If the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world, we can see the divisions that are signified by the current nonsense in US politics against the Green New Deal (GND). Recalling the media framing that came with changing global warming to climate change, we need to refine our understanding of environmental messaging. It’s more than about cow farts or plastic straws, and always about the modern against the anti-modern.

This time it’s about the Green New Deal (GND), not simply as legislation but now as political meme. The “common clay” of Blazing Saddles did signify the same racial, class, and gender divisions that will be contested in 2020’s US elections, and the GND will be a battleground if used not as a weapon but as long-term messaging.

GND as a RW sign does not signify the Roosevelt New Deal, but seems to have been media-framed by the usual RWNJ sources to become familiar reactionary messages, as if taking away cows, airplanes, and pickup trucks was somehow imminent or even immanent. The latter is more important because as George Lakoff indicates it is a struggle between moral systems.

The pro-fascist America First of FDR’s era is no different than Trumpian MAGA and the anti-modern, ahistorical discourse of sado-populism needs to remain under constant critique.

When re-regulation takes place in the US, those promoting a “moral” capitalism will need to reexamine their neoliberal premises, because its environmental discourse reveals the continued appeasement of radically conservative moral positions.

You can see this dilemma nearly everyday in DK’s diaries musing about “socialist” framing, as if rebranding suboptimal capitalism was a solution to some fundamental structural misunderstandings about society and property. Today’s example was a diary on parsing “public capitalism” versus “private capitalism” without even describing state-owned enterprises or collectives, much less working out modes of production.

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All the right-wing tropes from Fox News have been affixed to the Green New Deal. Text analysis on voter descriptions of GND show clear difference between Fox and non-Fox viewers. Unique Fox viewer mentions: cows, airplanes, ridiculous

Full analysis: https://t.co/4QlwtOEBmx pic.twitter.com/J7zpGpHa9e

— Kevin 'there is power in a union' Reuning (@KevinReuning) April 16, 2019

The conversation around the Green New Deal has evolved since we last looked into it six weeks ago. Since then, Jay Inslee entered the 2020 field as an explicit climate change candidate, and we’ve found clear support for a range of Green New Deal policies. At the same time, the right has been attempting to use the Green New Deal as a cudgel against everything but climate change. This led to one of the strangest speeches on the Senate floor in a while.

We have reason to expect then that voters might have new thoughts on the Green New Deal, so in a survey with YouGov Blue we asked voters to describe it in their own words. We asked before any of our GND questions, so we are isolating what respondents think about GND without ever being informed of what is in the Green New Deal. The results show a lot of consistency among Democrats, but that Republicans and Fox News viewers are beginning to pick up on the new right-wing party line that has been hammered home since the plan’s roll-out. Spoiler alert: there are lots of cows.

www.dataforprogress.org/...

Deconstruction as a scientific heuristic has a role to play even as behavioral economics and cognitive science dominate some disciplines because as Lakoff demonstrates, the reason of Enlightenment Reason is “not how the brain works”. That conflict remains not simply as the obvious disciplinary divergence of analytic and continental philosophy or orthodox and heterodox economics. This is easily seen in the dichotomy of culture theory and culture studies.

Lakoff (2010)

Negating a frame activates that frame. Using conservative language to argue against conservatives just reinforces conservative framings. Environmental language must avoid activating anti-environmental frames and anti-environmental language.

For example, defending science activates the idea the science needs defending and so is questionable. Go on offense, not on defense.

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Parts of the conservative moral system contradict environmental values — Man over Nature, Laissez-faire markets, personal not social responsibility, etc. Environmental values derive from a moral system centered on empathy and social responsibility.

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This means that one should talk using the positive language of an environmental (and hence progressive) moral system, and avoid the language of the anti-environmental (radically conservative) moral system.

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Why Conservatives Message Better: In business school, they studied marketing, and marketing professors study cognitive science to learn how the mind really works. Progressives tend to study political science, law, economics, and public policy, which assume Enlightenment Reason, which is not how the brain really works. Those fields get reason wrong and thus give conservatives a big advantage.

Needed Long-term Messages: In order to decide on short-term messaging, one has to have a very good idea of the long-term ideas that are necessary to make sense of and to integrate short-term messages.

• We Are Part of Nature
• Nature Nurtures Us
• The Greatest Moral Issue of Our Time
• Children and Grandchildren
• We All Own The Air
• The Global Economic Crisis Is The Same As the Global Environmental Crisis
• Systemic Causation and Risk: Every language represents direct causation in its grammar. No language in the world represents systemic causation in its grammar. Yet both the global economy and global ecology are systemic in nature, with large-scale overall causes, positive and negative feedback loops, and so on. Systemic causation must be taught; it does not arise naturally as a concept. We must learn to think in systemic terms. Systemic risk is different from local risk.
• The Cost of Doing Business
• Cost-Benefit Analysis: The use of cost-benefit analysis is inherently anti-ecological.
• Energy Saved Is Worth Far More than Energy Used

www.huffpost.com/...

As this AOC video reminds us, Greenwashing — mystifying science at the corporate level as marketing policy was and remains profitable as lobbying and RWNJ messaging gets repeated ignorantly by the GOP. Dislocating the discourse from labor policy and healthcare is important for the RW to continue corporate exploitation.

This AOC video is an example of the need to attend to all of the cultural and economic variables of the framing of long-term messaging as listed above.

Without engaging the greater anticapitalist ecosocialist discourse, the moral high ground can be held without the internecine messaging that comes from sectarian conflict (Watermelonism). You can know the RWNJ lexicon of coal-fetishism and “windmill cancer” without legitimating it. Similarly, Democrats can adopt green discourse without needing to legitimate science-skepticism.

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Dutch tulip forecast: brilliant, with a chance of tourists https://t.co/jSWeEoPOdP pic.twitter.com/VoYoLmbv0U

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) April 19, 2019

Some see carbon neutrality as an end rather than a means to a post-carbon economy, even as traditional uneven development remains supreme. Like the GND, a post-carbon future is not an anti-carbon one, and messaging must reflect that, even for the common clay of those afraid their “western civilization” is somehow also in peril.

Erik Swyngedouw has warned against the depoliticizing tendency of carbon reductionism — that is, reducing all politics down to a question of their effect on carbon emissions, especially when coupled with claims of urgency. Granted, climate change is a huge problem, but it is not the only problem in whose service we should pause other aspirations. And climate change is not a stand-alone problem with a technical solution — it is symptomatic of the broader system that is producing it. Pollin’s reduction of climate change to a question of an investment fix is appealing because it makes the problem seem manageable. But climate change is not a technical problem. Climate change is a political problem, in the real sense of the word political, meaning a problem involving competing visions of the kind of world we want to live in.

truthout.org/...