Timothy Burke on "Framing"

Timothy Burke writes in "Easily Distracted":

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.

It's an interesting piece, covering a lot of ground other than political strategizing. Check it out here.