By Eva Ciabattoni

Two books, UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004) and writer-editor Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (Metropolitan Books, 2004), look at the question of how so many supposedly rational people have been persuaded to vote against their own economic self-interest.

Both books agree that this sleight of hand is based on a continuing culture war pitting the latte liberals, those cartoonish Volvo-driving, chardonnay-sipping, paper-shuffling parasites, against the plain-talking, beer-swilling, hard-working heartlanders - but Frank does so in more lyrical language than Lakoff.

Most of Frank’s book is a tour of Kansas: from the wealthy suburbs of Johnson County to the meatpacking plants of Garden City, from present-day to past. According to Frank, the kindling for the culture war is backlash - “a crusade in which one’s material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are all-important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged.”

The backlash is fueled by a culture of victimization - no matter how many elections are won, how many media outlets bought, how many judgeships attained, the liberal juggernaut continues to threaten the real, the good, the American way of life.

As Frank engagingly meanders through his material, his most powerful insight is that the culture war and the fictitious all-powerful liberals are used to hide the elephant in the parlor - the role of free-market capitalism. People miss the point that media, far from being a liberal tool, are corporations. They have one goal: profit. If vulgarity sells, vulgarity we shall get, especially as media bosses lobby for ever more deregulation. Frank proposes that the great fiction is that “what divides America is authenticity, not something hard and ugly like economics.”

Lakoff takes a very different approach. He analyzes the 40-year conservative strategic plan that has defined the frames that people use in arranging facts. He explains that the conservative model speaks to people with a “Father Knows Best” frame and that the progressive model speaks to people with a nurturant family frame. In President Bush’s phrase “America doesn’t need a permission slip,” the words “permission slip” evoke a powerful frame.

Focus groups have found that people like the words “clean” and “healthy” - no one wants to live in a poisoned community, after all. So we get a Clear Skies frame for legislation that will increase pollution. Tort reform is a frame for a strategic initiative: In addition to limiting the awards that polluting or careless corporations must pay to a calculable amount that can be built into a company’s risk-benefit model, it tightens the noose around donations to the opposition party.

Although billed as “The Essential Guide for Progressives,” conservatives can read Lakoff’s book as an enemy playbook.

Try this alternate frame in place of the Social Security reform frame: shell game.