Word games: George Lakoff, the Democrats' hottest new thinker, misses the meaning behind the message

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Kenneth S. Baer

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate By George Lakoff Chelsea Green Publishing Company, $10.00

On a cold Sunday a few weeks I after the presidential election, I was sitting in one of those meetings that every politico hopes will turn out to be legendary. A young, promising candidate had gathered his consultants and closest advisers around his dining room table for a day-long conference to plot his run for higher office. It would be years until the next election day and longer still until the candidate's career would peak, but deep down in every political hack's heart lies the unstated hope that this will be the horse to go all the way--and that you will have been there when he got it all started.

In the middle of the discussion, the candidate's veteran media consultant pulled out a thin book--heavily underlined and annotated--and began reading passages from it as if it were the Bible. The book was George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, a volume that quickly has made its author one of the most sought-after speakers and advisers in Democratic circles and a cult figure among the liberal left. On the book's cover, Howard Dean touts Lakoff as "one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement;" Robert Reich hails the book as "essential reading;" and Don Hazen--the founder of the left-wing Web site Alternet.org--writes in the book's introduction that Lakoff was "like a great reserve of pinot noir that few people drank. But not anymore. George Lakoff is on the road to fame and renown."

So who is this new messiah? And how does he propose that a party of pinot noir drinkers win back the hearts and minds of those who would rather quaff Budweiser?

Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, uses linguistic analysis to diagnose Democrats' problems. He argues that all of us have, as part of our "cognitive unconscious," frames that shape how we see the world. These frames are profoundly powerful, influencing "the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions." We discover our frames through our language; if we change our language, we change our frames. "Reframing," Lakoff writes, "is social change."

Of course, Lakoff cautions that it's not just the language itself that matters: "[I]deas are primary--and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas." So, language reflects our mindset: If we change the language, then we can change how people think. This is where liberals and progressives have gotten in trouble, Lakoff argues. They make the mistake of sifting out the facts, while ignoring the reality that debating in a conservative frame only reinforces it. To change those red states to blue, then, progressives have to change minds by first reframing the debate. If, as Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "[T]he limits of my language are the limits of my world," then the limits of my language apparently are also the limits of my ability to win an election.

I am not a cognitive linguist (the limits of my expertise in the field begin and end with the Wittgenstein quote above), and I cannot critique Lakoff's linguistic analysis. But I can say confidently that his political analysis is severely lacking. Don't Think of an Elephant is a small volume big on assumptions and short on the historical and political context that would shed light on why Americans respond to certain language in the ways that they do. In some places, Lakoff offers superb advice to candidates, but after reading this book--which, as a collection of many previously released articles, is disjointed and repetitive--it seems that Lakoff is primarily concerned with using linguistics to make the case for his liberal-left politics. That may bring comfort to his neighbors in Berkeley, but there's little evidence that it will win elections.

The heart of Lakoff's argument is that the roots of political debate in America stem from competing notions of the family: the "strict father" and the "nurturant parent." Conservatives are strict fathers who want to "protect the family in the dangerous world, support the family in the difficult world, and teach [their] children right from wrong." They have a clear model of what it means to be a good person--one must do what's right, pursue one's self-interest in order to prosper, and become self-reliant. This path is not just a way to prosperity, but a way toward morality. In this, Lakoff finds the conservative justification for cutting social programs (why reward those who can't help themselves) and to pursue a unilateral foreign policy (a strict father is a moral authority who tells others what to do).

Progressives, says Lakoff, are nurturant parents who believe in empathy and responsibility. Like good gender-neutral nurturant parents, they care for their children and thus want to protect them and make sure that they can live happy, fulfilled lives. Lakoff goes as far as to say that it's a "moral responsibility to teach your child to be a happy, fulfilled person who wants others to be happy and fulfilled." From this moral charge there follows a whole roster of progressive values that Lakoff lays out--freedom, opportunity, prosperity, community-building, honesty, trust--as well as six distinct types of progressives, from identity-politics activists to environmentalists to "spiritual progressives" who include "pagan members of Wicca."