Lakoff, Framing and the Left

George Lakoff's been getting a lot of attention lately, and it's well deserved. If you're not familiar with his ideas about politics and framing, his new book Don't Think of an Elephant is a great starting point (it's cheap and short - I actually read most of it while killing time in a bookstore the other day), and you can go here for a lengthy excerpt from the first chapter. While I think this is a good and important book, I think the power of Lakoff's approach could be enhanced if it pays a little more attention to Left social movements, rather than mainstream Democratic partisan politics.

Since I've been reading so much about Lakoff lately, what started as a short posting ballooned into a monster, particularly considering I really should be working on my final papers now, but here it is. I divided it into three parts: 1. Lakoff on the Right and Left. 2. Lakoff's Missing Frames. 3. Towards a New Left Master Frame.

Lakoff on the Right and Left

Lakoff's central point is that the Right has been very effective at framing public discourse and the Left has been terrible at it. For example, "tax relief" evokes a frame of taxation as a burden, an affliction. If that's true, you can't be against "tax relief," can you? This also explains how the Right will frame policies that actually increase pollution as the "Clear Skies Act." The frame evokes liberal policies and makes people feel good about them, but the policy itself is conservative and has nothing to do with making the skies clear.

I'm not so sure about his claims about the Left, though. I certainly agree that Democrats have been terrible at framing their views. However, I think Lakoff, like most Democrats, has totally forgotten about any real "Left" and how the Left has always framed issues. One example of why I think this: he cites Clinton's successes at framing. His two examples: Clinton's use of "welfare reform" and "ending the era of big government." Lakoff says Clinton effectively co-opted these conservative frames to achieve his liberal goals. The only problem with this is that "welfare reform" and cutting government spending were not "liberal" goals, they were conservative goals. Clinton co-opted the conservative language, true, but also the conservative substance of the policies. This isn't quite the same thing as the Right using liberal frames to sell conservative policies.

This seems obvious to me, but apparently not to Lakoff. My guess is that, like most Democrats and Americans, Lakoff does not recognize what to me is one of the defining features of American politics over the last 40 years: the de-politicization of the economy. During the 1930s and 40s, free market capitalism was totally discredited. Plop someone like Milton Friedman down in this time period and they'd be laughed at. The debate was over how to regulate capitalism for the common good or to ditch it entirely in favor of a new system. If you read things about domestic economic policy by Republicans like President Eisenhower, they sound like the liberal fringe of the Democratic Party today.

However, for a number of reasons (the conservative movement, anti-communism and the breakup of the American Left, post-war affluence, the corruption of politics by money, etc.) the economy has become totally off-limits as a political subject. Capitalism is seen as a system that produces a natural equilibrium of sorts where people who work hard are rewarding, those who don't work hard get what they deserve and everybody is the better for it all. Since politics and the economy don't mix, people often don't even think about economic issues when they vote, let alone about how we might change the economy to make it more fair. To do so would disturb the natural equilibrium of capitalism. Politics and the economy have become decoupled.

I think Lakoff suggests this at times, but doesn't pursue it fully. For example, he argues that the Left and Right use competing metaphors of the family to frame issues. (This "family metaphor" has attracted a lot of criticism and it certainly has some problems, but I think if interpreted in a certain way, it can be quite helpful...I'll come back to this later.) He argues that conservatives use a "strict father" metaphor to make sense of the world and he links this metaphor to classical liberalism. He doesn't, however, look in a very explicit way at where the Left, or "progressive," metaphor of "nurturant family" leads in terms of economics. In failing to do this, he also fails to look at various Left-wing movements throughout history and how they have successfully framed their positions. It's not that "The Left" is horrible at framing, it's that "Democrats" are horrible, and I would suggest this has a lot to do with the decoupling of the economy and politics I described above. In adopting the "strict father" pro-capitalist stance, they rob themselves of opportunities to construct a consistent, meaningful framework of understanding.

Lakoff's Missing Frames

Lakoff talks about "strategic initiatives." The Right is great at them: the reason they support "tort reform" is not just because of the specific policy itself, but because of the consequences of that policy: by preventing people from suing corporations, they're preventing the basis for future regulation of industry. The reason they support "partial birth abortion" is not just to prevent the particular procedure, which is very rare, but to institutionalize the idea that abortion is a brutal, immoral procedure; creating a "slippery slope" to further legislation.

