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[pegkerr]

Gacked from daily_granola:

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New Video: George Lakoff on Family Values

"Conservatives have long invoked family values to promote wedge issues and win elections, but the implications of family values on our politics and society run far deeper than campaigns and elections. In the Rockridge Nation video that we are releasing today, George Lakoff examines the extraordinary influence of James Dobson on parenting in America. He also discusses progressive and conservative conceptions of family values, and why progressives must overcome the conservative dominance of this subject.

For far too long, organizations that advocate a conservative family model, most notably Focus on the Family, have grown in strength and influence. Few progressives have found effective ways to challenge them, or even recognized the need to provide a progressive account of family values. (Moms Rising is one recent move that looks promising.) We hope that this new video will help to spark discussion among progressives about what the family means to us and how we can become advocate for policies that serve our vision of family values.

We would like to thank Tim and Michael of Made Green Sustainable Filmmaking for all of the work that they contributed to this video. Their ideas, skill, and diligence helped to create something that we hope you will find informative and useful.

After you go to our Video and Audio page and watch it, you can click the "share" button on the video to send a link to a friend. Alternatively, you can go to the video on YouTube and use the information that YouTube provides to link to or embed the video on your blog or website."

Comments

[joel-rosenberg.livejournal.com]

Just curious: how much influence has James Dobson had on your own parenting? I'm pretty conscious -- past the point, I'm sorry to say, of useful self-consciousness -- of the influences on my own parenting, and James Dobson isn't, well, on the list at all.

I'll certainly watch the Lakoff video -- it'll be interesting to see how he's executing his framing of the issue.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with Dobson's parenting theories at all.

[msavi.livejournal.com]

Hm, I don't like the proposed dichotomy. I don't think it's a good idea to tell parents either you're "strict" or you're "nuturing" and neither the twain shall meet, or that one cancels the other out.

I'm no fan of James Dobson (I know of him, but I don't read/listen to any of his stuff), but somehow I think he and his followers would strongly resent the implication that they endorse and even teach domestic violence. That strikes me as a low blow, and turned me off to the rest of what the gentleman in the video had to say.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

It's a larger part of what Lakoff (the speaker in the video) has been studying and talking about for the past several years: the idea that in the struggle between conservatives and progressives, both sides are talking past each other because they truly do see the world in different ways. And conservatives have been winning because they have managed to "frame" the debate in language that supports their world view. You can learn more about his ideas here. I became interested in his ideas when I read Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Here is an excerpt. It made a lot of sense to me, because it explains how and why liberals and conservatives seem to be concentrating on and talking about completely different things. Lakoff explains that they both actually have a coherent moral structure for understanding the world, but these moral structures are quite different--and conservatives have been doing a better job of convincing the world that their moral structure is THE moral structure.

[msavi.livejournal.com]

Ah. Perhaps that's the crux then; I'm neither a liberal nor a conservative. IMHO, I think that for people floating around somewhere in the middle, the language of extremes might possibly damage an otherwise sound argument. It can lose credibility.

[joel-rosenberg.livejournal.com]

The problem is, I think, in that the underlying argument is, roughly, just a less less sound as LaRouche's war against Strauss, and less so than Stalin's against Trotsky. (I think Steve Brust would argue that it's much less so than Stalin's war against Trotsky, and I'm not sure that I'd disagree.)

To go beyond the platitude of different people see things differently to seeing political results as the effect of a deliberate, concerted campaign/conspiracy is, I think, not merely a bug in Lakoff's overall view of the world, but a necessary part of it. And it's one that falls apart pretty quickly upon examination.

[enegim.livejournal.com]

It is quite possible that Dobson would resent that implication. That doesn't make it untrue. I can't find a quote to point to at the moment, but certainly I'd call some of what he does precisely that: advocating domestic violence.

[raenaissance.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. I'm actually taking an anthropology class right now called The Cultural Politics of American Family Values, so this tied right in!
;)