Framing Framing

I am very pleased to see Democrats slowly coming alive to the significance of rhetoric in campaigning, an awareness that seems to be attributable very largely to the efforts of George Lakoff (or perhaps his recent high profile is rather a symptom of this wider shift). But I think it is crucial that all the useful talk of "effective framing" not become yet another occasion for liberals to endlessly assume personal responsibility (and so indulge in a fantasy of personal control) for structural conditions that are not in fact susceptible to remedy this way.

It doesn't matter how compelling your frame when the owners won't let you put your art up on the wall. Conservative media are a hurdle that cannot be overcome by even the most perfect framing of liberal values, goals, and policies.

Conservatives largely drive the news cycle. Even if many reporters and columnists are at least notionally liberal (as is usually the case with educated people), the owners of most media are conspicuously not. And the short segments and infotainment-aesthetic of commercial broadcasting create structural impediments to the discussion of policy as opposed to the endless circulation of gossip and conjuration of dramatic "confrontations" between personalities -- a condition that favors the conservative personalities (typically yes-men figureheads for moneyed elites) over liberal policy-makers (who typically govern well but campaign badly).

What must happen, along with the new experimentalism and heightened awareness of the importance of effective rhetoric, is the creation of real alternative but mainstream media through which liberal framing can express itself in the first place. This means that Air America Radio needs to keep acquiring affiliates (in so-called swing states, in large markets like LA and Chicago, and especially in Washington, DC), the emerging liberal flogosphere and digital grassroots organizing archipelago need to continue networking together, the talk of a liberal television network (possibly involving Al Gore?) needs to bear fruit...

Also, it is important to remember that the conservative think-tanks progressives bemoan these days came into existence precisely because conservative intellectuals couldn't cut it in the academy, and that much of the fundamentalist Mega-Church grassroots organizing and social service provision happening now on the right is a pale contemporary reflection of the Union Halls, Labor programs and organizing that once invigorated the American left. These movements and institutions and resources are tattered and torn but they are a world awaiting re-invigoration and re-invention.

Those who imagine the left confronts thirty years of building a culture to confront the contemporary conservative leviathan mistake the extent to which so many of the pieces from which a fighting left can be assembled are lying around in wait right now. They also fail to grasp the extent to which conservative effectiveness has derived from the special discipline and urgency of a desperate minority fighting to retain their hold on power and wealth they can no longer justify except to themselves and to defend values that strain against the broad currents of global culture.