The war with Iran is the fourth pointless and meaningless war of my lifetime. In this war, many people will die, and and an enormous amount of wealth will be wasted, but nothing will be gained. I can find no better way to comment on this war than to present to you Edna St. Vincent Millay's one-act play "Aria da Capo." Here is a link to it on Youtube. I hope you enjoy it.
Aria Da Capo - Presented by Acting Troupe of Lambert, May 2023
Framing is the process of setting the context of the discussion of a political issue. Effective framing determines the way that voters see an issue. For example, do we call Medicare for All an extension of an existing program? Do we call it a socialist invasion of private healthcare? Do we call it a revolutionary expansion of social justice in the United States? How do we want voters to think about it? A political proposal can succeed if it is framed in a way that draws political support, or it can fail because it is framed in a way that alienates voters.
Last week, I said that the Democratic Socialists have good ideas that need to be reframed as the moderate proposals that they really are. The Democratic Socialists present their ideas as revolutionary improvements in our society, but in fact, their ideas are far from radical. They are well within the main stream of American politics, and they include nothing that poses the slightest danger to our capitalist system. However, the Democratic Socialists' ideas need to be reframed to make their moderate character obvious to everyone. Republicans have already begun to characterize the proposals as dangerous communistic ideas. If Democrats allow that framing to dominate the discussion, their proposals will fail for lack of support from voters and politicians. A moderate framing might just give Democratic Socialists' proposals a chance to win. What would such a framing look like?
We Americans are not a revolutionary people. Most of us
believe - rightly or wrongly - that we live in a fine country with good institutions that offer all of
us opportunities to get ahead. Even our labor movement has never been
revolutionary. The movement has focused on obtaining higher wages and better
working conditions in the workplace, and it has avoided becoming the base of a
political movement. We have never had a labor party. We recognize that our
country has problems, and we understand the need to solve them, but we don’t
see our problems as symptoms of a system that is fundamentally flawed and needs
to be replaced.
It is true that a sizable part of the electorate has lost faith in our system. Many believe that the system is rigged against them and that both parties are dominated by money and by corruption. Such people form the base of the MAGA movement on the right and of politicians like Graham Platner or Zohran Mamdani on the left. However, those alienated voters are not the people who need to be persuaded. The ones on the left are already prepared to support policies to make our country more equitable, while the ones on the right can probably not be persuaded to support such policies under any conditions. The voters who might be persuaded by a moderate framing are the people in the middle who still believe in our system.
Those of us who wish to promote change to solve our obvious
problems must work within this political culture if we wish to be successful.
That means that we must frame our proposals in a way that appeals to the fundamental, political attitude of the majority of Americans. How can we do that?
One element of moderate framing is a narrow, problem-solving
approach that avoids fundamental criticism of our society and economy. This approach says that, while our
economy and society are fundamentally just and sound, a problem has arisen that we
need to solve. For example, many of us know that Americans pay more for
healthcare than the people of any other industrial country in the world. We
know, too, that our system produces mediocre health outcomes at best. We can say that this problem has
come about because greedy people have taken advantage of our open economy to
build healthcare system that brings them enormous profits at the expense of the
rest of us. For the benefit of all of us, we need modify the system so that it
provides better care at a cost that we can afford.
A second element of moderate framing is to emphasize the
fact that our solution does not represent a major break with our existing
system. We need to argue that the solution we are proposing is really an
extension of the system that we already have. Medicare for All is such an
extension. Our existing Medicare program is one of our most successful
programs. It provides affordable healthcare to millions of senior citizens. All
we are proposing is to extend it to cover the rest of us. Why should seniors be
the only people with affordable healthcare? Why shouldn’t all of us have it? No
major change to the system is needed. We just need to extend it to cover us all.
A third element of moderate framing is to show that our solution would save money for American businesses and put more money in everyone's pocket. Americans are stressed economically, and we can address their suffering by pointing out how our proposal would put money in their pockets. In the case of Medicare for All, our case could begin with the idea that the taxes they would have to pay would be less than the health insurance premiums that they are now paying. As a result, people would have more money to spend on other things. In addition, Medicare for All would relieve businesses of the cost of health insurance. That would allow the businesses to raise salaries and also to hire more workers.
This argument is particularly important for persuading so-called "centrist" Democrats. Today's Democratic Party is not a working-class party. It is the party of the patrimonial middle class, and the members of that class do not need Medicare for All because they already have decent health insurance. In order to get get Congress to pass Medicare for All, it's supporters will have to persuade the centrist Democrats as well as some Republicans that Medicare for All would benefit everyone and not just people who lack health insurance today.
