It was sometime during 2002 that the name "George Lakoff" started coming up from time to time on my local NPR station, in a handful of book reviews, and in other sources of political and academic chatter. I remember being heartened at the time to learn that some creative thinking was finally coming out of our side of the aisle. After all, by the time that "Moral Politics" was in its second printing, two years of Republican rule had been preceded by eight years of a Democratic presidency whose brand of progressive innovation followed the formula: Take one part Latest Republican Policy Initiative, add one part water. In spite of the fact that I was, and remain,
seriously skeptical of the claim that political dispositions can be boiled down to whether your parents were nice to you or not, and slightly dubious of the notion that "frames" are literally built into the structure of your brain, it was quite a relief to hear that at least we were starting to move our party's conversation away from choosing which core Democratic value to butcher this week to pick up two percentage points in the Sunbelt suburbs.
Lately, however, I've been following the growing celebrity of George Lakoff with dismay. The man has some interesting ideas, to be sure, and in the narrow field of professional political wordsmiths, they deserve a good deal of attention. But I'm starting to get the sense that Democratic rank-and-filers, desperate for a beacon to follow to victory in '06 and '08, are beginning to regard his advice as The Answer To All Our Problems. To hear a lot of progressives talk about Lakoff, you'd think that we were just handed some sort of secret decoder ring that unlocks the secrets of the other side, and now it's just a matter of deciphering Frank Luntz's talking points, breaking the code and using it for the powers of good. In the imagination of a good number of Lakoff devotees, the two-party system is nothing but a massive Skinner Box, and winning political campaigns is just a matter of knowing all the right buzzwords that trigger some primitive response mechanism that makes voters reach for either the lever marked "Republican" ("Tax relief!" Bzzt!) or "Democrat" ("Right to marry!" Bzzt!). Is this what behavioral scientists see when they look at the world?
The first practical problem with taking Lakoff's advice too seriously is that, frankly, rank-and-file Democrats have little to no power to institute it. We can all agree that the next time the Republicans start talking about tax cuts, our side should talk about the wealthy sharing the obligation to pay our "patriotic dues." But unless the DNC starts mass emailing draft proofs of its talking points and swing state ad scripts for our review, it really doesn't matter what we think.
"Well," you may reply, "we could always band together and demand that our representatives start using more effective frames," and that's absolutely true. But that brings me to my next point: We didn't lose the 2004 election because we used the wrong catch phrases, and we wouldn't have won it if John Kerry had read "Don't Think of an Elephant." We lost the 2004 election for a complex array of reasons, among them: a weak candidate, an unclear national security plank, a reactive field strategy, African-American voter disenfranchisement, the decades-long demise of organized labor, over-reliance on overpriced and out-of-touch consultants, and a host of other problems. Any one of these factors will require our banding together and demanding things of our representatives; do we really want to top our list with the request that they start saying "Right-wing power grab" repeatedly every time they have a microphone in front of them? Is this really the biggest fish we have to fry?
The second problem with taking Lakoff's advice too seriously is the converse of the first: Lakoff lets us off too easily. Lakoff's message is quite easy for rank-and-file Democrats to stomach, because it lays all the blame on the campaign professionals and none of it on things that regular people can and must do something about. As much as I sympathize with the sentiment - the Kerry campaign was horrendous - I reject the notion that campaigns belong to the consultants' to win or to lose, and that we have nothing to do with it. Armchair quarterbacking is as easy as it is useless; fortunately, unlike professional football, in party politics we can do more than sit around and be spectators. This is our party, we're the ones who suffer from its defeat, and it's thus our responsibility to build the basis for its success. The answer to our party's woes is not to yell at the coaches, or to get Bob Shrum to do better focus group tests on the "frames" he chooses.
Solutions require a lot more hard work on our part. Poor framing doesn't even begin to describe the degree of the Democratic Party's disrepair. If I were to point to a single, paramount cause of the Democratic Party's decades-long decline, it would be the decimation of the labor movement in an era of free market globalization. Unions were once the institutional backbone of progressive political engagement; in 35 years, their representation has been reduced from nearly a third to less than 13% of the workforce, and they have to fight hard to keep their own members from voting Republican.
Moreover, their decline has coincided with the rise of evangelical churches as the institutional backbone of conservative Republicans. Again, the 2004 election, like the 2000 one, was decided by a dizzying array of factors, but chief among the reasons for the steady rise of the GOP since the 1960s is the fact that the Republicans have developed a strong foundation of enduring institutions that has brought conservative activists together in person, molded their common values into strong ideological convictions and clear political objectives, and put them to action on the ground. Politics is merely the formal exercise and expression of the power that religious conservatives have accumulated over years of organizing themselves into a coherent movement with a single voice. The institutions they have built to accomplish that feat include not only the network of evangelical churches, but the constellation of self-help groups, magazines and newspapers, rock bands, summer camps, political action committees and so forth that orbit around it. It is this type of grassroots foundation that is missing from our party, and that is our task to re-create if we hope to win elections in the future without compromising the values that separate us from the party of Ann Coulter and James Dobson. Juggling synonyms will do nothing to accomplish that task. Politics may exist in our heads, but it also exists in the world, and we're losing in both arenas.