Frames are powerful because they can quickly bring up a whole set of feelings. When we communicate, frames give us a simple way to elicit a particular response to what can be a very complex issue or idea.
The conservatives’ “death tax” frame is a perfect example.
The Frame on Taxes
John McCain upset conservatives because of the position he took on the inheritance, or estate, tax.
The United States was founded in opposition to a monarchy supported by a landed aristocracy. Our country’s Founders wanted to make sure that their radical idea—a country governed by We the People—would never be replaced by a king and a bunch of nobles.
Writing more than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson argued for a tax on accumulated wealth because he knew that if wealth was passed down from one generation to the next, those lucky inheritors would turn into new aristocrats. You don’t hear about the Founders passing on fortunes because most of them didn’t believe in doing so. Thomas Jefferson himself died in debt.
Despite Jefferson’s warnings about the danger to “the state” of the accumulation of “excessive wealth,” such a tax was not actually put into place until 1916. The estate tax was one of the many reforms put into place during the Progressive Era, a period from 1896 to 1918 when ordinary people rose up against the robber barons and the monopolists who had created an aristocracy of wealth, power, and privilege in this country. President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, advocated for the estate tax in 1906, arguing, “The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the State because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”
Teddy Roosevelt, in that simple sentence, gave us the liberal frame on the estate tax and in fact on all taxes. Taxes are the means we use to fund our society, which includes the government institutions that make it possible for people to accumulate wealth.
I often talk to people on my radio show who say they shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
“Why not?” I ask them.
“Well, I’m a self-made man,” they reply. “I’ve earned all of my money by starting my own business, and I don’t see why I should pay any of it to the government.” That’s the conservative core story, that self-interest trumps the public interest.
“Okay,” I say. “Well, do you have plumbing and electricity in your business?”
“Of course.”
“Do your employees and customers use the highway and street system to drive to your business or take public transportation to get there?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. And do you use money for your transactions and keep that money in a bank that you trust?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I say, “it seems to me you’ve relied pretty heavily on the government institutions and government-built infrastructure of our society to build your business. You’ve used public utilities and the public transportation infrastructure; you rely on the public regulation of banking and finance; you probably also are relying on public education to train the people who work for you and on public programs like Social Security and Medicare to cut the cost to you of employee benefits. Seems to me like you owe society a pretty large bill for all the services you use to make your business possible and profitable, and the way we pay that debt is through taxes.”
That’s the traditional liberal American story on taxes, and it’s a powerful one. It works even better for the estate tax.
Estate Tax or Death Tax
Most of us would like to be able to pass along enough money to our children to ensure that they will be able to put food on the table and perhaps even to avoid working for a living for a few generations. We don’t, however, want to create a permanent overclass in America simply because someone got lucky and had a very good businessman for a grandfather or a very good investor for a grandmother. Family dynasties—in our day, the Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Bushes spring to mind—are ultimately not healthy for democracy and largely didn’t even exist in this nation until after the Civil War, when incorporation and taxation laws were changed to allow the massive accumulation of wealth using the corporate form.
Nor are they healthy for capitalism. Many wealthy businesspeople believe that a powerful class composed mostly of people of inherited wealth cripples innovation and ingenuity, creating a disincentive to work among the best educated. Warren Buffet is a good example of a self-made man who has decided to give his massive estate away rather than give it to his children (the kids don’t become paupers—they each will inherit millions).
He’s in good company, which includes the father of Bill Gates as well as businessman Bill Foster, who will owe the tax.
“The proponents of estate tax repeal are fond of calling it the ‘death tax.’ It’s not a death tax; it’s a rich kids’ tax,” Foster has said. “The estate tax is one of our time-tested and best tools in preventing the aristocracy of an ‘Old Europe’ from establishing itself on our shores.”4
Understood as an inheritance tax or, as Foster calls it, a “rich kids’ tax,” this tax makes sense. An inheritance tax is a kind of tax even a Republican might be willing to support. And that posed a problem for conservatives, who actually want to create a new aristocracy. So they changed the frame.
The frame “inheritance tax or estate tax” gave people the positive message that We the People helped create the wealth of the rich, and We the People have a right to use some of that wealth to pay for the institutions that keep our nation strong. It reminded people of the aristocrats of old Britain and of how in America we have a democracy rather than an aristocracy.