A final element of moderate framing involves showing that the moral case
for our proposal comes from traditional, American values. James Talarico’s campaign
website provides one way of doing that, but it is not the only possibility. His
approach is religious, but one possible secular approach would be to emphasize
traditional, American ideas of fairness. A system that was designed to make
money for its designers while squeezing the rest of us financially is
fundamentally unfair. It is not consistent with our idea of fairness. A system that provides affordable care for some people but not for others is incompatible with American values.
The key to successful framing is to repeat it over and over and over. We can't just make our point and assume that people will get the idea. We have to repeat our point over and over. We have to say it in different ways every day. We have to use TV ads, blog posts, Instagram posts, FB posts, newspaper articles and magazine articles. We have to repeat our point so often that it becomes part of the accepted view of the topic. Republicans are very good at this. Democrats have to learn.
Let's get busy!
Why do many progressives in the United States like to call
themselves “Democratic Socialists?” Why do they insist on a political label that is suspect
and even vaguely threatening to many Americans and that opens candidates up to
the undeserved accusation that they may be communists?
They have not adopted the label because of a need to identify a radical political platform that is outside of the main stream of American politics. In fact, the political platform of the Democratic
Socialists is well within the main stream of politics in capitalist countries or
even in the United States. A proposal
like Medicare for All is hardly radical. It is nothing but the expansion of a
successful, existing program to include more people. Another favorite of
Democratic Socialists, the Green New Deal is nothing but a modification of our
longstanding policy of promoting energy development for the benefit of our
economy. Why are such moderate proposals labeled as “democratic socialism?”
One reason is that we on the political left like to describe our proposals as revolutionary changes. We like to think of ourselves as saving the world rather than merely making modest changes in our current policies. So, we describe what we are doing in revolutionary terms. Moreover, it is hard to mobilize millions of young people to work for a political campaign with the goal of tweaking the status quo. So, we call ourselves a revolution even when we aren’t really one. We exaggerate as Bob Dylan did in the 1960s. “Democratic Socialist” is far more thrilling and satisfying as a label than “progressive Democrat.”
However, the label also has a disadvantage: it invites the political right to agree that our proposals are radical or even revolutionary and that the people who make such proposals are socialists or even (gasp! choke!) communists. Ronald Reagan did that when he warned of “socialized medicine” in his campaign against Medicare in the 1960s, and Pres. Trump used the same kind of language in his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore. Thus, both the left and the right tend to paint the left’s policy prescriptions as more radical than they really are. For the right, they are changes to be avoided at all costs, and for the left, they are a revolution that we must fight for if we are to have a better society.
Unfortunately, this illusion of radicalism makes our
political dialogue very unrealistic. Disagreements are painted as much greater than they
really are. Both sides act as if they believed that a revolution were coming. The
social media are full of leftist posts that fulminate against the evils of
capitalism and of rightist posts that warn of danger to all of our most cherished
rights and traditions.
Both sides are talking nonsense. Nothing remotely radical or revolutionary has been proposed by the Democratic Socialists. Expanding a successful and popular healthcare program like Medicare to cover more people is not a revolutionary change, and neither are any of the other proposals of the Democratic Socialists. Consider, for example, the domestic policy proposals in the agenda outlined by Melat Kiros, the Democratic Socialist who recently won the Democratic primary in Denver, Colorado. They include "Medicare for All, stronger housing and childcare programs, public financing of elections, ... and abolishing ICE."
Kiros's ideas may be good ideas, but they are hardly revolutionary, and they do not threaten capitalism in any way. If all of her proposals were adopted, many of our people would probably be better off, and our society would be more just, but the structure of our capitalist economy would not change. Our corporations would still be profitable, and capitalists like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would still be billionaires. Even the public financing of elections coexists with capitalism in many countries. The truth is that the Democratic Socialists are in no way revolutionary. They appear to be radicals only because they think of themselves that way and because they use the "socialist" label in a way that plays into the hands of those who oppose even moderate changes to improve the life of our people.
We don't have to allow ourselves or our country to be drowned in a fight over imaginary radicalism. The fight favors only the political right and gets in the way of needed changes. We can frame important and useful proposals like Medicare for All, affordable childcare or the Green New Deal as the moderate proposals that they really are, and we can find real solutions to real problems like extreme inequality. We can avoid getting trapped in pointless discussions about the meaning of "socialism," and we can start to mitigate the injustices of our society. Let’s get real.
