We have been following the story of Betsie Gallardo lately, she being the woman that, due to a medical decision, was being starved to death in a Florida prison.
She has inoperable cancer, her death is imminent, and her mother was working hard to make it possible for Betsie to die at home with some dignity.
As we reported just a couple days ago, half the battle was already won, as the Florida Department of Corrections had agreed to place her in a hospital so that she could again go back on nutritional support.
On January 5th, the Florida Parole Commission voted to allow her to end her life at home-and that means you spoke out, made a difference, and achieved a complete victory for the effort.
But even as we celebrate that victory, I think we should take a moment to realize that there is a bigger lesson here: the lesson that the fights over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT), benefits for 9/11 first responders (the Zadroga Bill), and Betsie Gallardo's imminent release are all actually pointing us to a political strategy that works, over and over, if we are willing to understand the wisdom that's been laid before us.
While most contributors here are using more appropriate terms, such as wealthy or rich or oligarchy, some folks here are falling into the right-wing messaging/framing trap of using the the phrase "top earners". "Top earners" is one of the most obnoxious, Orwellian labels that the conservatives and the MSM have ever created.
While I expect media companies owned by Rupert Murdock or GE to engage in this kind of right-wing framing, I would like Kossacks to please consider using more accurate and less conservative-narrative-reinforcing terms.
I avoid this phrase like the plague, and am uncomfortable even repeating it in this diary, but it seems that some Kossacks have fallen in this rhetorical trap. I'll explain over the jump...
(It's a good time to be thinking deeper - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
"the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly"
If anyone managed to come away from Part I: Humans: not just selfish with an overly sentimental view of human nature, this post will rob you of that delusion. Yes, we humans have a remarkably developed faculty for cooperation and group-oriented behavior, in comparison to most other species. That's an encouraging thing to know. And it may even become useful, if you start to identify the conditions that tend to set us up for cooperation. However, as Charles Darwin, David Sloan Wilson, and many others have suggested, the processes of group selection that helped us evolve to be cooperative within our groups probably also encouraged competition (to put it mildly) between groups.
Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson explain in their book, Unto Others:
...our goal ... is not to paint a rosy picture of universal benevolence. Group selection does provide a setting in which helping behavior directed at members of one's own group can evolve; however, it equally provides a context in which hurting individuals in other groups can be selectively advantageous. Group selection favors within-group niceness and between-group nastiness. Group selection theory does not abandon the idea of competition that forms the core of the theory of natural selection...
And here's Wilson again in The New Fable of the Bees: Multilevel Selection, Adaptive Societies, and the Concept of Self Interest:
[Multilevel selection theory] has the capacity to explain the behavior of individuals who demonically work to undermine their groups (within-group selection), individuals who angelically work on behalf of their groups (the bright side of among-group selection) and avenging angels who work on behalf of their groups to destroy other groups (the dark side of among-group selection). We might not like the dark sides of animal and human nature, but they exist and require a theory to explain them. ...multilevel selection theory has the potential to explain the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.
Why do you build me up, buttercup, just to let me down and mess me around? Seriously though, this just underscores that the purpose of this series is to use the lens of evolutionary theory not to idealize but to examine and better understand how humans and groups work, particularly in relation to collective action - and hopefully make practical use of that understanding.
I want to stress that although President Obama is the focus of this discussion, this is really about something much bigger: it's about how we understand history and politics and the meaning of being progressive. I'll have much more to say about that in other diaries this weekend.
George Lakoff offered one of the best perspectives imaginable for addressing the larger question this week, in his HuffPo essay, "Disaster Messaging". In it, he begins by giving his description of an all-too-familiar dynamic:
Democrats are constantly resorting to disaster messaging. Here's a description the typical situation.
The Republicans outmessage the Democrats. The Democrats, having no effective response, face disaster: They lose politically, either in electoral support or failure on crucial legislation.
The Democrats then take polls and do focus groups. The pollsters discover that extremist Republicans control the most common ("mainstream") way of thinking and talking about the given issue.
The pollsters recommend that Democrats move to the right: adopt conservative Republican language and a less extreme version of conservative policy, along with weakened versions of some Democratic ideas.
The Democrats believe that, if they follow this advice, they can gain enough independent and Republican support to pass legislation that, at least, will be some improvement on the extreme Republican position.
Otherwise, the pollsters warn, Democrats will lose popular support -- and elections -- to the Republicans, because "mainstream" thought and language resides with the Republicans.
Believing the pollsters, the Democrats change their policy and their messaging, and move to the right.
