Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election…

Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives elections now for decades. They win even when they lose, because all parties focus on the economy. /1 https://t.co/5Aes38xtnq

The annual budget ritual is next week in Australia, the great religious festival of economic society. The ALP like most major progressive parties don’t even realise that this is them ruling from inside the cells that framing has created for them. /2 https://t.co/fx2QuCQfwz

The truly ridiculous idea that a country is run by money. By what it can ‘afford’. Nobody even questions it, except the MMT folk. As if a country is a business, with cashflow. Exactly how modern conservatives want you to think of a country. That’s why they invented the frame. /3

This isn’t some hippie argument about ‘there are more important things than money’ either. Money is a medium of exchange, nothing else. Wealth is what a country has by means of its social arrangements and natural resources. Not money. A country is a society, not an economy. /4

By drastically narrowing society to that handful of social transactions we call ‘economic’ transactions, the people who benefit most from those transactions benefit even more. That’s all that the economy is. A political strategy to redirect all politics, to those transactions. /5

Here’s another frame that the ALP and other progressives globally have swallowed hook, line and sinker. ‘The vulnerable’. We’ve heard that a lot in this pandemic, and it’s spreading, now into talk about unemployment benefits too. Increases are targeted at ‘the vulnerable’. /6

It sounds such a lovely, caring thing to be doing, looking after the vulnerable. But that’s not what the framing means at all. Conservatives set it up to mean people who are reliant upon the State for assistance. By doing that they’re also arguing something else. /7

That there are far too many people who are not vulnerable in that State-aid way. They’re not truly vulnerable. Thus their constant assault on social welfare programs. This subtle difference in meaning has enormous outcomes, quite deliberately. /8

It replaces the idea of an inter-connected and inter-dependent society, with a nation of individuals, more or less ‘having a go’ to make themselves prosperous and thriving. Never forget that they don’t hide, this, for them ‘there is no such thing as society’. They say it. /9

The vulnerable are the people who aren’t yet having a go, but we can give them (temporary) aid to help them have a go too. This is what the framing means, and the ALP like the usual deer in the headlights are doing it all for the LNP, even though the LNP lost the election. /10

That’s the power of framing. Once your frame sticks, you own the space. Winning the election is no longer necessary. Progressive voters can gnash their teeth about how the ALP isn’t doing progressive things. If they did the framings would crucify them. /11

The public lives and breathes the framings, not the daily policy debate in parliaments. Unless they develop alternative framings and spend years promoting them widely, they’ll keep losing, even when they win. To finish, here’s another angle on the ‘vulnerable’ framing. /12

When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after lift-off in the 1980s, the eventual cause was found to be some O-ring seals in one of the booster rockets. A relatively minor part of the whole shuttle assembly. But a vulnerable part, as it turns out. /13 https://t.co/b7FexlgJT6

Now imagine treating that vulnerability in the way we’re treating vulnerabilities, in politics. By treating it as a separate, isolated thing that can be allowed to go its own way, while the less vulnerable carry on. As if the Shuttle could have just kept on flying. /14 https://t.co/Mxz4cfiQ5t

Obviously ridiculous. Because the vulnerable part was completely inter-connected with the whole Shuttle assembly. This is what the stupidity of economic politics completely misses, inter-connection. Societies invented ‘the public’ in the late 19th century for this reason. /15

Not to look after a handful of separate unfortunate people. But because they realised their society was collapsing, because the suffering of the vulnerable was creating an explosion everywhere else. Modern conservatives seem completely incapable of understanding this. /16

You are only as strong as your weakest link, as the saying goes. If you let society fail for that weakest link, the whole lot comes tumbling down. We’re doing that with Covid right now. Letting the vulnerable die, thinking that’s an isolated problem. It’s not. /17

It’s the symptom of our entire society collapsing. /end