Fear of framing

Posted by Deanna Zandt at 12:00 PM on February 3, 2006.

It's the end of Week Two here in the Echo Chamber, and it seems like an appropriate moment to address some fundamentals of progressive framing: what it is and isn't, as well as investigating why some progressives are resistant to the concept of framing in general.

Reframing pokes at a number of sore spots for people on the Left. Some of those spots include:

1. Our insistence that the Facts Alone Will Set Us Free.

2. Our resistance to ideas that feel like marketing and "selling."

3. The challenge that we might be fundamentally mistaken about how things operate.

4. The idea that framing is some kind of "magic bullet" to fix our problems. (Though no one is suggesting that it is.)

As Peter Teague noted in an article on framing earlier late last week, the word "framing" has come to mean the same thing as messaging or spin. This kicks the purpose of the overall progressive reframing project off-kilter in many ways. Says Teague:

Despite attempts to fight the tide, framing has come to mean finding better words and images to communicate with various audiences (the president broke the law by authorizing spying). The problem (and I think it's serious), is that we're proposing "frames" that are actually messages within frames, that evoke frames of which we remain oblivious. In the name of fixing a problem (we don't have a clue what the frames are in which we're operating) we're actually perpetuating it.

I think getting this right matters, because what framing really points us to is a deep rethink that forces us to challenge our assumptions and identities and that will require a reorganization of many of our efforts. It is not sloganeering, messaging or spinning, all of which leave our assumptions, identities and institutions comfortably in place.

It is this last statement about the larger challenges that many find the hardest pill to swallow. Teague continues on to discuss the impact on our organizations and leaders being too heavily invested in how things are at the moment to seriously challenge any of these notions, and thus, the hard work is up to us.

But we are all invested heavily in how things are, and it's going to take a lot of hard-pill-swallowing for all of us to challenge our identities and assumptions as progressives. Take Sore Spot #1, for example -- our stubborn addiction to preaching from the Fact Pulpit. As AlterNet's executive editor, Don Hazen, says in the introduction to George Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant":

Progressives have been under the illusion that if only people understood the facts, we'd be fine. Wrong. The facts alone will not set us free. People make decisions about politics and candidates based on their value systems, and the language and frames that invoke those values.

Thus, we have to dig deeper and examine closely just what those values are, and how we tap into them. Study after study shows that the majority of Americans share values considered progressive when asked. (Jim Hightower talked about some of them in a recent article.) For many, trying to understand the psyche of Americans and to reach out to that hits sore spot #2 -- that we are somehow spinning and selling messages people would otherwise be resistant to.

This is pretty self-defeating, in my book: assuming from the start that people don't want to hear what we have to say. My own general assumption is that people desperately want to hear a progressive vision based on their values, but we haven't really given them that, or communicated it in a way that they can see or feel part of the big picture. In a recent interview about progressive book publishing, Colin Robinson talked about progressives' general distaste for marketing, which, in many ways, is related to the resistance to framing:

The Left has always had a very suspicious attitude towards marketing. The idea with a lot of people on the Left is that if you have to sell something to someone, that probably means that they don't want it, and there's something sort of unethical about it. The idea is that you should plant your standards and wait for people to rally around it. Well, that's just not good enough.

Not only is it not good enough, but it's a fairly ego-centric approach to doing the work of social justice. As I said in an earlier post about abortion framing, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to put our message out, and not necessarily how people will be most receptive to what we have to say. What the reframing question is asking us to do is step down from our soapboxes, take a deep breath and get back to the roots. Are we who we really say we are?

This brings us to sore spots #3 and #4: we might be wrong (gasp), and there's no magic potion to solve our problems. Many have railed against the notion of framing based on the assumption that somewhere along the way, linguists are staging a secret coup to take over the debate of fixing the progressive movement.

I'm not aware of any such such coup (though those linguists are a sneaky lot, watch them), nor anyone suggesting that playing with language is the only answer to our woes. Far from it: reframing, as Teague suggests, goes beyond the messages and language. Reframing is the difficult, and often scary, prospect of admitting what doesn't work and rediscovering our fundamental core. We've pointed fingers at those who give in to their fears, but maybe it's time for us to stop being afraid as well.

Deanna Zandt is a contributing editor at AlterNet.