Commentary by TrueDialog.org's Founder, Carl Lindemann

July 10 - Where are the Whirling Dervish Dems?

Some claim there is an unfortunate slant to my views here. The misuse of Spin is not exclusively a Republican or conservative phenomena, to be sure. Still, there isn’t an across the aisle equal to the term “Rovian” and attempting to find balance by saying  “Carvellian” seems dated. The reality is that Karl Rove has no equal, and those claiming otherwise are spinning wildly.

The problem, as I see it, is that Democrats seem to think that fighting fire with fire is the answer. Fight spin with counter-spin. But does it really matter whether you prefer if your dreidel turns to the right or left, clockwise or counter-clockwise?  

Such principled objections seem rather academic since we are now in something of an arms race in the realm of Spin. Rove may not have an equal, but he does have something of a rival in George Lakoff. Lakoff has become the de facto leader of this movement to teach the Democrats how the game is played. He’s a respected scholar who has crossed over from the theoretical to the practical to apply some of his academic understanding. His teachings focus on the importance of “framing” – how the context helps define the meaning. If you can fashion the frame around events, you can determine the meaning people take away from them.

Framing is an important process where facts, events, personalities, and whatever other loose threads of our experience are woven together so that we can form a coherent picture of what’s happening and can tell captivating stories about it. The problem is when framing becomes the focus, and the people, places and things being framed take on a secondary role.

It’s really a matter of process – what’s the best way to come to understand reality?  The issue is easy to see if you look at the scientific process. Good science operates through a tug-of-war between theory and facts. You need to have a working hypothesis to design experiments, gather data and move forward in your understanding. This working hypothesis is just a starting point, however. What’s exciting about science is the unexpected. A scientist is on the way to discovering something new when the data goes against the grain of the working hypothesis. That forces the scientist to rethink what’s happening, to come to a different understanding than what he started out with. Then, a reformulated hypothesis guides new experiments and new data gathering. This is how the scientific process advances.

Lakoff’s framing is the equivalent of a working hypothesis. What would happen in scientific research if the working hypothesis were the be-all-and-end-all?  What if experiments were designed to find data to fit the frame, and that any that didn’t fit got tossed? Galileo got a taste of this when he had the churchmen look into his telescope. He showed them that not all the heavenly bodies revolve around the Earth. But that is not what they found. Galileo, not the churchmen, discovered something new. He found that science is no match for dogma and tradition. Seeing isn’t believing – believing is seeing.

Now, we see the same dynamic at play in the Culture of Spin. Instead of dogma and tradition, we have ideology. Ideology defines the solutions even before we’ve considered the facts. In fact, what counts as facts is dictated by a rigid ideology. What happens when the facts evaporate and there’s nothing left to support such a frame? The topic changes and a new set of “facts” are gathered to support the same ideological frame.

What’s the worth of creating a liberal frame to counter a conservative one? If the facts are secondary, and each actually chooses different facts to support the different frames, then there is no way to mediate between these. We never move past the working hypothesis and we are stuck with preconceived notions resistant to reality. Is this the best way to do real-world problem solving over taxes, healthcare, etc?

So, in this sense, the Democrats are no better that the Rovian Republicans if they seek to adopt the same basic belief that ideology trumps reality.

I welcome stories of Democrats taking this frame-happy approach and will eagerly examine and expose them. Tragically, the Republican examples I’ve pointed to are in the newspapers every day. Even Republicans have become anxious about this sad reality. 

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