Framing

“Moderate” has become a key word in San Francisco politics as a movement funded by wealthy tech interests campaigns to undermine progressive power at City Hall. But there’s a big problem with words like "moderate" and "centrist": They mean different things to different people. As such, they lack any real definition or meaning.

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San Francisco has serious challenges, but regressive Republican policies are not the answer. Neither are they moderate in any sense of the word. To do something “in moderation” is to avoid extremes on either side. But it’s quite extreme to push failed right-wing policies designed to treat poverty and illness with more pain.

In 2024, we should reject meaningless frames like centrist and moderate. Instead, examine the moral views underlying each candidate and proposal.

Are they rooted in a morality of Republican strictness or Democratic empathy?

Does the evidence suggest their policy approaches are effective or ineffective?

What are the moral politics of the people funding the campaign? Are they progressive or regressive?

Then vote your values.

Rapid diffusion of solutions to a changing climate is paramount if the US is to mitigate carbon emissions. A timely response depends on how people perceive and understand innovations such as new practices, programs, policies, and technologies that promise to reduce emissions. This article explores multisolving innovations in the context of interventions that can be targeted to community leaders and decision makers. We focus on examples led by policy staff; directors of municipal offices and departments of transportation, housing, sustainability, urban planning, and public health; and elected county and city officials where there may be mixed support for efforts to reduce carbon emissions, to show that some innovations can be accurately framed solely in terms of community health benefits. When communicating with stakeholders who are dismissive or skeptical of climate change, we suggest using messages that describe the benefits of mitigation innovations in terms of human health, rather than climate, to achieve broader acceptability.

Berkeley linguist George Lakoff recently came up with the strategy that he decided to call the truth sandwich. Here’s how to build one: Lead with the truth. In the middle of the report, briefly describe the falsehood. And then fact-check the misinformation and repeat the truth.

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Lakoff has said that he thinks media organizations are unintentionally spreading misinformation when they repeat lies or quote politicians who are asserting falsehoods.

“Avoid retelling the lies. Avoid putting them in headlines, leads or tweets,” Sullivan wrote of Lakoff’s advice. “Because it is that very amplification that gives them power.”

Maybe the clearest sign, the clearest admission that all of this was part of the conservative push to attack education and build the muscles and power to limit academic institutions came from one of the architects of the plan himself. Chris Rufo is already known for working with Ron DeSantis to attack the New College in Florida, driving away numerous LBGT students, and making the school a far more conservative and repressive institution. On December 19th Rufo publicly tweeted out, “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.” And his plan worked. He is now openly bragging about it not just on social media, but in the Wall Street Journal.

Just like Ackman, Rufo is no longer even pretending that this is about antisemitism, protecting Jews, plagiarism, or anything else with any merit. Ackman calls it attacking diversity at these institutions, Rufo calls it winning the culture war, and yet numerous major publications immediately went with the framing that these men really care about academic integrity, Jewish students, and seemingly whatever else these cynical and bad-faith actors wanted them to say.

Right now, it seems to me that, in a number of respects, we are at the stage that the American environmental movement was at in the 1950s or 1960s. At that time, there were people-supporters of the park system, hunters, birdwatchers and so on-who cared about what we would now identify as "environmental" issues. In the world of intellectual property we now have start-up software engineers, libraries, appropriationist artists, parodists, biographers, biotech researchers, and others. In the 1950s, there were flurries of outrage over particular environmental crises, such as proposals to build dams in national parks. In later years, the public was shocked by burning rivers and oil spills. In the world of intellectual property, we currently worry about Microsoft's allegedly anti-competitive practices, the uncertain ethics of patenting human genes, and the propriety of using copyright to silence critics of the Church of Scientology. We are notably lacking two things, however. The first is a theoretical framework, a set of analytical tools with which issues should be analyzed. The second is   perception of common interest among apparently disparate groups, a common interest which cuts across traditional oppositions. (Hunter vs. Birdwatcher, for example.)

What kinds of tools am I talking about? Crudely speaking, the environmental movement was deeply influenced by two basic analytical frameworks. The first was ecology, the study of the fragile, complex and unpredictable interconnections between living systems. The second was welfare economics, which revealed the ways in which markets can fail to make economic actors internalize the full costs of their actions. The combination of the two ideas yielded a powerful and disturbing conclusion. Markets would routinely fail to make economic actors internalize their own costs, particularly their own environmental costs. This failure would routinely disrupt or destroy fragile ecological systems, with unpredictable, ugly, dangerous, and possibly irreparable consequences. These two types of analysis pointed to a general interest in environmental protection, and thus helped to build a large constituency that supported governmental efforts to that end. The duck hunter's efforts to preserve wetlands as a species habitat turn out to have wider functions in the prevention of erosion and the maintenance of water quality. The decision to burn coal rather than gas for power generation may impact everything from forests to fisheries.

It is practically first principles in the study of group identity that when we identify with a sports team, religious group, or political party, our self-esteem is bound up with that group. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has famously shown, our group allegiances take on a deeply moral element. We naturally tend to associate our group and its values with moral goodness and our competition with moral depravity.

For Republicans (and Democrats), admitting that fascists and Nazis are on their side of the ideological spectrum—that they have any overlapping worldviews, values, or tactics with “us”—is a tribal psychology no-no. Fascists and Nazis, the exemplars of political evil, must share space with our partisan opponents. It works like a syllogism. Leftists are the bad guys. Fascists and Nazis are also bad guys. So fascists and Nazis are leftists.