While surfing to and fro, I ran across this announcement of a talk by George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley: Tonight: Cognitive Linguistics and Politics. What a shame... we missed it. Lakoff is apparently a Noam Chomsky wannabee, being a professor of linguistics and all, and using it as his springboard into progressive politics.
The links in the announcement take you to a plug for Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (A Progressive Guide to Action) where you find an excerpt for a book review by Marc Cooper. The review is appropriately titled Thinking of Jackasses: The grand delusions of the Democratic Party. This from a contributing editor of The Nation. The review is a beauty.
Just a few weeks after the November election House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (a veritable totem of blue-state liberalism) invited Lakoff to come in and coach the Democratic caucus in this new way of thinking. Other liberal members of Congress distributed hundreds of copies of his book to Hill staffers. Lakoff's slim volume has now had multiple printings, and its small Vermont-based publisher predicts that half a million copies will eventually be sold. "What are there?" Margo Baldwin, of Lakoff's publishing house, said to the Los Angeles Times as she estimated the market. "Fifty million unhappy Democrats out there?"
Baldwin's off-the-cuff remark betrays the real reason for Lakoff's sudden popularity. Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, Don't Think of an Elephant! is a feel-good self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their commonsense message has been misunderstood by the eternally deceived masses. Liberal values are American values, they say, but somehow Americans just keep getting tricked -- by Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, AM talk radio, conservative think tanks -- into thinking and voting against their own interests.
So what's an earnest, honest liberal to do when nobody wants to hear the truth? Why not turn to personal therapy disguised as politics, psychobabble as electoral strategy? Lakoff, revealingly, provides nary a word on reshaping the Democratic Party itself, blunting the influence of corporate cash, eliminating the stranglehold on the party and its candidates by discredited but omni-powerful consultants, reversing its estrangement from the white working class, finding some decent candidates, or just about anything else that might require actual strategic thinking, organizing, and politicking. Never mind. What liberals most need to do, Lakoff says, is "be the change you want."
This is not to disparage as self-indulgent, latte-sipping navel-gazers and whiners the 48 percent of the electorate that voted Democratic. But Limbaugh-driven stereotypes aside, the Democratic liberal and activist crust does indeed seem ever more in denial about the depth of its defeat, about its detachment from what it claims as its "traditional base," and about its apparent willingness to pursue little more than a self-referential, self-indulgent political aesthetic.
Nancy Pelosi certainly seems to epitomize the latte-sipping, navel-gazing, whiners who are so pathetically out of touch with America.
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