Framing: It's About Values and Ideas
Katha Pollitt is a leading thinker and I’ve long been a fan of hers. In her piece last week in The Nation, where she discusses framing (http://thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050711&s=pollitt), there are three basic points on which we agree fully:
- Using new slogans for old ideas is misleading and pointless.
- The scope of women’s issues needs to be broadened.
- We need to continue support for safe, legal medical procedures to end dangerous or unwanted pregnancies.
Where do we disagree?
Framing is about moral values and systems of ideas primarily, and secondarily about the language used to express those values and ideas. Reframing is reconceptualizing – using your mind in a different way. But Pollitt asserts incorrectly that reframing is nothing but “repositioning their policies linguistically to give them mass moral appeal.”
Reconceptualizing policy is very different from the superficial messaging work that Pollitt correctly criticizes. Reconceptualizing policy means taking a policy goal currently understood in terms of one set of ideas and re-establishing it in the context of another, completely different set of ideas, with very different implications for this and other policies.
For example, the conservatives successfully reconceptualized taxes. Taxes were understood up to the late 70’s as what you pay to live in a civilized society and get services that most individuals cannot afford. Conservatives reconceptualized taxes as useless burdens, afflictions placed on us by an inefficient, immoral, and bloated government – afflictions requiring “relief.” So-called “tax relief” is a short, memorable phrase that evokes the new set of ideas about taxes. But don’t confuse the slogan with the underlying ideas.
In contrast, Frank Luntz’s attempt to replace “private accounts” with “personal accounts” in the social security debate failed because there was no new system of ideas being evoked. The moral here is that what matters are the deep ideas, not just the words.
Pollitt mistakes the rejection of the “choice” vocabulary with a surrender to the right wing and an abandonment of the idea. Nothing could be further from my intent. But the language and the ideas associated with the word “choice” are not working and need to go.
This was foreseen a decade ago by a linguist, Deborah Tannen, who observed that “choice” comes from a consumer vocabulary and carries a consumer frame with it, evoking flightiness and inconsequentiality—like choosing shoes or a shampoo. “Life” comes from a moral vocabulary, and carries a weighty morality with it. The concept of choice, she predicted, would lose out to life in the long run, and history has shown she was right.
Moreover, “choice” focuses the issue narrowly and literally on abortion per se. The conservative position evokes a more powerful symbolic issue—symbolic of the strict father worldview, the heart of conservative thought. In a strict father family, the father is in charge. If his wife or daughter wants an abortion on her own, that is an ultimate insult to his family authority. For the right, outlawing abortion isn’t just, or even mostly about saving the unborn. It’s about upholding strict father morality, and with it, the entire conservative worldview. To accept abortion as the main battleground is accepting their framing of the issue: out-of-control sexuality, lack of discipline, and a challenge to the moral authority of the strict father.
Progressives need symbolic issues of their own, issues that evoke their core moral values: care and responsibility, which imply security, fairness, freedom, and so on (See chapter 8 of Don’t Think of an Elephant!) With a focus on these issues we can take back “life” as a central progressive value, rather than cede it to conservatives.
One such symbolic issue, which could split the right, is infant mortality: eliminating it requires social programs that the right hates: pre- and post-natal care, health care for poor children, anti-poverty programs, and so on. Another is personal freedom in all private family matters, building on the Schiavo case.
There are other potent symbolic issues as well:
- Providing medical facilities (not just emergency contraception) for the 25,000 rape victims who get pregnant every year. Can you be against that?
- Eliminating unwanted pregnancies through sex education and family planning facilities. Nobody’s for unwanted pregnancies.
- Fighting spousal and child abuse, where right-wing Christians tend to be among the worst abusers.
- Getting mercury out of breast milk and women’s bodies. 1 of 6 women in their child-bearing years have such high levels of mercury that doctors would recommend postponing childbirth if they were tested for mercury. This could be part of a progressive pro-life agenda.
- Supporting a rebirth of the ERA.
- Adopting Joan Blades’ motherhood manifesto, that government policies should start with the priorities of mothers. Let the right-wing argue against the priorities of mothers.
Instead of being a one-issue movement, make it broad and take it into the health, environmental, and anti-poverty realms. Instead of being on defense, go on offense. Instead being portrayed as immoral, take a set of morally irreproachable views that can symbolically evoke the whole range of women’s issues – and more! And take a long-range view.
The heart of reframing is reconceptualizing, strengthening and broadening a position from a moral perspective. Reframing requires changing how you think.
