How We Talk About Politics (and Life) Matters
What we talk about when we talk about politics is important, but how we talk about politics and political ideas is the key to whether we are being persuasive or not, or even understood. The liberal-left pays a lot of attention to what we talk about, often at the expensive of how these things are talked about. However, the left is especially horrible in framing arguments and topics.
Framing is best understood through the phrase framing the debate. The debate is a means in which we engage in formal argument. The frame is the architecture of the debate – the structure, rules, topics, staging – architecture which influences not just how the debate happens but the topic(s) that is debated and how that debate is understood. Here’s a concrete example, using “abortion debate” and the three main ways the debate is framed:
Reproductive rights: The fight over the medical procedure called abortion is really a battle over a human right, specifically the right of women to decide on their medical care, and, deeper, how to live their lives.
Abortion: The fight over the medical procedure called abortion is, just that, a fight over a medical procedure. This is the narrowest of the three frames and the one which the debate often defaults to.
Baby-killing: The fight over the medical procedure called abortion is a fight over the lives of children, whom include the “pre-born.” The abortion debate centers on the “rights of the child” and stopping “murder.”
Using those three takes, how the argument/discussion is framed not only determines the subject and terms of the debate but often the outcome. If an abortion opponent is limited to arguing about human rights of the living - the woman - they are disadvantaged. If an abortion rights proponent has to debate about the “rights of the pre-born,” they are screwed. The default frame of abortion as abortion helps no one, including people who want some clarity on the subject.
I’ll give you another example of framing, one that most people wouldn’t identify as such.
On Thursday, SFGate ran this headline, “Four tech companies just saved California from a budget crisis.” Really? That’s cool. What did these “four tech companies” do? Did their shareholder donate their dividends to the state? Did their C-suites tell Governor Newsom that California can have their yearly compensation? Did they liquify all their assets and put them in the public pot? No, not exactly.
The four tech companies that “saved” California did so by paying their taxes. According to SFGate:
Big Tech’s stock prices boomed in 2024. Bay Area-headquartered Nvidia, Apple, Google and Meta were already humongous companies at the start of the year — as of Thursday, they’ve grown in value by 199%, 19%, 19% and 59%, respectively. Tesla, which has a Palo Alto engineering headquarters and large local workforce, is up 38% year to date. Even some smaller and less well-known Bay Area firms are seeing banner years: Broadcom is up 48%, and AppLovin is up a bewildering 693%.
This rise in stock prices led to bigger paydays for executives and workers – particularly those at Nvidia, Apple, Google and Meta - which means higher taxable incomes, which means more tax revenues, which helps California. These people are making more money, so, under California’s tax code, they are required to pay more taxes, just as if you or I was to hit paydirt in California, we’d be presented with a bigger tax bill than last year, and that would benefit the state.
And, while Nvidia, Apple, Google and Meta, and all the other companies mentioned above, did see their value rise, as determined by stock prices, we know that what a company is valued at has a lot more (sometimes nothing) to with than earnings.
Take AppLovin, a mobile app/gaming company. The value of their stock rose nearly 700% this year. While AppLovin’s revenue is up over last year (that we know), it did not make a 700% jump! And when you look at the company’s SEC reports, two things jump out: First, is that AppLovin’s stock price is under its December 2021 high and it’s rise is pretty much a recovery. Second, while the company has “potential,” it’s SEC report shows many substantial risks that any increase in the company’s value has to based on bets, which means the heroes responsible for AppLovin’s big year are gamblers (and the people hyping AppLovin).
If anything, the people who “saved” California are the anonymous legislative staffers who wrote the tax code. So, the heroes here are not the “four tech companies,” any tech companies, or anyone who pays taxes. And that is the way that the SFGate story should have been written. But because it was framed to lionize the “four tech companies” our uncritical takeaway is:
- Corporations and the billionaires saved the day
- Corporations and the billionaires always save the day
- Corporations and the billionaires are the only ones who can save the day
- We should always trust and follow corporations and the billionaires
- We the citizen are subservient to corporations and the billionaires
By framing – or, to be fair, continuing to frame - corporations and the billionaires as the heroes, SFGate reenforces the idea that a corporate oligarchy is not just desirable; it is natural.
This framing is not unique to SFGate, it is pretty much the de facto frame that we live by. It is a frame that has been around since early in human history, one that – tweaked to accommodate feudal lords, royalty, dictators, popes, etc. – asserts authoritarianism and the domination of wealth as the natural order of things. It is a frame that is extremely hostile to democracy, popular control, and the commonwealth. It is a way we are trained to think, reinforced by casual headlines like “Four tech companies just saved California from a budget crisis.”
Knowing about framing and identifying it is an essential part of politics and life. The 2024 presidential election was largely about framing, a skill that Republicans – including Trump - excel at. The right is so relentless in their framing that we miss a lot of it, especially when their frames become “conventional wisdom” or, worse, our primary way of understanding things.
Sounds grim? It’s not. As noted, manipulating people through words and meaning has been happening forever. If we take the Garden of Eden literally, we’ve been taken by framing since the near dawn-of-man. That I am writing about this stuff and can identify framing is proof that skepticism and critical thinking are effective tools to disrupt the bullshit. And, as dominant as some of their frames are, we are talking about this stuff, which means that we still own our thoughts and can change how we communicate and understand things. That is not a small thing.