The Republicans demand even more and refuse to support the Democrats.
We have seen this on issues like health care, immigration, global warming, finance reform, and so on. We are seeing it again on the Death Gusher in the Gulf. It happens even with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.
Why? Is there anything the Democrats can do about it? First, it has to be understood. It doesn't just happen.
My answer to the above is 40 years of unanswered conservative hegemonic warfare. Lakoff's answer is more narrowly focused, but entirely consistent: conservatives understand (whether consciously or not) that they're playing for the long haul, that every battle of ideas is inter-related, and that compromising validates the other side, so it should generally be avoided at all costs. He puts this much more precisely in terms of his area of expertise, and it's well worth reading through to get more grounded in the specifics, which he presents in a series of brief sections:
This is the second of two diaries this weekend dealing with much-misunderstood fact that framing, as discussed by George Lakoff in Don't Think of An Elephant, is not just a matter of communicating to others, it's also about how we understand things ourselves. The first diary dealt with the situation in which two different ways of framing are applied to the same basic factual situation, with no contradiction, but with very different implications because of what they make easier or harder to do, and/or what they make relatively transparent and graspable, and what they make opaque and hard to get a handle on. I explained how the basic idea works in terms of two different ways of conceiving of the number plane--Cartersian coordinates vs. polar coordinates--and then I applied it to comparing cap-and-trade vs. carbon tax approaches to dealing with global warming.
In this diary, I want to take on a more general, more abstract political problem--the growing power of psycopathy or close mimicries of it in our political system. And to try to get a handle on it, I want to examine a different basic dichotomy in framing: that between a simpler and a more complex conceptual framework, in which the more complex framework can comprehend the simpler one, but not the other way around.
Before I do that, though, I want to provide a few reminders of what I'm talking about, and why psychopathy is a good description. Exhibit A, on the last day of April, Daniel wrote a diary about this little piece of Wall Street psychopathy making the email rounds:
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
It's hard to tell just what's the most delusional aspect of this rant, which is a major part of indiscreet charm of the psychopathic elite. But it did quickly recall another memorable x-ray of the corporate soul from a decade earlier; call it "Exhibit B":
When a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and raising prices, Enron energy traders celebrated, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports.
"Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing," a trader sang about the massive fire.
Four years after California's disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard - on audiotapes obtained by CBS News - gloating and praising each other as they helped bring on, and cash-in on, the Western power crisis.
Six years ago, cognitive linguist George Lakoff published a book that caused a sensation, but ultimately failed to have the impact that it should have. One of the reasons was that progressives who should have known better misunderstood Lakoff's discussion of framing as only being about messaging, which is completely false. Of course framing is very important when it comes to messaging, but if you think that framing is only about messaging, then you can simply dismiss it as yet another consultant's trick. You can even denounce it as immoral--as Booman appeared to do in the discussion section of this diary. But as Lakoff himself tried to explain, framing involves our own understanding of things as well as how we communicate to others.
There's nothing terribly new about recognizing this. Indeed, historian Thomas Kuhn's 1963 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which coined the term "paradigm shift" is all about the importance of framing in science: Scientific paradigms are conceptual frameworks that define what the basic elements of study are. They are not about communicating to others. They are about how scientists themselves think about what they are doing. This weekend, I want to give two different examples of this in action. I want to illustrate two different ways in which framing can matter. In the first, I want to talk about contrasting frames that can be virtually interchangeable in some situations, but that nonetheless take us in very different directions, so that their formal compatibility masks a pragmatic divergence. What these sorts of divergent frames show is that frames are ultimately rooted in purposive action, and reflect the logic of that action--a point that William James made repeatedly over 100 years ago.
I know you're probably thinking, "What the fuck is he talking about?" But I promise to make it very clear very quickly--as soon as I tell you what's to come in the next diary, tomorrow. In that one I want to talk about contrasting frames are not virtually interchangeable, where it's literally impossible to understand one of the frames in terms of the other. (In an even more confusing case, it's impossible to understand either of the frames in terms of the other--which is mostly what interested Kuhn. But I'll leave that topic for another time.)
Two Equivalent Coordinate Systems
There's a simple mathematical example of contrasting frames that can be virtually interchangeable in some situations, but that nonetheless take us in very different directions: The use of two different coordinate systems to describe the number plane. The number plane is what we get when we place two number lines at right angles to one another, like this:
It's also called the "Cartesian Plane," after philosopher/mathematician Rene Descartes, who first invented/discovered it. The two number lines are called the x- and y- axes, the point they cross at is called the origin, and it's given the value 0 on both axes. We say it has coordinates 0,0. These are called "Cartesian coordinates."
