Don't Think of Lakoff

Baltimore Group Blog interviews Lakoff about his new book, Whose Freedom, confirming my point that liberals pay too much attention to Lakoff at their peril. Lakoff's argument as presented in the interview combines ex recto assertions, a catastrophic failure to look beyond post-1990 American politics, and a whiff of anti-empiricism.

Most detrimentally to his argument, Lakoff begins by asserting that "Freedom is part of all of American life, and it is central to progressive thought. All of progressive thought has to do with, say, people fulfilling their dreams, people achieving their purposes, people getting their needs met. These are all issues of freedom." The only part of it that is true is the first part of the first sentence, which explains why the following claims are worthless.

The word "freedom" is only central to American politics. In other Western countries, it's only one of several motherhood values of equal worth. As Eric Foner shows, ideas that are referred to in most countries in terms of justice or equality are referred to in terms of freedom in the US. Indeed, it's a uniquely American view that people getting their needs met is an issue of freedom; welfare economists refer to meeting needs as competencies, and ordinary people outside the US refer to that as dignity, human rights, standard of living, or lack of poverty.

If Lakoff's observations about freedom are half false and half trivially true, his observations about the conservative worldview are entirely unsupported. He motivates Moral Politics, "I began by asking how different positions fit together. What is it about conservative ideology that makes it natural for that ideology to be against abortion, for the flat tax, against environmental regulations, for owning guns, and for tort reform?"

Justin at Semantic Compositions has already done my job for me in criticizing Lakoff's poor grasp of conservative values. Essentially, Justin argues, Lakoff asks himself why conservatives hold certain values, instead of asking conservative thinktanks or looking at how they actually argue. This leads to plenty of factless statements about how conservatives must think, which are better for demonization than for the critical study of politics.

In addition, Lakoff's theory has no way of explaining why worldviews change their views on some subjects. It's important to ask why American liberals and conservatives reversed their traditional views on budget balancing some time between 1990 and 2000. There are ways to explain this reversal, none of which has anything to do with framing. Lakoff's study of politics is thus analogous to a study of sociolinguistics that ignores the fact that languages change, or even that there's more than one language in the world.

So far I attacked Lakoff's theory. Just so that you understand how bad his practice of rhetoric is, the theory is generally considered his stronger suit. In explaining why the Republicans manage to frame issues better than the Democrats in the interview, he says nary a single correct content word.

For example, he talks about Iraq. His argument is that the Republican frame of "cut and run" is successful because it evokes the strict father mentality and the Democratic frames, such as "stay and pay," respond in similar language and seem self-interested. So far so good, but Polling Report has numbers showing that Lakoff's characterization isn't particularly true. Americans are about evenly divided about setting a timetable for withdrawal, and trending toward greater support.

It's true that Congressional Democrats have a lower general approval rating than Congressional Republicans and than Bush, as well as lower support on Iraq. But to attribute it entirely to framing ignores several elephants in the room, such as the success of conservative center-shifting, and the general perception of Democrats as spineless politicians who care about winning more than about achieving things.

I am not going to get into the details of center-shifting, but in a nutshell, it imitates successful historical rhetoric, and is built in such a way that relies on certain peculiar left-wing pathologies to maximize its effectiveness when used by the right. The other problem, perception of Democrats, will only be exacerbated if Democrats start framing instead of come up with novel liberal policies that connect to the people.

Nowhere is Lakoff's fatal misunderstanding of politics more inherent than in his characterization of political campaigns as primarily about values. Values are of course important, but they're one thing among several, and as long as Democrats are characterized as empty suits, they won't achieve anything by talking just about values. The greatest political gains everywhere come from promoting policies that most people can connect to and from using competent rhetoric.

The best case study Lakoff gives, Reagan's victory in 1980, again ignores a huge elephant in the room. Carter was a fairly unsuccessful President, who could not secure the release of the hostages in Iran or rein in stagflation. And even then, Reagan won with a bare majority of the popular vote. It's almost impossible to believe that someone seriously analyzes political success and failure without reference to the economy or to foreign policy performance.

A better case study for Lakoff would be the 2000 election, in which Gore failed to win a majority despite the unprecendented peacetime prosperity. But even that election does not bode well for Lakoff's theory. Gore ran a weak campaign, but not because of the lack of framing; rather, it was because he was just a bad public speaker, and because he made the mistake of distancing himself from Clinton. To compound the problem, he still ran to the dead center and failed to distinguish himself from Bush, as Nader's getting almost 3% of the vote indicates.

This interview is a good example why there's very little that Lakoff says about politics that is worth listening to. Physics has reached a level of rigor that permits it to make serious factless theories; all other scientific disciplines, with the possible exceptions of chemistry and biology, need to be firmly anchored in empiricism. Lakoff's misapplication of cognitive science to politics causes him to make outlandish statements that contradict not only established political science and political history but also plain facts.

It's legitimate and important to study political psychology and the impact of different kinds of rhetoric, but both theoretical and practical purposes. It's even possible to study this within a liberal framework, although it will make results more error-prone and require especially vigilant attention to possible bias.

However, such a study will necessarily have to be empirical in nature and rely on earlier results of rhetoric and political science. The rigorous study of rhetoric has a longer history than most academic disciplines, and the rigorous study of politics has produced many solid results. It makes sense to try and wed them, but any such synergy will be as different from Lakoff's analysis as chemistry is from alchemy.

Furthermore, it's unlikely that such an academic program will be very useful in politics. Some principles will probably find uses, but the practice of politics tends to require a lot more than theory. A speechwriter for a Democratic Presidential candidate will be wise to rely on frames that have been shown to work rather than on those Lakoff says must work; the candidate him/herself will be wise to rely on issues that connect to the people rather than on those Lakoff says will evoke a positive emotional response.