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Let Go of the Lakoff

In presenting his case for why Howard Dean's determination to make George Lakoff the Democratic Frank Luntz is the wrong strategy, Brad Plumer forgets to mention why it's completely insane.

Geroge Lakoff -- I'm sorry to say -- is absolutely horrible at framing things. No, I mean it, the guy is atrociously fucking bad at it. He's a perfectly good guru because he understands what framing is and why it's important and I'm glad that Democrats are realizing we need to put some thought into our language, but Jesus Christ, has anybody actually read his book? He's the worst goddamn framer I've ever read. Democrats should be the nurturing parent? Are you kidding me?

After the election, I read Lakoff's book for a review I was doing. I was stunned. The guy's recommendations seemed completely ignorant of everything else he said. Frames, for instance, bring to mind a host of contexts and other information. So the strict father frame the Republicans use immediately paints Democrats as mommy. And while mom is awesome, it's dad you call when you hear noises downstairs late at night. That's how Republicans win elections, they basically mount the stage and say "did you hear that, America? I think I heard someone jiggling the door downstairs! Now would you rather have George Bush and his bat go check it out, or should we send John Kerry and his baguette?" So Lakoff responds to this by suggesting that Democrats become a gender neutral nurturing parent, which simply doesn't exist, and would actually just mean mom.

The books flaws are legion, and all like this. He recognizes that you can boil the Republican agenda down to 10 words, forming five simple programs and principles. Great. But his counter-suggestion for the Democrats is the worst, most meaningless boilerplate I've ever heard. After the fold, I'm going to attach a review I wrote of his book shortly after the election. It never got published, but I've always liked it, so here ya go. But before you're off to there, it should be said that Brad, and for that matter, my old blogmate Jesse, shouldn't be quite as dismissive of framing as they are. It's one weapon in the political arsenal, and we should make sure we know how to use it. Just because some Democrats are too overzealous in pursuing it, doesn't mean you should marginalize the whole pursuit. But so far as we're going to do any framing at all, anything Lakoff says should be immediately reworked and forwarded over to DeLay's office, in the hopes that they'll use it and destroy their rhetorical advantage.

Anyway, my review follows:

Even before Fox called Ohio for Bush, the conversation had begun. I think it was Carville who fired the first shot, consigning Kerry’s hopes to “drawing an inside straight” and saying that the loss would cause Democrats to “reassess” things. Depressed as I was about the electoral vote, a reeling party’s quest to rebuild itself strikes a romantic, Rocky-like chord in me. I imagine us sprinting through snowdrifts, grunting out chin-ups in picturesque forests, and grimacing through raw-egg protein shakes, all set to “Eye of the Tiger”. But the Democratic Party has no biceps to rebuild or gut to trim, so we have to settle for the literary equivalent of the training montage. And with each morning’s op-ed page offering a new list of post-mortems and alternative visions, it seems we’ve already begun.

Like all good cinematic warriors of lore, we have a long list of gurus to speak to. But the most pressing appointment is surely with George Lakoff, the Berkeley-based linguist who’s long been begging us to catch-up to the Republicans in framing, warning that we need a unified ideology underpinning our policy proposals if we’re to have any chance of matching the right’s soundbyte clarity. We didn’t listen, thinking our organizational strength, fundraising success and general rightness more than enough to convince a wavering electorate. We were wrong, and now the education must begin.

Happily, we don’t need to travel all the way to Berkeley to learn the lessons. We can stay seated in the Heartland, soaking up local culture and values, all the while reading Lakoff’s new book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” It’s a quick one, 119 pages, and clear, too. Lakoff writes with the exaggerated simplicity of an academic desperately trying to dumb down a theory, and his short, declarative sentences make the work oddly reminiscent of Hemingway, or at least Hemingway with a PhD in linguistics.

