Marc Cooper reviews George Lakoff's "
Don't Think of an Elephant" and Thomas Frank's "
What's the Matter With Kansas?" as well as the lesser known "
Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture" by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, in the current issue of the
Atlantic (see link note at bottom of diary).
But a review of these recent publications is only a cover for Cooper to attack the prevailing mindset of progressives in the aftermath of the 2004 election, a mindset that is feverishly grasping Lakoff's "reframing" paradigm as the beginning and end of our what to do now? crisis.
More below...
Cooper dismisses Lakoff's new popularity not as a blueprint for a serious progressive agenda, but as "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."
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."
Hmmmm. Sounds like Cooper is on the Reform Agenda to me:
- Blunting the influence of corporate cash
- Ditching the failed consultant clique
- Reconnect with the working class
- Find some decent candidates
What I didn't realize was that
Reform conflicted with
Reframe. And it doesn't have to really. But Cooper is pointing out that the reframe paradigm is giving progressives an easy way out, a way that minimizes the real change needed in the movement.
And he proposes that for many progressives, Lakoff's paradigm allows them to smugly explain their repeated losses, which is all they really want, rather than effectively engineering victories.
It's much easier nowadays to fancy yourself a member of a persecuted minority, bravely shielding the flickering flame of enlightenment from the increasing Christo-Republican darkness, than it is to figure out how you're actually going to win an election or, God forbid, organize a union.
We're all familiar with Lakoff's "strict-father versus nurturing family" construct, or as Cooper summarizes it, the James Dobson vs. the Dalai Lama. Lakoff urges Democrats to get out and use his new vocabulary to persuade the Dobsons to want to become Lamas.
Fat chance, says Cooper, that we progressives will even try:
Not that many of Lakoff's followers can actually be expected to go out and even try to practice some of that "reframing" on mainstream America. Most are content just to cluster together and lament the deepening religio-social abyss that surrounds them.
Cooper also points to the increased use of the F-word--fascism, that is--as evidence of progressives descent into unreality. He even cites a Lakoff Rockridge Institute Fellow:
Troy Duster, an NYU sociology professor and a senior fellow at George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute (which focuses on, yes, reframing), wrote in the same Nation forum that the election results forced a choice between "two nightmares": either 60 million Americans "knowingly" ratified Bush's "right-wing ideology," or "we have just witnessed a second successive nonviolent coup d'état--a massive voter fraud that produced, among other anomalies, a gap between exit polls and paperless electronic voting tallies."
If we assume that Bush actually won, Duster continued, then we're facing something worse than fraud: that other F-word, fascism. Every industrialized nation, he claimed, has a "smoldering" right-wing base of 15 to 20 percent of the population, just "waiting to be stoked" by some fascist demagogue--maybe like George W. Bush.
It is a mistake to think of 1930s Germany, Italy and Spain as exceptional and inexplicable political aberrations that could not happen here. We easily forget that those right-wing governments had strong electoral showings and sympathizers in many Western nations.
And progressives are supposed to let this guy help Lakoff help them reframe the political debate? Liberals are to go to the American people and explain how--thanks to having a strict-daddy world view--they've been "stoked" into becoming brownshirts? Duster has merely reframed Bertolt Brecht's aphorism that when the people can't be trusted to vote properly, we should dissolve them and appoint another in their place.
Here is where Cooper loses me. No, I am not an alarmist about rampant fascism, but I am concerned that complacency "it can't happen here" is a self-fulfilling expectation in reverse: it might just happen here just as soon as we are certain that it can't. George W. Bush's flippant remark that his job would be a lot easier "if I was the dictator", was one of those jokes that bear more than a kernel of truth.
And Duster is right: there are 15-20% in the U.S. that might object if Bush were to dissolve Congress and the Supreme Court and name himself President for Life, but wouldn't mind if he ignored the Constitution and eliminated all opposition and silenced all critics.
But Cooper is mostly on target, especially when he complains that progressives are at risk of dropping the ball by placing process over substance:
Barely three weeks after the election the trendy MoveOn.org, the motor force of the so-called "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," rallied its adherents coast-to-coast in a round of 1,600 house meetings. The assembled liberal activists--some 18,000--polled themselves and then published their top six political priorities. The results, in order, tell you all you need to know about the current state of progressive detachment and denial. Election reform and media reform came in first and second. The war in Iraq was third, followed by the environment, the Supreme Court, and civil liberties. In short, the biggest problems liberals face are those damned voting machines and Fox News. Glaringly absent from this activist wish list is anything vaguely resembling an aggressive populist agenda. The MoveOn plan provides no answers to those sweaty plebes out there who are "stoked" by kulturkampf rhetoric as well as all-too-real fears about their jobs, wages, health insurance, and school tuition.
These substantive issues are at least as important as the frame we present them with.
Cooper is much more generous to Frank's Kansas, "one of last year's infinitely more thoughtful political books." Frank's book, as most here know by now, rips the GOP myth of "those liberals are the elitists, not us", but also insists that Democrats need to embrace aggressive economic populism.
Frank's most biting criticism of the left came outside of his best-selling book (possibley--Cooper speculates, a sales-driven editing decision):
Frank's harshest and most insightful characterization of progressives comes outside the confines of his book--from both before and after the election. In a February 2004 essay in the obscure Le Monde Diplomatique, Frank mercilessly attacked aloof, self-absorbed liberals.
Leftists of these tendencies aren't really interested in the catastrophic decline of the American left as a social force ... If anything, this decline makes sense to them: the left is people in sympathy with the downtrodden, not the downtrodden themselves. It is a charity operation.
And in a post-election piece in The New York Times, Frank concluded that the Democrats "lost the battle of voter motivation before it started," by choosing high-profile assistance from "idealistic tycoons" over a more natural class-based alliance with common people. As a result, "they imagined themselves the 'metro' party of cool billionaires engaged in some kind of cosmic combat with the square billionaires of the 'retro' Republican Party."
The fixation and fear that the Democrats will react to the 2004 loss by trying to appease rural white voters hamstrung by obsession with "God, guns and gays" is misplaced, Cooper says (while remarking that many progressives are just as obsessed with the same issues, albeit on the other side).
Contrary to the initial "moral values" explanation of Bush's victory...
As more data come in from last year's election, it seems ever clearer that the vote was not decided by some grand clash of moral or personal values. There's a much simpler explanation: Americans were terrified by 9/11, and a small majority of voters concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the incumbent was clear in his thinking on this matter--and that John Kerry, at best, hadn't anything much different to offer.
Here in DailyKos, many of us have endured venomous flames and troll ratings for suggesting that we ought to reconsider our stance on gun regulations and shift our abortion focus to prevention, and talk about nature conservation instead of "environmentalism". These are the progressives Cooper is talking about, those who think we only need to reframe, not to reform.
And part of that reform is learning a broader tolerance for divergent views within our ranks:
The trick of effective politics--as opposed to thinly disguised self-affirming psychotherapy and aesthetically gratifying rebel poses--is precisely to unite people with different views, values, and families around programs, candidates, and campaigns on which they can reach some consensus, however minimal. Before liberals and progressives dash out with their new vocabulary to try to convince others of the righteousness of their values, they might consider spending some time listening to others instead.
And fundamentally, I agree with Cooper: If the reframe without reform mindset prevails, we will truly become a permanent and almost entirely irrelevant minority.
Note: The full Atlantic article is available online only to paid subscribers, so if you're not, try out the issue in your neighborhood bookstore while you sip a half-decaf caramel latte, you deluded navel-gazing jackasses! (:^)