Donald Trump has done pretty well for someone ridiculed by most of the liberal media as an incoherent babbler. His campaigning speeches were just “word salad”, people chuckled. But the speeches worked. And they did so because Trump is a brilliant and careful rhetorician. His can-do slogan of renewed domestic glory – “Make America Great Again” – won over Hillary Clinton’s … well, what was hers, again? Oh, yes, “Stronger Together” – which met exactly the same fate as the Remain campaign’s insipid “Stronger In”.

In the language of political discourse analysis, greatness and strength are both examples of a frame: a guiding metaphor or image for a political argument. It is striking how often Trump deployed the frames of beauty, happiness and optimism: “You’re going to be so happy; you’re going to be so proud,” he would beam, even as he curried favour with racists. Frames can inspire. But they can also deceive.

As another example, we hear a lot about “the British people” these days. The three judges who ruled on the Article 50 challenge were called “enemies of the people” by the Daily Mail, while the Telegraph spoke of “the judges against the British people”, even though the decision defended British citizens’ right to parliamentary representation against the arbitrary exercise of executive power. This singular “British people” has come into peculiar focus since the Brexit vote. As Theresa May said again this month: “The British people, the majority of the British people, voted to leave the European Union.” The “people” voted; now the supposed “will of the people” must be respected. Except they, and it, are purely imaginary.

Hillary Clinton’s slogan turned out not to be so strong.

Photograph: Paul Sancya/AP

The Brexit vote was carried by 27% of the population, or 37% of the electorate; slightly fewer voted for Remain; the opinion of the rest of us is unknown. Clearly, the picture of a single British “people” with a unified “will” on this issue is a fiction. (Nor, for the same reasons, did “the American people” vote just for Donald Trump: more people voted for Clinton, and about 42% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote at all.) “The British people”, then, is just another frame, to bolster the leave campaign’s successful deployment of the frame of taking back control. Now, it appears the country has a choice between a “hard Brexit” or a “soft Brexit”: a frame that may seem to favour the pro-EU side if one thinks of hard and soft landings, or their opponents if one favours tumescent forcefulness.

Frames are often imposed by means of subtly manipulative language – Unspeak, or argumentative soundbites. (The idea that Britain should “take back control of our borders”, for example, dishonestly implied that we had no control over them beforehand.) But the same frame can be invoked by many different forms of words. Also part of the leave campaign’s “control” frame, for example, was the emphasis on making our own laws and reclaiming our sovereignty (something else we already had, as evidenced by the very fact we are able to leave the EU).

Political arguments are often conducted as a clash of frames. Control or strength? Security or empathy? And successful social and political reforms can be accompanied by clever reframings. In the US, “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” was redesignated “marriage equality”. Now, the frame was not one of homosexuality, but one of equality: of simple fairness. And in this way, or so it might appear, prejudice was overcome. On the other hand, the faultline over abortion rights in America is symbolised by the incommensurable frames in which the issue is couched: one side uses the frame of life (“pro-life”), the other the frame of choice (“pro-choice”), and never the twain shall meet.

The Leave campaign emphasised the need to reclaim our sovereignty. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Frames are all around us. They saturate political and social discourse. Some think this is just the way mass political communication is bound to work, but others say it doesn’t have to. Must we always fight framing with framing, or is it time to try something different?

In recent years, it has become fashionable in political psychology to say that, broadly speaking, liberals and conservatives respond positively to different sorts of frame. This is one of the ideas promoted by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, whose popular book on framing, Don’t Think of an Elephant!, became a battle manual for despondent Democrats after George W Bush’s second election victory. In an earlier book, Moral Politics, Lakoff suggested that a major difference between conservatives and liberals lies in their mental models of the family. Republicans love a “strict father” frame, while Democrats prefer a “nurturant parent” picture.

In this sense, Lakoff pointed out recently, Trump is not some bizarre perversion of Republican party politics; on the contrary, he played the campaign as the ultimate “strict father”, threatening to ban Muslims and Mexicans from entering the country, and ready to insult anyone who disagreed with him. He, Lakoff argues, “is a pragmatic conservative, par excellence” – as well as a master of political framing.