Lakoff starts strong, offering a bird’s eye view of Republican successes (“tort reform”, “partial birth abortion”, “tax relief, the “death tax”) and explaining why they matter beyond superficial imagery. He provides answers for Democrats still puzzling over the working class’s apparent determination to spite their bank accounts at the ballot box and still raging over the public’s willingness to buy into links between Iraq and al Qaeda (respectively, “voters vote their identity” and “If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off”) offering a much-needed shove to a debate that, till now, had stalled at conclusions of stupidity and/or bigotry.

The book is packed with forehead-slapping moments, when Lakoff lays out a truth that had been hovering just out of your reach, or brings clarity to an argument that had seemed simply paradoxical. My personal favorite is his riff on the Bush Administration’s use of Orwellian language, (i.e, the Healthy Forests Act, PATRIOT Act, Clear Skies Initiative, and No Child Left Behind). As Lakoff notes, “Imagine if they came out supporting a ‘Dirty Skies’ bill or a ‘Forest Destruction’ bill or a ‘Kill Public Education bill. They would lose. They are aware people do not support what they are trying to do. Orwellian language points to weakness…When you hear Orwellian language, note where it is, because it is a guide to where they are vulnerable.”

At the center of his diagnosis is the Republican adherence to the “Strict Father” frame, an insight Lakoff fleshed out after some sympathetic, evangelical linguists pointed him towards the writings of popular conservative preacher James Dobson. It’s hardly a contentious claim; David Brooks regularly refers to the Republicans as “the daddy party”. From here, however, Lakoff enters shakier territory. He suggests that Democrats have the “nurturant parent” model, a gender-neutral frame that ideally combines mommy’s interest in your PTA meetings with daddy’s family protection strategies. But for a linguist dedicated to explaining the power and far-reaching implications of frames, he’s puzzlingly clueless as to the implications of his own. Parents are gendered, not gender neutral, and the word “nurturant” has, in our culture, an immediate feminine connotation. And because that brings us back to mommy, where we’re hostage to mommy’s (often unfair) stereotypes. We may be better on education, talented with the checkbook, and attuned to the children, but we’re not the one you call when you wake up and hear noises downstairs. The Republicans, with ads featuring shadowy men of swarthy complexion and, when that proved too subtle, wolves, create fear and offer protection, it wouldn’t seem that a “nurturant” perspective is effective framing for a response.

It’s not just in parental models that Lakoff seems strangely tone-deaf to his own framing. Oftentimes he seems content to simply propose alternatives, either unaware or unconcerned with his offering’s weakness. Towards the book’s end, he lauds the 10 words that define the Republicans – strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, family values – and offers 10 words for our own. The Democrats, according to Lakoff, should throw their party behind a stronger America, broad prosperity, a better future, effective government and mutual responsibility. The obvious difference between the competing sets is that, aside from family values, the Republican’s are all grounded and actionable. Lakoff’s proposals, conversely, mean nothing, they’re campaign slogans fit for the side of a bus or the bottom of a bumper sticker, not declarative principles.

But maybe it should come as no surprise that one man’s attempts to reframe the Democratic Party would be weaker than the Republican Party’s decades-long campaign to frame itself. And therein lies the importance of this book. The right has raced ahead in their use of language, and the Democrats have been unfocused and ineffective in their attempts to catch up. That’s partially attributable to a widespread ignorance of the whole topic, and partially to a lack of motivation on our part. But, as I said at the beginning, the Democrats have woken up to their weakness and have begun training for their comeback. Genuflecting before Lakoff is a good first step, we desperately need to learn what he has to teach. That some of his proposals are weak should be no distraction; it just means that, in time, the student will have to surpass the master.

