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Notes -
TL;DR: see the bullet points at the end
Today, let's talk an old article and see if it still has relevance. Way downthread when talking about language, I was reminded of one of the language influencers of the left, George Lakoff. A linguistics professor by trade, he wrote a number of books, two which I'll mention briefly: "Moral Politics" in 1996, where he argued conservatives and liberals differed in their emotional and subconscious attitude towards government, and "Don't Think of an Elephant!" in 2004 as a rough guidebook accompanying his progressive think-tank, where he argued that the linguistic framing of the debate often would often determine who would win. Conservatives think of government like a strong and strict parent who needs to strictly raise their citizen-kids into more-responsible adults, then be hands-off from there, he argued. Liberals, however, think the government is and should be a nurturing parent, promoting good virtues and protecting against corruption and badness that encompass various common ills of society. Lakoff thought that liberals were often losing because they were using conservative linguistic frameworks. He was especially active in trying to push a certain brand of linguistics during the Bush years, but upon the 2008 crash his think tank collapsed and he more or less retired at 67.
However, for today, the year is 2011 and he comes out to pen one more article with some advice. Enter The “New Centrism” and Its Discontents. The event he's worked up about? Obama's 2011 State of the Union, with whom he disagrees about political tactics. Please note that any emphasis is purely my own.
He goes on to argue that while many Obama-style Democrats were using the playbook of using friendly-sounding packaging to sell good liberal policies, that this was bound to backfire dramatically as the packaging would become the product - or perhaps more accurately, the framing determined the (often hostile) battlefield. Well, wait, actually it's worse - he thinks that to some extent, fighting wars of words on hostile territory actually pushes moderate voters to the right in a sort of self-reinforcing cycle! He thinks not just that politics is a value conflict, but that the fight itself shifts the power of the players. This was a little bit new to me.
I found this especially interesting. He thinks that conservatives are really good at using the right language, partly through what elsewhere in the article he describes as a far better and more organized (or at least, disciplined) media ecosystem. Is he right? Do liberals regularly lose the language framing wars among moderates and swing voters, and thus the battle, even before they begin?
Whoa. Brain-changing language is quite a claim. This caught my eye a little bit because of how it makes at least a theoretically-grounded factual case for language as a thing that influences people on a physical level. Is he to be believed? I have my doubts about the scientific application, but it was interesting to see this discussion happen in 2011. However, that's not an accident! Obama was, in the referenced Tuscon speech, speaking soon after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that is now seen as one of the earliest examples of political assassinations now frequently discussed. If language usage choices rewire the brain, are we actually to blame, at least in part, for these kinds of shootings? (I hope I'm not misrepresenting his point here)
In a way, this seems pretty prescient. According to progressives, at least (and certainly others) radical conservatives did take over the Republican party, and they did espouse authority and overwhelming force to punish the unworthy and the enemies, and they did use the deficit as a ruse, and they did have a uniquely selective approach to which science to believe. It's all over the news these last few months. As a pretty classic centrist myself, that feels like a pretty damning indictment, if true. Is it true? And even if he's wrong, does he have some useful advice?
The "progressive" solution
He ends by giving essentially a nice bullet-point list of things that progressives need to do. (I should note that there is some question as to whether 2011-era progressives are the same group as 2025 ones, so maybe it's best to consider it more broadly). If you read nothing else, this is his thesis, distilled.
Again, strong language. Conservatism drives empathy from the world? Uncharitable, but I can kind of see it. My parents originally flipped from Republican to Democrat, even as religious social conservatives, because in the words of my dad, "they at least pretend to care about poor people, but the Republicans don't even try". There's some pragmatism here, even among the moralization, for finding good allies. His vision of morality as the wellspring of progressive vision is an interesting one that I think partially got lost in the political noise, though I'm unsure how well it would work in practice. Most of all, though, the sixth bullet point has almost objectively been flagrantly violated in the last decade. Support Trump? You must be stupid, or mean, or shortsighted. Different values? No, clearly you just didn't see all the facts. If nothing else, I think for Democrats to get their mojo back, that probably has to change. You can't persuade someone you don't even understand.
What do you think? Is he right about language choices molding the political conversation and even changing values themselves via mere reinforcement? Should Democrats focus on long-term value-change strategies? Even if he's wrong, would you appreciate a Democratic party following his six proposals? Are "progressives" still losing the language battle? Food for thought.
To me, the most interesting point is how Lakoff's programme interacted the change in what the left-wing project was about between then and now.
