Sometimes we are weakest when things seem to be going well. I am not the first one here to express my nervousness about what we face until November. Being both an academic and a long tome political activist I have been dissapointed too many times. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is not good for anyone, especially the country. Everyone has an explanation for how we managed to do it in 2000 and again in 2004. My problem is that I have seen few explanations that make sense to me. Add to that the 2006 victory that went nowhere and I am really wanting answers that make sense for a change. In the spirit of being dedicated to winning the presidency and having a congress that allows the president to govern, I have been asking us to do a little self examination. The way I am doing this is by using the critique offered to us by George Lakoff in his newest book: The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st Century American politics with an 18th Century Brain. The comments and responses are not all encouraging. Self criticism is not a featured diary topic for some of us. That, I am very sure, is a mistake! Look below the break and I'll spell out the reasons why.
The things Lakoff warns us about have already been happening, but they will certainly intensify. Meanwhile, the press, in all its "wisdom" is just as oblivious to how it plays into the hands of the right wing issue framers as it was 4 and 8 yeras ago. I saw one "critique" of the McCain campaign calling it a pinata attack. Acussing it of flailing around tossing out attacks on Obama with the hopes they might hit something even though they seem to be blindfolded. Ummmmmmmmmmmm! Wrong! The person(s) who offered that analysis do not understand how framing works.
Just what is "framing" and why must we worry about it?
Here it is in a nutshell. Framing is related to a model of how our minds work. In the previous two diaries [see links below] on this topic I spoke about the problem with the 18th Century Enlightenment aooroach to politics. This bothered many as did calling the people who fit the description "neo-liberals". One was so bothered when accused of fitting the description Lakoff provides that he troll rated my comment in my own diary! I thank him for proving the point so blatently. Here is Lakoff's explanation for why so many of us (myself included) often fit the "neo-liberal" model even if we do it unintentionally. It has to do with how we view ourselves as we try to use our minds in the best ways we have been taught.
You think with your brain. You have no choice. Though we may sometimes wonder what part of their anatomy certain political leaders think with, the fact is that they too think with their brains. Thought- all thought- is brain activity.
So far so good? Then where is the problem? He points to the obvious fact that we can not analyze our thinking process at the neurological level. The result of this is a historical model of our thinking process strongly related to Cartesian dualism. The mind/body dualism, what Lakoff calls "the disembodied mind" is the mind we worship in connection with the Enlightenment.
There is a problem with the Enlightenment, though, and it lies not in its ideals, but in the eighteenth century view of reason. Reason was assumed to be:
Conscious - we know what we think;
Universal - the same for everyone;
Disembodied - free of the body. and independent of perception and action;
Logical - consistent with the properties of classical logic;
Unemotional - free of the passions;
Value-neutral - the same reason applies regardless of your values;
Interest-based - serving one's purposes and interests; and
Literal - able to fit an objective world precisely, with the logic of the mind able to fit the logic of the world
So what could possibly be wrong with this picture of our minds? Just this: If it were true we would not be where we are now after the last two major elections. Yes you think with your brain. But how? Is it the neat model above? Or is it something much more complex and something that makes the above model actually misleading if you try to use it? Lakoff explains the role of the cognitive unconscious that involves reflexive patterns of though rather than the reflective nature of conscious thought. Here's the punch line:
As a result, your brain makes decisions for you that you are not consciously aware of.
Disagree? You are free to. But do you understand that that disagreement was almost certainly reflexive not consciously reflective.
If you believe in the 18th century view of the mind, you will believe something like this [a description of the people who vote contrary to their "best interests" as you percieve them] , and you will be dead wrong!
Here's where he will offend many of you, but please hear us out this time. He speaks of those democrats who hold the Enlightenment view of mind and their failure to get their points across because of that reliance on that view. In contrast:
Republicans operate under no such constraints and have a better sense of how minds work. That's why they are more effective. Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have the votes to override a presidential veto or block a filabuster. They didn't use their mandate to sustantially change how the public - and the media - thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because their wa slittle understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives - a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But changing "minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you undestand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains - and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.
And that leads us to the framing of issues for that is where the changing of brains has to take place. WE are behind, they have done a lot of work.
Frames are among the cognitive structures we think with. For exampkle when you read a murder mystery, there is a typical frame with various kinds of characters: the murderer, victim or victims, possible accomplices, suspects, a motive, a murder weapon, a detective, clues. And there is a scenario in which the muderer murders the victim and is later caught by the detective.
Think about what just went on in your brain. The words "murder mystery" certainly bring about all those other things. It was not necessary to spell them out here other than to illustrate this point! Let's do a political frame: The "bad apple" frame. You all know this one.
To progressives, those in authority are accountable to the public. To conservatives, only underlings are accountable to those in authority. When things go wrong they find a bad apple....
There are two related uses of the bad apple frame:
- To protect the organization and its mode of opperation. The Bad Apple goes; the organization is redeemed and keeps operating as before.
- To find a target in the organization to blame so that everyone else in the organization escapes blame.
How very very many times have we seen this during the Bush administration?
So what is our job, given all this? Lakoff's message has two thrusts, first to alert us to the existence of a multitude of frames that were used successfully before and will be used sucessfully again, and second to get our own moral and empathic frames out there to use as we try to win over voters.
Notice I did not say anything about erasing the old frames that are based on the authoritarian model. That is because it is not possible to do that. Nor did I say anything about convincing those who respond to these frames that they are not being "reasonable". No, the correct approach is to do everything possible to move the process from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind where reason and decent values will reveal the con game. As long as they are part of an unconscious, reflexive system this will not be possible.
Then we must do the very hard work of repeating our message of an empathic government's duty to its people, namely protection and empowerment. That is where I left off last time so go to Is Barack Obama changing people's minds? and Are YOU using an 18th century mind to try to do 21st century politics? A little investment here will yield big dividends (catch the frame?). Let's win this one big!