George Lakoff’s New Happiness: Politics after Rationality

ARTICLE

George Lakoff’s New Happiness:Politics after Rationality

John B. Parrott

Published online: 6 October 2009# National Association of Scholars 2009

Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science George Lakoff is

among the handful of current faculty members in the United States to have

successfully recast himself as a significant figure in national politics. Though

his views place rather far on the progressive left, he has, unlike some other

scholar-activists, focused most of his energy on advancing the fortunes of the

mainstream Democratic Party. Having eschewed the more radical views of

Noam Chomsky or Bill Ayers, Lakoff remains somewhat less in the

spotlight. His influence is, nonetheless, both broad and deep.

Lakoff is best known for his advocacy of the idea that most people are

profoundly influenced by metaphors that “frame” their decisions, including

those about party registration and voting. He believes that politicians are

aware of this human frailty and manipulate it to their advantage. In other

words, political choices in a democracy have little to do with voters making

rational and informed decisions and a great deal to do with how elites set up

the “narratives.” Lakoff’s involvement in politics has consisted of arguing

three points: that Republicans have been masterful in manipulating voters by

means of framing devices; that Democrats possess the better arguments but

have generally failed to find effective ways to frame their messages; and that

he, Lakoff, can help the Democrats close the metaphor gap.

Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:414–430DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9130-x

John B. Parrott is a writer and independent scholar residing in Pennsylvania; [email protected]. Hehas taught at Oglethorpe University, Kennesaw State College, Kutztown University, and the PennsylvaniaState University. Prior to teaching, Dr. Parrott served as an Air Force intelligence officer, where beforeretiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel he saw duty in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War. He isthe author of Being Like God: How American Elites Abuse Politics and Power (University Press ofAmerica, 2003).

There is more to Lakoff than this summary suggests. Properly understood,

he is heir to a tradition of radical utopian thought and has affinities with

twentieth-century neo-Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer,

and Herbert Marcuse, who also concerned themselves with how best to bring

about revolutionary consciousness among people who seemed content

without it. Towards this end, Lakoff makes some extraordinary claims by

rejecting reason and rationality as they have been understood in Western

thought for essentially the past twenty-five hundred years. In this essay I

reflect on Lakoff’s ideas and career in an effort to clarify his contemporary

influence. I focus mainly on his 2008 The Political Mind: Why You Can’t

Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain.1

Cognitivism: A Reflexive, Not Reflective, Mind

George Lakoff began his career in 1972 as a faculty member at the

University of California at Berkeley, where he is now the Richard and Rhoda

Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics.

Intensely interested in egalitarianist, or “progressive,” politics, he also

founded and was senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute, which operated

from 2003 to 2008. According to its (now defunct) website, the institute

“promote(d) the effective articulation of progressive values.” It did this by

monitoring public debate and suggesting both long-term and short-term

options for framing that offer a progressive perspective. We work

primarily at the level of values and ideas across specific policy areas. At

the level of language, we point out ineffective word choices and suggest

argument forms and phrasings that better express progressive values.2

In addition to The Political Mind, Lakoff is the author of many works,

including Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) and Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know

Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

1George Lakoff, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an18th-Century Brain (New York: Viking, 2008). Subsequent references to this work will be citedparenthetically within the text.2For existing details about the Rockridge Institute, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockridge_Instituteand http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rockridgeinstitute.org.

George Lakoff’s New Happiness: Politics after Rationality 415

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockridge_Institute

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rockridgeinstitute.org

(Chelsea Green, 2004), which garnered acclaim as a New York Times

bestseller.

Lakoff’s ideal seems to be a “velvet” revolution, i.e., the use of peaceful

means to inculcate the ways of radical equality into government and society

and muscular government as the curator of this equality. The velvet

revolutionary parts company with the traditional revolutionary in that he

avoids confronting the fortress of established power directly, but seeks rather

to erode the sand from under it. He doesn’t throw bricks at the police; he

talks to the people.

In The Political Mind Lakoff says that the American Founders created a

living, breathing democracy based upon freedom and the spirit to imagine:

“We have new wonders to discover, new dreams to dream” (13). And this

“dynamic democracy they designed leaves open the possibility of revolu-

tionary change” (13). It is time for revolution, Lakoff indicates—but he

means it metaphorically: a revolution in how we think about knowledge and

knowing. The traditional way we think about knowledge and knowing, or the

conventional way we understand rationality, is outmoded. Lakoff calls the

paradigm that holds that the brain is a deliberative device capable of

independent thought and analysis the “Old Enlightenment” way, and he says

it should give way to a new paradigm, or “a new understanding of how we

understand reality” (14). He calls for a

new philosophy—a new understanding of what it means to be a human

being; of what morality is and where it comes from; of economics,

religion, politics, and nature itself; and even of what science, philosophy

and mathematics really are. We will have to expand our understanding of

the great ideas: freedom, equality, fairness, progress, even happiness. (14)

Lakoff’s claims ought to strike sober, literate, and educated people as

hyperbolic. There is indeed a tradition of sorts in which thinkers claim that

their views will once and for all overturn the accumulated weight of

philosophy and science and usher in a new age. But such breathless fantasy is

more common to self-published pamphlets distributed in public parks than to

books written by chaired professors. Extraordinary claims require extraordi-

nary evidence. Does Lakoff provide it? No, but he has a theory.

Specifically, Lakoff says that knowledge and knowing reside in, and

rationality exists in reference to, the cognitive properties of the brain, or the

ways it symbolizes concepts and represents facts. Rationality, he says, resides

416 Parrott

in narratives. Narratives are the subconscious pictures we have of ourselves,

others, and the political and moral events of the day. They center around

dichotomies, such as Good and Evil, and they “give meaning to your life”

(33). Narratives also center around roles that, like narratives, arrange

dichotomously and involve a protagonist we sympathize with and a demon

who threatens us. Particular roles Lakoff names and describes are Hero,

Villain, Victim, and Helper.

Narratives are cultural and “are instantiated physically in our brains. We

are not born with them, but we start growing them soon, and as we acquire

the deep narratives, our synapses change and become fixed” (33–34). “We

cannot understand other people without such cultural narrative,” he

continues, “but more important, we cannot understand ourselves” (34).

Narratives “can be activated and function unconsciously, automatically, as a

matter of reflex” (34); “[c]ultural narratives define our possibilities,

challenges, and actual lives” (35). Lakoff also refers to narratives as

“Frames,” which is the appellation he seems to prefer.

Lakoff writes that not to accept the cognitive paradigm and the primacy of

psychological narratives is not to comprehend rationality and how human

beings know about their world. This is a way of saying that we can pretty

much dispense with the Western tradition, starting with Plato and Aristotle,

and everything since founded on the premise that disciplined rational inquiry

might get us somewhere. He is silent on the matter of how much the

discovery of these psychological narratives is itself indebted to rational

thought.

The Lakoff reader, however, might be troubled by the paradox. What if the

primacy of psychological narratives is just another psychological narrative?

If we follow Lakoff by radically downgrading the power of rational thought,

what basis do we have to credit his own theory? The answer, to the extent

Lakoff gives one, seems to be: a political basis. His theory squares with

progressive politics, so it must be right. Right?

Writing with politics and morality in mind, he says that rationality isn’t

just undesirable, but dangerous. To hold to the traditional view of the rational

mind “not only hides the real threat to our democracy, it all too often keeps

many of our most dedicated political leaders, policy experts, commentators,

and social activists from being effective” (15).

In The Political Mind Lakoff argues that knowledge and knowing should

proceed according to the cognitive practices of framing and polarization.


“Framing” is the rhetorical technique of putting the “right” context in

place so that a particular side wins in argument. And the “right” side for

Lakoff is the progressive side; therefore framing has a decidedly and

explicitly political application. Lakoff argues that conservatives threaten

democracy: “In its moral basis and its content,” he writes, “conservatism is

centered on the politics of authority, obedience, and discipline. This content

is profoundly anti-democratic, whereas our country was founded on

opposition to authoritarianism” (68).