In 2011, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to deliver rising material standards of living for the bottom 99%. The activist base had started to shift to social issues (the tipping point was the failure of Occupy in late 2011) but the establishment wouldn't for a few more years. The frame that Lakoff was telling the Democrats to adopt was to fully lean into their role as the Mummy Party. (It isn't in the excerpt above, but Lakoff explicitly said was that the correct frame was that the nation was a family and the State was a "nurturant parent"). Of the six points, 2 is "accept support from successful businessmen who offer it", 4, and 5 are "git gud" and 1, 3, and 6 are "always talk like Mummy, talking like Daddy only benefits the Daddy party".
What actually happened is that the broader left-wing ecosystem of which the Democratic Party is part did embrace the spirit of points 1 and 3. They did organise around a single morality, optimise their communication to reinforce the frame of that morality, try to change the world through brain-changing morality etc. But the morality they adopted wasn't egalitarian therapy culture with the State as mother, it was woke culture with the State as HR lady. By 2020, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to raise the relative social status of historically oppressed groups at the expense of white males.
Do you think that a mommy-mentality or "egalitarian therapy culture" would have been more effective in terms of pure politics?
It might be a question of methods. I think to most Democrats being a good person for selfless and societal reasons was part of the messaging, but were they "gentle and firm"? Seems to me that the mainstream left decided that shame and blame was more effective. They were, of course, almost completely wrong on medium- and long-term time horizons, though not the short-term one.
However, it's undeniable that some parts of his plan did get implemented. When he says "government is about 'necessities' – health, education, housing, protection, jobs with living wages, and so on – not about “programs.” Economic success lies in human well-being, not in stock prices, or corporate and bank profits" that does sound pretty familiar to me! Another weak point: he theorizes that it's impossible to be all talk but no action. He says "language use, over and over, affects how citizens understand policy choices, which puts pressure on legislators, and ultimately affects what policies are chosen," but is that really true? Did a shifted linguistic landscape around housing, education, health, jobs, etc. lead to matching policies? Biden Democrats would say yes, but that they simply were too modest to take credit (or that people were too dumb to give them that credit). I kind of think no, and that's where maybe it all falls apart for me - I don't think I'm really a Lakoff acolyte. Messaging does frame the issue, but I don't think I buy the value-shift theory. Or to be more precise, backlash from a mismatch between values and action (even if perceived and not truly real) overwhelms any incremental gains provided by the linguistic landscape of the fight. As I like to say, betrayal is actually one of the most powerful emotions (and voters are really fairly good at sniffing out bullshit).
Yet I wonder. DO we in fact have a shifted attitude toward some of these issues? Health care yes! Conservatives were very resistant to "health care is a human right" but I think that attitude is everywhere now. People are less sympathetic to corporations, even if deregulation still has lots of appeal. Social spending they maybe even went backwards; he says "Social Security and Medicare are earned" but today that reads like a GOP talking point. I assume he's pretty unhappy with the current landscape, although I don't really know - but if so, who does he blame? Centrists, or progressives?
The big one, as I see it, is the migration of the abortion debate from "pro-choice / pro-life" to various terms like "reproductive rights", "reproductive freedom", "family planning", and, most eye-rolling of all, "right to choose."
It's a sleight of linguist hand that moves the subject of debate from the issue of terminating a pregnancy to the much more broad concept of individual liberties and choice. This is effective because, in the most whishy-washy general sense, very few people in America vote for less "choice" and / or less "freedom."
The apoplectic left doesn't actually have a very specific reason why they hate Trump. Ask them. In real life. Most will, first, engage that classic cosmopolitan liberal snide sense of humor and begin with something like "I mean, where do I even start? lolol!" Keep pushing. Get past the "literally Hitler's" and eventually you'll probably get to some version of "He's trying to take away our rights?" Which ones? Specifically And then you'll get to some real meat - maybe. The Dobbs decision will probably make an appearance. This is when you can calmly inform your counterparty that Dobbs didn't "make abortion illegal" or anything close to it.
But the vibes will remain. "He's made the country feel so much worse!" Has he? Or does this linguistic shift mean that anything short of ear-splitting affirmation of everyone's "lived truth" default to Nazi level oppression?
Average lefty here, happy to respond with specifics?
I just sort of mourn the old United States where acting with blatant corruption was out of the pale.
Also as someone in science I mourn the days when the nation took pride in being a powerhouse in things like scientific research, and in being a place where people all over the world wanted to come and get educated here.
We had this really great thing going being not just the most economically powerful but also the most intellectually productive country in the world, and we acted as a vacuum sucking up all the intelligent and ambitious people from around the world and having them come here to build things with us.