Another model of liberal v conservative frames has been developed by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. His “moral foundations” scheme lists six axes along which people make political value judgments: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, ingroup loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and purity/degradation. Research suggests that liberals respond more strongly than other people to arguments within the “care” and “fairness” frames, and less strongly to the others. Conservatives, meanwhile, respond more or less equally to all six. This is offered as one explanation as to why the frames of strength and group loyalty, for example, are traditionally rightwing appeals, while the left invoke empathy and egalitarianism.

Some people suggest, indeed, that this difference makes a conservative’s campaigning job fundamentally easier than a liberal’s, as Aleksandra Cichocka, lecturer in political psychology at the University of Kent, explains. “Research shows that people endorse rightwing ideologies because they offer feelings of security, certainty and power,” she says. “It has been argued that right-wingers hold a sort of psychological advantage, because they provide simpler and possibly less ambiguous ideas on how society should work. Such ideas would be especially appealing to those who have been feeling powerless or out of control, and the recent economic crisis or increasing terrorist threats might have made people especially prone to feel this way.”

In the issue of abortion rights in the US, one side uses the frame of life (“pro-life”), the other the frame of choice (“pro-choice”). Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The Brexit and Trump campaigns did employ what are often thought of as rightwing frames – but not only those. Jim A Kuypers, professor of political communication at Virginia Tech and the author of several books on frame analysis, observes that both campaigns employed “a great deal of safety talk”, as well as emphasising in-group loyalty – “citizens of the UK, not the EU; Americans first; not the world”.

But Trump also exploited the frames that supposedly appeal most to liberals. “I think part of Trump’s appeal,” Kuypers suggests, “is that he is also speaking out using the harm/care and fairness/cheating categories” – in other words, those theoretically owned by his opponents. Trump claimed empathy for downtrodden American workers, while the aggressive moniker “Crooked Hillary”, however unfair in fact, evidently stuck.

The idea that the right are better at framing than the left has been common since the early 2000s, but there are differing ideas about why it should be so. Some people think rightwing frames are more attractive to many people because they are simple and easy to understand. Some, like Lakoff, think the problem is that Democrats have not taken framing seriously enough to do it right. Others add that institutions are key. Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia and a Green party activist, runs the Green House thinktank and the “Green Words Workshop”, whose aim is to explore ways of communicating ecological issues more powerfully to the public. “Far more resourcing is needed,” he says, for the left to match the framing power of its adversaries. “That’s one of the problems; we need the kind of network of thinktanks, foundations etc that the right has. Money matters!”

The Daily Mail called the judges who ruled on the Article 50 challenge over Brexit were called ‘Enemies of the People’. Photograph: Daily Mail

So what is to be done? Read, like many others, thinks those on the left ought to be bolder about “framing for success”. “We tend too often to act like a bunch of policy wonks, rather than a bunch of people out to win,” he says. In his 2014 report, Post-Growth Common Sense, he suggests that the very idea of “the environment” suggests that nature is something outside ourselves, and that “sustainability” implies simply adjusting the current system so that it can keep going for ever. Instead of “sustainable development”, he suggests that Greens should adopt a frame of “environmental citizenship”. Opposition to economic growth to its own sake should be framed not as “limits to growth” or “degrowth” but as “one-planet living”.

Lakoff, meanwhile, advises Democrats to pivot to the frames of “public” and “freedom”. Stop defending “the government”, he says, and instead talk about “public resources”, “public servants”, and so forth. “And take back freedom,” he advises. “Public resources provide for freedom in private enterprise and private life.” He even suggests that progressives should “give up identity politics. No more women’s issues, black issues, Latino issues. Their issues are all real, and need public discussion. But they all fall under freedom issues, human issues.”

He sums up his advice to progressives: “Understand what you believe. Say what you believe and be honest. Understand that other people have a different worldview. Understand that most people are biconceptual” – liberal on some subjects, conservative on others. “Speak to that aspect of the biconceptual brain that has empathy,” he advises. “Bring the science of mind into public discourse.” All that, he adds wryly, is of course “a tall order”.

