The News: Window Dressing

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

I despair about the main body of Democratic officials in Washington, who just don’t seem able to kick their addiction to consultants and campaign managers. In the midst of an enormous crisis engulfing the nation and consuming all of the emotional and intellectual energies of their core voters, many Senators and Representatives can only manage to stay on message about affordability, as they’ve been told to by the infrastructure of professionals and pundits who encrust the party like so many barnacles. So if you look at their social media accounts you see a lot of posts like “What is happening in Minnesota is very worrying, and especially distracting from making America affordable again!” and “I’m concerned about ICE, because it’s not as if they can detain high prices!”

That these allegedly seasoned politicians have not been able to process that Trump’s electoral performance in 2016, 2020 and 2024 was strong in part because he disdains message discipline of any kind is very revealing. It’s an open question of whether the content of Trump’s addled, cruel, abusive and destructive communications is what appeals to many Trump supporters. I think even some of his political allies aren’t sure, not the least because that content is not necessarily politically successful when it’s reproduced by other Republicans. But unquestionably some of Trump’s affect is part of what works for him, not just for his supporters but in how it is a red flag for his many adversaries. I include myself: the only way I could not think with fury and disgust about what Trump said on any given day would be to not read the news or any social media of any kind. The only peace of mind possible now lies in being an informational hermit.

The Democrats were lost to their consultancies the moment that they became enamored by the idea of “framing” as described by the linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff’s scholarship on framing is perfectly valid as a general point, and in a deeper sense, thinking about framing has always been the tension between rhetoric and authenticity that made rhetoric a subject of philosophical concern all the way back to antiquity. If it turns out that you can construct persuasive communications that draw on falsehoods and are composed with malign intentions by communicators who have no real faith or belief in what they are saying, then isn’t facility with rhetoric always already a sign that someone is untrustworthy, insincere, manipulative? Which, unfortunately, opens up the opportunity for someone to seem truthful by scorning the usual norms of persuasive rhetoric, which is often just a master-class rhetorical strategy used by especially unscrupulous demagogues.

The temptation of framing in Lakoff’s sense to Democratic party leaders was more specific, but no less troubled. It let them think that all you needed was some market research to tell you what your audience’s favored frames were and then you could just press a few buttons and jump into the right frame. Voila! Political success is yours. A lot of adorations directed at Obama’s campaigns argued that this is what distinguished Obama as a candidate, that his people had extremely precise data-driven calibration of the message to the audience, that winning big was a result of frame selection and then communicative skill at composing enframed messaging on exactly the right wavelength, in a just-in-time fashion.

I hasten to add that the temptation of re-framing as the major goal of political action has not been limited to Democrats nor confined just to Lakoff’s approach. It’s a slightly uncharitable summary, but I think at least some of what Stuart Hall and his closest compatriots within the academic left were arguing about Thatcherism in the mid-1980s amounted to “framing theory” via Gramsci, that the left had to acknowledge the attractive rhetorical composition of Thatcherism and try to counter it with something equally attractive rhetorically, which had to be other than relying on tropes of old-style unionism and social democracy.

The problem then—and now—is that this approach is substantially wrong as a theory of political leadership or campaign efficacy. Metaphors aren’t magic keys that unlock the box of political action. The alignments that matter are social, emotional, philosophical. People need to feel recognized by candidates and parties and to have recognition of candidates and messages, to be able to emplace a candidate within a social and economic world that they feel a relation to. People need to feel agentive, mobilized, useful, in a political movement or party, to be given a job besides pulling the lever and writing a check. They need to see evidence of alignment in values that precedes and supercedes the content of any given message, that is persistent and consistent in what candidates do and in the coherency of what they do from action to action, message to message. The candidate needs to be able to speak with seeming spontaneity from that consistent underpinning of values and to apply those values legibly to novel situations as they arise. Any time a candidate needs to stall on hearing a question until they can check with the consultant is a hard fail in political terms.

However, frames do change in the top-level public culture that is maintained by the dominant media, by the punditry, in much social media. There is something we could loosely call hegemony in the classic sense. There are “Overton windows” that allow previously marginalized propositions and claims to be laundered into acceptability and become legitimate viewpoints debated soberly by the guardians of the conventional wisdom. And it really does matter in some way when frames change. It’s less about producing alignment and often more about producing alienation and orientation, when the frame gets moved to the point that you feel almost insane because of its lack of fit between you a reader or a voter and the rhetoric inside the frame. It’s just that it’s not something you can simply do by being a master of persusasive rhetoric nor by collecting fine-grained demographic data.

Frame-changing by intent or design is mostly a matter of grinding persistence across a broad communicative space over years of effort. It’s about “working the ref” via instrumentally manipulated discourses about inclusion, “viewpoint diversity”, fair-mindedness, and ‘rationality’. And it is in fact data-driven, but the data an aspirant frame-changer needs is not a linguistic sampling of preferred discourse associated with a particular social group or community. What the manipulator needs to know is 1) whose livelihood depends on producing content for the public culture sustained by legacy media and 2) whose livelihood depends on producing official communications that are designed to maintain inoffensiveness or invisibility against the backdrop of public culture.

Bombarding the first group with “work the ref” manipulation and “both sides-ism” is how you move the Overton windows. Once you’ve moved the Overton windows, the second group of communications professionals will catch up, because that’s what discursive camouflage is all about, matching to whatever seems like maximum consensus of the moment and disappearing from view as a result.