In other words, a good frame, once established, has policies literally flow from the frame itself. It's the ideas and frames that matter, not the facts or the policies. If the frame is set, then a fact that doesn't "fit" with that frame will get rejected as irrational.

Lakoff gives a few examples of a good strategic initiative by progressives: the Apollo Project. The basic idea is that we should put money into funding research on alternative forms of energy. Once you do this, there are consequences in many other areas: jobs, health, clean air and water, foreign policy, etc.

However, Lakoff argues that this is the exception to the rule on the Left. I agree...to the extent that you count the Democratic party and mainstream American liberalism as "The Left." If you look a bit further to the Left of institutionalized politics to the sphere of Left social movements, you find plenty of examples of good framing. I've thought of three examples of framing from three different social movements over the last 100 years offer evidence of this.

First, the labor movement, particularly the radical, populist wing of the movement in it's early years. They talked about "wage slaves." Theirs was a world in which they, the laborers, were the "wealth producers," while the capitalists were "plutocrats" who were stealing the products of their labor. As a result of their shared condition, workers stood in "solidarity" with one another, cooperating with one another in "mutual aid."

The term "wage slave" itself is particularly useful. What does it mean to be a slave? To be powerless, controlled by others and robbed of your freedom, dignity and the fruits of your labor. What's the opposite of being a slave? To be a free citizen among equals in a democracy. You're not a "cog in the wheel" but an "empowered participant" who sits at the table with your equals to make decisions democratically.

When you think of things this way, the institutions of a more democratic economy literally flow right out of this frame. To the extent that everyone chips in and does their part, people should make relatively equal wages. Hierarchies, to the extent that they exist, should be democratically elected, bottom-up. No one group of people should have a monopoly on the empowering types of labor while others clean the toilets, so jobs should be allocated in a way that empowers everyone and asks all to share the unpleasant tasks. Because of this, every worker needs to have a sound education and the basic necessities of life that allow people to reach their fullest potential, such as health care, nutrition and a healthy environment, and these things should be available to everybody equally because we expect everybody to do their part.

My second example comes from the feminist movement. The phrase "The Second Shift" is used to describe the fact that women are working both "at work," but also at home. This simple phrase does a very powerful thing: it shatters our notion of what "work" means and, as a result, reshapes the way we have to think about the economy, the family, gender, politics, education and more. Capitalism tells us that the only labor that "counts" is labor in the market, although labor in the market is just a small subset of labor that is socially necessary. Since we want to reward work that contributes to a healthy society, we need to question whether or not it's fair to make one's economic well-being depend solely, or perhaps at all, on their participation in the labor market. We also need to question whether or not it's fair to banish one gender to do all of one type of unpaid labor while another gender can be "doing their part" by only laboring in the market. If the market isn't fair and doesn't result in a natural equilibrium where everybody gets what they put in, then perhaps we should do something politically to correct this.

A third social movement is the "democratic globalization movement." This movement offers lots of useful frames, although it generally doesn't have a good name that envokes those frames so you may mostly know this movement as the "anti-globalization movement" that is, in fact, very globalized.

One frame articulated within this movement is that "Another World is Possible." This frame is associated with the World Social Forum, a large gathering of activists from around the world devoted to creating a more just, sustainable form of globalization. Their slogan, "Another World is Possible," I would argue, is a powerful one. One could criticize it for being overly vague, and it is, but remember, a frame is not a policy. "Another World is Possible" suggests that Margaret Thatcher, who famously argued that "TINA - There Is No Alternative" to free market capitalism, is wrong. It begs the questions: what kind of world is possible? How might we get there? It doesn't offer any immediate solutions, but it does deny, up front, the central premise of the Right's economic dogma - that free market capitalism is beyond politics or social meddling and is the natural form of human organization.

There are other frames, too. And they're not all exclusively left-wing either. "Outsourcing," for example, has become a very powerful frame whose meaning is still being contested. For conservative nationalists, on the one hand, the "out" in "outsourcing" implies that there is an "in," a proper place for those jobs: in our country, not theirs. Here, instead of leading to solidarity with working people around the globe, this frame can lead to hostility, competitiveness and ethnocentrism. On the other hand, "outsourcing" is a powerful frame for illustrating how corporations are increasingly beholden to no nation or state and can scour the globe for wherever they can exploit wages and resources most efficiently for their own profit, leaving the people behind powerless wherever they go. This interpretation implies very different loyalties and policies.


