Advertising and agency

Tim Burke has a thoughtful and fascinating post up about the contradictions of liberal agency with respect to advertising, a puzzle I’ve occasionally thought about devoting some time to thinking about. Does is undermine the whole liberal agency scheme, or is it an expensive boondoggle? Probably neither, but apparently those answers tend to run in cycles. Also, a hilarious attempt at regulating the messages of alcohol advertising in the UK.

I’m puzzled by the following paragraph, however, which relates this discussion to our current political dillemas:

This all has a lot to do with why I absolutely loathe George Lakoff’s crippling talk about “framing”. It’s a fatal dalliance for the Democrats, an invitation to think that the only reason they’ve lost elections is that they don’t subvert the will of the proles as effectively as the Republicans. This is fatal partly because it feeds into some of the subsurface elitism of some Democrats, and invites them to destructively Olympian and vanguardist attitudes. But it’s also fatal as a more general conception of politics: you can’t believe in the ability of people to choose (with whatever provisos and limits you want to put on that) while also preaching corrosively that it’s just a matter of slickly framing things to divergent communities’ prerational and ahistorical way of being in and seeing the world. Now I happen to think and hope that this will someday also be the downfall of the Republicans, that eventually some of their voting base will see that they’re being played. But if I want to understand why that hasn’t happened yet, I need to be just as interested in what it is that the voters see from within their social and personal worlds as I am in the kinds of rhetoric and appeals that is connecting with their vision. I need to assume that somehow a genuine connection has been made even if it’s one that is not in the ultimate interests of many Republican voters.

This certainly fits with Burke’s comment in the discussion below that he suspects the Democrats are SOL in 06 and 08. Burke seems to be assuming here that a) the Democrats thinking in terms of “framing” (that is, technologies of advertising) will be “fatal” but the GOP does it now with a fair amount of success and hasn’t been caught yet. Now this could all be correct, and that wouldn’t surprise me at all. But why is something that’s politically successful for them “fatal” to us? Why is it “fatal” for one side to flirt with such assumptions while the other side uses them to great advantage for decades before the strategy backfires? I don’t share Burke’s confidence that it will, but even granting him the benefit of the doubt, there is a tremendous unexplained disparity here. This paragraph requires, it seems to me, further explanation.

A more interesting question is how to one might approach political discourse in a way that’s respectful of the agency of our fellow citizens and at the same time recognizes the very real ways in which “prerational and ahistorical ways of being in and seeing the world” are quite real and unignorable parts of the political landscape.