No Guru, No Method, No "DaVinci Code"

I agree with pretty much every word of
Ken Baer's negative review of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff's book Don't
Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate-.
And yet, at the same time, I think it is largely unfair to George Lakoff.

I know Lakoff a little bit. I read Moral Politics in the first edition, ten years ago, and found it useful. I visited Lakoff's Rockridge Institute last year when it consisted of a room 12 feet square with four people working in it. That was shortly before he became the darling of the left-wing funding world.

I found his insights about language useful in the 1990s and they are useful today. For anyone trying to master the role of language and mental images in political life, it is extremely helpful to grasp what linguists and cognitive scientists know about how people hear and use words, and the mental frames that language evokes and fits into. It provides some rigor and theoretical underpinning to a part of what a speechwriter is trying to do.

In addition, Lakoff significantly helped liberals understand the difference between policy proposals that are simply good ideas with a constituency, and those that have a much broader resonance, such as the Apollo Initiative to reduce dependence on foreign oil by creating U.S. jobs in energy research.

But as Baer points out, when Lakoff is asked to recommend specific political proposals, his answers are pretty much what you would expect from a Berkeley humanities professor who hasn't spent much time outside of the coasts or actively trying to master the political process: redefine spending as investment. A living wage. "Understanding and restraint" rather than war in Afghanistan. And his policy proposals, as well as the underlying analysis, are profoundly ahistorical. As Baer points out, Lakoff seems to believe that the Right recently invented the
term "tax relief" and that with a similarly savvy choice of words, liberals might undo a 
century's worth of anti-tax politics. I don't think so.

But is it Lakoff's fault that he's a cognitive linguist, not a historian or a congressman? Or is it the fault of those Democrats, such as the consultant Baer cites at the beginning of his review who brings out a heavily underlined copy of Don't Think of an Elephant at the beginning of a campaign meeting and proposes to use it as an atlas to political success? Is it Lakoff's fault that people who should know better fall at his feet, despite the fact that he's never had the slightest involvement in American politics, and beg him for pearls of wisdom? "Oh, Professor Lakoff, please tell us the magic words that will unlock the gates of the promised land?"

The deeper problem is in liberals' search for a guru, which inevitably leads to a cycle of over-expectation and disappointment, with Lakoff one day and someone else the next. What happened to the ability to take some insight like Lakoff's, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them? Why is that so difficult? Perhaps the problem is that too many of the people in the fawning audience for this don't have a solid, multi-disciplinary liberal arts education that enables them to do that. They're political science majors with masters' in public policy, and the world of linguistics is mysterious and enthralling, and the fact that it seems to be based in "neuroscience" (oooh!) makes it somehow an extra-powerful secret code.

It's the same problem I have with David Sirota's "DaVinci Code" article from the American Prospect. Sirota identified four utterly idiosyncratic Democrats mostly from rural states or districts, ranging from one of the most deeply conservative Southern Democrats to Socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and declares them to have some kind of magic formula that would revive liberalism and the Democratic Party. If they do, it's certainly not the same magic formula! Each of his four politicians has found a distinctive way of connecting their own strengths and their ideas to their own consitituency. Good for them. There's something to be learned from that. But it is not a code, and Lakoff's ideas are not a code either. Moral Politics (not Don't Think of an Elephant) is a book worth reading. But so are a hundred other books.