when you successfully impose your framing as the ‘common-sense' position.”
George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. He gives this precis: “Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic.”
