It has been about 9 days since the President spoke. He is part of a system and in that context he gave an inspirational speech. Unfortunately it said very little about the state of the Union or the world it is part of. George Lakoff: 'Conservatives don't follow the polls, they want to change them … Liberals do everything wrong' How the progressives have got it wrong and if they don't start to get it right, the conservatives will maintain the upperhand. In the years I have been here writing and reading I have come to believe that Lakoff is usually mainly on the right track. I also see that only a minority of the so called "progressives" pay him much attention. They go on with their same behavior over and over again, expecting the results to change. Often this kind of behavior is given as an example of "insanity" This, among other better reasons, is why we entitled our book Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World. Read on below and I'll give another view of the state of our "Union".
According to Lakoff:
"The progressive mindset is screwing up the world. The progressive mindset is guaranteeing no progress on global warming. The progressive mindset is saying, 'Yes, fracking is fine.' The progressive mindset is saying, 'Yes, genetically modified organisms are OK', when, in fact, they're horrible, and the progressive mindset doesn't know how to describe how horrible they are. There's a difference between progressive morality, which is great, and the progressive mindset, which is half OK and half awful."
Now a knee jerk response to this is that it is certainly not true. Evidence for protests against all these things is abundant. But that misses the point. These are things for which trying to fix them is clearly not enough. They can not be allowed to go on. This has been true for enough time to make it clear that the forces of destruction are winning big time!
Lakoff is affable and generous. In public meetings he greets every question with: "That is an extremely good question." But he cannot keep the frustration out of his voice: the left, he argues, is losing the political argument – every year, it cedes more ground to the right, under the mistaken impression that this will bring everything closer to the centre. In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves. The reason is that conservatives speak from an authentic moral position, and appeal to voters' values. Liberals try to argue against them using evidence; they are embarrassed by emotionality. They think that if you can just demonstrate to voters how their self-interest is served by a socially egalitarian position, that will work, and everyone will vote for them and the debate will be over. In fact, Lakoff asserts, voters don't vote for bald self-interest; self-interest fails to ignite, it inspires nothing – progressives, of all people, ought to understand this.
When he talks about the collapse of the left, he clearly doesn't mean that those parties have disintegrated: they could be in government, as the Democrats are in the US. But their vision of progressive politics is compromised and weak. So in the UK there have been racist "Go home" vans and there is an immigration bill going through parliament, unopposed, that mandates doctors, the DVLA, banks and landlords to interrogate the immigration status of us all; Hungary has vigilante groups attacking Roma, and its government recently tried to criminalise homelessness; the leaders of the Golden Dawn in Greece have only just been arrested, having been flirting with fascism since the collapse of the eurozone. We see, time and again, people in need being dehumanised, in a way that seems like a throwback to 60 or 70 years ago. Nobody could say the left was winning.
If you think these examples are nothing for us to worry about I can only mourn your lack of understanding. It is the planet now and nations are an historical artifact. We no longer can tout our government as a shining example. Just a better way of conning the people. There is much more to this but these ideas are central:
If all political belief originates from one of two wellsprings, if the last thing you should do to propagate your belief is to water it down, if backing it up with facts just weakens it, what would a debate look like, in a world of perfectly understood frames? Say your opposer was Todd Akin, the Republican who notoriously opposed abortion even for rape victims, on the basis that proper victims didn't normally get pregnant because "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down". It is an extreme example, but justifiable, I think: to try to argue against that with a moral case, rather than basic biological realities, would be missing a trick. Lakoff shakes his head: I can see him thinking, "Forget tricks!" Instead, he says: "You have to go up a level, to the moral level. You have to say, this is somebody who's interested in male domination. That's what liberals are afraid to do."
A classic liberal pitfall is the idea that by repeating one of the opposition's ridiculous lines, you make it look even more absurd. "There was an election in Wisconsin," Lakoff says, "there was a horrible governor there, and the Democrats were so stupid that they put up billboards all over the state with a picture of him smiling. They had his name in large letters next to the picture, and it says, 'Why is this man smiling?' And then in smaller type, it has a list of his positions, all from his point of view? As if everybody will recognise that this is a horrible man. Instead, it is a billboard in his favour. It's about time progressives got out there and said what's true about themselves, as well as what's true of the other side. If you have a strong position, let's hear it."
A thought strikes me as I go over all this for the nth time. Are liberals that sure of their moral ground? Are the facts they keep citing for
them rather than for others? It often seems that way.
I'll sum up by saying that as an almost 78 year old the state of this supposed "Union" is as bad as I have seen. This is in large part because there are so few who see the way it needs to be fixed. They will instead play electoral politics as they always have with potential loss of even the Senate looming. That is not a happy picture. We really don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing!