One-Trick Pony

I've already given my take on the Blue State writer George Lakoff, author of "Don't Think of an Elephant."

Now some other people with credentials far better than mine are weighing in on the Lakoff phenomenon.

Here's"Reason" managing editor Jesse Walker:

But the problem with Lakoff isn't merely that he's politically tone-deaf, nor that he's unwilling to confront the possibility that there's such a thing as a bad tax. He is hardly the only Democrat to suffer those two debilities. The problem is that he has a frame of his own to sell, a model that may have some explanatory power but which he has stretched far beyond its limits. The difference between left and right, he argues, is best understood as a split between two concepts of the family. Conservatives follow a "strict father" morality; liberals favor the "nurturing parent" approach. Both project their preferred ideal onto the nation.

This was the essence of my objection:

The idea here is that, to everyone, the government is a sort of parent, and the insight is seeing that people have two views of parents. Can't anyone on the left take a step back and see that a lot of people don't think of the government as any kind of parent. It's an unruly servant of the people, a creation of, and a function of, the civil society, the voters as a whole, the community. That would be the view of the old radicals, like Jefferson and Paine.

But to the new ones, we are 260 million children fretting about mommy and daddy issues. I can't help seeing in that thinking a relic of the '60s generation which defined itself by ambivalence to authority figures and ultimately to their own parents. Those '50s parents created the suburban homes that turned out the spoiled children who hurled themselves to crush and overthrow the old religious and political hierarchies symbolized by their parents.

And here's former White House speechwriter Kenneth S. Baer:

I am not a cognitive linguist (the limits of my expertise in the field begin and end with the Wittgenstein quote above), and I cannot critique Lakoff's linguistic analysis. But I can say confidently that his political analysis is severely lacking. Don't Think of an Elephant is a small volume big on assumptions and short on the historical and political context that would shed light on why Americans respond to certain language in the ways that they do. In some places, Lakoff offers superb advice to candidates, but after reading this book—which, as a collection of many previously released articles, is disjointed and repetitive—it seems that Lakoff is primarily concerned with using linguistics to make the case for his liberal-left politics. That may bring comfort to his neighbors in Berkeley, but there's little evidence that it will win elections.

Editor's note: "Cognative linguist" happens to be pretty close to what Choam Nomsky does. Could be more than a coincidence. Certainly the idea of "a model that may have some explanatory power but which he has stretched far beyond its limits" seems to fit both cases.

Editor's note to editor's note: Yes, I know I misspelled it. A while back I did an imaginary dialogue between "Choam Nomsky" and "Moochael Mire." And I found I got a steady stream of hits for "Choam Nomsky." Seems a lot of his fans think that's how he spells it. So I'm amusing myself by doing it again.