Now we started with this mean style of politics which makes those same people not want to come here anymore. Some might still do it based on a risk-reward calculation, but even then, we’ve destroyed science funding in the country and so even the reward side of the equation also got hit.
Meanwhile, we’re destroying the open market of energy that we used to have and actively persecuting renewable energy technologies. Places like Texas were world leaders in renewables because the tech is just simply good and competitive. No more. Batteries and renewable energies are the technologies of the future of the rest of the world and we’re letting China and the rest of the world just absolutely eat our lunch there. While the world undergoes this technological revolution we just chose to sit it out.
So overall, largely because of Trump and his politics, we’ve become this angry inward focused power that is giving up the very sources of dynamism that make us powerful.
I guess the one thing we have is AI and it’s just about the only area where the United States has an advantage that the Trump administration isn’t trying to destroy while pursuing some misguided ideological end.
By that you mean "moral" corruption, and that appears to be the root of the disagreement. Conservatives (and the average leftist is motivated by the same things per Haidt- after all, they [perceive themselves to have at least perpetuated if not] built the system, they are interested in that work meaning something) correctly observe that people who are unwilling to respect their prerogatives of decorum are probably unwilling to respect conservative framings entirely.
For instance, if a conservative redefines X to mean Y "because it's what decent people do" (read: because I make money hand-over-fist; business always marches alongside honor), a reformer might then redefine word X as Z and reject definition Y with prejudice, which will disadvantage and destabilize conservatives that built their fortunes around definition Y.
"Where my country gone?" is a conservative statement, it's just coming from the left now.
Well, as long as they were the correct color. They had quotas for that, just like they did in the '50s, for the same reasons they had them in the '50s.
Science that doesn't replicate isn't science, and the initiatives to do R&D were also suffering from the "so long as they're the right color" problem. I guess it's the age-old dilemma where you can either do science or you can sacrifice it to be anti-racist, just from the right's definition of anti-racism instead of the left's. Naturally, this is moral corruption to the left, just like ending racism the first time was to the right.
No, only China. Nobody else invested into the tooling to manufacture the panels for the same reason the US couldn't- too expensive. The West has already lost the battle for renewable energy sovereignty (and already won the battle for forcing Europe into a dependence on American natural gas by successfully provoking a war in Ukraine); the only question is whether we want to pay now to redevelop indigenous green energy generation capacity, or pay later by having to do that anyway when China starts making diplomatic demands in exchange.
Now, are tariffs the right way to do that given how long it takes to spin up manufacturing in a country that has largely forgotten how to do it? Well, maybe not (annexing the country with a good chunk of high-tech manufacturing immediately to the north is likely to be the better long-term plan here). But it does strike me as interesting that the Rs have pivoted into being the party of bad ideas and the Ds into the party of no ideas.
Maybe that is the deeper issue but I had more in mind things like: the president and his associates running cryptocurrency scams on their supporters
That sort of thing didn’t used to happen in the US or even the developed world from what I know.
The moral corruption I perceive is that suddenly the US started acting in ways that I associate with third world governments, and there was only tepid criticism.
Affirmative action type stuff to me is a side note to what I’m describing.
I agree with conservatives about basing acceptance for jobs and studies on merit instead of skin color.
That doesn’t change the fact that we’ve essentially renounced the role as the country that hoovers up all the intellectual talent and high agency individuals from the world and puts them to work building things here on our soil.
Look, science has flaws, but it works, damn it!
The survivability of cancer has increased dramatically over the past decades. That’s just one (set of) disease(s). Dementia, Parkinson’s, AIDS, diabetes, MS, arthritis, many of these conditions have seen outcomes quietly yet drastically improve over these past decades. Science is working and still acts as a fundamental engine advancing human wellbeing.
Materials science, computational techniques, and even odd niche branches of science such as looking at what chemicals are in the saliva of lizards, have delivered huge advances in recent decades. And surprisingly, most of this has happened in the US!!
You might be destined to get Alzheimer’s in the future and science poses the ability to save your very brain and being from a terrible fate. Or maybe you will experience a horrific accident and regenerative medicine techniques might save your life from becoming a living hell.
Scientific advancement is occurring, and is good for all of us, and despite our comfort and confidence in continuous advancement, it’s not guaranteed.
The current administration has been a storm that passed though science funding at every level, ripping up grants, discouraging a generation of youth from getting into the discipline, and discouraging people who typically would have come here to work in our labs to stay away and go elsewhere.
The sheer strength of our position as the center of the scientific world might allow it to hunker down and withstand all of this, but that’s not at all the outcome you would hope for.
I agree and this one is complicated, but we had a role to play in a technological revolution that the entire world is going through and we decided it’s better to sit back and actually attack it rather than get in and help shape it.
