Reading Mike's diary, "Next Big Change Up: Health Care Reform" on Friday, it became quite clear to me that there were two different frames at play simultaneously. Within frame one--the big-picture of what Obama is proposing, compared to (a) what the rest of the world does and (b) what's most economically rational for the economy as a whole--this is definitely a rather tepid, centrist sort of approach that's only a first step toward really doing the job. But within the second frame, the framework of American electoral politics (including the institutions related to it) it is clearly pushing the boundaries-hard-and it's being designed with the clear intention to succeed, no matter what. As Mike himself stressed, the lessons of the Clinton's failure are clear, and Obama is moving quickly and boldly in order to not lose the momentum, while leaving details to Congress in order to reduce the number of bites the established special interests can take.
It strikes me that this two-frame view is an example of how we need to become more sophisticated in how we talk about politics in the current Democratic Trifecta era, particularly as we're still way behind the curve in changing the larger media and institutional environments I so lovingly refer to as "Versailles." As long as that hegemonic infrastructure remains firmly in place, there will be sharp differences between how things look seen through one frame vs. the other. These two frames are both objectively real. They are not just ideological constructs that different people buy into, though they certainly do depend in part on ideology for their existence-but only in part.
At this level, ideology can perhaps best be understood as a common framework shared by different actors that configures political space-including who the actors are, what their alliances are, what their current and prospective interests are, etc., etc., etc. Ideology in this sense is not something that's just in someone's head, it's an interactive reality, rooted both in realworld relationships between people and things (individually and collectively) and in how people interpret them. Versailles embodies the smaller frame-it's a set of institutions, inhabited by a group of people, who share a set of ideas and practices in common, all of which sharply limit the realm of the thinkable, so that it routinely includes-or at least deems reasonable- preposterous lies, while excluding all manner of inconvenient truths.
Early in the New Deal era, these two frames were much closer together than they are today. The actors and institutions that would have kept them farther apart had been politically discredited and decimated by almost 3 ½ years of Depression before FDR took office. What's more, there never was a conservative ideological structure of the sort we have now. (Indeed, that structure only came into being after the New Deal, precisely because it's a reactionary structure that needed the positive examples of the New Deal and the Civil Rights eras in order to understand more precisely just what it was opposed to.)
Because the two frames are significantly further apart today, this gives rise to a number of political challenges. One of the most fundamental is figuring out what we're talking about, even amongst ourselves. Not realizing that there are two different frames in play gives rise to things like the often-heard claim that progressives "all want the same thing." This seems self-evident to those who only see the inner frame, even as it seems absurd to those who only see the outer frame. The recent dispute between David and Nate Silver (which I weighed in on here ) is exemplary of this difference in perception. Although I don't think David is actually blind to the inner frame (he's written plenty that attests to his awareness of the challenge of shifting or breaking through that frame) , he clearly sees it as much less important for defining what constitutes progressive politics vs. politics as usual, and in this dispute (though not elsewhere) David acted as if the frame Nate was using did not exist.
It certainly doesn't exist in the way Nate assumes that it does. But it does have some reality, and the way that Mike talks about the Obama Administration's approach to passing health care reform helps to illustrate that reality. Is the Obama Administration seeking to work within the inner frame in a way that expands it, and thus takes into account the outer frame as well (even if not always very visibly)? Mike clearly believes (a) that it does and (b) that the logic described in his book will force Obama to think more and more in terms of the outer frame as well. In his "Has Obama Adjusted his Poker Game?". tremayne is implicitly making a similar argument:
During the designing of the stimulus bill Barack Obama's team bet against itself: they threw in a bunch of stuff, mostly huge tax cuts, in anticipation of Republican objection to their spending plan: "Look how bipartisan we are, we're giving you stuff before you even ask for it."
When every single Republican in the House voted against the bill the White House seemed to realize their mistake.... it seems they have learned a lesson. Even moderates are unhappy....
It is, indeed, a big bill. There will be a lot of squawking and the final bill will almost certainly be smaller. But I think a lesson has been learned: make them fight you for every little concession before you give anything away for free.
One elegantly simple way to describe how Obama's strategy has changed is to say that it fundamentally hasn't: he's using the exact same consensus-seeking (or more, accurately, consensus-building) strategy, but substituting the outer frame for inner one. Of course, shifting from one frame to the other really does change the strategy in all sorts of ways, as strategy is usually understood. So perhaps it's better to just acknowledge that, and rephrase a bit: Obama is using the exact same consensus-seeking meta-strategy. And if that really is the case, then there's a very good chance that the two frames will increasingly converge over time.
If this is the case, then, in the end, I will be a very happy man, despite my severe objections to Obama's currently mixed and muddled stance on civil liberties. That's because I've never objected in principle to his consensus-seeking desires, but rather to how he has sought to pursue them. Most notably, even before Obama appeared on the scene, I had pointed out that liberals and conservatives have much more in common than our political leadership class allows-with most of that coming from conservatives favoring liberal policies. From this, I have drawn the conclusion that Obama was mistaken to seek rapprochement with conservative leadership, and argued that he should be seeking it at the grassroots level instead. I have been open to the argument that Obama knows this, and sees the outreach to conservative leadership as a game he must play, but I have never heard this argument made in a specifically coherent and convincing manner. That doesn't mean it isn't true, it merely means that there's been nothing solid to debate.
We may now be moving beyond all that-at least in terms of what approach will dominate. It may well be the case that Obama will increasingly reach out directly to voters, and to Republican politicians outside Washington who are less uniform and ideologically rigid, because they are less subject to institutional constraints preventing them from being any sort of reasonable partners. If this is the case, then there is considerable room for Obama to press outward, expanding the the scope of the inner framework to a closer convergence with the outer one. The closer the two converge, the greater the chances for fundamental changes that really are adequate to the daunting size of the challenges that lie ahead.
P.S.
Here, I'm arguing in particular for a two-frame perspective. But the argument is actually more general. We tend, in general, to carry around simply models of the world in our heads, usually unaware of their existence, and how they shape the way we think about the world. One reason that social groups have coherence is because people in them tend to share some of the more basic (for them) models in common. One thing that contributes to fluidity, flexibility and adaptability is the availability of multiple, alternative models. The two-frame perspective is just one example of how that can look in action.
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