Recently, a lot of people on the Left seems to have fallen in love with Lakoff and his theories about framing the issues. However, I am unhappy with some of what I take to be the premises (whether implicit or explicit) which undergird Lakoff's theories. Specifically, I wonder if Americans do in fact share a relevantly similar share of values, and whether we understand other Americans well enough to answer the first question.
Recently, I have seen an upsurge in the discussion among Progressives and Democrats about Lakoff and the framing of issues.
However, it seems to me that in order for framing to work as a means of moving people who currently disagree with our policies into future agreement with our policies, our values and their values must not only be sufficiently similar in terms of content, but also in terms of the priority we assign to each value in relation to the others, and also in terms of the domains to which we think the values apply. Clearly, Republican political operatives use language, in a wholly disingenuous manner, to mask the underlying motivations for and effects of their policies. Still, the majority of people who support those policies probably do in fact believe in the values espoused to justify them. Therefore, simply pointing out the Republican hypocrisy does little to bring those people into agreement with our policies. Thus the first question is: Are there enough people on the Right who have a relevantly similar set of values as ours such that framing becomes a worthwhile enterprise?
It is a trite statement in politics that "we are all Americans" and that we have "shared values." However, if you take certain words or phrases that ostensibly provide the common ground for the political discourse surrounding our "shared values" and ask what these abstractions mean in concrete functional terms, it might be that this common ground largely disappears. To put this in perspective, think about how all American Christians believe in Jesus Christ and his teachings, and yet how there is little consensus among Christians about how that should inform their political choices. Furthermore, think about how unlikely it would be for a Liberal Christian of a certain denomination (Mr. X) to prevail upon another Christian of another denomination (Ms. Y)that, for example, Ms. Y is wrong in her belief that Jesus or his teachings would support policy Z.
In addition, consider how the Right has been able to effectively use the same words and values articulated by the Left as support for their agenda. I remember that here in California, the Republicans sponsors of the proposition banning affirmative action argued for it using dirrect quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. This was not, I would argue, a successful reframing of the issue in that I take framing to be a genuinely honest effort to get people to come to better understand what they genuinely do believe and value. (Lakoff on the Rockridge Institute website says something to the effect that the Right wants people not to think, whereas reframing issues gets them to think). Rather, what we saw was a fundamentally dishonest effort to preserve the normative force of a well-understood sign, not only divorsed from what the sign originally signified, but in fact with the sign signifying exactly the opposite of that which gave it its original normative force. Granted, the Left can and must do a better job of countering the Right when such distortions are made. However, whereas framing seems to operate upon a person's values (which tend to be if not always explicitly thought about, at least intuitively well-known and strongly felt), what seems to be important here, is not the sign itself, but the interpretation one gives to it. More to the point, when competing interpretations are offered to a voter, it will not necessarily be values that will decide the correct interpretation, but could rather be the context given to the sign by those who put forth the interpretation. Context can mean a lot of things, but one problem we face on the Left is that context often means historical context, and that is both something deeply contested and (almost paradoxically) often poorly understood. It is not just that this makes this type of fight difficult for us, it might also be that most of us are wholly ill-equiped to wage such a war.
As has been noted on this site recently, many of us have serious problems relating to the religious Right, Southerners, or Red Staters. We--as Democrats or Progressives--often fail to understand certain groups in the terms they understand themselves? What if all of this emphasis on framing presupposes a common ground that is more rhetorical illusion than real? What if all we agree upon amounts to a certain set of signs, without agreeing about what those signs mean. This isn't just about the speeches of one man, or the Bible, this goes to the core of the values we supposedly share. Word are signs too, and although we obviously share a common vocabularly about values, I still feel like maybe, in effect, we are speaking different languages when we talk about them.
Lastly, I am concerned that the entire infatuation with framing issues seems to presuppose that the act of framing will either move people closer to agreeing with us or keep them where they are. But might it not serve to reinforce the idea that the Left is full of bleeding heart, elitists, know-it-alls? I think this is particularly likely insofar as those who attempt to reframe issues possess an incomplete or erronious understanding of how their audience understands themselves.
In any event, I know that these concerns probably are overstated. Still, I put them out here in the hopes that someone will find them thought-provoking or interesting.