Posted by Ezra Klein on April 1, 2005 4:58 PM | Permalink

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Let Go of the Lakoff:

» Leaving Lakoff Behind from Doubly Sure
I hope it is not surprising to anyone that the way in which we talk about issues is vitally important. If this is the first time that Democrats are realizing the power of political discourse then maybe the party is in worse shape than I thought. [Read More]

» More on Lakoff and Dean from CommonSenseDesk
I posted earlier on Brad Plumer's arguments against George Lakoff. [Read More]

» Bush II; Day 152: Stirring up a little controversy over "framing" from Issues Forum
In case you don't know "framing" is almost like marketing: framing means taking an issue and creating a simple framework for helping people to understand that issue...from one's own particular point of view of course. The Republican party has been... [Read More]

» On Lakoff: Dispelling some myths and misinterpretations from DemSpeak

Majikthise takes on some misconceptions of Lakoff's "strict father/nurturing parent" metaphors

[Read More]

» Lakoff - XVI: public health and language from Effect Measure
This series began as an attempt to extract some useful ideas for public health from George Lakoff's neuroscience-inspired notions of "framing," notions that unexpectedly took the progressive political world by storm after being championed by, among o... [Read More]

» Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company from Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company
Inspired by the back-and-forth between Ezra Klein and Lindsay Beyerstein here, here, and here, I offer my own ideas on framing that completely bypass the "strict father" vs. "nurturant parent" debate. [Read More]

COMMENTS (74)

Thank you!

It's like believing that the scientist that put forth a theory for the basis of "sex appeal" to have copious quantities of it himself.

These are orthogonal vectors people.

Posted by: Gryn | April 1, 2005 5:08 PM

Two things about Lakoff. First, for an academic, he seems pathologically averse to footnotes or endnotes. Now, maybe it's because he just doesn't want to lard up his books intended for general audiences with scholarly accesories. Or maybe it's because there's not a shred of empirical or polling data to support his characterization of the strong father/nurturant parent model as it would apply to American politics. Since I haven't seen a shred of empirical evidence, I'm forced to conclude it's not simply that he's writing for a general audience that he doesn't provide empirical data to support his empirically-verifiable claims.

My other beef with his model is that I didn't recognize that parental dichotomy from my own family, and when I thought about it, it didn't seem to fit just about any of my friends' families either. The more I've pondered it, I think what he's working with is a ideal type of a white southern working class Protestant family versus a NE Protestant middle class family. Birmingham AL vs Manchester NH. But in my experience with more "ethnic" families--mostly Catholic, mostly Irish, Eastern European or Mediteranean, but also Jews and lots of Arabs--the family and parenting models are much less rigid. You even see this in terms of most of the competitive states in the electoral college, and why they're competetive: MI, OH, WI, NM, FL, MO, PA--ethnically mixed states with lots of Catholics, and not dominated by either white conservative evangelical protestants or upper middle class "yankee" Protestants.

What Lakoff gives us is the extreme poles. That's fine for understanding why the Republican leadership is as it is, since it's essentially the revenge of the white working class southern Protestants who defected from the Democrats from the mid-1960's onward. But that's not where the real political struggles are taking place right now, and it's more important, in my mind, to understand not the tension between strict father and nuturing mother, but the tension between autonomy and solidarity. In the 2000 election, it was autonomy, Bush giving back control of the Gov't, Gore overreaching on the environment, etc. Now, with fear of terrorism and the backlash against Bush's SS plan, it seems we're seeing the pull of solidarity, the sense that security comes with relying on each other, and having the state there as a backup. That's the tension, and Lakoff's ideal types doesn't deal with it at all.

Posted by: DHinMI | April 1, 2005 6:49 PM

Agree w/ Ezra 105%.

Posted by: praktike | April 1, 2005 7:04 PM

Right again Ezra.

Happy to agree with praktike one more time.

And though I almost always agree with DH, it is very grudging. Heh.

Posted by: Armando | April 1, 2005 7:07 PM

This is what I've been saying.

Posted by: Oliver | April 1, 2005 7:28 PM

one point -- it's not at all clear that nurturing Mommy is even the political equal of protective Daddy, especially at times like these. The primary role of a state gov't, after all, is protection. That's why people originally banded together, no?