It’s like if in the past upon seeing that the English were advancing with this new concept of coal fired trains and industry, we had decided to actively combat its establishment here to preserve the timber industry.
China has the lead but we could have played a role with innovating in this domain and then at least competing to help lead the global buildout that is (genuinely) occurring. Instead, China is the one and only benefactor, and for this is leaps and bounds ahead with the know how to produce and install this stuff and is doing so in every country across the planet. Not to mention that in any conflict has a decent shot at kicking our ass with massive swarms of cheaply made drones and batteries.
Were obviously just missing out on the next supercycle of technological development on the planet when we could have at least tried to be in the game.
Like I say we did stay in the game on AI, since it was genuinely our innovation which came from the US academia and tech industry. Currently it’s the only thing keeping the American economy afloat (although probably also is in big bubble territory).
But instead of navigating this time of challenges skillfully, focusing on our fortifying our competitive strengths, we just adopted the posture of an angry inwardly-turned nation that started attacking its own foundations of power and influence based on passing culture war freak out stuff.
In other words, stuff like affirmative action and all that is just some silly ornamentation we put on top of the most successful engine of power and influence of the modern world. We could have taken away the mild productivity-decreasing AA stuff and kept the foundation intact! Instead, we started chopping the entire thing down.
The baby can only be thrown out with its bathwater for so long. The lightening might be very hard to get back into the bottle, as each former center of world power and influence can attest.
As another scientist, the problem is that it has been working less and less well, with ballooning costs to boot (especially including the entirety of university funding).
On the teaching side, I've been now long enough part of academia, and have seen it from both the student and the teaching side, over more than a decade now, and it's obvious that the standards just keep going down and down. Professors openly admitting that they let everyone pass in the oral exam anyway, so why even bother making the written exam hard? Students just whining until they get their way, and the administration takes their side. Entire new courses with even lower standards are created, lest the "Nursing Sciences" may feel disadvantaged by the mean old boys club of math and statistics.
On the research side, it becomes harder and harder to even try to conduct neutral investigations. Everything that can possibly be judged politically has to either directly include assurances that you're a good person with good politics, or you have to live in fear that activist-scholars will go after you. Jesse Singal has examples that are close to the platonic ideal of course, but you're extremely mistaken if you think this just limited to specific topics.
I'm working in genetics, and it often feels like almost everything about it is politisized. IVF and embryo selection have always been opposed by the conservatives of course, but nowadays the left will be much more dangerous to your work. A colleague of mine works on a certain kind of serious, inheritable and debilitating diseases. She is being pressured by left-wing activist-scholars from the humanities to drop the topic since exploring the genetic background assumes these diseases are bad - which is ablism - , the money ought to instead go straight to left-wing support structures. Nevermind that most of the patients themselves hate the disease and are thankful for any attempt of fixing, even if only available for their kids. Do you think they get in trouble for this egregious breach of scientific conduct? Of course not, they get support from the administrative and cheers from the media. One of my PhD students is an Egyptian curious about his heritage, and we are investigating what the genetic differences we found functionally do. But even here we have to walk on eggshells since implying that different groups from different places with different conditions might be genetically different in meaningful, functional ways is a big no-no. Well, only for humans, for any other animal it's perfectly obvious and only a creationist would disagree.
And apart from the science itself, the AA hiring is also madness. I personally know not just one, but two cases of a female professor getting their position with just a single publication. I haven't had to work with them myself, but everyone who did has told me that they have been wildly out of their depth and very difficult to work with. Committees that make lists by publications and other measures of competence, and end up taking number ... eight because that's the first one that fulfils whatever quota currently in need of filling.
This is not mild productivity decreasing, these are the big dangers that have been bogging down science for decades. For a different field, just look at the nuclear renaissance going on in certain countries right now; we could have had that in the 90s for the entire world, but fearmongering and green extremism has thrown us back so, so far. Instead, we ideologically wasted so much on trying to turn solar and wind into essential generators through complicated battery schemes, while they are much better suited to simply being supporting energy generators for specific times & places. Michael Magoon has a whole slew of good articles for lay audiences on the topic, but the basic economic case is currently being proven by demonstration in my own home country, germany, which has managed to utterly ruin its own energy production through ideological mismanagement. Even just keeping the old nuclear reactors would have been better than the insanity we've went through. We didn't just move more slowly; We actively moved backwards, and are now depended on the countries around us who invested correctly.
The only part I agree on is that I do not like Trump and don't think he is likely to really fix things. But I also do not trust academia to fix itself. If anything, I expect it to get worse.
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