Opinion: Frames blamed as Dems shake off Lakoff
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Evan R. Goldstein writes an excellent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of George P. Lakoff, the U.C. Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics whose theory of ‘frames’ became very popular among the Democrats back when they were still failing. Now the Democrats are ascendant, yet Lakoff is oddly out of the winners circle. The basic dramatic structure includes a eureka scene:
In working out his theory, Lakoff found that people tend to vote not on specific issues but rather for the candidate who best reflects their moral system by evoking the right ‘frames.’ Consider the phrase ‘tax relief,’ an effective staple of the Republican lexicon. According to Lakoff, the word ‘relief’ elicits a frame in which taxes are seen as an affliction. And every time the phrase ‘tax relief’ is heard or read by people, the relevant neural circuits are instinctively activated in their brains, the synapses connecting the neurons get stronger, and the view of taxation as an affliction is unconsciously reinforced.
The hero’s moment of hubris:
‘When I entered the room, these senators got up and hugged me,’ Lakoff says. ‘It was an awesome situation.’
And the tragic fall:
Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, is even more skeptical than Pinker, declaring Lakoff a member of the ‘neuroenthusiasta,’ his term for cognitive scientists who overstate the implications of their research, and the journalists who breathlessly hype their findings.
Did Lakoff’s stock dwindle because he refused to become a Donkey Frank Luntz? Was he too eager to be the Donkey Frank Luntz? How did he end up drawing the ire of the good (Dust-Up contributor Marc Cooper), the bad (Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel) and the hairy (Harvard cognitive psychology prof Steven Pinker)? And where does Noam Chomsky fit into all this? Goldstein gets people speaking for all these positions and more.
I’m not so sure Lakoff’s way of thinking is as dead as it appears. What made him a Democratic star was that in the early part of this decade the party went in for a particular brand of self-criticism, which involved convincing themselves that the real problem was in the packaging, not the product. That seems to me still operative: Barack Obama has channeled Thomas Frank‘s duped-yokel thesis effectively enough that it’s clear he or somebody on his staff has read ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’ with care.
I think there are still plenty of Dems out there persuaded that if not for Karl Rove and his captains of consciousness (or more precisely, if only we had some new captains of consciousness), the American People would realize that taxes are a public good and private enterprise a necessary evil. Fortunately for those folks, in 2008 they may have gotten a pooch that can’t be screwed.
* Update: Penultimate paragraph has been rewritten because reading it over even I couldn’t understand what I was saying.