Posted by: praktike | April 1, 2005 7:45 PM

Pratike--You're right, people didn't expect daddy to take care of them, they banded together. Like a governement of the people and for the people, it's security through solidarity, not somebody "taking care of you."

Posted by: DHinMI | April 1, 2005 7:48 PM

Hm, so perhaps it's like going out and buying a Doberman Pinscher. But a Doberman that's also cuddly and fetches your slippers for you. I mean your health care. Shit. Well, I'll get this framing thing down one of these days...

Posted by: Brad Plumer | April 1, 2005 7:50 PM

Well said, Ezra. You should have "published" that review on your blog as soon as it was clear it wasn't getting published elsewhere. This needs to be said and heard a lot more.

Posted by: djw | April 1, 2005 8:22 PM

BTW, I just discovered via Jesse Z. that the Rockridge Institute has a forum where this kind of stuff gets regularly hashed out. Frexample.

Posted by: praktike | April 1, 2005 9:05 PM

Thank you for that review. I too, am not enthralled with Lakoff (and I know some folks who are). Your analysis is correct. Democrats have to start saying something concrete, and not talk a language that comes off mostly as fuzzy nothings.

Hoover won with "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage", which may not be, strictly speaking, "actionable", but it is an end result that people can easily grasp.

Posted by: Quiddity | April 1, 2005 11:30 PM

Thank you Ezra. I've been getting into a few fights lately trying to dispell a lot of bad notions about framing, especially from people who want to take a few bad examples of framing and blow it up into a condemnation of the entire topic (Joshua Green's Atlantic Monthly article is an example of this). You demonstrate that it is possible to present specific criticisms of Lakoff's work without being dismissive of the overall framing effort.

Bravo!

Posted by: Chris Andersen | April 2, 2005 1:31 AM

Lakoff's frames are poorly developed. he has done a good job at deconstructing Republican ones but the ones he's constructed seem cheesy to say the least. I think a lot of it comes down to his academic/Berkley background and lack of profit motive. Luntz has a private company which earns money which it can then pour right back into more polling and focus grroups. Lakoff has the Rockridge Institute, which can't even coordinate with Democratic candidates much less ear a profit off working for them.

The only Dem frame he constructed that seemed like it would work well was the one on taxes being everyone's dues/contribution to society. Most of the others seemed underdeveloped or untenable to me.

I've skimmed Luntz's manual. And I've read Lakoff's book. The difference is as a wide as the one between a Hummer and a tricycle.

Posted by: Lavoisier1794 | April 2, 2005 2:47 AM

I don't know if it agrees with Lakoff's definition, but back during the late-90s, William Saletan of Slate wrote about "framing" with articles under the "Frame Game" heading. As one would expect they were a lot less academic, but dealt extensively with how the GOP set the media context for the politics of the late Clinton years, especially impeachment and the 2000 election.

While Slate and Saletan especially are as passe in some progressive quarters as a Lakoff is en vouge, the idea at least should be considered on it merits. Looking at Slate's archive I didn't find any immediate theoretical statements of what framing was, like Michael Kinsley's "Age of Spin" from the early 1990 I think, but I did find several extended articles developing the ideas. You can cetainly disagree with Saletan, but I think he's a lot more grounded then Lakoff and would never fall for some of his dippier ideas.

For example, one of Saletan's earliest articles in the series was a piece on the 25th anniversary of Roe. Briefly but methodically, Saletan delineates the major arguments both sides have used and discarded over the last 25 years. Saletan doesn't offer any grand policy recommendations a la Lakoff, although he might say "Dems will be in trouble if they listen to this egghead, nuturant or not." But his surveys of where the two sides in the argument are, how they got there and how they're molding facts to their agenda is as good a lesson in applied political rhetoric as I've seen.

He also has an article on a DLC-CAP dispute from 1997! Ah, le plus ca change! While Saletan has not come up with the ten buzzwords that Lakoff attempted, his dissection of how Mark Penn and Stan Greenburg constructed their competing polls is a brilliant example of how to craft a subtle, well framed argument--something Lakoff appears to not be able to do.

Roe: http://slate.msn.com/id/2698/
DLC: http://slate.msn.com/id/2694/
I hope this is the general archive for the columns:
http://slate.msn.com/default.aspx?id=2077581&qt=22;Frame+Game&sort=d&rowstart=1&rows=25

Posted by: Exile in Colorado Springs | April 2, 2005 3:21 AM

I took Introduction to Linguistics with Lakoff in 1975. He was a very smart guy and most of his students loved him. I liked him even though he gave me the worst grade I ever earned at Berkeley (deservedly) but he was soft. The winds of political correctness were blowing strongly in Berkeley in the mid-seventies (in many ways it mirrored the fantasy world that Horowitz would have you believe every campus is today) and George was a dandelion, veering here and yon with each gust.

Lakoff is a brilliant, insightful teddy bear, a classic Ivory Tower Kumbaya liberal with a big heart. But taking practical, tactical advice from him in a political era where we need framers with sharp utility knives and equally sharp elbows would be a huge mistake. Lakoff provided the frame of 'framing', but God forbid he paints the picture for the Democratic Party.

Posted by: Bruce Webb | April 2, 2005 6:16 AM

From my perspective as a parent, it's hard to understand why so many would be scratching their heads about where Lakoff got the nurturing parent model. Dobson's (and Ezzo's) battle lines have been clearly drawn against attachment parenting. Lakoff talks extensively about attachment theory and punitive discipline in Moral Politics, and notes that he got his nurturing parent model from Bowlby/Ainsworth's Attachment Theory, which was picked up and turned into attachment parenting. There are numerous progressive child development, natural family living and public policy groups interested in creating policies that actually support women, children and families, and they are very much oriented around the model of the nurturant parent as representing what, at its best, our domestic policies can be.

I agree Lakoff isn't particularly good at creating memes, but I am very excited that someone of some visibility is finally taking seriously what advocates like Dr. T Berry Brazelton have been working tirelessly to promote for years.

Posted by: raisin | April 2, 2005 8:21 PM

Bravo, bravo, Ezra! -- Here's what I posted as a comment to Christopher Lydon's interview with Lakoff on BLOGGING OF THE PRESIDENT 2004 last year:

http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000025.html

It occurs to me that being "nurturing" (which may have some serious problems, because to a RED-BLOODED AMERICAN it sounds like being a wimp) is not the only alternative to "guts and glory." How about being SMART? -- is "look before you leap" a sign of cowardice, or is it the essence of street smarts? How about being HONORABLE -- in the sense of honoring international and domestic commitments? -- like the man said, "a promise is a promise." There seems to be such an incredible lack of imagination among our politicians. Of course Lakoff is right, but the art of rhetoric has been around for many years, and interstingly enough, the United States has been a leader in that field in recent decades. Where's the disconnect?

Posted by: cicero at November 29, 2003 09:20 PM

Nobody on that thread seemed to get my point at the time... but it's the same as yours.

Posted by: cicero | April 2, 2005 10:54 PM

Oh thank you! We have been talking about this privately. I didn't know there were others who were less than enthused about Lakoff. It's about authoritarian theocracy vs. civilized pluralism. But there is one other aspect that I think Lakoff, Frank and Dean miss; people aren't going to throw off their faith for any reason. Framing has to put Democratic values back in the context of living your faith. Pre-emptive war, bullying, poverty, abandonment, and vigilantism are not religious values. Community, inclusion, charity, and respect are.

Posted by: Sandy | April 4, 2005 5:21 PM

Hi, I'm new to this whole blog thing and I have a burning question. My friends don't care about what happens with the environment. I mean, they eat something and throw the wrapper on the ground. I try and get them to pick it up but to no avail. They just stare at me like something's wrong with me. Should I keep trying or should I just give up? Let me know.

Posted by: Yoda | April 7, 2005 12:22 PM