Despite the decline of the neoliberal consensus, it’s hard to break away from the dominant narratives of the last thirty years.

We’ve seen this is in surprise election after surprise election. Onlookers have underestimated outsider candidates because they don’t fit the mold of a successful politician. They don’t look right, they don’t say the right things, they lie and make mistakes, they have beliefs that are supposed to be electoral suicide — everything points to them losing. But they don’t. Scandals bounce off them and radical ideas gain support.

We find it hard to understand all this — you see it in countless thinkpieces. Why is Donald Trump impervious to lying, cheating and abusing his position? Why are young people interested in socialism again? Why are polls misunderstanding what voters want so often? The prevailing narrative that tells us how politics works suggests these things shouldn’t be happening, or at least not very often. But they are. Again and again and again.

Changing the narrative

In this episode, Warren spoke with Martin Kirk, Global Campaigns Director of The Rules, an organisation that is working to deconstruct and reimagine old narratives. They discussed how the language we use to describe big topics sets the tone without many people even noticing it.

Language guides how we frame problems.

Kirk points out that the way we talk about global poverty tells a story: this is a ‘natural’ system that requires charity, giving and compassion from the wealthy parts of the world. It is not something that the west caused with colonialism and then international debt and hard line neoliberal policy. This framing depoliticizes it. It makes the audience focus on treating symptoms of poverty rather than thinking about systemic change to the system that lets it happen.

Another example: the excesses of capitalism. The neoliberal vision of capitalism is inherently tied to growth. Growth must be aggressively, obsessively pursued. The problem with this is that the focus on growth has led to major problems in the system being ignored and undervalued: ecological destruction, inequality rising to historical levels, the long-term erosion of faith in representative democracy. As Kirk laid out in a piece for The Guardian, these are the threats that concern young people now.

“For millennials especially, the binaries of capitalism v socialism, or capitalism v communism, are hollow and old-fashioned. Far more likely is that people are realizing – either consciously or at some gut level – that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has as its single goal turning natural and human resources into capital, and do so more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment.”

There are restrictive frames like this all over the place. Politics, economics, technology — these are the major debates shaping the future, yet the range of options are being limited before any serious analysis can take place. As an organisation, The Rules aims to to bring disparate movements together, connecting the dots between various issues and crises — focusing on the systems that create problems, rather than the problems themselves.

And how can they change that? By changing the narratives that we use to understand problems. This isn’t a set of policy prescriptions — certainly not the classic leftist go-to of asking for more and better government — it’s a movement to connect activists and thinkers with the real issues.

Re-framing in the age of social media

“If you can’t reframe your argument, just get off Facebook.”

For most people, the realm they publicly talk about political issues is social media. That’s why this Atlantic video on applying framing to political persuasion is itself framed around having an argument on Facebook. Rather than blocking unsavoury opinions from your news feed, you could figure out ways to explain your point of view that chimes with their world view.

Changing people’s minds is very hard to do. We know from the last year that a number of organisations have figured out they can use digital tools to manipulate public opinion. Botnets, astroturfing, alternative ‘news’ networks, targeted ads and on and on. These are tools that disseminate false or misleading information. They work to discredit the truth and therefore bring down honest political actors — if everybody is lying and cheating, you might as well vote for the guy who’s honest about it.

These aren’t tools that actually change minds. They aren’t spreading coherent ideologies or policies. Most of what they achieve is disengagement from politics. And that opens the way for small groups of radicals to achieve power.

What The Rules is attempting is much, much harder than that, but their tactics are well-suited to the digital environment. Explosive Facebook threads are great examples of two sides getting further and further apart. It doesn’t matter how good it feels to drop a bunch of facts on your MAGA uncle, nobody wins that exchange.

Only by re-framing the argument — by undermining the conventional narratives that surround topics — can we start changing minds.

You know the drill

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