But it turns out that there's another way to think about the number plane, using what are called "polar coordinates".
In her blog today, Arianna Huffington asks if CBS’s new reality offering, Undercover Boss, is the most subversive show on television. It’s a provocative question, as most of us would like to think that a reality show existed that could turn the genre on its head. Maybe spotlight some of the reality that real Americans face, rather than spotlighting primarily those obsessed with fame. In the show, CEOs infiltrate the lower ranks of their organizations, often service industries, to see how business is going on the ground. Huffington proposes that in revealing the reality and conditions of low-wage work and workers, the show allows audiences a somewhat unprecedented look at what it really takes to get by in this country, while also illuminating the stark divide between the haves and have nots.
Here at The Opportunity Agenda, we talk a lot about values, and the importance of building communications around them. In fact, we built a whole organization around six core values that drive our work and the way we talk about it. We do this, of course, because these values matter to us. Seeing them realized and supported are central to our goals. But as NPR explained recently, leading with values is also a savvy communications strategy. In a story on people's beliefs about climate change, reporter Christopher Joyce describes findings from Yale's Cultural Cognition Project that people form their views about climate change, among other things, based more on their existing worldview - and values - than on the facts presented to them.
For months we’ve been arguing that President Obama’s failure to convey a core narrative, rooted in shared values, has been a major impediment to his success on health care reform and other progressive priorities. At long last, he seems to be coming to the same conclusion. As he told George Stephanopoulos last week:
OBAMA: If there's one thing that I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values. And that I do think is a mistake of mine. I think the assumption was, if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on the, you know this provision, or that law, or are we making a good, rational decision here –
STEPHANOPOULOS: That people would get it.
OBAMA: That people will get it. And I think that, you know, what they've ended up seeing is this feeling of remoteness and detachment where, you know, there's these technocrats up here, these folks who are making decisions. Maybe some of them are good, maybe some aren't, but do they really get us and what we're going through? And I think that I can do a better job of that and partly because I do believe that we're in a stronger position now than we were in a year ago.
I saw this excellent entry over at Docudharma and just HAD to share. Specifically, I want to hightlight a couple of paragraphs, because they relate very much to how the left has been thoroughly brainwashed by the right into adopting a permanently defensive, always-ask-for-crumbs mindset.
If you can change the way people THINK about an issue you can...and Rove did...change the way people talk about it and act on it. And it worked.
...
Somewhere in the back of our mind a nagging little voice cries out to us..."What will the Republicans think."
"How will the Republicans react?"
And the meaning of that voice is...."How can we PRE-compromise to the Republicans?"
In the Dem politicians mind, that translates into mental, almost unthought about, nearly unconscious phrases like... We have to GIVE THIS to the Republicans or they will be mad."
In bloggers minds that translates into mental, almost unthought about, nearly unconscious phrases like.... "We can't have Single Payer or a strong Public Option."
"We can't call for an end in Afghanistan."
"We have to compromise on Coal."
"We have to use the (demonizing) phrase illegal alien."
And of course the worst one, the grand daddy of them all, used by both the Polilticians and the Bloggers.....
"We don't have the votes."
When Mr. Bowers urges people here to throw everything we have into pushing a "public option" that really won't do the job of reforming health care and certainly won't lead to anything like single-payer, or when Mr. Rosenberg harps on the evils of the sellout Democratic Party yet always steps up to beat down any notion of actually leaving the Republican-wannabes to their political party of choice, what are they doing if not writing from the very frame of mind right-wingers want them to?
It's worth pondering. Anyway, read the full entry. It's quite eye-opening, for those willing to have their eyes opened.
As mounting evidence shows, the practice of busting myths - lining up facts to disprove an opponent's false assertions - just doesn't work. Most recently, Sharon Begley takes on the practice in Newsweek, exploring why people believe nutty stories about health care reform or supposed controversies about the president's birth certificate. She reports that, basically, people want to believe what they want to believe and they predisposed to ignoring any facts that clash with those beliefs. In fact, she finds that we actually go out of our way to find facts that bolster our beliefs. And most people are not too picky about the source of those facts, which makes the internet an ideal tool for them.