Most pundits, columnists, reporters, talking heads and experts-for-rent understand that the major threats to their livelihood come from being exposed as obviously wrong, from appearing to be so far from a space of discursive consensus that you are ‘extreme’ or even worse ‘weird’ and from being boring.

There’s some tension between managing these threats. You solve for the risk of being boring by being provocative, contrarian, even annoying. You solve for the risk of being too far from consensus by constant and seamless recalibration of your views while maintaining a clear brand of some kind of another. You solve for risk of being obviously wrong by relentless ahistoricity about your own work and a complete lack of reflection about it. You never discuss past views, you’ve never made a mistake, and you never show doubt about yourself.

---

Let me give a specific example. Think back to September 2016. Think about Facebook, think about Twitter, think about the mainstream American news media at the time. On September 9th, Hillary Clinton referred to Trump supporters and said that half of them were a “basket of deplorables”, that this half was “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”.

Think about the commentary in public culture over the two weeks that followed. A few commenters made the point that Clinton might well be empirically right in this characterization and that this was really the main thing that mattered, that there were no strategic implications to her statement in that the voters she was characterizing as such weren’t going to vote for Clinton in any event. This reading was swamped by a tidal wave of conventional wisdom running in the opposite direction, that a person wishing to be President had to speak as if they wanted to be President for everyone, that the phrasing of Clinton’s remarks encoded her as a judgmental elite and mobilized people who felt denigrated by association to deepen their opposition to her, that Clinton was just showing how little she actually knew about Trump’s probable voters and problematically claiming that ignorance as a mark of virtue. That it showed that Clinton was prone to gaffes, and that being prone to gaffes was a proven sign of inability to lead. On and on and on, and all the way into the first two years of Trump’s first term.

Right-wing pundits and consultants were quick to ‘work the ref’ and push the critique of the “deplorables” remark into being conventional wisdom while also working equally hard to separate out Trump’s rhetorical moves as being unlike Clinton’s, a bifurcation which has become the standard frame in the years since—that Democrats and “educated elites” must speak with forebearance, curiosity and care about and to the Trump base because that’s what Democrats and educated people believe in, but that Republicans have no obligation to the same.

Look back at the pundits who spent those weeks in 2016 and 2017 tut-tutting Clinton and announcing that this showed that she was and had been unready to assume the responsibilities of the President, that she was unsuited to bind up the wounds of a divided America. These assessments were delivered as if they referred back to an agreed-upon universal norm, a deeply-held value system that the pundit was not merely describing but in fact actively subscribed to.

Now trace forward from then to now and ask how many of those pundits have been consistent in that view. You will see in that tracing how a rhetorical frame gets moved, how the space where it used to be gets painted over, and how normalization happens through the inch-by-inch grind by people determined to authenticate their own extreme thinking. And you will see how rare it is for a pundit to either stick hard to the implied values of a past position or even to acknowledge ever having thought differently than they think now.

The punditry never really sees—or at least admits—how they’re being worked into a new framing, and about how that working reveals how many of them have no deep values or beliefs that anchor them to some basic propositions on right and wrong, good and bad, generative and destructive. When the frame changes, the tribunes of public culture always attribute that abstractly to what “Americans” or “the general public” think and do. If it’s acceptable for Trump and his appointees to every day describe more than half the country as communists, antifa, revolutionaries, agitators, very bad people, criminals, monsters, liars, and so on, most of the punditry holds that it’s because “Americans” aren’t reacting to or rejecting what he says. The responsibility and the agency for a shifted frame is always somewhere else and it’s always naturalized, just the way that it is.

But the the people who generate public culture are the ones who shifted the frame. They expected the heavens to crack the first time that Trump did something that “normally” would end a campaign—say, for example, mocking a disabled man—without being able to understand that they are the heavens. That if Trump got away with it, gets away with it, it’s because the people who still control public culture have let themselves be shifted into accepting he will get away with it. And very few of them will ever take note of how or why they moved from weeks of solemn pronouncements about the wrongness of calling a group of people deplorables to indifference to the wrongness of a daily torrent of vile abuse directed at the majority of the country.

The framing doesn’t change what many people think and feel in their more situated, experiential, everyday worlds. If “Americans” means more than half the country, then there is considerable reason to think that more than half the country is deeply disturbed by that abusive rhetoric, and not because that’s a frame they don’t like, but because they think it’s morally wrong in a much deeper sense. Yes, there is another part of the country that lives in a different emotional and epistemic world where the invective is what they want to hear, and again, not merely because it’s a familiar frame, but because it substantively gives voice to their deplorable vision of the rest of the country, their contempt for the America that has been and should still be.

What the first group, the majority of Americans, want from public culture is for it to stop fiddling with the frame, to stop curating an exhibition of vapid judiciousness and sycophancy, to stop acting as they either reflect what we all think and feel or as if they are responsible for making us think and feel properly. It’s the same thing we want from political candidates. Democrats, the authors and editors of public culture, the leaders of civic organizations, all need to drop their frame-setting and think differently. We want them to come down here with us. We want them to actually believe in something, to be honest about believing, and to risk being wrong or unfashionable or provocative in fidelity to those beliefs. To dig in somewhere real, somewhere human, somewhere in America.

Image credit: Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash