Let Go of the Lakoff

In presenting his case for why Howard Dean's determination to make George Lakoff the Democratic Frank Luntz is the wrong strategy, Brad Plumer forgets to mention why it's completely insane.

Geroge Lakoff -- I'm sorry to say -- is absolutely horrible at framing things. No, I mean it, the guy is atrociously fucking bad at it. He's a perfectly good guru because he understands what framing is and why it's important and I'm glad that Democrats are realizing we need to put some thought into our language, but Jesus Christ, has anybody actually read his book? He's the worst goddamn framer I've ever read. Democrats should be the nurturing parent? Are you kidding me?

After the election, I read Lakoff's book for a review I was doing. I was stunned. The guy's recommendations seemed completely ignorant of everything else he said. Frames, for instance, bring to mind a host of contexts and other information. So the strict father frame the Republicans use immediately paints Democrats as mommy. And while mom is awesome, it's dad you call when you hear noises downstairs late at night. That's how Republicans win elections, they basically mount the stage and say "did you hear that, America? I think I heard someone jiggling the door downstairs! Now would you rather have George Bush and his bat go check it out, or should we send John Kerry and his baguette?" So Lakoff responds to this by suggesting that Democrats become a gender neutral nurturing parent, which simply doesn't exist, and would actually just mean mom.

The books flaws are legion, and all like this. He recognizes that you can boil the Republican agenda down to 10 words, forming five simple programs and principles. Great. But his counter-suggestion for the Democrats is the worst, most meaningless boilerplate I've ever heard. After the fold, I'm going to attach a review I wrote of his book shortly after the election. It never got published, but I've always liked it, so here ya go. But before you're off to there, it should be said that Brad, and for that matter, my old blogmate Jesse, shouldn't be quite as dismissive of framing as they are. It's one weapon in the political arsenal, and we should make sure we know how to use it. Just because some Democrats are too overzealous in pursuing it, doesn't mean you should marginalize the whole pursuit. But so far as we're going to do any framing at all, anything Lakoff says should be immediately reworked and forwarded over to DeLay's office, in the hopes that they'll use it and destroy their rhetorical advantage.

Anyway, my review follows:

Even before Fox called Ohio for Bush, the conversation had begun. I think it was Carville who fired the first shot, consigning Kerry’s hopes to “drawing an inside straight” and saying that the loss would cause Democrats to “reassess” things. Depressed as I was about the electoral vote, a reeling party’s quest to rebuild itself strikes a romantic, Rocky-like chord in me. I imagine us sprinting through snowdrifts, grunting out chin-ups in picturesque forests, and grimacing through raw-egg protein shakes, all set to “Eye of the Tiger”. But the Democratic Party has no biceps to rebuild or gut to trim, so we have to settle for the literary equivalent of the training montage. And with each morning’s op-ed page offering a new list of post-mortems and alternative visions, it seems we’ve already begun.

Like all good cinematic warriors of lore, we have a long list of gurus to speak to. But the most pressing appointment is surely with George Lakoff, the Berkeley-based linguist who’s long been begging us to catch-up to the Republicans in framing, warning that we need a unified ideology underpinning our policy proposals if we’re to have any chance of matching the right’s soundbyte clarity. We didn’t listen, thinking our organizational strength, fundraising success and general rightness more than enough to convince a wavering electorate. We were wrong, and now the education must begin.

Happily, we don’t need to travel all the way to Berkeley to learn the lessons. We can stay seated in the Heartland, soaking up local culture and values, all the while reading Lakoff’s new book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” It’s a quick one, 119 pages, and clear, too. Lakoff writes with the exaggerated simplicity of an academic desperately trying to dumb down a theory, and his short, declarative sentences make the work oddly reminiscent of Hemingway, or at least Hemingway with a PhD in linguistics.

Lakoff starts strong, offering a bird’s eye view of Republican successes (“tort reform”, “partial birth abortion”, “tax relief, the “death tax”) and explaining why they matter beyond superficial imagery. He provides answers for Democrats still puzzling over the working class’s apparent determination to spite their bank accounts at the ballot box and still raging over the public’s willingness to buy into links between Iraq and al Qaeda (respectively, “voters vote their identity” and “If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off”) offering a much-needed shove to a debate that, till now, had stalled at conclusions of stupidity and/or bigotry.

The book is packed with forehead-slapping moments, when Lakoff lays out a truth that had been hovering just out of your reach, or brings clarity to an argument that had seemed simply paradoxical. My personal favorite is his riff on the Bush Administration’s use of Orwellian language, (i.e, the Healthy Forests Act, PATRIOT Act, Clear Skies Initiative, and No Child Left Behind). As Lakoff notes, “Imagine if they came out supporting a ‘Dirty Skies’ bill or a ‘Forest Destruction’ bill or a ‘Kill Public Education bill. They would lose. They are aware people do not support what they are trying to do. Orwellian language points to weakness…When you hear Orwellian language, note where it is, because it is a guide to where they are vulnerable.”

At the center of his diagnosis is the Republican adherence to the “Strict Father” frame, an insight Lakoff fleshed out after some sympathetic, evangelical linguists pointed him towards the writings of popular conservative preacher James Dobson. It’s hardly a contentious claim; David Brooks regularly refers to the Republicans as “the daddy party”. From here, however, Lakoff enters shakier territory. He suggests that Democrats have the “nurturant parent” model, a gender-neutral frame that ideally combines mommy’s interest in your PTA meetings with daddy’s family protection strategies. But for a linguist dedicated to explaining the power and far-reaching implications of frames, he’s puzzlingly clueless as to the implications of his own. Parents are gendered, not gender neutral, and the word “nurturant” has, in our culture, an immediate feminine connotation. And because that brings us back to mommy, where we’re hostage to mommy’s (often unfair) stereotypes. We may be better on education, talented with the checkbook, and attuned to the children, but we’re not the one you call when you wake up and hear noises downstairs. The Republicans, with ads featuring shadowy men of swarthy complexion and, when that proved too subtle, wolves, create fear and offer protection, it wouldn’t seem that a “nurturant” perspective is effective framing for a response.

It’s not just in parental models that Lakoff seems strangely tone-deaf to his own framing. Oftentimes he seems content to simply propose alternatives, either unaware or unconcerned with his offering’s weakness. Towards the book’s end, he lauds the 10 words that define the Republicans – strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, family values – and offers 10 words for our own. The Democrats, according to Lakoff, should throw their party behind a stronger America, broad prosperity, a better future, effective government and mutual responsibility. The obvious difference between the competing sets is that, aside from family values, the Republican’s are all grounded and actionable. Lakoff’s proposals, conversely, mean nothing, they’re campaign slogans fit for the side of a bus or the bottom of a bumper sticker, not declarative principles.

But maybe it should come as no surprise that one man’s attempts to reframe the Democratic Party would be weaker than the Republican Party’s decades-long campaign to frame itself. And therein lies the importance of this book. The right has raced ahead in their use of language, and the Democrats have been unfocused and ineffective in their attempts to catch up. That’s partially attributable to a widespread ignorance of the whole topic, and partially to a lack of motivation on our part. But, as I said at the beginning, the Democrats have woken up to their weakness and have begun training for their comeback. Genuflecting before Lakoff is a good first step, we desperately need to learn what he has to teach. That some of his proposals are weak should be no distraction; it just means that, in time, the student will have to surpass the master.