guardian | the left, he argues, is losing the political argument – every year,
it cedes more ground to the right, under the mistaken impression that
this will bring everything closer to the center. In fact, there is no
center: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the
conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the
mainstream moves. The reason is that conservatives speak from an
authentic moral position, and appeal to voters’ values. Liberals try to
argue against them using evidence; they are embarrassed by emotionality.
They think that if you can just demonstrate to voters how their
self-interest is served by a socially egalitarian position, that will
work, and everyone will vote for them and the debate will be over.
In fact, Lakoff asserts, voters don’t vote for bald self-interest;
self-interest fails to ignite, it inspires nothing – progressives, of
all people, ought to understand this.
When he talks about the collapse of the left, he clearly doesn’t mean
that those parties have disintegrated: they could be in government, as
the Democrats are in the US. But their vision of progressive politics is
compromised and weak. So in the UK there have been racist “Go home”
vans and there is an immigration bill going through parliament,
unopposed, that mandates doctors, the DVLA, banks and landlords to
interrogate the immigration status of us all; Hungary has vigilante
groups attacking Roma, and its government recently tried to criminalize
homelessness; the leaders of the Golden Dawn in Greece have only just
been arrested, having been flirting with fascism since the collapse of
the eurozone. We see, time and again, people in need being dehumanized,
in a way that seems like a throwback to 60 or 70 years ago. Nobody could
say the left was winning.
Lakoff predicted all this in Moral Politics, first published
in 1996. In it, he warned that “if liberals do not concern themselves
very seriously and very quickly with the unity of their own philosophy
and with morality and the family, they will not merely continue to lose
elections but will as well bear responsibility for the success of
conservatives in turning back the clock of progress in America.”
Since
then, the left has cleaved moderately well to established principles
around the politics of the individual – women are equal, racism is
wrong, homophobia is wrong. But everything else: a fair day’s work for
a fair day’s pay, the essential dignity of all humans, even if they’re
foreign people or young people, education as a public good, the natural
world as a treasure rather than an instrument of our convenience, the
existence of motives besides profit, the pointlessness and poison of
privatization, the profundity, worth and purpose of pooling resources …
this stuff is an embarrassment to center-left parties, even when they’re
in government, let alone when they’re in opposition. When unions
reference these ideas, they are dismissed as dinosaurs.
Yet equivalent right wing positions – that efficiency is all, that
big government is inefficient and therefore inherently bad, that nothing
must come between a business and its pursuit of profit, that poverty is
a lifestyle choice of the weak, that social breakdown can be ascribed
to single mothers and immigrants – have been subject to no abatement, no
modification, no ”modernizing”.
If we accept Lakoff’s conclusion, what would it mean to accept his
prescription? This is what he believes it would take to refashion the
progressive mindset: the abandonment of argument by evidence in favor of
argument by moral cause; the unswerving and unembarrassed articulation
of what those morals are; the acceptance that there is no “middle” or
third way, no such thing as a moderate (people can hold divergent views,
conservative on some things, progressive on others – but they are not
moderates, they are “biconceptual”); and the understanding that
conservatives are not evil, unintelligent, cynical or grasping. Rather,
they act according to the moral case as they see it. If they happen to
get rich, and make their friends rich in the process, that is just the
unbidden consequence of wealth being the natural reward of the
righteous, in their moral universe. To accept, let alone undertake, any
of this, one would first need to accept the veracity of frames.
Much of cognitive linguistics concerns itself with how we
build the mental apparatus to understand everyday situations: a
hospital, or a date, or a cash machine.
Erving Goffman, commonly cited as the most influential sociologist of the 20th century, wrote
Frame Analysis
in 1974, defining and exploring exactly how this happens. Having built
the frames to understand life, we no longer deliberately plug back into
it. It is unconscious; what we think of as “common sense” is merely an
act or notion that resonates with one of our deep frames.
Lakoff’s work on the conceptual systems around morals and politics
(and how they show up in language) has yielded two-dozen metaphors
for morality, most of them universal across cultures. Of those, the two
key frames informing political judgment involve the idea of government
as a family: the strict-father model (conservative) versus the
nurturant-parent model (progressive).
I talk to Lakoff when he is invited over to London by Counterpoint,
a think tank with an interest in how ideas can be used to quell the
xenophobia and repression that has, of late, swept Europe. In the
strict-father worldview, he explains, “The father is the ultimate
authority, he knows right from wrong, his job is to protect the family
and so he’s the strongest person, and because he knows right from wrong,
his authority is deserved. His children are born bad, because they just
do what feels good, they don’t do what’s right. They have to be trained
out of feelgood liberalism into doing what’s right.
You have to punish
the kids painfully enough that they’ll start doing what’s right and
they’ll get discipline. If they’re disciplined, they go out into the
world, and they earn a living. If they’re not earning a living, they’re
not disciplined, therefore they can’t be moral and they deserve their
poverty.”
To liberals, a lot of conservative thinking seems like a failure
of logic: why would a conservative be against equal rights for women and
yet despise the poor, when to liberate women into the world of work
would create more wealth, meaning less poverty? And yet we instinctively
understand those as features of the conservative worldview, and rightly
so.
The nurturant-family model is the progressive view: in it, the
ideals are empathy, interdependence, co-operation, communication,
authority that is legitimate and proves its legitimacy with its openness
to interrogation. “The world that the nurturant parent seeks to create
has exactly the opposite properties,” Lakoff writes in Moral Politics.
As progressives identify failures of logic in the conservative
position, so it works the other way round (one of Lakoff’s examples:
“How can liberals support federal funding for Aids research and
treatment, while promoting the spread of Aids by sanctioning sexual
behavior that leads to Aids?”).