The conservatives replaced that nice-but-not-very-powerful frame “estate tax” with a new frame: “death tax.” Death is one of Gingrich’s anchor words. No one wants to die. It also reminds us that this tax is levied when a loved one dies. Finally, it suggests that everyone will have to pay the tax—because everyone dies—rather than just the 0.27 percent (less than three-tenths of 1 percent) of Americans who actually paid it in 2006.5
Here’s how powerful the frame “death tax” is. When pollsters asked Americans whether they thought the estate tax should be reformed or repealed, 57 percent favored keeping the tax as it was or reforming it, while only 23 percent favored repealing it.6 When those same pollsters, joined by Frank Luntz’s company, later asked voters if the “death tax” was “fair,” they got a very different answer: 80 percent of voters polled thought the tax was unfair and should be repealed.7
“Death tax” is effective not because it is the best description of the tax. In fact, it is quite misleading. “Death tax” is effective because it triggers a picture of death and raises a whole constellation of negative emotions that arise for us around death. Those negative emotions become anchored to this tax. Once our feelings have changed, the way we think about an idea changes as well. It’s an incredibly powerful—albeit deceptive—frame and was promoted in large part by several heirs of the Walton family, who spent millions on front groups that promoted the “IRS death tax” frame to save those few people tens of billions of dollars when their estates move to their heirs.
War versus Occupation
Some frames can be hard to see or hear. When George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, he told the American people we were at war. That seemed to be a fact, not a frame.
“War,” however, is a frame, and it’s one of the most powerful in our culture. In the case of Iraq, using the “war” frame was the way that Bush, Rove, and their cronies helped persuade Americans that they were pursuing a noble strategy. Few Americans like to oppose a president when the country is at war.
The fact, however, is that the war in Iraq ended on May 1, 2003, when George W. Bush stood below a “Mission Accomplished” sign aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and correctly declared that we had “victoriously” defeated the Iraqi army and overthrown its government.
Our military machine is tremendously good at fighting wars—blowing up infrastructure, killing opposing armies, and toppling governments. We
did that successfully in Iraq in a matter of a few weeks. We destroyed its army, wiped out its air defenses, devastated its Republican Guard, seized its capital, arrested its leaders, and took control of its government. We won the war.
After we won the war, however, we stayed in Iraq. That is called an occupation.
The distinction between the “war” frame and the “occupation” frame is politically critical because wars can be won or lost but occupations most honorably end by redeployments.
We won World War II, and it carried the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt to great political heights. We lost the Vietnam War, and it politically destroyed Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.
Americans don’t like to lose or draw at war. Even people who oppose wars find it uncomfortable, at some level, to lose; and Republican strategists have used this psychological reality for political gain. When wars are won—even when they’re totally illegal and undeclared wars, like Reagan’s adventure in Grenada—it tends to create a national good feeling.
On the other hand, when arguably just wars, or at least legally defensible “police action” wars, like Korea, are not won, they wound the national psyche. And losing a war—like the German loss of WWI—can be so psychologically devastating to a citizenry that it sets up a nation for a strongman dictatorship to “restore the national honor.”
When using the “war” frame, it’s not politically possible to push to end the war: losing a war is too psychologically damaging. When using the frame of “occupation,” however, it is very possible to push to end the occupation, and in fact that end is welcomed. In this case, how you frame the US troop presence in Iraq has everything to do with how soon that troop presence ends.
Here’s a scenario—fictitious—of how Democrats could have played out the change of frames:
Tim Russert: So, Senator Reid, what do you think of this most recent news from the war in Iraq?
Senator Harry Reid: The war ended in May 2003, Tim. Our military did its usual brilliant job, and we defeated Saddam’s army. The occupation of Iraq, however, isn’t going so well, in large part because the Bush administration has totally botched the job, leading to the death of thousands of our soldiers and dragging our nation into disrepute around the world. I’d like to see us greatly scale down the current occupation of Iraq, redeploy our occupation forces to nearby nations in case we’re needed by the new Iraqi government, and get our brave young men and women out of harm’s way. Occupations have a nasty way of fomenting civil wars, you know, and we don’t want this one to go any further than it has.
TR: But isn’t the war in Iraq part of the global “War on Terror”?
SR: Our occupation of Iraq is encouraging more Muslims around the world to eye us suspiciously. Some may even be inspired by our occupation of this Islamic nation to take up arms or unconventional weapons against us, perhaps even here at home, just as Osama bin Laden said he hit us on 9/11 because we were occupying part of his homeland, Saudi Arabia, at the Prince Sultan Air Base, where Bush Sr. first put troops in 1991 to project force into Kuwait and enforce the Iraqi no-fly zone. The Bush policy of an unending occupation of Iraq is increasing the danger that people will use the tactic of terror against us and our allies; and, just as George W. Bush wisely redeployed our troops from Saudi Arabia, we should begin right now to redeploy our troops who are occupying Iraq.
