These ideas are placed into public discourse via a sophisticated conservative communications machine: think tanks, messaging experts,Grover Norquist’s weekly meetings at Americans for Tax Reform and across the country, training institutes, booking agencies, talk radio, Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, chambers of commerce, bloggers and the rest. This network puts those words and their frames, both political and moral, into the brains of a huge number of our citizens.
In my forthcoming e-book, I point out that each political tribe puts forth a narrative that blames the existence of the other tribe on a conspiracy of this kind. Lakoff lists the standard villains from the progressive point of view. For conservatives, it is “Hollywood” and the “mainstream media” that are to blame for people’s false consciousness.
In fact, Lakoff is most famous for Moral Politics, in which he argues that the difference between conservatives and progressives is that conservatives use a “strict-father” morality to evaluate public policy and progressives use a “nurturant parent” model. Never does Lakoff recognize that equating government-citizen and parent-child is a mistake.
Libertarians think that the false consciousness of people comes from academics such as Lakoff. For decades, we have hoped to change the narrative within universities.
“Libertarians think that the false consciousness of people comes from academics such as Lakoff. For decades, we have hoped to change the narrative within universities.”
I have a different view. I think the oppressor/oppressed narrative is appealing to many people, and much academic work in non-falsifiable subjects are attempts to rationalize popular prejudices. So attempts to convert academics to libertarianism are unlikely to succeed, and even if it does happen it won’t change many minds in the public at large.
When Obama speaks forcefully, as he did in his second inaugural address, he enables action to follow.
He’s like vox dei or something.
What is it about linguistics professors at Berkeley that makes them such insufferably smug liberals?
As opposed to the White House, which simply emails out everyone’s talking points.
Taking the most charitable view of Lakoff, in “Metaphors We Live By”, he didn’t equate government with family. Instead, he hypothesized that “people” think about government in that way.
As for changing academia…Dr. Kling, I’ve learned two things from reading your blogs:
Exit > Voice
Experiment > Argument.
What about a 4 axis model?
Conservatism
|
Communism — Libertarianism
|
Progressivism/liberalism
Well, the spacing didn’t work out in the text. The 4 ‘isms’ would be 4 opposing points on a compass.
One could easily take that paragraph and with very few substitutions turn it into a complaint by the right against the leftwing media conspiracy. One would think the author, Rakoff, would be able to see that and recognize further that it is a sign the argument is trivial. OTOH, he is probably writing for people who agree with him in the first place so maybe it is an irrelevant thought. I wonder how many people read his work and how many of those have a different point of view. This blog might contain the entire set.
There’s also a serious social distancing component. Caricaturing the opposition as he does (not only Conservatives took the “death panels” talk seriously) confirms that he has no desire to speak across the aisle. Though he couches his argument with a few quick brushstroke references to linguistics, his assertion is simply that Obama is simply a more authentic and genuine person, and that those who oppose him are (to use the common liberal term) neanderthals..
Now, anyone who is not within 20 feet of Lakoff politically is going stop reading before those sentences are finished. So, like many ideologues (Krugman, Norquist, anyone who quotes Ayn Rand), his rhetoric is not so much about signalling his alliances as it is about inducing disgust in those who differ. This is a bit like those convenience stores that blast classical music outside to chase away teenagers, except that in this case the adults in the store also enjoy talking about how uncultured teens today are.