Others, however, are sceptical that some kind of “good” framing can defeat the bad. In his recent book Enough Said, Mark Thompson, the former director-general of the BBC, argues that framing and spin have rendered the political environment toxic. He calls on politicians to adopt, instead, a mode of “critical persuasion”, treating the public like adults, and speaking honestly about the difficult tradeoffs involved in any decision. If aggressive framing by the right is somehow misleading and dishonourable, why should it be acceptable for the left? There is no perfectly neutral language that is completely free of framing, but clashes of highly potent frames can easily just lead to entrenched positions in a kind of frozen rhetorical war, as with the pro-life versus pro-choice standoff in the US.

Mark Thompson, former director-general of the BBC, has said that framing and spin have rendered the political environment toxic. Photograph: Robert Judges/Rex/Shutterstock

And what if the overarching frame that governs our political disagreements is itself poisonous? Too much of politics right now, Kuypers says, is conducted within a “tragic frame”, in which: “The other person or side is demonised, wrong, evil, needs to be punished. I believe this is an easier behaviour for liberals to engage in given that their moral foundations are so strongly linked with harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, although conservatives are not immune to this by any means. But how easy is it to demonise someone when you view them as unfair and harmful to the equitable view of humanity to which you subscribe?”

Clearly, this is already happening with Trump and Trump supporters. Things would be more civilised, Kuypers suggests, if we switched to a comic frame, which the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke defined as one in which people are “necessarily mistaken [and] all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools”.

But there is a deeper problem with liberals’ hand-wringing over the notion that the right are so much better at framing than they are. It is that it implies an uncomfortable theory of false consciousness among the benighted ordinary folk who vote for rightwing causes and politicians. They must be blinded by the frames; they could not possibly be deciding on the basis of the actual people and policies. Could they?

Well, maybe they are. It could very well be that the success of the way the Brexit and Trump campaigns were framed was just a symptom of something larger, rather than the proximate cause of victory. “Maybe the appeal of certain frames depends mainly on the real prevailing social conditions at any given moment,” suggests Deborah Cameron, professor of linguistics at the University of Oxford. “The anti-EU lot have been complaining about loss of sovereignty since we joined, but it took a prolonged period of deepening inequality and social upheaval to give Brexit traction. Or in other words, maybe it’s not primarily a question of how things are represented. Trump didn’t create his angry white public; they created a space for him to fill.”

The documentary film-maker Adam Curtis agrees that the framing is secondary. “I don’t think that the attraction of Trump or Brexit has much to do with the ‘stories’ they tell,” he says. “I’m not sure people believe those either. What they both do offer people is a giant button with ‘Fuck off’ written on it in giant letters. And faced with a distrust of all the old frames, a lot of people want to press that button.”

Trump addressing supporters during a campaign rally in Colorado. Photograph: Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty Images

Curtis argues that the power of political framing may be on the wane, because the rise of individualism, especially in the atomised world of social media, is an existential challenge to mass democracy itself. “To shape the world they way they want, politicians have to assemble the masses together. That’s what gives them power.” (They need to convince us, to return to our earlier example, that we are “the British people” or “the American people”.) “And the way they do it,” Curtis continues, “is by persuading people to give themselves up to a compelling story. In an age of super-individualism that’s impossible – it becomes like herding piglets, because everyone wants to define their own story and definitely not give themselves up to the politician’s frame.”

So where will the next big stories, the frames of the future, come from? “There is obviously a real hunger for something that allows you to challenge a system in which many people feel more and more helpless,” Curtis says. “I don’t think Donald Trump or Brexit are that – but they are straws in the wind.” He doubts, too, that a simple return to nationalism is the next epochal frame. Perhaps, he suggests, it will come from religion or science. But whatever it is, he points out, it “will have to square the circle. It will make you still feel that you are an individual in control of your life and feelings. But also make you want to surrender yourself to some grand picture of the future. Someone who manages to put those two together is going to be very powerful.”

Many might fear that Trump is already that man. But what if he is only a John the Baptist to the real framing messiah to come?