Equality of Opportunity as a Frame For Progressive Ideas

Recognizing a Contradiction 

Equality of opportunity can provide a strong frame for progressive ideas. To see why, we can begin by recognizing that - as I said in last week’s post on this blog - our people are suffering from a crisis of meaning and identity because of a deep contradiction between our values which stress opportunity and achievement and the reality of life in our country. That reality is that the structure of our economy limits opportunity and makes achievement extremely difficult. 

Fortunately, there are policies that would reduce the contradiction by changing the circumstances under which our people live. We can restore equality of opportunity. Things like a national health system or a better way of financing post-secondary education would make success easier by making people’s financial lives more secure. However, implementing such policies will be difficult because the Republican Party is strongly opposed to them.

Framing Our Ideas Using Widely Held Values to Persuade Voters

In order to overcome that opposition, we have to persuade a lot of voters[1] to support the kinds of reforms that we support, and to do that, we must frame our proposals in terms of values that the voters already accept. It has been shown that people vote their values. They do not vote directly for programs or policies; they vote for the values that they believe those programs or policies represent. Successful political appeals make use of values by claiming that certain widely accepted values demand that we enact certain policies. Successful political appeals repeat the claim over and over again in many different contexts until it becomes a part of what “everyone knows.”

We can appeal to the widely held values of fairness, a level playing field and equality of opportunity to frame the policies we support. Here is an example:

We believe that everyone ought to have the same opportunity to succeed, but our system has become rigged against hardworking Americans. Today, the children of rich people have a much better chance of succeeding than regular, hardworking Americans do, and that is unfair. We need to restore a level playing people that gives ordinary folks a chance to succeed, and to do that, we need to provide affordable childcare to give families a chance to get ahead.

Thus, we can counter the Republicans' claim that such a program would be a giveaway that unfairly taxes hardworking people to provide unearned benefits to lazy people.

Repetition is the Key

We need to state this over and over and over until it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” The reason for doing this is to get the voters to see affordable childcare from a new perspective. However, we wouldn't use this framing for affordable childcare only. We would use it in the same way for each of our policy proposals with the result that we would not merely be proposing affordable childcare, national health insurance or forgiveness of student debts. We would be proposing to restore equality of opportunity. We would be proposing to unrig a rigged system.

We Might Really Win

By framing our policy proposals in terms of widely accepted values, we would accomplish two things. First, we would acknowledge the lived reality of working-class Americans. They know that the system is rigged against them, and by framing our policies in terms of equality of opportunity, we would be saying that we understand the unfairness of their lives. Second, we would offer them the possibility that their lives could really be improved. Our narrative would be a believable alternative to the narrative presented by the MAGA Republicans. With such a narrative, we might really open the door to restoring equality of opportunity.

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[1] We don’t need to persuade everyone. We only need to persuade a small percentage of the voters because elections are won by small margins.