Lakoff intends The Political Mind to be a guidebook for progressives, and

advises on how the progressive can formulate positions so that his arguments

will carry the day in debate, his policy preferences will be popular in the

public eye, and his candidates will win at election time. He writes, “You have

to make the progressive version of (the ideas of freedom, equality, fairness,

and opportunity) uppermost in the public mind” (115). And he tells the

reader to repeat the progressive version multiple times: “Say things not once,

but over and over. Brains change when ideas are repeatedly activated” (116).

When progressives don’t narrate issues in ways that cause the acceptance of

their version, and when they don’t repeat the frames often enough for other

brains to internalize them, progressives fail to get what they want, and leave

the field of political combat to their opponents—conservatives.

Lakoff uses the Iraq War to illustrate what he means by framing. To justify

its involvement in Iraq, he writes, the Bush administration employed three

narrative templates that had the effect of “selling” the war to the public by

making it seem necessary. The administration formatted facts according to

the “Self Defense” template, which depicted the war as defending the United

States against Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction; the “Rescue”

template, which spun the war as an effort to rescue the Iraqi people from

Saddam Hussein’s cruelties; and the “War” narrative, which saw events in the

context of traditional combat (148–49). And because the Bush administration

shaded events in language and symbols and metaphors along the lines

suggested by these three positive themes, and got the public to accept them

as valid, it was able to insert the United States Army into Iraq and maintain

its presence there.

Lakoff also puts forward the progressive template, which he casts as the

corrective to the Bush administration’s frames. He calls this the “Occupation”

frame. Unlike the Bush frames, which amount to ruse, Lakoff argues that the

Occupation frame more realistically depicts what is actually happening. The

418 Parrott

Iraqis have risen in insurgency against us and the Iraqi Army is ineffectual

and corrupt; in light of these realities “occupation” better describes the

American presence in Iraq. But the Bush administration wouldn’t use the

Occupation frame because it didn’t want people to know the truth: “the Bush

administration had to keep the War frame in order for Bush to be a War

president, and thus keep his war powers” (149). Lakoff’s advice to

progressives to confront this situation? To “repeat over and over the truth

that we were running an occupation and that there was no way of winning”

the war (152).

Lakoff intends to show that progressive-led government is a beneficial

force that ought to be sturdy because it exists to serve people, so he favors

frame-making that depicts government as positive and candidates favoring

big government as worthy of being elected. “The ethics of care shapes

government,” he says. “Empowerment [of people] by the government is

everywhere” (47). “The role of progressive government is to maximize our

freedom—and protection and empowerment do just that. Protection is there

to guarantee freedom from harm, from want, and from fear. Empowerment is

there to maximize freedom to achieve your goals” (48). And because it is the

party progressives feel most comfortable with, The Political Mind is filled

with illustrations firmly and uniformly inclined toward the Democratic Party.

Lakoff sees the intent and effect of pro-progressive framing as the marketing

of issues and candidates in ways that convince the public to trust centralized

government and the Democratic Party.

At this point, the reader may wonder whether “framing” is just another word

for “propaganda.” I am not sure how to answer that doubt. Certainly much of

what Lakoff argues sounds like a theory of why propaganda works. Both

“framing” and “propaganda” intend to instill a politically relevant disposition

into an audience. Of course, the word “propaganda” is in bad odor, and

extolling the importance of the “right frames” avoids that complication.

A key problem for theorists of revolution along statist, egalitarian lines lies

is getting the public to accept the revolutionary paradigm as valid. If the

status quo is illegitimate and its ideas only conditional, what makes the ideas

of the revolutionary any more universal and worth espousing? The Political

Mind addresses this problem by contending that progressive ideals are natural

to the human being—that we naturally dispose to them. In other words, to

the brain left to its own devices and unfettered by distractions, the

progressive narrative on any issue will be seen automatically as “truth.”


