Conversational frames in the context of political debate are usually a question of: “What implied negative factor are you using to knock down your opponent?” If said negative factor is something that your opponent is also against, you might actually be strengthening their long-term position at the expense of a short-term punch.
Let’s take a common statement you might see on /r/the_donald—“Democrats are the real racists.” This statement is a framing mistake. This might, in fact, be true. However, this statement reinforces several mistaken notions, such as “racism is bad” and “racism is a defined thing at all.” Even Scott Alexander can see that racism is a poorly defined term that fails to distinguish profit-driven actions which happen to use as race as a proxy, separatism, correct snap judgement, and several other tasks involving pattern recognition. So, saying “Democrats are the real racists” is a phrase that loses the frame for a very limited potential gain. Whatever gain could be achieved could also be accomplished by other phrases that don’t accidentally reinforce The Narrative.
The Left, of course, weakens its own frame all the time. Saying that democracy is not working because Trump has been elected or because it’s easily gamed by foreign interference gets people into the right mindset for accepting alternatives to democracy.
On the other hand, saying “the Left is weakening democracy” is also a good example of losing the frame. While you don’t want to weaken any existing system without a clear alternative, some mistrust in democracy is a good thing.
One of the most frustrating ways the Right weakens its frame are statements to the effect of “The elites are greedy and care just about themselves.” While this is technically true, this is a “fake explanation” which feels like an explanation, but actually isn’t. Elites and people in general care about themselves and have been greedy since time immemorial. Self-interest is constant. The problems of today need to be explained through elements unique to the current system. The problem is less about individual ambition of elites, but their lack of ability to get along with each other. Serious division between elites creates proxy fights and is more dangerous than unity. Moreover, elite status should in general be celebrated. Money is a coordination tool, as are many forms of managerial power. Disrespect of those coordination tools causes society to lose its ability to effectively steer resources.
Another key cognitive mistake that liberals and conservatives make is to take the statements of the Left’s “caring” frame at face value. While this is not a fatal mistake by any means and the consequences of it are sometimes tragi-comically instructive, it’s worth pointing out.
For example, progressive economist Yoram Bauman designed a revenue neutral carbon tax to help combat global warming in a ways that’s potentially palatable to anti-big government conservatives. He put this on the ballot in Washington State. In response, a broad coalition of the Left came out strongly against the measure because it fails to help communities of color. Even Vox’s reporting on the subject can be surprisingly accurate when the author doesn’t know whose side to back.
This should not come as a surprise to people familiar with the concept of virtue signaling. The idea of needing to take ideas seriously at all and think ahead to questions of “what changes others (anti-big government conservatives) would cooperate with” is too uncomfortable for some.
Similarly, some neoliberals have tried to raise money for poor people in Africa as a competition with other subreddits. The results? 4chan took first, closely beating the fundraiser hosts themselves at second, with a solid third finish by anarcho_capitalism. Socialism and other lefty subs gave the fundraiser the middle finger. Once again, not a surprise. Spending money for the alleged goal of achieving worldwide equality is not The Narrative-approved way of doing business.
Also of special interest are the weak frames displayed by self-proclaimed centrists.
One meme that’s arisen in the face of the James Damore lawsuit against Google is the following: “What matters is not diversity of people, what matters is a diversity of thought.” It’s a little harder to see why this frame is a bit off. It seems that “diversity of thought” is a good idea today because it allows for some right-wing arguments to remain in a left-dominant culture. This is a dream because the left would rarely cooperate on this dimension once leftist dominance has been achieved. It’s easy for the Left to spin a gender realist such as Damore as “being against thought diversity” due to promoting “dominant viewpoints.” The very fact of which viewpoints are in fact dominant could and will be lied about. The problem with “diversity of thought” is that it weakens the Right’s position in all cases where the Right is in power, as it allows for leftism to creep back in and dominate the Right, as it is wont to do.
