| Luntz can advise Dems and Reps alike because he's basically amoral, It's a job. And honesty is not part of it.
Lakoff, OTOH, is deeply concerned with honest communication, because his interest goes deeper than communication. It goes to thought itself. In fact, this was his key insight that got him started in the field of cognitive linguistics--a field he helped found--with his first book, Metaphors We Live By, co-authored with Mark Johnson. The insight was this: metaphors don't just express ideas, they shape them.
Lakoff's first book on politics, Moral Politics, was all about making sense of why liberals and conservatives believed in what they did as coherent sets of beliefs. (Try explaining to a Martian Vulcan what taxes and abortion have to do with one another. "Well, you see, Spock...." Right!) He published that book in 1996. It was his response to the GOP victories in 1994.
Lakoff listened to what Republicans were saying, and was very puzzled. "Here I am, a professional linguist, and I don't understand what they're saying in my native tounge!" (Paraphrase). It was professionally embarrassing. So he set out to understand why. Why did what conservative say make no sense to him as a liberal? And why was the reverse almost certainly true as well?
His answer was that liberals and conservatives both use different family models to structure their most basic political beliefs, and those different models produce different structures of thought.
If the Dems had any sort of cohesive infrastructure, they would have jumped all over Moral Politics as soon as it came out and handily won back Congress that same year. (I did my part, I gave it a glowing review in the Christian Science Monitor)
But here we are now, a full 13 years later, and they still don't get it, even though many of them now know who Lakoff is. They still don't understand what he's saying. They're like a kid, looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Luntz they understand, because he does what a lot of other people do, and he's successfully sold himself as doing it better--despite the obvious flaw in that logic that Digby handily points out. That's fine. He's a microscope salesman.
But what the Dems need isn't another microscope. It's a telescope. They need to see the big picture. And Lakoff is a telescope manufacturer. But the sad fact is, Democrats don't even realize there is a big picture. So why the hell would they want a telescope anyways? Isn't it just an ass-backwards microscope? With the controls all out of place--if not out of reach?
So as a result, they don't even begin to think about the big picture. They continue to accept the Republican's big picture framing--such as talking and thinking about taxes as a burden--and hence tax relief as a good thing, when what they ought to be concerned about is the purpose of taxation--what taxes can pay for, including all the physical and human infrastructure for creating vastly more wealth in the future, so that paying more taxes still leaves far more income left over.
Right now, what taxes could pay for would be universal health care and saving the planet from global warming. There are no taxes on a dead planet, but somehow most people don't want that. It's way past time that someone got that through the Democrats' heads. But that someone is not going to be Frank Luntz. |