Frames and frame-making derive from Lakoff’s conception of the mind as

“embodied.” Embodiment seems to be Lakoff’s equivalent, at least

functionally, to B.F. Skinner’s Behavioral idea of the conditioned reflex,

which holds that the mind as an independent and deliberative device does not

exist and that instead thoughts and their consequent actions root in reflexes.

“If all thought were conscious and reflective, you would know your own

mind and be in control of the decisions you make,” Lakoff writes. “But since

we don’t know what our brains are doing in most cases, most thought is

reflexive, not reflective, and beyond conscious control. As a result, your

brain makes decisions for you that you are not consciously aware of” (9).

According to Embodiment, ideas—and again, Lakoff writes in reference to

moral and political ideas—come into being as the result of the physiology of

the brain and the impact on the brain of our material environment and social

relationships. Ideas are created by “the neural anatomy and connectivity of

our brains” and “the ways we function bodily in the physical and social

world” (10). The import of this would seem to be that thinking does not take

place in the form of rational mental abstractions, and that the human mind

that births ideas does not do so as an analytical device that possesses

intellectual or conceptual sentience. “Morality and politics are embodied

ideas, not abstract ones, and they mostly function in the cognitive

unconsciousness—in what your brain is doing and you cannot see” (10).

The embodied mind “ultimately determines what morality and politics should

be about. This is how reason really works” (11).

And this embodied mind is one that reposes naturally toward the

progressive political outlook. Dr. Lakoff contends that the brain is “wired”

to identify with certain concepts, and, in the realm of politics and

government, to desire and support certain actors and their policies and to

oppose and reject other actors and their policies.

Conservatives, Lakoff says, hold a worldview centering on authority and

competition. “Conservative thought begins with the notion that morality is

obedience to an authority” (60). Linking conservatives with obedience

inherently inclines them, or at least makes them vulnerable to, authoritari-

anism and selfishness, qualities civilized people in a democracy regard with

contempt. Progressives, on the other hand, hold beliefs that orient around

compassion and cooperation, traits our brains favor and tell us we benefit

from, and that operationalize when we form ourselves communally into

democracy. “Empathy is at the center of the progressive moral worldview,”

420 Parrott

Lakoff writes, and the mind automatically inclines to the progressive

worldview: “we are not just pre-wired for empathy, but for cooperation”

(101). If at any time we think or act in selfish ways, he says, it is because our

natural mind gets sidetracked from its default setting. In politics, this happens

when conservative actors play on the mind’s attraction to authority and

competition and the accordant susceptibility to fear that inheres in these

traits. “The politics of authority is succeeding because conservatives have

been activating their ideas in the brains of the public, while finding ways to

inhibit the use of progressive modes of thought” (120).

Lakoff examines a second cognitive device that he says should be utilized

in the new philosophy of understanding: “polarization,” or what Richard

Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” of discourse. He arranges the content

and conclusions of The Political Mind along a tidy Good-Evil axis, with

progressives and their policy preferences always residing with the Good and

conservatives and their preferences universally housed with the Evil. A

longtime staple of the egalitarian politics and worldview, polarization as a

device for persuasion has been written about by philosophers like Sorel,

activists like Saul Alinsky, and revolutionaries like Lenin. “Before men can

act,” Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals, “an issue must be polarized. Men

will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 percent on the side of

the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.”3

The Political Mind legitimizes a polarized style of thinking by asserting

that the Left-Right spectrum, in which liberalism and conservatism are taken

as different streams of the philosophical mainstream, is an “inaccurate

metaphor, and a dangerous one” (45). Lakoff claims that the spectrum

metaphor permits conservatism to be “passed off as ‘mainstream’ ideas,

which they are not,” and progressive ideas to be “characterized as ‘leftist’

and ‘extremist,’ which they are not” (45). And “there are no moderates—that

is, there is no moderate worldview, no one set of ideas that characterizes a

‘center’ or ‘moderation’” (44). “The moderate” is actually the person who

uses conservative thought in some instances and progressive thought in

others. “My job here is to make you think twice about [the left-to-right scale]

and then stop using it,” he says (47). For Lakoff, the only paradigm that

explains morality and politics is the dichotomy between progressivism and

3Saul D. Alinsky, Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: RandomHouse, 1971; New York: Vintage, 1989), 78.


conservatism, and the fact that all that is moral and functional in a democracy

stands with the former, while reaction and authoritarianism reside solely with

the latter.

