I took my time and read through Paul Rosenberg’s piece today, entitled Two Frames For Looking At Healthcare Reform-And Beyond. The language is close to impenetrable and the entire piece could have been pared down to a few paragraphs. I’ll do that here so that you don’t have to suffer through trying to decipher Rosenberg’s meaning. Here’s what he’s trying to say.
When it comes to Obama’s health care plan, there are two ways of looking at it. On the one hand, the plan clearly doesn’t go as far as the socialized health systems utilized in other industrialized nations. On the other hand, the plan is pretty aggressive considering the political milieu that prevails in Washington DC, and it seems well planned to actually pass through that system and become law.
Depending on whether you emphasize the plan’s inadequacies in a purely objective sense, or you emphasize the practical difficulties of passing any health care plan, you will come to different conclusions about how good the health care plan and the strategy for passing it are.
When people have political discussions that don’t recognize the reality and validity of these different ways of viewing politics, then confusion can result. In addition, it is not clear whether Obama is stuck in the mode of dealing with what is possible and practical, or if he is actively engaged in expanding what it possible so that it better resembles what is objectively desirable. I am hopeful, but not yet convinced, that Obama is doing the latter.
There are other points that Rosenberg makes but the above is a concise distillation of his main argument. You’ll notice that my distillation doesn’t include the word ‘frames’ or talk about people using different frames to understand politics. That’s because the ‘framing’ aspects of Rosenberg’s piece are totally inappropriate and distract from what he is trying to communicate.
Rosenberg is expanding the meaning of a frame beyond its ability to have explanatory power. I’m not going to get into too much detail on Lakoffician framing here, so we’ll keep it basic by looking at Lafoff’s Introduction to Simple Framing. When Lakoff talks about a frame, he is talking about something fairly concrete, like an elephant, which, when invoked, “is realized in the brain by neural circuitry. Every time a neural circuit is activated, it is strengthened.”
This is an oversimplication, but it works for our purposes. People understand and process political information through neural circuitry that is built up over time. If you want people to build up negative feelings about taxes then you can use a term like ‘tax relief’ which implies that taxes are a burden from which people need relief. This type of analysis is useful when it is kept to its original purpose. But Rosenberg is talking about something much, much less concrete than an elephant or taxes. He’s talking about people’s broad political worldview and dispositions.
Some people are very idealistic and others are rigorously practical. Those are mainly personality traits but they also involve a degree of ideology, including actual conscious intellectual activity. For example, it’s possible to focus your intellectual energies on figuring out the best possible health care system or to use your intellectual energies to figure out the best possible health care plan that can pass through the 111th Congress of United States of America. The difference between these two activities is not one of framing. One is an academic exercise that you might assign to a class of political science students or health professionals and industry lobbyists. The other is a political and legislative exercise. All thinking can be studied by cognitive science and all information processing can be analyzed through a Lakoffian framework, but the difference between academics and legislating is not a suitable subject for Lakoffian analysis. Yes, if you really want to strain the meaning of ‘framing’, you can include the ‘frame’ of being an academic idealist and the ‘frame’ of being a legislator or member of the executive branch. But you’ll be abusing the science.
To be generous to Rosenberg, he is trying to say that different people interpret political information differently depending on whether they are dispositionally inclined to think about objectively good outcomes or politically good (possible) outcomes. That’s not framing, though, because it is information neutral. It doesn’t matter to the academic idealist how the message is crafted because it is their disposition to discount outcomes that fall short of the ideal. The ‘ideal’ isn’t a frame, but the end result of a (hopefully) intellectual exercise aimed at determining the best solution to a problem.
Of course, the reason Rosenberg is writing this piece in the first place is to contribute to the ongoing conversation that was started by Nate Silver in his piece: The Two Progressivisms. In other words, he is trying to find some common ground between the argument laid out by Silver and the rebuttal of David Sirota. And that’s fine. But criticism that Nate Silver, Al Giordano, and I have been leveling at OpenLeft’s analytical work is based on them operating in a strictly academic/idealist mode without due consideration for practical realities. It’s also, at least in my case, about the cringeworthy obsession with message (rhetoric) over organization (action) in the context of the progressive movement. Abusing Lakoff is almost a way of life over there.
