There’s been a lot of talk in blogs much more important than mine about what the Democratic Party needs to do to come back from this string of defeats in recent elections. One method they keep coming back to over and over again, is “framing”. And the person most associated with this method is George Lakoff. Framing — as far as I understand it — involves creating an overarching metaphor or conception which describes your position and then choosing your language carefully to continually reference that metaphor.
The Republicans, according to many reports have been working on their frame since Barry Goldwater’s defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In the intervening 40 years, they have been systematically honing the basics of their frame, which pictures Government — especially the New Deal and Great Society reforms — as an intrusive, immoral, expensive, inefficient and ineffective force which must be resisted by shrinking it until it can be drowned in the bathtub. Within that frame, they have created such phrases as “right-to-life”, “death tax”, “partial-birth abortion”, “tax and spend liberals”, “healthy forests”, “defense of marriage” and, most recently, “social security privatization.”
The power of frames is that they create such a structure around ideas that even opponents are forced to use a language which helps to defeat them. For instance there’s the phrase “Bush tax cuts”. Googling on that exact phrase brings up about 268,000 items, many of them critical of the program. But think about the term for a moment: even though the vast majority of Americans are finding this legislation actually increases their taxes and expenses, by using the phrase “tax cut” we ourselves are referring to a horrible program with terminology that brings to mind something good. After all, those opposed to tax cuts must be for tax increases and therefore, they’re trying to take my money!
So we need to refer to this program with terminology which shows our approbation by phrasing it as something bad. Even calling it a “Millionaire’s Tax Cut” doesn’t do it because there’s a double good here: “millionaire” = “something I want to be” + “tax cut” = “giving me back more of my money”. A commenter on one of Kevin Drum’s articles about framing suggested “…the Bush Entitlements or Corporate Entitlements…” as a way of phrasing it, which isn’t bad. If we go with a phrase like that we have to understand that we are ceding the term “entitlements” for all time (which may not be a bad idea, since our society’s Calvinist outlook despises the thought that anyone may be entitled to anything) because using these terms agrees with the framing of government support as something bad.
Finding the right frame is going to be difficult, since, as the traditional “Big Tent” party, the Democratic Party is composed of hundreds of often competing interests. But I think we are moving in the right direction when we use terms such as “fairness”, “equality”, “inclusion” (that might be a bad one, according to CBS), and “community”. And when we discuss our opponents, we should use terms such as “ravenous”, “un-neighborly”, “landlords”,”selfish”, “restrictive”, and “heirs and heiresses” — all terms with negative connotations. We need to get onto the debates early and place the issues into our frame before the Republicans, with their parrot-like media accomplices insinuate their take on things.
Josh Marshall has a very good suggestion on these lines: “In the coming Social Security debate, Democrats should dust-off Clinton’s ‘mend it, don’t end it’ rhetoric. ” Clinton was referring to Affirmative Action when he said it, but it applies well here. As Marshall says:
The strength of the Republican privatization argument — and all their rhetoric and strategy point to this — is the contention that privatization is just a reform, a way to improve or save Social Security, or to put it simply, a way to make sure people get their checks when they retire. But what this is really about is abolishing Social Security; and that fact needs to be taken as granted — not even a subject of debate — in the way Democrats frame the debate and how they talk about the subject.
When the debate arises, lets make sure we tell everyone that the Democrats created Social Security because we care about people. The Republicans opposed it then and they want to end it now. We want to mend it, not end it.