Another way centrists implicitly fail to understand the world is in the following implied mentality: “if only the two ideologies could cooperate.” This phrase considers the Left to be an ideology with values and consequences that result from those values. You might have encountered “ideologies” like libertarianism, which values its conception of freedom and measures all policy up against that standard. Whether you think libertarianism’s conception of freedom is correct or not is besides the point. The point is that libertarianism is an ideology. If you tell a libertarian that a certain set of university propaganda is destroying freedom and this is true and believable, they will be against that set of university propaganda.
The mistake that many centrists, libertarians, and the like make is to even consider leftism an ideology at all. There are some ideological leftists for sure, but they are far outnumbered by the mob. Instead of using principles and outside evidence, rank and file leftist use the goodness or badness of actions as determined by local status gradients to reason about causality, e.g. “You see, Trump is bad and the stock market is good sometimes, so Trump could not possibly have caused the stock market to go up.”
Moreover, in addition to anti-ideological reasoning, the Left is more of a set of tactics to cheat at status games. The idea of cooperating with the Left is an oxymoron. Don’t get me wrong here. Any individual leftist, large organization, individual elites, the USG or even the Democratic party are entities that could be negotiated and reasoned with, given sufficient trading items and enforcement mechanisms. The Left as a whole can’t be cooperated with because the Left is itself the strategy of defecting. Note that this frame is less of a catchy set of buzzwords to use on Twitter and rather a set of ideas to carry through your life.
So, the moment a centrist talks about “cooperation”, he is on the Right, which is obvious to both the Right and Left, and eventually to him, as well. While the idea of the “Left as a defect button pusher” is an extremely strong mental frame, there are a couple more takes on it.
A few people have noted that the Left has a near constant desire to destroy the meaning of certain words and a set of corresponding ideas. Jordan Peterson even noted: “Make no mistake about it: The aim of the radical left is the destruction of even the idea of competence.”
Of course, the frame could be stronger by omitting the word “radical”, but this is a good tweet nonetheless.
“Rights” used to mean negative rights, that is, protection from the government, up until they became positive rights the government could use to justify taking more money from people. Many words ranging from legal ideas of “marriage,” universal human notions of “gender,” and many other ideas have fallen into a shade of their former selves.
The general philosophy of postmodernism does not even allow for a possibility of words having a connection to reality at all. According to postmodern theory, language is only an instrument of power and pretending to use language for truth is a plot by the powerful.
Realizing the lack of desire of the leftist to connect words to reality at all is an important observation. However, it’s important to note that destruction of meaning is not actually the worst that can happen. What is worse is an inconsistent destruction of meaning.
“Marriage” has both lost some of its meaning as an important piece of social technology and simultaneously created tough penalties for the man once it ends. The terms man and woman are losing their meaning as solid biological categories and are instead fluid notions that could be picked up on a given day, while simultaneously being categories that must be legally and biologically catered to, or else risk punishment from the law.
Pure destruction of meaning is less dangerous because it allows for competing concepts to fill the categories. It’s a sort of weaponized ambiguity that denies the ability of words to mean things on the one hand and creates legal penalties for going against the pretended meaning on the other.
In the same vein, simply pressing the defect button on every social arrangement, whether it is arguments about the causes of mass shootings or agreements to honor democratic elections, is already quite dangerous. However, what’s even more dangerous is not the just defecting against societal norms and getting away with it, but breaking the techniques by which society could structure any cooperation.
One of the strongest frames I keep in mind when looking at the world is to view the Left’s entire lack of respect for money, power, the meaning of words, and even body language signals as a single push towards destroying the capacity for any agreement at all.
What are the consequences of this frame? It’s not to become sad about civilizational prospects, but rather to rid oneself of any delusions that surrendering on yet another policy will work this time—and to stop reinforcing frames charitable to the Left.
Civilization must go on.
Carelessly taking one conversational step forward and two steps back has gone on long enough.