Steve has a New York Sun column today on George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor whose notions about rhetorical “framing” are apparently attracting a lot of attention from Democratic politicians. Lakoff’s general point is that people think, and vote, in ways that have little to do with right reason properly applied, and much more to do with the sub-rational frames — Republicans as the responsible “daddy party,” for instance, and Dems as the simpatico but soft-minded “mommy party” — through which they view American politics.
I think there’s a lot to be said for Lakoff’s general argument. (At the very least, it gets closer to the heart of voter behavior than overly optimistic notions about “deliberative democracy”.) But as for Lakoff’s specific applications of his thesis . . . well, I’ll let Steve take it away:
With this deep psychological motivation lurking behind American political debates, it’s no surprise that Mr. Lakoff perceives hidden agendas everywhere. Conservatives “are not really pro-life,” he writes. Rather, because abortion allows teenagers to be promiscuous and women to delay childbearing to pursue a career, it threatens their model of social control: “Pregnant teenagers have violated the commandments of the strict father. Career women challenge the power and authority of the strict father,” explains Mr. Lakoff. “Both should be punished by bearing the child.”
Similarly, Republicans support school testing not to identify substandard schools and improve them, but for more nefarious reasons.”Once the testing frame applies not just to students but also to schools,” writes Mr. Lakoff, “then schools can, metaphorically, fail – and be punished for failing by having their allowance cut,” leading ultimately to “elimination for many public schools.” The goal, it turns out, is to replace the entire public school system with private institutions.
The list of GOP deceptions is seemingly endless. Republicans don’t support tort reform because they care about the cost of frivolous lawsuits; they want to bankrupt a Democratic Party that relies on contributions from trial lawyers and leave corporations free to pollute the environment. The war in Iraq, as one might expect, is really about “the self-interest of American corporations.” . . . On issue after issue, “what conservatives are really trying to achieve is not in the proposal,” Mr. Lakoff explains. The “real purposes are hidden.”
Let’s allow that there’s a kernel of truth here — namely, that any political movement tends to emphasize small-scale aims that are palatable to most voters, in the hopes of moving the country toward larger-scale aims that can’t yet claim much popular support. For instance, many Republicans would like to drastically overhaul Social Security, but the GOP is proposing incremental reforms at present, because the public generally likes Social Security as it is. Similarly, many Democrats would like to have a European-style social safety net, but in the absence of public support, they spend most of their time either defending the status quo, or proposing incremental welfare-state expansions (e.g. John Kerry’s health care plan).
THE PARANOID STYLE: But why, instead of focusing on how the Democrats can find the right frames to move the country toward Swedish-style statism (or whatever preferred end he has in mind), does Lakoff leaps immediately to the assumption that rhetorical frames must, by definition, conceal bizarre hidden agendas — agendas that bear almost no relation to the frames themselves? Steve rightly cites the famous Richard Hofstadter essay on the “paranoid style” in politics . . . but why is this style so appealing to otherwise intelligent people? Why the eagerness to believe the absolute worst about your political opponents (pro-lifers don’t care about babies, they care about subjugating women; Wolfowitz, Feith, et. al. aren’t misguided idealists but power-mad lackeys for oil companies, and so on)?
Hofstadter’s essay suggests — rightly, I think — that the leap into paranoia has to do with a desire for rationality and order. “The higher paranoid scholarship,” he writes, “is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.” This isn’t just a matter of dividing the world into a neat moral black-and-white, though that has something to do with it. It’s also a matter of explaining away the messiness of reality. If the Bush Administration really believed there were WMDs and wanted to democratize Iraq, the paranoid mind thinks to itself, then 1) why didn’t we find any weapons, and 2) why are we doing such a lousy job of democratization? It could be that the world is a messy, human-error-riddled place — but saying that we really went in for the sake of Halliburton and the oil companies makes the chain of causality so much simpler. (The same is true of conspiracy-theorizing on the right, I should add, where Bill Clinton’s success could never just be explained by the willingness of the American people to excuse sleaziness and mendacity during economic good times . . . no, there had to be murder behind it.)
In other words, the paranoia of writers like Lakoff is itself a “framed” way of viewing the world. Which, I suppose, only makes his thesis that much stronger.
— Ross
The Dish 