We’re coming off of, or at least we’ve had a period of (because who knows about the future) thirty plus years of conservative dominance of Washington. By some measures you could say forty years. But at least thirty, notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s eight years in office. That conditions a generation of people with mindsets based around Republicans being the party of power, the party whose ideas get vindicated at the polls. Most of all Washington is a city that coddles up to and worships power. But a generation of one party holding the reins selects for certain kinds of journalists in key positions of power, the policy experts at the think tanks who get the journalists calls, the lobbyists who move the most money and so forth. You build up a set of assumptions about what kinds of people and ideas are respectable and which aren’t. Which are old-fashioned, which are ‘cutting edge’ and so forth. Who defines conventional wisdom?Unfortunately, there has been a real assymetry in how the two major parties have approached framing the issues. The Republicans aggressively frame issues in a very conservative way, and in too many instances a hardcore rightwing way. Their segregationist voter-suppression program is a key example of the latter.
In all of these respects, DC remains overwhelmingly wired for the GOP. [my emphasis]
The Democrats, on the other hand, have largely accepted the conservative framing while trying to present a friedlier face than GOP radicals. This is something that linguist George Lakoff has emphasized for years. Here is a piece he co-authored with Gil Duran, Trump has turned words into weapons. And he's winning the linguistic war Guardian 06/13/2018:
Trump knows the press has a strong instinct to repeat his most outrageous claims, and this allows him put the press to work as a marketing agency for his ideas. His lies reach millions of people through constant repetition in the press and social media. This poses an existential threat to democracy.I have my reservations about the part of Lakoff's argument that stresses the idea that disputing false claims serves to reinforce the false claim. There's an important point there. But facts do matter! Nixon was a crook. For journalists, it's part of their job to verify or debunk claims, including ones that are current political narratives from partisans. Scientists have a similar obligation in their fields, although they have an advantage in that their specialized journals and forums don't have the same kind of general audiences as news services.
Language works by activating brain structures called “frame-circuits” used to understand experience. They get stronger when we hear the activating language. Enough repetition can make them permanent, changing how we view the world.
Even negating a frame-circuit activates and strengthens it, as when Nixon said “I am not a crook” and people thought of him as a crook.
Scientists, marketers, advertisers and salespeople understand these principles. So do Russian and Islamic State hackers. But most reporters and editors clearly don’t. So the press is at a disadvantage when dealing with a super salesman with an instinctive ability to manipulate thought by 1) framing first 2) repeating often, and 3) leading others to repeat his words by getting people to attack him within his own frame.
Politicians face a different kind of challenge debunking false claims, not least because their messaging inevitably requires a great deal of generalization and simplification to fit into 30-second TV ads or to compete for a short space for a quote in newspapers or news reports. But it is possible. Bernie Sanders, in fact, did a good job of it just this week in his "town hall" appearance on FOX News. (Holly Otterbein, Sanders takes on Fox - and emerges triumphant Politico 04/15/2019)
But the Democrats as a group really do have a serious framing problem. It's not all about slogans and spin. But framing really does matter a lot. Historian Rick Perlstein in an interview with Isaac Chotiner, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future New Yorker 01/10/2019 talks about the Democrats' often weird habit of ducking-and-covering in the fact of Republican attacks. Some of it is no doubt related to the desire of Democrats to please big donors who aren't especially enthusiastic about the kind of programs the Democratic base like.
The recent public bickering between the Sanders camp and the Clintonian establishment-Democratic thinktank Center for American Progress headed by Neera Tanden has provided some public reminders of the kinds of contributions that can be at stake (Elizabeth Williamson and Kenneth Vogel, The Rematch: Bernie Sanders vs. a Clinton Loyalist New York Times 04/15/2019):
Money to the Center for American Progress from the personal foundation of the Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg surged to $665,000 in 2018 from $15,000 in 2017, while Facebook fended off scrutiny for mishandling users’ personal data, fueling violence and providing a platform for Russian election interference.Contributions can be structured in such a way to maintain general independence for a thinktank. But thinktanks are also often structured as advocacy institutions in some way, not as independent academic institutions.
Last year, the center got $1 million from the family foundation of Jonathan Lavine, a managing partner at Bain Capital, and at least $1 million from the tech industry’s Silicon Valley Community Foundation. It also received $225,000 from the private foundation of a Walmart heir, Sam Walton.
But Perstein is also correct that there looks to be some kind of strange psychological factors at work in the Democrats' ingrained habit of accepting Republican framing. The party, he says, "almost forty years later, is still traumatized by the success of Ronald Reagan. It’s a profoundly generational phenomenon, and, clearly, it’s scary."
He gives this example of how the Democratic "trauma" and duck-and-cover instinct played out during the Cheney-Bush Administration:
O.K., but you didn’t really answer my question earlier about whether the Democratic Party is unhealthy. This party just won a huge national victory, I think it’s won six of the past seven popular votes for the Presidency, et cetera.Robert Cruickshank gives a brief sketch of what Perlstein calls the Democratic trauma in a Twitter thread.
Right, so what do you do with that political capital? That’s the trauma - they don’t even see political capital. They still see the Democrats in a situation of political deficit.
So liberalism and the Democratic Party have always been O.K., but, because they’re so traumatized, and because of the rise of the right, they haven’t been willing to rhetorically, and in terms of actual policies, push forward enough and get enough done?
Well, look at the Democrats at a time like 2004. George Bush has started this disastrous war, he’s beginning to approach going underwater in his popularity, and yet he wins reëlection. His campaign strategy was to try to get voters saying, “Well, I don’t really agree with what he is saying, but he really seems to believe in what he is saying.” And he ran against a candidate, John Kerry, God bless him, who literally formed his political identity as this brave, truth-telling veteran who talked about the immorality of the Vietnam War. And Kerry ran an entire Presidential campaign in which he did not say one word about the thing that had defined him. And then ran a party convention in which no one was allowed to criticize George Bush by name. So of course they voted for the authentic candidate. [my emphasis in italics]
Dem establishment still misreads 1972 & 1984 elections in order to silence the party's left. It is hard to see how any Democrat, regardless of ideology, could have defeated two popular presidents riding strong economic booms (which were crafted to ensure their re-election).— Robert Cruickshank (@cruickshank) April 16, 2019
1980 looks like a landslide on the electoral map but many states were close, Reagan only got 50.5% of pop vote, and voters broke for Reagan only in final two weeks. It was a close election. So was 2000. So was 2016.— Robert Cruickshank (@cruickshank) April 16, 2019
Perstein illustrates the current duck-and-cover Democratic reaction, one that recalls the famous Robert Frost quote, "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
The Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to take yes for an answer. They can’t even accept the idea that they are a majority party. There’s this great line, “He who seems most kingly is the king.” Unless you act like a leader, people aren’t going to treat you like a leader.
Take [Democratic Congresswoman Rashida] Tlaib using a swear word. Truman got in trouble for saying “If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell.” And that was a brassy sort of rhetoric people had come to expect from Democrats. Not this pearl-clutching response that, every time someone uses strong language, they have to apologize for it. [my emphasis]
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