In The Political Mind Lakoff offers many reasons why we should not

think like the conservative. On issue after issue, he paints progressivism in

bright, hopeful colors, while conservatism shades bland or darkly. On

economic markets, progressives stand for empathy and believe that markets

ought to be regulated by government, because government “has a crucial

moral mission to play…that in many cases inherently cannot be carried out

by private enterprise” (51). Conservatives, on the other hand, see markets as

“conferring economic freedom—freedom to make money in business any

way you can” (62).

In morality and policy, progressives, again, stand for empathy—“behind

every progressive policy lies a single moral value: empathy, together with the

responsibility and strength to act on that empathy” (47). For conservatives,

“morality is the morality of obedience” (65). On government, progressives

represent compassionate government that empowers and protects people

(47), while conservatives “rarely talk about government empowerment and

act as if it does not exist—except in the case of corporate subsidies” (63). On

democracy and power, progressives favor separation of powers “to avoid

dictatorial powers via a balance of power” (50), while conservatives favor

unitary power vested in the executive branch that led during the Bush

administration to wiretapping, threats to habeas corpus, and other

antidemocratic tendencies. The problem wasn’t with Bush, Lakoff says,

but rather with his administration’s “general conservatism—the mode of

thought itself” (65).

The Political Mind goes on and on about issues all across the political

horizon; from military intervention to social security to the environment to

civil rights and beyond, progressives repose as the compassionate Good and

conservatives skulk as the selfish Evil. Progressives are, either directly or via

insinuation, the Heroes, people with whom we can relate, while conserva-

tives appear as the Villains, agents seeking to thwart the Heroes at every turn.

And because our minds naturally incline to the progressive side, we should

see this automatically; if we do not, it is because conservative imaging of

reality has prevented it. But the antidote is available: use progressive frames

to counter conservative ones. “You can use progressive language, ideas,

images, and symbols repeatedly to activate the progressive worldview in

422 Parrott

people, who have both [progressive and conservative] worldviews, so that

the progressive mode of thought is strengthened and the conservative mode

weakened” (114).

The merits of this caricature of conservative thought and panegyric to

progressive thought lie beyond this essay. I think it’s safe to say, however,

that few conservatives would recognize themselves or their ideas in this

hostile portrait. What’s more arresting is that Lakoff not only sells his

product, but buys it too. After explaining that the human mind can’t really

think but can consume highly reductive and polarized images, he proceeds to

conjure his own highly reductive, polarized images. There is an elemental

honesty in this, but it’s not exactly what you’d expect from a senior scholar

with scientific pretensions. Lakoff seems to have talked himself into the

virtue of being stupid, and then proceeded to demonstrate how the new

stupidity works.

In The Political Mind Lakoff endeavors to get classical liberals—he uses

the term “neoliberals”—to recognize the unreality of their “moderation.” He

chides neoliberals for refusing to engage in pro-progressive framing, and for

accepting the Old Enlightenment view of rationality and its prerequisite of

investigating facts wherever they may lead and apart from the pre-determined

assumptions of progressive ideology. “Neoliberal thought,” he writes, “arises

from the Old Enlightenment view of the mind” (59). “I have previously

criticized neoliberals for assuming that just citing facts and figures will carry

the day politically, when what is needed is an honest, morally based framing

of the facts and figures, showing their moral significance, and conveyed with

the appropriate emotions and with words, images and symbols that really

communicate” (52).

