Edward Berge
I’ve often quoted George Lakoff’s work (with Mark Johnson) in The Philosophy of the Flesh. He has a new article at the Huffington Post about returning to democracy after the recent events in the news. Read the entire piece, which is a call to action at this link. Here are some excerpts:
Which would you prefer, consumer choice or freedom? Extended coverage or freedom? Bending the cost curve or freedom?
This is exactly what Frank Luntz advised conservatives to say. They have repeated it and repeated it. Why has it worked to rally conservative populists against their interests? The most effective framing is more than mere language, more than spin or salesmanship. It has worked because conservatives really believe that the issue is freedom. It fits the conservative moral system. It fits how conservatives see the world.
The Democrats have helped the conservatives. Their pathetic attempt to make any deal to get 60 votes convinced even Massachusetts voters that government under the Democrats was corrupt and oppressive, not just inept, but immoral.
All political leaders argue that they are doing the right thing, not the wrong thing, that their policies are moral, not evil.
Conservatives understand this, liberals tend not to. Conservatives know a morality tale when they see it: Greedy Wall Street bankers, who have cost people their homes, their jobs, and their savings get billion-dollar bailouts from the government, while those honest hard-working people get nothing. Corruption. Oppression. A threat to freedom.
The conservatives are winning the framing wars again — by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has.
But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal-making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner, assuming it would be “pragmatic” to court corporations and move to the right, in the false hope of bipartisan support. A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand, and that made ordinary folks feel they were being bamboozled. And in many cases, they were.
Even the language was a disaster. Liberals thought that conservatives would like consumer choice. That’s why they used “public option.” As Harry Reid said, “It’s public and it’s an option — a public option.” But what did a conservative hear in the words “public option?” Say “public” and he hears “government.” “Option” is a policy-wonk term, from the language of bureaucracy. Say “public option” and the conservative hears “government bureaucracy.”
The results of deal-making in the name of pragmatism have been considerably immoral, as documented thoroughly by progressives like Drew Westen, Matt Taibbi, Robert Kuttner, and many others. Advice on what to do instead has not been lacking from other progressives. Advice is all over the blogs. Guy Saperstein is an excellent example.
We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestion — and ridicule. Rachel Maddow is one of the best, and her popularity is well-deserved. What’s more fun than ridiculing Tea Party-ers, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the like, by showing the factual errors, the flaws in their logic, and the cruelty of their positions.
But we have been dealt a triple blow. A year of failed deal-making by our side, the Tea Party win in Massachusetts, and worst of all, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to turn our democracy into a corporate plutocracy. This is serious.
Democrats still have the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate, but the momentum is on the conservative side. Their victories in the framing wars have inevitably led to a crucial electoral victory and to a Supreme Court death threat to democracy itself, framed as free speech.
Democrats have electoral power, but progressives have not created an effective movement to take advantage of that power.
Conservatives…don’t believe that government should serve public needs, that instead government should be privatized and shrunk to fit in a bathtub, as if governing would disappear with government. But governing doesn’t disappear when government shrinks; instead corporations come to govern your life — like HMO’s, oil companies, drug companies, agribusiness, and so on, with accountability only to maximizing profit, not to public needs.
I posted the above in the IPS forum Pub room, since there didn’t seem any other appropriate room created for political discussion. Given that here is my response there to the above post:
When I wanted to post this I didn’t know in which forum to place it. It almost seems like politics isn’t a “spiritual” issue in the integral world. And yet as Lakeoff makes clear, a key reason liberals are losing the political battle is because they do not recognize the moral implications of the issues. And morality has always been a key ingredient in the spiritual domain. We might even say that politics and business suffer from a lack of properly infused morality into its practice.
There are a lot of directions I’d like to go with morality but for now I want to focus on why it seems to be an unconscious avoidance in the integral community. A strong case can be made that the political arena, public policy, is where the rubber of spirituality meets the road, where we put our moral beliefs into practice in shaping policies that help others. So I have to ask why enacting law to help others seems like anathema in integral circles? How many get politically involved in supporting legislation? In writing their representatives? In campaigning for a candidate that embodies their spiritual ideals? It almost seems like political activism is considered a MGM activity and that we need to focus on business, specifically, selling business our model.
