Survival of the Fittest

George Lakoff, a noted linguist, writes about the frames used by President Bush in his acceptance speech. This is the fourth of his series about the frames used in major speeches at the Republican National Convention.

On Day One of the convention, the frame, he says, was : All terror, all the time (The global War of Terror defines our lives and our generation).
On Day Two: Pull yourself up by your bootstraps--if you can afford the boots (With enough discipline, all Americans can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become prosperous).
On Day Three: Red-meat night frames Kerry (Kerry is weak, unpatriotic, antimilitary, against national security, without resolve, soft-hearted, confused, and totally unfit to be commander-in-chief).
And Day Four, the President's frame: Freedom, liberty, freedom.

The concept of frames is itself an interesting one. Something like the paradigms we talked about in the olden days, the concept is meant to explain how we view things, how our perspective literally shapes our perception. A photographer "frames" a shot by selecting what portion of his 360-degree perspective to capture through his lens. All else is ignored because what is seen through the lens is all that can be seen. A painting is "framed" by its outer boundaries. Whatever else may have motivated the painter is unseen. In making our case for any particular point, the frame is provided in large part by our values, especially clearcut, bedrock values that can be stated in black and white terms. At least that's how I'm understanding frames right now without having read Lakoff's book on the subject.

That being said, there are a couple or three paragraphs in Lakoff's analysis of Bush's speech that are striking:

Conservatives have long sought to destroy Social Security and Medicare, for two reasons: First, from their moral perspective, all social programs take away the need for discipline and create dependency. Since discipline is seen as the basis of all morality, all such programs are immoral. Second, there is a business motive. Businesses can make more money if they can get their hands on all the Medicare and Social Security money as investments in them, not in the people whose health and future are insured. The conservative solution is to privatize both programs, creating "personal accounts." More freedom.

The motivation for government-run Social Security was that each generation would pay for the next. In Medicare, as in any insurance program, the lucky (those not injured or diseased) would pay for those less lucky. In addition, there were the twin motivations of economy of scale and of protection, from stock market declines, bad judgment, and from an individual's squandering. But in conservatism, those not sufficiently disciplined deserve what happens to them. If you're undisciplined enough to squander your personal savings account or not shrewd enough to invest wisely, then you deserve to lose your health and retirement money.

After all, conservatism posits a natural moral hierarchy of winners and losers. Conservatism gives you motivation (a pathway) to win. If you lose, your loss is a motivation to win in the future. If you're not disciplined enough to take advantage of the opportunities, too bad for you. You just won't make it in the opportunity society. And you don't deserve to.

I'm thinking that the frame here is "survival of the fittest" of the most crudely Darwinian sort. If you do not make it the opportunity/ownership society, then you are not fit to survive. How Christian is that?

Another perspective is that wealth becomes an indicator of superiority with the implication of worthiness. In other words, the wealthy are the "chosen people." Now that's more Christian--or at least Judeo-Christian. Just the wrong Testament.