What bothers Lakoff about classical liberals in particular is their

propensity to discuss progressive actors and progressive-oriented issues in

terms of self-interest. When the scholar acknowledges that progressives have

interests, his observations leads him to conclude that they act the same way

conservative actors do, and such analysis detracts from the progressive

message. In talking about progressives as being motivated by self-interest,

Lakoff says, progressivism looks the same as conservatism, which prevents

progressive frames from prevailing and allows the conservative status quo to

continue. To be “honest” and to posit knowledge that is “morally based,” one

must imbue with progressive ideals and utilize progressive framing

techniques. One must not follow the truth wherever it may lead.


Written by perhaps the nation’s foremost contemporary cognitivist scholar,

The Political Mind is itself an exercise in cognitive politics, and the reader

familiar with image-making and the paranoid style will recognize these

devices in the book’s pages. The reader interested in polarization rhetoric, for

instance, cannot help but compare Lakoff’s framing of the current culture

war with the imagery employed by a certain Wisconsin senator fifty years

ago. The Political Mind begins:

Radical conservatives have been fighting a culture war. The main

battlefield is the brain. At stake is what America is to be. Their goal is to

radically change America to fit the conservative moral worldview. The

threat is to democracy and all that goes with it.

Things, Lakoff says, are bleak:

The radical conservatives seek and have already begun to introduce: an

authoritarian hierarchy based on vast concentrations and control of

wealth; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken

government; no balance of power; priorities shifted from the public

sector to the corporate and military sectors; responsibility shifted from

society to the individual; control of elections through control of who votes

and how votes are counted; control of ideas through the media; and

patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics and the market.

Lakoff continues:

The future of democracy is at stake now. (1)

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, begins:

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic

atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have

selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are really

down—they are truly down…

The situation, McCarthy said, was dire:

Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out peace—

Dumbarton Oaks—there was within the Soviet Orbit 180,000,000

people. Lined up on the anti-totalitarian side there were roughly

1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six years later, there are

800,000,000 people under the absolute dominion of Soviet Russia—an

424 Parrott

increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to

around 500,000,000. In other words, in less than six years the odds have

changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us.

McCarthy went on:

As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great

democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without

but rather because of enemies from within.”

The truth of this statement is becoming terrifyingly clear as we see this

country each day losing on every front.4

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Cognitive Style

Lakoff contends that our minds use narratives to push the facts we observe

into perceptual categories that are familiar and help us make sense of the

world. These narratives, or frames, give us roles we play, and these roles

arrange according to a binary structure: we are geniuses or fools, aggressors

or victims, builders or destroyers. Lakoff claims that we don’t realize any of

this because (a) the narratives we employ and our dispositions regarding

empathy and authority function on a subconscious level, and (b) Republicans

and conservatives bombard us with faulty information that confuse our

narratives, excite our fears, and short-circuit our natural inclination toward

compassion and left-leaning progressive policies. The Academy tends not to

want to acknowledge that the psychological approach is becoming a

significant part of the teaching process. But framing and the polarized style

constitute both for students and the professoriate exceedingly damaging

practices, and they deserve scrutiny.

One anti-intellectual feature of the cognitive style is that it prevents

college students from doing what they’re supposed to do—learn. Framing

issues may result in getting certain parties elected to office and certain

policies popularized, but it still represents an artificial form of knowledge,

4JosephMcCarthy, “Speech atWheeling,West Virginia, 9 February 1950,” inMichael P. Johnson, ed., Readingthe American Past: Selected Historical Documents, Volume II: From 1865 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998),191–95, cited at http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/mccarthy_wheeling.pdf, 1.


http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/mccarthy_wheeling.pdf

and one inferior to genuine understanding based upon facts. Progressives

may call framing reality, but it is not.