Towards a New Left Master Frame

Lakoff argues that there are many different types of "progressives" (a term he uses broadly), from "socioeconomic progressives" to "identity politics progressives" to "anti-authoritarian progressives." He argues, however, that they all share the same "progressives values" and "nurturant parent morality."

Like I said earlier, many are critical of the family metaphor, but at least based on my reading of Lakoff, it's more useful than it may first appear. First, he argues that people actually carry both frames with them and those frames are activated in different contexts. Second, he's not reducing everything to the family. At other points in the book, he discusses other frames, such as the "nation-state as individual" metaphor, that are consistent with the "strict father" frame, but are not reducible to it. His central message is that people, in a local context, interpret the world in ways shaped by their local experiences. The family is a particularly profound local context for people's lives and when facts are explained in ways that resonate with people's family knowledge, they can be very powerful.

So he's not saying that decisions made by CEOs to lay off 3,000 workers or by legislators to cut spending on education are driven by a theory of the family. Rather, he's saying that these actions can be interpreted in multiple ways and that the way these individual actions "make sense" depends on the frame through which people are viewing them. The logic driving these acts on a global level can be that of free market capitalism, which values profit over people. However, the way individuals and groups, at a local level, come to accept or criticize these actions can be based on an entirely different logic. The frames that resonate most powerfully with people are those that fit with their local experiences. This is why the family can be such an important metaphor for social policies in other spheres.

And, by the way, it's not just the family that this idea can be applied to either. Marx's theory of alienation worked much the same way: industrial capitalism forced individuals into alienated labor conditions, but it did so in a very leveling fashion: they were now just cogs in the wheel, but they were all cogs in the wheel and they were all in the crowded factory together and, in recognizing their common situation, they could become a revolutionary class. From this common factory experience, a frame of the proletariat would be formed which, like Lakoff's family frames, would become a powerful lens through which the whole world could be interpreted.

So framing things in ways that resonate with people's local conditions matter. If we buy Lakoff's claim that the "nurturant family" is the frame through which Left policies make sense, then where does my argument about the economy fit? As Lakoff argues, free market capitalism resonates strongly with strict father morality. However, it is entirely inconsistent with nurturant family morality. On the other hand, it is quite consistent with all three of the Left social movement frames I described above.

But if Democrats and liberals are afraid of challenging the hegemony of the capitalist frame, then they're going to have a very hard time finding the "strategic initiatives" called for by Lakoff. At the same time, they're never going to build an alliance with the anti-capitalist Left. When Democrats operate from within the pro-capitalist frame, then it's little wonder that they have a hard time articulating policies that flow from a frame that questions capitalism's natural supremacy. They're trying to articulate Left policies from within a "moderate Right" frame. They're policies don't flow from the very frames they're utilizing.

What's an alternative? I'm not arguing that everyone Left of the Republican Party come out tomorrow as "anti-capitalist" and call for a socialist revolution or anything like that. I happen to believe capitalism is a bad system and ought to be replaced, but I can cooperate with someone who either doesn't go that far or isn't sure that this is feasible provided that we share the following assumption: capitalism is a socially created system that is, to say the least, highly flawed, and we ought to work on these flaws to the extent that they contradict our shared values. In other words, the economy is not a natural phenomenon and it should be subordinate to our shared values and goals as a society.

As I mentioned earlier, this would not even be controversial just a few decades ago. This assumption is the basis of everything from New Deal liberalism and European-style Social Democracy to more radical Leftist politics. It's an assumption that underlies all of the policies, "moderate" or "radical," that people on the Left generally support. And recognizing this does not require we all become "socioeconomic progressives" who believe the economy is at the root of all problems. All it requires is recognizing that the economy is not a product of divine will and that we can and should work to restructure it to the extent that it helps us build a better society. If you believe, for example, that patriarchy is the primary source of oppression in our society or perhaps you don't want to accept that there is any one primary source of oppression, then you still need to adopt this economic assumption or your framing will always run into barriers whenever your policies come into conflict with the capitalist status quo.

If this change is made, "Moderate Democrats" can keep their policies as far as I'm concerned, but at least they'll be articulating them in the context of a frame that allows their proposals to resonate. And when people like me either agree or disagree with them, we'll at least have a shared set of assumptions on which to base our disagreements. This shared set of assumptions is what you get when you determine the terms of the debate yourself instead of trying in vain to accommodate your opponents frame.