Another aspect is that spiritual for much of the integral community is achieving particular states of consciousness, a very individual and narcissistic affair. To wit our discussion in the enlightenment as commodity thread, where it’s just another possession to notch our belt of positive achievements. Yes, so-called compassion is part of the mix, but only in helping others to meditate to achieve their own blissful states of consciousness. God forbid that we should actually work to change the economic or political systems that enslave people externally. That might actually create conditions whereby people would have the time and energy to meditate to have enlightenment states of consciousness.
Again it goes to the power of the unconscious influences of political and economic systems in which we are embedded. In my comments on Patten in the integral capitalism thread I commended him for recognizing how ads affect us in this way; despite our claims to be conscious of them they influence us nonetheless. And yet he and many of us, me included, fail to recognize how our political and economic systems do so even much more insidiously. Even to the point where we tend to ignore these systems in our quest for spiritual attainment, as if the latter exists in vacuum of empty space disconnected from these bases. In Lakoffian terms, it doesn’t even enter our frame.
So here the topic sits, in a pub. I suppose we can connect a drunken state to an enlightenment state easier than we can to a political-economic state?
Here are a few more of my comments from the group:
Talk about framing: Lakoff mentions Rachel Maddow above and I’m a huge fan of hers, watch every night after work while I prepare and eat dinner. So last night VP Biden’s economic advisor is on defending Obama’s new proposed “spending freeze.” Maddow eviscerates him (see transcript) for using this framing, that it’s a betrayal of the President’s principles for helping our economic disaster. It’s just more of the same of him trying to frame things in a way to win back those dissatisfied independents that voted in a Republican Senator to fill Kennedy’s vacant seat. Meanwhile, as Lakoff notes above, it only further serves to alienate his true base, like Maddow. The latter makes it clear that no matter how Obama frames it, even in terms approved by conservatives (like a spending freeze), they will oppose it regardless. It’s not just the frame but who frames it that matters.
So why is Obama continuing to try to win support from those that will never, ever give it? Why not just hammer your moral stake in the ground for what you truly believe and damn who likes it or not? Ah, but then it wouldn’t be “political,” would it? Again I ask why not? What the hell makes being political devoid of sticking up for your morals? Or trying to please everyone for a vote? You cannot negotiate with terrorists, or Republicans, so why waste more time with them?
Part of this goes to the integral notion of preaching to your audience, changing your message for different people depending on their understanding. But when your mass audience is the “American people,” all over the political, economic and religious spectrum there is no one framing that will appeal to them all. You’re going to have to pick your core constituency and reinforce them or lose them. Even those terrorist conservatives know this and gear their frame accordingly. Damned liberals are stupid sometimes.
But is Obama even a liberal? It would appear not, just another two-faced politician corrupted by the system and willing to say anything to maintain power. And he is apparently not doing that very well either.
Maddow last night praised Obama for all the acheivements he’s made so far with the economy. She showed how the number of new unemployed has gone down steadily, and how the GDP has gone up steadily, since he took office. She showed how stimulus spending created new jobs and prevented other jobs from being lost. Then she asked: So why is he now switching plans mid-stream with this spending freeze idea? Why, since he’s marched down the field and is on the one-yard line, is he going to punt with 1st and goal?
Maddow had on economist Galbraith who agreed that now was the exact worst time to change the plan with a spending freeze. No one could see a good rationale for it and it was concluded it was a symbolic, political gesture, a “framing” that would be suitable for O’s conservative opponents. This is exactly what McCain proposed, which idea was soudly rejected in the voting booth. But again O is trying to appease not only conservatives but the angry American mobs who voted for a Republican in the MA Senate election. O must be getting advice that he needs to sound more conservative to win back these disgruntled common folk. But Maddow showed numerous polls of exactly those MA constituents casting their vote for the Republican. They still favored things like the public option in healthcare. They still favored Obama’s performance. They still favored stimulus spending. So who the hell is advising the big O to frame this way? It’s not going to appeal even to its target audience and certainly will piss off his base and the conservatives.
It’s time to hire Lakoff to learn how to spin properly. It’s time to get out Geitner and Summers and bring in Reich & Krugman, taking not only a policy but a moral stand on proper economic behavior. At least moving it in the right direction. Listen up big O.