Commit to empathy and responsibility REFRAMES “Do not obey in advance.”
How to prepare to face the 2025 cruel-wing Mump Regime.
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Reframing IS social change.
“Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world,” writes George Lakoff.1 “It is changing what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.” The number one rule in framing is to use your language when you argue against the other side, not theirs.
Open the Overton Window in 2025.
In 2025, Americans face the cruel-wing Mump Regime set on dismantling a care-wing government. The Mump Regime will not protect our health, wealth, and freedom. How do we convince, persuade, and cajole progressives to publicly commit to framing their issues around empathy and responsibility? The answer seems too simple: We must repeatedly call on others to commit to making empathy, the soul of democracy, central to constant public discourse. Doing so can open the Overton window toward the duty to care for each other’s freedom.
Yale Historian Timothy Snyder writes in his 2024 book On Freedom, “A little leap of empathy is at the beginning of knowledge we need for freedom.” In December 2024, Rachel Maddow asked Snyder “how to retain our rights and the things we enjoy about our government against … oligarch domination.”
In Snyder’s 2017 bestseller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, the first lesson, Chapter 1, is Do not obey in advance. Most people do not know how to make empathy central to constant public discourse. Consequently, they do not know how to REFRAME the public conversation. Rachel’s question was asking Snyder how to exercise lesson number 1 with a focus on our duty to care.
Snyder replied, “First of all, we have to keep it positive, not in the sense of saying that everything is great. It’s not. It’s terrible. (The Mump Regime is) trying to break the government, which means breaking the country. But positive in the sense that we should have a shadow (government),” i.e., local people who can describe how things could be better based on a shared commitment to empathy for and responsibility to humanity.
In Politics the Wellstone Way: How to Elect Progressive Candidates, a workbook for progressive activists published in 2005 by the late US Senator Paul Wellstone’s family, they encouraged progressives to embrace the core values laid out in Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, published a year earlier. Almost 20 years later, too few progressives have been able to apply the science-based methods of communication laid out by George Lakoff and promoted by the Wellstone family.
You’re invited to our Zoom Forums
Empathy Surplus Network USA is an education collective of progressives for progressives. Lakoff’s science-based communication techniques are simple but not easy to apply. Thinking differently requires speaking differently, which requires a nurturing community. Join our nurturing community. Our 2025 Zoom Forums begin on January 6, 2024. Here’s our schedule and instructions on how to enroll: proempathy.us/25schedule.
Lakoff, George, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Preface: Reframing IS Social Change, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, 2014.