Twenty-five years of conservative rule in America has caused progressives to take a hard look at how their values were dashed to near obscurity. Ineffective paradigms of signing petitions and street protests have been shouted down by the wailing of Fox News correspondents and reactionary radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and former Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. Conservatives ably transformed the political debate using messages that appealed to the viscera of an undereducated, overly devout public entrenched in Calvinistic morality.
The messages that gave way to the reigns of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have now been scientifically dissected by linguists into “frames” which substituted a steady diet of political fiber from the left into empty-calorie morsels of moral insight from the right. Now, cultural anthropologist Jeffrey Feldman has taken framing to the next level, applying frames to famous presidential speeches in Framing the Debate: Famous Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation (and Win Elections).
Framing the Debate is interesting to read if one is willing to accept Feldman’s interpretations of speeches and how presidents through the years have used language to connect the dots between themselves, government and morality. For instance, Feldman found that in President Bush’s 2002 “axis of evil” State of the Union address, Bush used the word evil or a synonym for it 5,100 times in his forty-eight minute speech.
This is the essence of framing, developing a concept and repeating it enough times until the concept seeps its way into the subconscious. Feldman makes clear that framing has been used as far back as Revolutionary War times, and likely longer than that. It is a devilishly simple way of having a profound psychological impact upon the masses. Feldman also takes the opportunity to explain the difference between framing and spin - framing being the creation of an argument, and spin the whitewashing of actions leading to cataclysmic results.
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