Blog: Framing

It is traditional to describe politics as a "spectrum," from extremists on the left to extremists on the right, with the population spread out in between and politicians located at various points based on their policy positions. Using this model, game theory would recommend politicians running in national elections try to position themselves close to the center.

This is just like a classic game theory example (PDF, scroll to bottom of page 58): two vendors are selling ice cream on a long beach, and can choose where to place their carts. Everyone will go to the closest vendor, so the two vendors have an incentive to move closer and closer to each other (to capture more of the beachgoers in between) until they end up right next to each other in the center of the beach - giving each half the beach, but forcing customers to walk much farther than if they simply located themselves farther apart.

Game theory leads to some poor outcomes for beach vendors, but even worse for politicians, because the whole metaphor of a political spectrum is a false one, as George Lakoff argues in a recent article. Instead, he describes two "systems of values and modes of thought," the progressive and conservative worldviews. Many people mix and match viewpoints between the two, but that doesn't mean they are in the "center" - a person who is liberal on social issues and conservative on trade would be just as far away from a social authoritarian and economic populist as a pure progressive is from a pure conservative. And the universe of positions isn't limited to just two issues.

Lakoff describes the people who split their positions as "biconceptuals," and the way for a Democrat to appeal to a biconceptual isn't to "move right" or adopt conservative values, but rather to speak about the class of issues where the biconceptual is in agreement with the progressive viewpoint, which most voters hold on the majority of issues. The DLC, which has made a habit of attacking other Democrats as extremist and sparked a lively debate recently through an op-ed which generated rebuttal op-eds, eloquent responses online, and a debate on Meet the Press, recommends precisely the wrong approach, accepting more conservative policies on more issues, mostly issues where the American people in fact largely agree with the progressive viewpoints. When viewed through the lens of biconceptuals, this strategy makes no sense. It only seems logical in the false metaphor of a single political spectrum.

During the 2004 election, a new idea burst into the popular political consciousness - "framing." The idea is simple, and to me, obvious: the way people talk about an issue influences the way they think about an issue. Say "estate tax" and people think about taxing big mansions for a small number of people; say "death tax" and it sounds like your grandmother is going to have to pay up when she passes away. Say "Social Security privatization" and people think about the failed energy schemes in California, but "personal accounts" sound like prudent saving for the future. "Partial-birth abortion" sounds gruesome, but it's just a scary way of talking about "late-term abortions".

Writers use words to persuade all the time. I called the California energy deregulation plan a "scheme" to convey the disaster that it represented for the state, rather than, say "experiment". Of course words have power, and nobody should recognize that more than writers.

That is why it's baffling the way some writers vehemently dispute the idea that framing could provide value. Jonathan Chait wrote a cover story in The New Republic this month about the rise of the netroots and their value to American politics. All in all, I think it's a remarkably even-handed analysis that gives credit to most of the netroots' major effects on politics, something most commentators outside of that world have thus far been slow to understand or reluctant to admit.

But he takes a sudden dig at framing:

Among the most revealing is the netroots' incessant use of the words "meme" or "frame" to describe ideas. It is a formulation that assumes that establishing the truth about an idea matters less than phrasing the idea in the most politically effective way and repeating it as much as possible. As Ed Kilgore (a moderate liberal blogger with a complicated relationship to the netroots) has put it, this wording "reflects the strange belief that politics is all about noise' and narratives'; whoever makes the most noise or gets the most Google hits is going to win, regardless of objective reality."

Chait's argument makes sense if you assume there is one objective truth and that intelligent people can always arrive at it. The netroots' fundamental claim, which Chait misses, is that it's impossible to agree on a single inviolable truth. Instead, reasonable people can disagree, and whoever is most effective at articulating their beliefs in easily comprehensible language is most likely to prevail. Yet there's remarkable resistance to this simple idea.

When some members of the profession of journalism build their self-images on the notion that they are ferreting out absolute truth, challenges to this orthodoxy can meet extremely strong opposition. Just look at the New York Times Book Review, which essentially printed an attack op-ed in the guise of reviewing an excellent book, Jeffrey Feldman's Framing the Debate. It's a baffling set of untruths and misreadings that Feldman rebuts more effectively than I can. But just the fact that the Times Book Review chose to run such an opinionated, direct argument as a review is telling. When reviewing a book about one of our Founding Fathers do they choose a scholar with an opposing view to write the review? The vehemence of the responses from various quarters can only mean that the idea of framing is hitting an uncomfortable nerve with certain members of the press. And it's long overdue.

A lot of people on discussion boards and blogs are falling prey to the "fixed pie fallacy", which I described a while back in a fundraising context. The fixed-pie thinking here goes that Americans have a certain set of opinions, and we have to choose positions in order to capture at least 51% of the opinions.

But opinions aren't fixed, and most importantly the relative priorities aren't fixed. Why do many voters think that "Christian values" means banning abortion and gay marriage, rather than improving the quality of education and finding ways to help the poor? Why do they think that "security" means starting wars in countries that didn't attack us while failing to inspect shipping containers or put guards around nuclear facilities?

We should neither "move left" nor "be more centrist." We should identify those core principles of Democrats which do resonate throughout the country and aggressively communicate those to all voters. As NY State Senator Eric Schneiderman said, don't talk about moving to the center, talk about moving the center back to the center. Right now voters hear principled persuasion coming from the right, moving the electorate farther right, and "ok we agree with that but not this" from the left.

As for who runs in 2008, please don't think so much about that. A huge problem with the party is that it's mostly small set of prominent national celebrity figures without a lot of local community involvement. There are a host of local conservative-leaning institutions from Chambers of Commerce to churches across the country explaining to citizens why they should be Republicans. They have surrogates on all the media shows arguing for the conservative viewpoints. Then every four years the Democrats pop up and expect one national figure to singlehandedly build a nationwide party infrastructure, develop a message, communicate it widely, and get a majority of Americans to vote for ideas they're just hearing for the first time.

When Bush ran in 2000 he didn't invent the conservative message. He didn't build up the party. He was just a guy chosen by a larger ongoing organization to run for a specific office. Rather than debating how far right we should move or who should run in 2008, we should be figuring out how to build the ongoing campaign in 50 states starting at the local level. And that's what the DNC chair needs to do.

It's not about where the chair is on the political spectrum, but whether the chair will build a robust party or maintain its narrow, short-term focus. I fear the interest groups that make up the party today want a weak chair who won't challenge their power. We need the opposite. I'm not sure Howard Dean is the guy, but I doubt Tom Vilsack is either. Maybe it's Simon Rosenberg, who has built a credible organization and hit a lot of important themes when he spoke at the Morning After Conference we organized this past weekend. But the building needs to be done and we need a chair who will do it.