Why does the media refuse to acknowlege the Republicans want to destroy Medicare?

From Steve Benen today discussing yesterday's Meet the Press Roundtable offered the question that progressives and liberals have to really focus on:

The question isn’t why Dems are on the offensive; the question is why the Beltway media finds it offensive [that the Democrats are attacking the destructive policy offered by the Republicans.]

The media takes the Republican narrative of destroying Medicare as serious policy, but the mere presentation of the facts by Democrats that what is presented is the destruction of Medicare is blown off as mere demagoguery or Mediscare. Why is the media so damned blind?

The answer to that question according to George Lakoff's book The Political Mind: Why you can't understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain is that the conservatives have framed the allowable possible narratives to exclude the idea that the government can possibly do anything at all without becoming a tyranny. If something does not fit into the narrative society prescribes for a given role then the individual will most often refuse to recognize the exceptions. That's because these narratives, as provided by society, are hard-coded into our brains. Those narratives are how we determine what things "mean."

People choose the roles they play from an accepted set of roles offered by society, and within each role only certain narratives are permitted. Let me emphasize - anything not fitting into that role is generally ignored unless it becomes extremely pressing. "Designing a successful government program to solve a social problem" is not an allowable narrative if your role is successful Washington reporter.

For conservatives generally the only acceptable way to get medical care is from private wealth or from current employment. That's their narrative. But it pointedly excludes the idea that the government might use reasonable insurance planning to organize the financing of health care services in advance of need and then let the private market bid to offer those services.

The answer to the question is that conservatives like the Koch brothers have worked reporters very hard to set the acceptable narratives that successful reporters are allowed to consider. There is no equivalent liberal or progressive effort being planned or conducted.

Also as Lakoff points out, merely providing the facts does not overcome the hardwired narratives built into the brain. The fantasy that such facts might change the narratives is the 18th-Century brain theory he is demonstrating is false. Frames and narratives are what matters, not facts. Those frames and narratives are hardwired into the structure of the brain. Facts that do not match the narrative will find it difficult to find a "landing place" in memory.

Dredd discusses dementia, personal and social

Is America suffering through a period of social dementia? Have we all lost contact with reality as a group? That is an implication of Max Blumenthal's discussion of Secular Salvation Narratives. Dredd discusses this. Dredd's discussion goes further than Blumenthal's by suggesting that America as a society has culturally lost contact with reality. If that's true, then it goes to the very core of our culture, and that hinges on the nature of narratives. So first let's briefly look at what Dredd suggests.

Dredd is describing America as a society in which certain elites wanted to take control of the population, but instead of using the brute force techniques of government (which they concluded would not work) they developed a set of propaganda narratives to control how Americans think. Go read Dredd's article. Propaganda that works does so by creating a preferred narrative that shifts the culture. "Preferred?" Well, "Propaganda" naturally means that the narrative desired by the propagandists is the goal.

The psychologists say that the human memory is physically laid down in a narrative framework. That, it seems to me, is the basis for the way culture is passed on from one generation to another and probably the way information used to be transmitted between families and communities before humans developed technologies to transmit information. In other words, we learn what is important about how society is ordered through the stories we are told.

So exactly what is a narrative? Well, it's a story. That is, it is a set of characters who undergo a series of events, and the events are connected through the means of cause-and-effect. Narratives fit into an overall pattern of beginning, middle and end, and each of those categories has different characteristics and different purposes. I speculate that the human capacity to think in narrative may be the origin of the human ability to recognize time. (The discipline of General Semantics calls this Time Binding.)

The difference between history and a fable is that when one is telling history the details of the events are verified by sources other than just trust in the veracity, memory and accuracy of the story-teller. The tales told by minstrels when they passed from one community to another were generally dependent on the memory of the minstrel. Minstrels seem to have developed poetic techniques as memory aids so that they could remember the details well enough so that when they told the same tale several times, they actually did tell roughly the same story. Remember those poetic techniques. They were methods of using quirks of the brain to better remember details.

Those same narrative techniques that transmit culture also transmit propaganda. The two American business disciplines most closely associated with creating propaganda are Public Relations and Advertising. Both say to the public that they don't change anything, and yet they both sell their services to many businesses and individuals who are investing good money in what they do with the intent of making a profit. Is it reasonable to believe that those businesses exist but do nothing effective? Nope.

I wouldn't dismiss Dredd's description of modern America as a culture that has lost contact with reality. His proposal regarding how it might have happened is missing only a good description of who the culprits who did it are. The social mechanics are certainly in place, and the evidence for the sanity of American culture is weak at best.

Max Blumenthal's description of a secular narrative built up by Obama in order to win the election as President and now dashed in the chaos of the health care reform legislation in the Senate looks like a good explanation for the mass depression currently being felt by disappointed liberals and progressives.

Anyway, these are my current thoughts on the subject.

Narrative - why it matters

Here is an interesting story of how narrative drives political actions.

Earlier this week on NPR, I heard a man-on-the-street segment about the current election cycle featuring three Southern women, two Texans, one a former New Orleans resident who left after Katrina.

The first woman is an assistant manager in a store somewhere in Texas. She sounded bone-weary about both politics and life. When the interviewer asked what national issues she followed most, she said that she just keeps her head down and tries to keep her family afloat, that all that stuff is beyond her. But when she was asked a bit later about what she’d find attractive about a presidential candidate, she very forcefully turned to the issue of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, she said, are what has made it difficult for Americans like herself to access welfare and health care. The interviewer pointed out that illegal immigrants usually don’t make use of welfare or unemployment compensation, but the woman shrugged that off. Her resentments were deeper: she sees people that she’s sure are illegal immigrants driving by in nice cars and they seem far better off than she is. She’s struggling just to keep afloat, she’s had to give up health insurance for her children because it’s unaffordable. Her answer to the mystery of how people around her seem better off is that government has something to do with it but in a deep and enigmatic way, and that she’s looking for the candidate who will admit to it, who will mirror her structure of feeling, long before she’s looking for some highly concretized solution. [Snip]

That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she’s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she’s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now.

The real problem as far as that woman is concerned is

that life is changing, that the changes are mysterious, that power lies somewhere far away from where the speaker exists, and that they don’t believe that there’s much to be done about it.

The Liberals have been offering plans and programs that are intended to solve that woman's problems, but they all come down to one thing as far as she knows. She is currently fucked, things aren't getting better, and they won't get any better, and the only thing the Liberals offer is "I'm and expert. Trust Me." and she doesn't, because the experts in the past said the same damned thing, and look how THAT turned out.

The Conservatives offer a narrative that "explains" why her life is so difficult. It's simple. All the illegal immigrants are coming over the border and using up the resources. That's why she can't get any. The narrative is simply, it's understandable, and - Hey! It still won't change anything, but that lady understands what is happening to her, and nothing is going to change anyway. At least she has someone to blame.

I'd say that the same thing that drives this woman to the narrative "It's all about the illegal immigrants." will also drive her to find a leader who promises that if she will join him, things will get better because he understands her and her problems. That would fit right in with the idea that she is looking for someone who can mirror the structure of her feelings.

That structure is found in the narrative she accepts as explanation. As Mark Kleiman pointed out in his post that directed me to this one, The answer as far as that woman is concerned could just as well be that "Witches cause the problems."

She'll ignore the expert who says "Trust me." because that does not mirror her feelings the way the narrative she has accepted does.