The student who reads Lakoff is told that the War on Terror is little more

than a Republican narrative intended to dispose the public toward

authoritarianism by playing to its fear of insecurity. Lakoff depicts the

September 11 attacks as events Bush used to create a national trauma, an

ordeal whose conditions embossed into the minds of Americans an artificial

need for wiretapping, vigorous police surveillance measures, and the

detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The War on Terror, Lakoff writes, is

only a metaphor, and one that serves as “the staple of right-wing politics at

home” (128). However valuable this imagery proved in discrediting George

W. Bush and his policies, it fails miserably in explaining what actually

happened, or in predicting what can happen in the future. The student who

reads The Political Mind will be surprised to learn about various plots of

genuine Islamic terror cells in the United States, including the May 2009 plot

to bomb synagogues in New York City, or the overwhelming and bipartisan

vote by the Senate to refuse to close the Guantanamo facility and transfer its

detainees to prisons on the American mainland. The list of Lakoff’s frame-

making that turns out to be fiction can go on. While they helped to

delegitimize policies and policy actors opposed by Lakoff and the

Progressive Left, such images have no value to the individual interested in

learning what really happened.

A second anti-intellectual feature of the cognitive paradigm is that it

undermines the wall separating the Academy and the state. Because it

conforms so closely to politics—because its categories of Morality/

Functionality and Immorality/Disfunctionality correspond to political cate-

gories and because politicians build their structures on shifting sand,

cognitivists will forever lack consistency in their work. The result will be

an unending series of episodes that embarrass both the scholar and his

profession. The reason for this is that in linking his work to partisan opinion-

makers the cognitivist will find it hard to retreat from reality when those

opinion-makers shift to using frames.

In The Political Mind Lakoff uniformly images Barak Obama, then a

senator, as a full-blooded progressive. During the Bush administration

Obama brought our attention to the “empathy deficit—a failure to care, both

about others and each other” (47). And what’s more, Obama is a senator who

does what others do not—he refuses to accept his opponents’ frame-making,

426 Parrott

and instead shifts discussion of issues toward his own frames (153). What

does Lakoff do now that Obama is president and conducts some of the same

policies as conservative Republican George W. Bush?

“On wiretapping,” Lakoff says “the issue is one of liberty. [George W.

Bush] wanted to take ours away” (152). Since Mr. Obama has continued the

wiretapping, is he also trying to take away our liberty? On the Iraq War,

Lakoff “published an article pointing out the consequences of allowing

[Bush] to keep the War frame in the public mind, and suggesting that the

truth be told: it was an occupation” (149). Since President Obama uses the

“Iraq-as-War” rather than the “Iraq-as-Occupation” frame—even to the point

of visiting the troops in Iraq—will Lakoff write another article suggesting

that “the truth be told?” Or, since Obama does not accept his opponents’

frame-making, will Lakoff now inform his readers that Bush’s policies were

factually based and the progressive frame was fiction?

A third anti-intellectual feature of the cognitive approach, at least as it is

outlined in The Political Mind, is that it misstates the traditional Rationality

model, and does so in a way that makes investigation of the progressive

positions on issues impossible. Lakoff indicates that the traditional Rational

Actor model fails because it “makes the inherent claim that reason does not

involve either metaphors or frames. It therefore cannot be a model of real

human reason” (221). Only the Cognitivist paradigm can be a model for

rational action, he says, because it alone takes into account that the brain

operates according to unconscious symbols and frames.

And since Lakoff has already established that the brain inclines naturally

toward empathy and progressivism, rationality simply equates to what its

consciousness, aided by imagery from progressive activists, tells it. However,

the true student of the Rational Actor model regards the mind as a deliberative

device—not predisposed in any one direction and simply captive of the frames

others have placed into it—and views the rational process as involving scrutiny

of all information, including the ways such information is packaged to him by

others as well as his own non-rational feelings and emotions.

For example, in considering how to view global warming, Cognitive

model analysis would stress compassion and view events according to the

following narrative, which would be seen as natural to the mind:

Economic man produced global warming and chemical chickens. The

unbounded pursuit of self-interest that was supposed to be moral, was


supposed to produce plenty for all, is bringing death to our earth. If it

continues, half the species on our planet will die within a century.

