Get this: Republicans have managed to dominate national politics since 1980 by cleverly manipulating the American working class into voting against its economic interests using language, symbolism, and emotion.

You’ve heard that one before? Well, then you may wonder why University of California, Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg even bothered with the generously subtitled “Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latté-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show” (Public Affairs, 264 pages, $26).

After all, we already have Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” published way back in 2004 and all the imitators that have followed, peddling their different theories about how the Democrats can win by changing just their style, not their substance. We’ve already been informed that the great unwashed would give up their childish attachment to “values” issues like abortion and the Second Amendment and realize that they should be voting for national health care and a higher minimum wage if only the Democrats could come up with a more compelling “narrative.”

Early on in “Talking Right,” Mr. Nunberg casts aspersions on the idea of treating language as an “easy palliative” for the Democrats’ problems. He even casts a derisive eye on “the recent vogue for explaining the Republicans’ success by pointing to their ability to spin ‘better narratives.'” But, when it comes down to it, Mr. Nunberg is a linguist.And when you’ve got a hammer … well, you just start whacking away.

To be clear, Mr. Nunberg’s isn’t a bad book. It’s entertainingly written, with a great deal of partisan flair (he assumes a certain level of liberalism from his readers, as a regular commentator on National Public Radio has every right to do). What’s more, there’s some interesting linguistic history and some interesting contemporary factoids about phrases (such as “liberal elites”) that have crossed over from conservative media into the mainstream.

Yet, at a very basic level, the book suffers from a sort of circular logic that assumes Democratic policies are better for non-rich Americans and that the Democrats will start winning when they come up with words and stories that make that indisputable fact clear.

Mr. Nunberg is nearly obsessed with the idea that Republicans have hoodwinked working-class voters into believing social class and ideology and shared values are more important than economic class. “How abstract must the notion of ‘red-state culture’ be,” Mr. Nunberg asks, “if it entitles [right-wing talk show host Laura] Ingraham — who is the daughter of a Connecticut lawyer, and who went to Dartmouth and the University of Virginia Law School and now lives in Washington, D.C.— to claim the right to share a first-person plural pronoun with a Pentecostal deer hunter from Oklahoma?”

Pretty damn abstract, he determines, going so far as to call blue-collar Republicans’ anger at liberal elites an “inauthentic form of resentment.” Of course, it’s words such as inauthentic — delivered by Berkeley professors who think they know average Americans’ interests better than the average Americans in question — that cause such resentment in the first place.

Mr. Nunberg gets it right when he writes off a few bad ideas for how to deal with the Democrats’ image problems. Rebranding taxes as “membership fees” is about as likely to work as calling them “revenue enhancements.” Some pigs you just can’t put lipstick on. “People have always regarded taxes as a burden, if not exactly an affliction,” he writes. Likewise, trying to appropriate the word “values” — as in “health care is a value” — is doomed to failure.

But Mr. Nunberg has much less to say when it comes to what will work. His view of how to remake the Democratic narrative basically comes down to this: Whereas the Right’s story always pits “regular Americans” against “liberal elites,” in the proper, populist Democratic story, “With the help of the hero, ordinary hard-working people stand up to powerful bullies, who finally get their comeuppance.”

The hero in that story, one supposes, is a Democratic president like Bill Clinton who famously said he’d fight for “people who work hard and play by the rules.” But Al Gore’s modified shtick about “the people versus the powerful” failed in 2000, and John Edwards’s shtick about “two Americas” failed in the Democratic primary in 2004.

It’s growing increasingly hard for Democrats to be heroes to “ordinary hardworking people” when they see them ultimately as rubes who’ve been lulled into a “false consciousness.” A book by a liberal professor simply reiterating rapidly aging clichés won’t help them figure out how to make it any easier.

Mr. Sager’s book, “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party,” will be published by Wiley this fall.