{"id":1599,"date":"2005-06-07T04:27:50","date_gmt":"2005-06-07T11:27:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/06\/09\/various-readings-about-lakoff-and-framing\/"},"modified":"2005-06-07T04:27:50","modified_gmt":"2005-06-07T11:27:50","slug":"various-readings-about-lakoff-and-framing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1599","title":{"rendered":"Various readings about Lakoff and Framing"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Lakoff’s idea of “framing”<\/a> is very much “in” among liberals nowadays. Frances Moore Lapp\u00c3\u00a9<\/a> sums it up well:<\/p>\n

“Frames,”? according to Lakoff, are the key to understanding how political ideas are received. Human beings don’t absorb information as raw material; we sift input through frames of meaning carried in the language we use.<\/p>\n

Lakoff’s central idea is that conservatives see the world through a “strict father”? frame emphasizing discipline, self-reliance, forceful defense, while progressives see the world through a “nurturant parent”? frame…supportive, nourishing, emphasizing mutual responsibility. Lakoff claims that thirty-five to 40 percent of Americans fall into each camp, although most are some sort of mix.<\/p>\n

The Right, Lakoff points out, is extremely good at selling their policies in clear, easy to understand “strict father”? frames. Progressives, on the other hand, too often seem to offer laundry lists of issues lacking any overarching moral framework.<\/p>\n

So, it’s easy to see why progressives are rallying around Lakoff’s call to arms. Since polls show majorities actually agree with the progressive agenda on many key issues, including corporate power, the environment and abortion, focusing on “framing”? issues in ways that Americans can understand them seems like the answer they’ve been praying for. Certainly, much of Lakoff’s advice about communicating progressive ideas is powerfully insightful and right on target<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve been resistant to Lakoff’s frames, partly because they seem too crude to really say much about real-world politics. Doug Muder’s reformulation<\/a> of Lakoff’s two categories into the Inherited Obligation family and the Negotiated Commitment family seems, to me, much more likely to reflect how people are really feeling:.<\/p>\n

The right distinction isn’t between the conservative nuclear family and the liberal nuclear family, but between two completely different ways of experiencing family. Those two modes of experience may express themselves in families that are not nuclear at all.<\/p>\n

The key distinction in Ault’s account is not strictness vs. nurturance, but the Given vs. the Chosen. What, in other words, is the source of your responsibilities to other people? Are you born with obligations? Or do you choose to make commitments? As with strictness and nurturance, every actual person experiences some combination of obligation and commitment. But emphasizing one or the other makes a striking difference. […]<\/p>\n

Several liberal\/conservative issues become much clearer in this analysis than they are in Lakoff.<\/p>\n

Abortion. In the Inherited Obligation model, having children is an obligation, not a choice. Of course a pregnant woman may find it inconvenient to have a child at this point in her life, but that’s no reason to let her opt out – obligations are almost always inconvenient. In the long run, however, children are a good deal; their obligation to you pays off when you are old. In demanding that a young woman carry a fetus to term, then, society is looking out for long-term interests she may not yet have the perspective to see.<\/p>\n

Conversely, in the Negotiated Commitment model nurturance is a gift, not an investment. A child is more like a work of art and less like a retirement plan. Having a child out of obligation, without a sense of commitment, is seen as a recipe for disaster. Pregnancies that result from rape, ignorance, or a birth-control failure are set up for such a disaster. If society is going to hold a prospective mother responsible for the welfare of her child – and it should – she must be given a chance to decide whether this child is her project or not.<\/p>\n

Same-sex marriage. The husband\/father and wife\/mother roles in the Inherited Obligation model are timeless, unchangeable, and necessary. Someone has to be the husband\/father and someone has to be the wife\/mother. Same-sex couples just can’t cover both roles, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.<\/p>\n

But no comparable difficulty exists in the Negotiated Commitment model. A child has needs, and the parents have to negotiate a plan to meet those needs. Whether the parents are a mixed-sex couple or a same-sex couple – or even a single parent with a lot of committed friends – the problem is the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mulder is also very interesting discussing why it is “Inherited Obligation” families often see the “Negotiated Commitment” model as a threat to their way of life, rather than just a harmless live-and-let-live alternative.<\/p>\n

