Trump and framing
George Lakoff on Trump last July:
Donald J. Trump has managed to become the Republican nominee for president, Why? How? There are various theories: People are angry and he speaks to their anger. People don’t think much of Congress and want a non-politician. Both may be true. But why? What are the details? And Why Trump?
He gives an extended answer that he says is based on his research…but his sample of the theories above is too short: he leaves out the simple fact of Trump’s celebrity, which is surely much too important to leave out. An unknown guy from East Jesus, Oklahoma who did exactly what Trump did would not, I think, have had the success Trump had.
Lakoff explains Trump’s success with his story about the nation as a family.
In the 1900’s, as part of my research in the cognitive and brain sciences, I undertook to answer a question in my field: How do the various policy positions of conservatives and progressives hang together? Take conservatism: What does being against abortion have to do with being for owning guns? What does owning guns have to do with denying the reality of global warming? How does being anti-government fit with wanting a stronger military? How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty? Progressives have the opposite views. How do their views hang together?
The answer came from a realization that we tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms: We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security. The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).
Meh. I’m sure that’s true to some extent, but I’m not the least bit convinced it’s the Key to All Mythologies, and I dislike the way Lakoff always presents it as if it is. His “realization” is his interpretation, and I don’t think it explains as much as he seems to think it does.
And then Trump…What the hell kind of father figure is he?!! He brags about never playing any active part at all in rearing his own children. He cheated on all his wives. He abuses women and brags about it. (To be fair, Lakoff wrote the above long before the Access Hollywood tape appeared.) He’s rude and pugnacious and unpleasant and hostile to women – he’s hardly a Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks type. The Strict Father is not supposed to be a greedy violent rapey asshole. So, no, I don’t find Trump convincing in the part.
Lakoff is interesting but not, to me, very convincing…which is amusing in a way, since he “frames” himself as an expert on how to be convincing.
H/t Dave Ricks
So, kinda like a Trump layoff?
(spinoff, but that doesn’t scan as well) ;-)
To me, Lakoff’s explanations tend to look more like a simple answer to a complex question. If there is an answer, it will be a complex of answers. And it probably won’t be rational, because irrationality is the key to much of human thought. Too many people are still stuck in that idea that humans are naturally rational, and that we will naturally do what appears rational to us. I don’t think that’s true, but it is conventional wisdom, and who am I to argue with that?
Here’s my armchair theorizing about the rise of Trump:
1. Republicans became the party that refuses to compromise. Explaining why is probably a whole separate argument itself, but here are a few contributors. (a) The tyranny of 40% — hard-core conservatives don’t have an actual majority among the population as a whole, but they can control the Republican Party, and they make up enough of the public that they don’t think they need non-conservative allies. In part they’re right: they vote in higher numbers (especially in midterms), and aren’t “wasting” their votes by being concentrated in urban areas. (Progressives, by contrast, have generally learned to accept that they need to do business with squishy left-center moderates if they want to get something done.); (b) They’ve promoted an ideology that strong leaders don’t ever ever compromise, they just stand firm and wait for their opponents to capitulate. Some of them really believed that Obama would give up his signature piece of legislation (Obamacare) if faced with a government shutdown, while others just promoted that idea for personal gain (hi, Ted Cruz!), but it’s stuck; (c) their increasingly dramatic rhetoric makes it hard to compromise: it’s one thing to cut a deal with a president who is just another American who happens to be more liberal than you care for, but cutting a deal with a president who is a socialist Muslim atheist communist tyrant bent on destroying the country is practically treason. So everything in the Republican race became a competition to see who could outflank the others — “you say you want to close the borders? Well, I want to build a wall! And make Mexico pay for it! Beat that!”
2. Republicans became the party where facts don’t matter. Global warming is a liberal hoax! Tax cuts totally do reduce the deficit! Obamacare is failing! Ignore the crime statistics, you know in your gut that the country is more dangerous. Ignore the unemployment statistics, they’re rigged. The media are all liberals, experts are lying, data is faked. How can, say, Jeb Bush show that Trump’s tax plan doesn’t add up, when Jeb Bush’s plan doesn’t, either? Who cares what the factcheckers at the NY Times and WaPo say about Trump, given that we know they’re lying liberal media stooges?
3. Since facts don’t matter, it’s about appealing to the emotions of Republicans. And Trump won that game, “bigly,” because he recognized that restraint and dignity and looking “presidential” are secondary, if not counterproductive, to showing that you share their anger. Sure, all 17 candidates are anti-immigrant, but *I* called them rapists and murderers! They all say Hillary’s a crook, but *I’m* the one threatening to lock her up! They whine about the liberal media, but *I’m* going to sue the fuckers!
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The latest “This American Life” is really good/sickening. It addresses this “post-facts politics” infecting (especially) the Republican Party.
Obama was head of the law review, but he never wrote a single article! (He did.) Illegal immigrants are flooding the country! (They’re not, and numbers are down.) Etc. etc.