However, it's true that the audiences we want to reach are not usually completely opposed to our arguments and comitted to disagreeing with us regardless of the facts. Usually, we need to sway the middle, the people who haven't necessarily made up their minds. Why not line up statistics showing how wrong opposing arguments are for them? There are a few reasons. First, even with these groups, facts are not going to be the swaying element of your argument. If they are leaning toward believing that immigration is generally bad for the country, numbers showing how much immigrants contribute to the economy are not going sway them alone. It's important, instead, to frame arguments with the basic values that we know our audiences share. In the case of immigration, fairness is important. Numbers can then support how, because immigrants pay into a health care system, for instance, it's only fair that they receive the benefits from it.
But with these middle audiences, there is another danger in relying on myth busting, and that's repeating your opponent's argument. If a series of myth busts say "immigrants do NOT commit more crimes than citizens" or "health care reform does NOT want to kill your grandmother", you have put those arguments back into print once again, with only a measely "not" separating them from your opponents. Worse, some myth busting sheets repeat the arguments word for word and the refute them. Research shows that this mainly leaves the bad argument lingering in people's minds, not the counter. As Shankar Vedantam reports in the Washington Post:
After days of confusion and denial about whether the Obama administration was officially no longer using the term "War on Terror," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that the Obama administration is no longer speaking of a "War on Terror."
"I haven't gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It's just not being used," said Clinton during a briefing with reporters aboard her plane to the Hague to attend an international conference on Afghanistan.
Given the many problems we face as a country, one might ask whether or not it matters if the administration uses the term "war on terror" or not. The answer is that yes, it obviously matters, at least a little bit. While it is not a term either President or Senator Obama used very much at all, candidate Obama told Bill O'Reilly, when asked, that he believed America was in the middle of a war on terror. If President Obama didn't feel like the term mattered at all, then he wouldn't have said that.
Now, a different question is, does it really matter that much? The answer in this case is probably not. Not only had the term become a bit of a bankrupt joke that holds little currency with people either in this country or abroad, but the real question is whether President Obama will continue the various policies associated with the GWOT. Secret prisons, declaring people "enemy combatants," torture, vastly increased defense spending, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, Iraq and Afghanistan troop deployments, etc. Beyond a name, the "war on terror" was a series of horrific policies. To end the "war on terror," you can't just drop the name. The administration must drop the policies, too.
And by "they", we mean the very audiences we need in order to change the conversation about health in this country: politically active moderates and liberals. Recent focus groups with these audiences show an apparently growing comfort with not only declaring health as a human right, but also in recognizing what that would mean to health care reform.
These groups build on our national poll from 2007 showing that 72% of the general population believe that health is a human right. Using the demographic data provided by the poll, our researchers at Belden Russonello & Stewart honed in on persuadable audiences to determine their receptivity to a number of human rights messages.
A year and a half ago, The Opportunity Agenda embarked on an ambitious effort to elevate social justice values, problems, and solutions in the 2008 presidential election cycle. In particular, we sought to make two crucial ideals, Opportunity and Community, front and center in public and political discourse around the campaign. Opportunity is the idea that everyone should have a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential; it is an idea inextricably linked with the American Dream. Community is the notion that we share a sense of responsibility for each other; that we're all in it together and strongest when we leave no one behind. Community values are the essence of our national motto, e pluribus unum, "from many, one."
The Opportunity Agenda has promoted those values across social issues, from education to living wages to the integration of immigrants to health care to family farming, identifying the practical solutions that uphold our core ideals. We have worked in collaboration with hundreds of social justice leaders, organizations, and everyday folks, and in a particularly strong partnership with the Center for Community Change and its network around community values.
Our effort has included research on American values, public opinion, framing, and media discourse; communications tools and training for hundreds of advocates, organizers, faith, and political leaders around the country; outreach to mainstream and ethnic media; new media advocacy, from blogs to YouTube, to MySpace and Facebook; and message support to the Heartland Presidential Forum: Community Values in Action, co-sponsored by the Center for Community Change in Des Moines, Iowa, ahead of the caucuses.
Our effort is strictly non-partisan and does not embrace any candidate or either party. We believe that a long-term campaign to move hearts, minds, and policy must cross partisan boundaries.
As the Democratic National Convention came to a close, we were able to see real progress in moving the political discourse. Opportunity and Community were very much "in the house" at the Democratic convention. Indeed, the theme of the convention-renewing America's promise-had deep roots in the narratives of Opportunity and Community. We'll be analyzing the Republican convention shortly.
Someone at MyDD pointed out the need for a catchy soundbite name for the energy plan, to contrast to McCain's "all of the above". I think I have the right one: Green Jobs.
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