The Metaphor Analyst
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, describes himself as a “metaphor analyst.” He briefly captured public attention in 2001 when he applied his interpretive skills to the terrorist attacks of September 11. “Towers are symbols of phallic power,” he wrote, “and their collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power.”
In the wake of Democrats’ election defeat, Mr. Lakoff has re-emerged to help liberals refine their message. Earlier this month, the professor met with House Democrats to explain that Republicans succeed because they frame political issues on their own terms.
Instead of “trial lawyers,” Mr. Lakoff suggests, Democrats should speak of “public protection attorneys.” Instead of “environmental protection,” it’s “poison-free communities.”
Howard Dean calls Mr. Lakoff “one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement.” Before the recent election, the Senate minority leader and the chairman of the House Democratic Policy Committee distributed hundreds of copies of Lakoff’s book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” to their colleagues and staffs.
Mr. Lakoff’s ideas may be informing the progressive movement at the moment, but they are surprisingly illiberal. His book often reads like a counter-Enlightenment tract of the Romantic period. What holds back the left “is a set of myths believed by liberals and progressives,” Mr. Lakoff argues. “The myths began with the Enlightenment.” One myth is this: “If we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they’ll all reach the right conclusions.”
But people are not rational beings as the Enlightenment envisioned them, according to Mr. Lakoff. “People think in frames,” he writes. “If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off.” Thus, “progressives hear conservatives talk and do not understand them because they do not have the conservatives’ frames” – and vice versa. We can’t understand one another because our worldviews are “instantiated in the synapses of our brains.”
So it goes without saying that policy issues can’t be discussed reasonably or dispassionately by looking at the relevant data. This is another Enlightenment myth. People don’t make rational calculations about self-interest. They “vote their identity – they vote on the basis of who they are, what values they have, and who and what they admire.”
To Mr. Lakoff, it all goes back to warring visions of “idealized family structure.” Conservatives see the nation as a family based on the “strict father model,” in which the head of the household orders his wife around and beats his children, with the goal of fashioning them into disciplined and self-reliant adults. Progressives prefer a “nurturant parent model,” in which two mutually supportive parents nurture their children and raise them to be nurturers, too. All our politics flow from this. It’s why conservatives “are against nurturance and care,” as Mr. Lakoff puts it.
So elections aren’t about the issues. “What conservatives have learned about winning elections is that they have to activate the strict father model in more than half the electorate – either by fear or by other means.” Mr. Lakoff hopes liberals will learn the same lesson and use framing to activate the nurturant parent model.
The public fills a strikingly passive role in Mr. Lakoff’s view of politics. Politics is really a rhetorical battle between different elites, each seeking to stimulate different synapses in voters’ brains – and have them vote almost by instinct. This may be a compelling view to some people, but it’s scarcely progressive.
The reactionary thinker Joseph De Maistre once wrote that he knew of Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on, but the Enlightenment’s dream of the abstract, reasoning individual was a fantasy. Mr. Lakoff, similarly, looks at the political landscape and sees disciplinarians and nurturers, but no one open to rational argument.
With this deep psychological motivation lurking behind American political debates, it’s no surprise that Mr. Lakoff perceives hidden agendas everywhere. Conservatives “are not really pro-life,” he writes. Rather, because abortion allows teenagers to be promiscuous and women to delay childbearing to pursue a career, it threatens their model of social control: “Pregnant teenagers have violated the commandments of the strict father. Career women challenge the power and authority of the strict father,” explains Mr. Lakoff. “Both should be punished by bearing the child.”
Similarly, Republicans support school testing not to identify substandard schools and improve them, but for more nefarious reasons. “Once the testing frame applies not just to students but also to schools,” writes Mr. Lakoff, “then schools can, metaphorically, fail – and be punished for failing by having their allowance cut,” leading ultimately to “elimination for many public schools.” The goal, it turns out, is to replace the entire public school system with private institutions.
The list of GOP deceptions is seemingly endless. Republicans don’t support tort reform because they care about the cost of frivolous lawsuits; they want to bankrupt a Democratic Party that relies on contributions from trial lawyers and leave corporations free to pollute the environment. The war in Iraq, as one might expect, is really about “the self-interest of American corporations.” On issue after issue, “what conservatives are really trying to achieve is not in the proposal,” Mr. Lakoff explains. The “real purposes are hidden.”
Such paranoia calls to mind earlier, left-wing critiques of conservative conspiracy-mongering. The most famous belongs to Richard Hofstadter, whose 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” argued, “Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.” One can scarcely imagine a more irreconcilable conflict than Mr. Lakoff’s clash of right and left, in which each side can’t even understand the other because of divergent mental processes hardwired in our brains.
When Hofstadter wrote his essay, he noted that the paranoid style was “not necessarily right-wing.” But conservatives at the time felt politically dispossessed and current events provided “a vast theater” for the paranoid imagination. His words still resonate: “Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.”
There’s no doubt that the Bush administration and the war on terrorism provide a vast theater for the liberal imagination – one that a “metaphor analyst” is especially equipped to interpret. But one suspects that the progressive left will only return from the political wilderness once they step out of their metaphorical world and into the real one.