Economic man was an idea—a claim about human nature. Empathy and

real reason…reveal its fallacies. (121)

In its assessment of global warming, on the other hand, the mind using

the Rational Actor model might follow this path: “Scientists are

contending that the planet is warming and that human beings are the

cause. We know that the polar ice caps are indeed melting. But at the

same time, other scientists say that the warming is very slight, and may

be occurring naturally. I also know that prominent environmentalist

voices, while they sound the alarm on global warming, live in elaborate

energy-guzzling mansions, and avoid being impacted by conservationist

measures.” The former sentiment, which belongs to Lakoff, accepts global

warming claims automatically and doesn’t burden itself with contrary

information because it has internalized progressive frame-making: “When

you accept a particular narrative, you ignore or hide realities that

contradict it” (37). The latter logic investigates multiple aspects of the

issue and results in a more complete analysis. It subjects feelings the

person possesses to examination. Adopting the cognitive model might

work well for progressive pressure groups and political candidates, who

find that uncomfortable realities and contradictions to their positions will

not be inspected, but it is the latter process that is more likely to render a

better appreciation of the issues.

A fourth and perhaps most important anti-intellectual feature of the

cognitive approach is that innocent people can be damaged by its devices.

Framing and polarization are said to represent ways of understanding facts

that move civilization to a higher level. The problem with these devices is

that their operators often use them in ways that, intentionally or not, hurt

innocent people.

In velvet revolution, no less than in conventional revolution, innocent

people may count among the casualties. Frame-making includes labeling

someone as a racist or a sexist. The progressive may argue (but only in

private) that society as a whole benefits from cognitivist devices, and that in

order to make an omelet a few eggs must invariably be broken. But under

such logic everyone lives in constant intimidation, and the progressive

becomes the thing he says he despises—the witch hunter.

428 Parrott

Conclusion

As 2005 dawned progressives were down and dispirited. George W. Bush

was newly re-elected, and Congress was firmly in Republican hands. Bush in

2004 had garnered a majority of the vote—the first president since 1988 to have

done so—and his coattails helped Republicans gain seats in both the House and

Senate. As Bush began his push in January 2005 for Social Security reform, with

a plan that centered around voluntary personal investment accounts, the chances

were good that progressives might suffer yet another defeat, and that the

Republican wave might turn into a juggernaut.

Democratic leaders caucusing on the issue invited George Lakoff to a

strategy meeting held in Cambridge, Maryland. Lakoff received the

invitation from North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, the chairman of the

Democratic Policy Committee. Dorgan had picked up a copy of Lakoff’s

Moral Politics, and became an instant fan of the framing concept. He was

also familiar with Lakoff’s runaway bestseller Don’t Think of an Elephant, a

copy of which Lakoff would send to every Democratic legislator. Don’t

Think of an Elephant would become, according to journalist Matt Bai,

“ubiquitous among Democrats in the Capitol.”5

At the Cambridge gathering Lakoff urged Democrats to resist private

investment accounts by imaging them as reckless. Democrats went to the

media with a message that Americans’ savings would be gambled away by

the plan, and before long a frightened public blanched in its enthusiasm for

social security reform. A CNN–USAToday poll noted that those favoring the

idea went from 42 percent in January to 33 percent in April. “We branded

them with privatization,” Nancy Pelosi said afterward, “and they can’t sell

that brand anywhere.” “At the beginning of this debate,” she went on, “voters

were saying that the president was a president who had new ideas. Now he’s

a guy who wants to cut my benefits.”6 Republicans themselves pulled away

from the plan, and when in March 2005 Majority Leader Bill Frist said the

Senate might have to postpone the vote on the issue, its fate was sealed. Bush

had been delegitimized on Social Security reform, and his private investment

accounts proposal was defeated. The framing campaign had done its job.

5Matt Bai, “The Framing Wars,” New York Times Magazine, July 17, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17DEMOCRATS.html.

6Ibid.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17DEMOCRATS.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17DEMOCRATS.html

There is nothing new about political figures relying upon appearances

rather than reality when exercising their power. In his famous tract published

in 1513, Niccolo Machiavelli advised the Medici rulers to “appear as you

wish to appear.” What is disturbing, however, is that more and more we see

public officials—and scholars—living in fiction. What is also disturbing is

that neither statesmen nor scholars seem to realize is how uncontrollable this

practice is.

430 Parrott