Code red

Language can frame political reality, something conservatives seem to grasp readily

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain
By George Lakoff
Viking, 292 pp., $25.95

A better title for George Lakoff's new book, "The Political Mind," might have been "Invasion of the Brain Snatchers." Lakoff's provocative thesis is that for several decades "radical conservatives" have managed to change our brains, causing Americans to elect right-wing Republicans, even though in their hearts they really want to vote for liberal Democrats.

According to Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, the way we view the world is conditioned by narratives and metaphors that over time become hard-wired in our brains. Although we can overcome these patterns of thought when trying to make sense of new events or information, it is not so easy to do. The path of least resistance - or in Lakoff's technical vernacular, the neurological path with the most chemical receptors at the synapses - is to fit the emerging reality into a preexisting mental "frame." As a result, reason is at a distinct disadvantage in political discourse.

According to Lakoff, there are only two worldviews: progressive and conservative. In his construct, progressives (i.e., liberals) are all about empathy and responsibility, while conservatives stand for authority and obedience. As he suggested in his earlier book "Moral Politics," this dichotomy can best be understood by child-rearing metaphors: the "strict father" (conservative) and the "nurturant parent" (progressive).

These two immutable and mutually exclusive moral systems are principally a function of unconscious belief, not reason, writes Lakoff; so a conservative cannot convert a liberal by simply making a compelling argument. The only way a liberal will change his stripes is by rewiring his mind, through the careful and repeated use of powerful code words that over time trigger consistent and predictable physiological responses in the brain.

For example, Lakoff observes that conservatives have caused a lot of erstwhile liberals to hate taxes by repeatedly juxtaposing the word "tax" with the word "relief," implying that "those taxed . . . are victims." Prolonged exposure to this metaphor strengthens "all the synapses on all the neurons" on all the affected pathways in the brain. "If you don't have this understanding of taxes beforehand," asserts Lakoff, "it will come into your brain after a while." Overcoming this negative view of taxation requires a tax-affirming metaphor that can create an alternative "neural structure," not a convincing rational argument.

The basic theme of the book, stripped of its neuroscience and linguistics jargon, is an affirmation of what advertisers and political consultants have believed for half a century: Consumers and voters are moved more by images and stories than by facts and ideas. To hear Lakoff tell it, conservatives have been playing a well-funded, 21st-century game of "cognitive politics" for decades, while liberals have been stuck in the 18th century, naively and fecklessly relying on Enlightenment-era reason.

Lakoff believes that if only liberals would conduct their own sustained campaign of "brain change," they would carry the day over their conservative opponents, because the progressive worldview is a much closer reflection of man's true nature. According to Lakoff, recent brain research has proven that human beings are predisposed toward empathy, rather than self-interest. Furthermore, he argues that recent historical scholarship has determined that the intellectual foundations of American democracy are similarly "rooted in empathy" - rationalists like Hobbes, Locke, and Madison notwithstanding.

This book is unapologetically written as a how-to manual for true believers on the left, "to make progressive political advocacy more effective." Although he gives conservatives grudging credit for realizing that well-crafted language affects the brain, Lakoff claims that they have used their linguistic powers for evil purposes, sowing unjustified fear among the masses, enriching rapacious capitalists, and establishing a repressive authoritarian regime (i.e., the Bush administration). Apparently he has empathy for everyone except conservatives.

This Manichean perspective is bad enough, but even worse is that Lakoff's core argument against reason cannot be sustained on its own terms. Take the war in Iraq. Lakoff argues that by framing our military campaign in the Middle East as a "war on terror," the Bush administration is tapping into well-worn pathways in the brain that predispose the American public to defer to presidential leadership out of a sense of fear and loyalty. Antiwar advocates cannot win a rational argument within that frame. If, instead, they created an alternative mental frame by characterizing our presence in Iraq as an "occupation" in support of bigger "oil profits," Lakoff writes, the American public would become more open to hearing the case for bringing the troops home. In other words, if both left and right were equally effective in establishing their opposing narratives and metaphors, neurological space would be created for an old-fashioned clash of ideas - just the sort of intellectual engagement that Lakoff thinks is passé.

Lakoff elides this apparent problem by asserting that the truthfulness of the liberal worldview can be seen without resort to reason; it is self-evident. To Lakoff's eyes, once voters are exposed to a progressive framing and "made aware of the facts and figures," their naturally empathetic minds will reach the obvious conclusion - vote for Obama!

In the end, Lakoff's book is not really concerned with deepening our understanding of the mind or improving the quality of political discourse; its purpose is to secure partisan victory. As such, it cannot be taken seriously as a work of science or scholarship.

James A. Peyser is a partner with NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit that supports educational entrepreneurs nationally. He is a former chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education.