Our belief in negotiated commitment – that people are not obligated to relationships they did not choose – is like one of those devastating European germs that white settlers spread throughout the world three centuries ago. We are immune; our families are based on negotiated commitments and (though they are far from perfect) work quite well in that environment – as long as we can maintain the social safety net.<\/p>\n

But Inherited Obligation families are not doing nearly so well. Blue states consistently lead red states in statistical measures of familial success – low divorce rate, low drop-out rate, low violent crime, low teen pregnancy. Divorce rates in particular seem to vary inversely to liberalism: conservative Baptist marriages fail far more often than those from more liberal Christian denominations.<\/p>\n

We have trouble grasping how tolerance can be threatening. Ault explains:<\/p>\n

Liberally minded people often do not realize … that rather than respecting fundamentalists views, they are denying them by insisting that religious beliefs or ethical standards be seen as personal, private matters we must all tolerate in one another – that moral standards are relative, not absolute. … Shawmut River’s commitment to absolutes was in keeping with the binding character they saw in the family obligations through which their world was organized. To see moral standards as personal and relative, on the other hand, widened the scope of individual autonomy and freedom in ways that denied and threatened to undermine lives that depended upon seeing family obligations as nondiscretionary – not as something individuals can choose or not choose, but as absolutes they have to accept.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats, drawing on Lakoff (sort of), are saying that we have to “reframe” our advocacy of reproductive rights; we have to talk about “freedom” rather than “choice,” and so on. I’m pretty much a “whatever works” person; there are dozens of correct arguments in favor of keeping abortion safe and legal, and we should be willing to try all of them out and see which ones work.<\/p>\n

But talking about how to “frame” arguments in favor of legal abortion and other feminist issues seem a bit besides the point. As Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women<\/a> sharply observes, “Dems spend far more time trying to find new and clever ways to talk about abortion rights than they actually spend talking about a woman’s right to choose motherhood or not. ” She links to this terrific article by Martha Burk:<\/p>\n

Lakoff is probably right that Bush’s appeal to women and men alike was more emotional than rational. But the erosion of women’s support for Democrats was also a result of the Kerry campaign strategy. The Kerry campaign shied away from talking to women at all, choosing instead to go for the white male warrior vote. Women’s advocates were alarmed about this from the beginning, when the Democrats refused to fund a strategy to get women to the polls, while the Bush team had a person in every precinct who was responsible for turning out the female “W”? vote.<\/p>\n

Even female Republican pollsters like Kellyanne Conway admit that women lean Democratic “if left to their own devices.”? That’s because women depend more on the social safety net (the compassionate “parent government”? in Lakoff-speak), and the Democrats have traditionally stood for better social services like expanding health care and child care, and ensuring retirement through Social Security (women’s main source of retirement income ). But the Democrats failed to exploit this natural advantage, instead trying to out-tough-guy Bush on the war and homeland security. According to the Votes for Women 2004 project, Republican women’s events were about how much the campaign valued women, while Democratic women’s events were about extracting money from female donors to use on general campaign themes. Significantly, among women who stayed away from the polls, homeland security ranked third behind the top concerns of jobs and economic security and health care security.<\/p>\n

Leaving women out of the debate was not new for the Democrats. They have shown us in the last two elections that they don’t want to be too vocal about women. Every time George Bush said to Al Gore, “I don’t trust the government, I trust the people,”? Gore had the perfect opportunity to counter with “except for women in making their own decisions about their own bodies.”? He never once took that opportunity. In 2004, the Dems avoided “women’s issues”? at every turn, even taking the Equal Rights Amendment out of the platform for the first time in 40 years. When their own internal polling showed the pay gap as one of the top concerns for women, the candidate didn’t want to talk about it publicly. As for the abortion issue, only those far inside the Beltway could decode Kerry’s rambling answer in the final debate to conclude he was…sorry, Howard…pro-choice. Even so, the DNC is now blaming the loss on “being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion,”? according to Dean.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Curtsies to Marriage Debate<\/a> and Lucinda Marshall<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Lakoff’s idea of “framing” is very much “in” among liberals nowadays. Frances Moore Lapp\u00c3\u00a9 sums it up well: “Frames,”? according to Lakoff, are the key to understanding how political ideas are received. Human beings don’t absorb information as raw … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}