An i-Mac winked from a Formica tabletop in one corner of his basement office, and battered metal desks and bookcases were stacked with linguistics journals, policy papers, and copies of Moral Politics translated into Japanese, Korean, and German. Intrigued by the book, I met with Lakoff in early November. Moral Politics, just updated and reissued in paperback by the University of Chicago Press, has become a must-read among embattled liberal political strategists: in the past year, Lakoff has been asked to explain its concepts to the Democratic Senators Policy Committee and the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. (Think Al Gore, Michael Dukakis and Gray Davis.) And they lose, time and again. Instead, liberal policy wonks and pollsters create a series of positions and niche-market them to narrow interest groups. They are fighting a war of opposing moral visions, rooted in notions of the ideal family.īut while conservatives aren't embarassed about connecting their "Strict Father" family values to their politics, liberals seem ashamed to mention their "Nurturant Parent" morality at all. In it, Lakoff argues that liberals and conservatives aren't just quibbling over policy details like the size of a tax cut or the structure of a Medicare drug benefit. The result was a book - part cognitive scholarship and part liberal wake-up calll - called Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. He literally put on dark glasses and went into the "Jews for Jesus" bookstore on Telegraph Avenue to buy copies of Christian child-rearing manuals like Dare to Discipline and God, the Rod, and Your Child's Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents. He talked to a friend, a therapist, who told him enigmatically that the answer to a single question - "If your baby cries at night, do you pick him up?" - would reliably distinguish liberals from conservatives. He read manuals by political consultant Frank Luntz, who had advised the Gingrich campaign and would later advise Arnold Schwarzenegger. What underlying metaphor, Lakoff wondered, gave coherence to liberal and conservative worldviews, when it obviously wasn't logic? He talked to conservative linguistics experts who earned their livings as Bible translators. That's how things start, if you're a linguist. Then I asked myself how my own political positions fit together for me and I was just as confused. I didn’t understand what being for the flat tax had to do with being against environmental regulations, or for gun ownership. I didn't understand what being against abortion had to do with supporting the flat tax, or the death penalty. "I didn't understand how the positions fit together. When conservative Republicans swept into Congress in 1994, Lakoff read all of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and became even more confused. Obviously all the people in the convention hall did, and this bothered me because I am a professor of semantics. "I understood each sentence, but I didn't understand how they fit together. "I found myself embarrassed," he told me in an interview in his basement office on the U.C. At that, the well-dressed Republican delegates burst into cheers.Ī professor of cognitive science and linguistics, Lakoff earns his living thinking about how people think, and he just didn't get it. "Why should the best people be punished?" he heard Vice President Quayle ask indignantly, making a one-sentence argument against the graduated income tax, which is structured to hit the wealthy harder than the poor. O ne evening in the summer of 1992, George Lakoff - a cognitive scientist at the University of California at Berkeley - was watching the Republican National Convention on television ("out of duty," he says) and growing more and more confused. Why Liberals Lose: An Interview with George Lakoff
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