The think tank Progressives desperately need has sent out an email announcing that they are folding for lack of funding. This news is sad indeed.
The Rockridge Institute and its online community Rockridge Nation were invaluable for guiding progressives in how take the national debate out of the hands of conservatives. For people like me, it was invaluable in literally teaching us how to think about the moral values that underlie our political beliefs and the policies we promote--and then how to move from thinking about those values to arguing for them. One need only look to the right-wing questions in the recent ABC debate to see how dire the need is to escape the narratives created by decades of right wing investment in "cognitive policy." Or look to the DLC and Hillary Clinton's campaign to see the fatal flaw of dismissing the issue of framing and ignoring the call to speak clearly for progressive moral values (and instead, taking the "surrender in advance" tactic of dealing with conservatives).
Here's some key points from their email announcement which we as progressives all need to take to heart as obstacles still to be overcome:
**The Progressive Funding Problem: The 1997 Covington Report [Sally Covington, Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations] observed that conservative foundations tend to give large, multi-year block grants to promote conservatism in general. By contrast, progressive foundations tend to give small grants for a short time over a short list of specific issue areas. This results in small nonprofits having to constantly spend a lot of time and effort raising money, and all too often failing to raise enough.
**The Cognitive Science Problem: Few people are aware of the results in cognitive science and neuroscience and the techniques of analysis developed in cognitive linguistics. Progressives tend to view research in terms of polls, surveys, and focus groups, rather than the methods for understanding human cognition.
**The Enlightenment Reason Problem: Progressives commonly believe in some version of Enlightenment Reason, which says that reason is conscious, dispassionate, logical, universal, literal (it directly fits the world), and interest-based. The cognitive and brain sciences have shown this is false in every respect. But if you aren't aware that we normally think unconsciously in terms of frames and metaphors, then framing would seem like deception, spin, or propaganda.
**The Material Policy Problem: Unlike conservatives, progressives tend to think of policy as material policy alone--the nuts and bolts--and not cognitive policy: the ideas that must be in the brains of the public for policies to be seen as common sense. There is thus little or no understanding of the importance of cognitive policy.
**The Framing-as-Messaging Problem: If you don't know that framing is the study of thought, then you would naturally but incorrectly think of framing as messaging. This is reinforced by the fact that understanding framing does, in fact, help with effective messaging.
**The Training Problem: Framing research can't be done by just anyone. It takes training. And since staff members have lives and need financial security, it is hard to maintain a highly-trained staff without sufficient and stable funding.
The work that Rockridge has done is still available on their site and Lakoff's books of course can still be read, purchased and shared. But I'm sorry to see the Institute go.