TR: But the war …
SR: Tim, Tim, Tim! The war is over! George W. Bush declared victory himself, in May 2003, when our brave soldiers seized control of Iraq. That’s the definition of the end of a war, as anybody who’s ever served in the military can tell you. Unfortunately, our occupation of Iraq since the end of the war, using a small military force and a lot of Halliburton, hasn’t worked. We should take Halliburton’s billions and give them to the Iraqis so they can rebuild their own nation—the way we helped Europeans rebuild after World War II—and go from being an occupying power to being an ally of Iraq and the Iraqi people, like we did with Japan and Germany.
TR [bewildered]: I can’t call it a war anymore? We have to change our NBC “War in Iraq” banners and graphics?
SR [patting Russert’s hand]: Yes, Tim. The war is over. It’s now an occupation and has been for three years. And like all occupations, it’s best to wrap it up so Iraq can get on with its business. I’m sure your graphics people can come up with some new logos that say “Occupation of Iraq.” It’ll be a nice project for them, maybe even earn them some much-needed overtime pay. The “War in Iraq” graphics are getting a bit stale, don’t you think? After all, soon we’ll be able to say that we fought World War II in less time than we’ve been in Iraq. Wars are usually short, but occupations—particularly when they’re done stupidly—can be hellish.
TR [brightening]: Ah, so! Now I get it! I even wrote about wars and occupations in my book about my dad. Thanks for coming on the program today and clarifying this for us.
Frames matter and have consequences, sometimes life-and-death consequences. If the Democrats had been able to shift the media’s discussion from “war” to “occupation” back in 2003, we could have prevented the deaths of many, many Iraqis and thousands of US soldiers.
From Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds,
and Restore America’s Original Vision by Thom Hartmann,
© 2007, 2008, published by Berrett-Koehler.
Walking the Blues Away
From Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the
Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being
Never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
THE HUMAN BODY IS A SELF-HEALING ORGANISM. WHEN YOU CUT your finger, it heals. If you break your leg, it heals. Even if part of you is cut out in surgery, the surgeon’s wound heals. We heal from bacterial and viral invasions, from injuries, and from all variety of traumas. The mechanisms for healing are built into us. Five million years of evolution, or the grace of God, or both, have made our bodies automatic healing machines. So why wouldn’t the same be true of our minds and emotions?
All of the traumas that we experience in life leave their wounds; if humankind hadn’t had ways of healing from those emotional and psychological blows, over time society would have become progressively less functional. Instead history shows us that people usually recover from even the most severe psychological wounds, often learning great lessons or gaining important insights in the recovery process.
The famous Kauai longitudinal study of children raised in stressful, disadvantaged conditions found that a higher percentage of the children grew up “highly resilient” than did a middle-class comparison group.1 The generation that survived the Republican Great Depression and the Nazi Holocaust in Europe went on to create important social institutions, build nations, and offer comfort and hope to humankind. Elie Wiesel’s experience specifically comes to mind: although he would never have wished on another the horrific experience of being in one of Hitler’s death camps, through his writing of that experience he has given a particularly inspiring model of resilience and healing to the world.
The reality is that although adversity breaks some people, it strengthens others. And when people heal from adversity, the old cliché What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger usually rings true.
But, just as with the production of scar tissue in the healing of a wound to the skin—a process involving millions of cells producing very specific compounds in response to the trauma in the tissue—there must be an inborn mechanism for healing the mind and the emotions. And just as healing from a cut can be speeded up by keeping the wound clean and dry or can be slowed down by letting the wound get wet or dirty, this emotional healing is also a process that can be either stimulated or thwarted by our interventions.
I’ve identified a specific healing mechanism and process that nature has built into the human mind and body that enables us to process trauma in a way that is quick, functional, and permanent. Just like the skin’s mechanism for forming
scabs and scars and eventually even making the scars vanish, this mechanism is simple, fundamental, and elegant.
In its simplest form, this mechanism involves rhythmic side-to-side stimulation of the body. This side-to-side motion, or bilateral movement, causes nerve impulses to cross the brain from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere and back at a specific rate or frequency. This cross-patterning produces an organic integration of left-hemisphere “thinking” functions with right-hemisphere and brain-stem “feeling” functions. This integration is a necessary precursor to emotional and intellectual healing from trauma.
This steady movement of nerve impulses across the hemispheres of the brain is stimulated in the bilateral-movement processes of a variety of modern forms of psychotherapy, such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Emotional Freedom Technique, and Thought Field Therapy. In its purest form, however, I’ve discovered that the natural and rhythmic left-right-left-right process of walking, while performing a simple mental exercise, can also stimulate this same internal integration process.
This, I posit, is the way humans have healed themselves from trauma for the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and it is only because so few of us walk anymore that we have to resort to office-based psychotherapeutic processes to produce the same result.
The Thom Hartmann Reader Page 11
