Freedom's not just another word

George Lakoff, bestselling author of "Don't Think of an Elephant," says that liberals have foolishly allowed conservatives to claim ownership of "freedom" -- even though the progressive version is the one Americans actually believe in.

By Laura Miller

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June 29, 2006 | A recurring gag on "The Daily Show" involves a series of short clips of appearances by various advocates of the Bush administration on assorted news programs; the joke is that they all use the same buzzwords -- "cut-and-run" is the latest example -- with a robotic uniformity. The laughter this routine gets comes partly from the way it makes the conservatives seem like automatons, and partly from the sheer obviousness of the ploy. What makes them think we're so dumb? George Lakoff, a University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor who has lately taken to advising the left on how to better convey its political message, would probably reply, "What makes you think you're so smart?"

Lakoff's latest book, "Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea," doesn't offer a material advance on his earlier works on political culture, "Moral Politics" (1996) and the how-to manual "Don't Think of an Elephant," which became a bestseller in 2004. "Whose Freedom?" focuses on the one key concept in its title and elaborates on all the ways that progressives can reclaim the idea of freedom from the right and present their political approach as more true to traditional American ideals of liberty. Conservatives, Lakoff argues, have used the media to imprint their version of "freedom" in the public's mind -- literally in the circuits of our brains -- using a canny understanding of how political language shapes political beliefs and the very same numbing repetition that "The Daily Show" mocks.

People on the left tend to regard Lakoff either as a prophet preaching the way out of the wilderness or as a psychobabble-spouting ivory towerist who caters to the self-help mind-set of cloistered liberals instead of advocating roll-up-your-sleeves organizing. The truth is probably in the middle, because Lakoff is right when he observes that American political behavior seldom follows the directives of rational self-interest and that a lot of our thinking transpires unconsciously. The dopey repetition that we chuckle over watching "The Daily Show" uses the same technique employed by the show's advertisers, a litany that sneaks into our heads despite our knowing skepticism. (And what skeptics could be more knowing than Jon Stewart fans?) It works. Otherwise, the corporate advertisers -- no fools -- wouldn't be paying so much for it.

The strength of "Whose Freedom?" is that it attributes the left's current foundering not just to a failure of strategy but to a failure of self-knowledge. Progressives, he argues, don't really understand what they believe or, just as important, how they believe it. "Freedom and liberty are progressive ideas -- our ideas," he writes. "It is time for progressives to fully integrate them into our everyday thinking and into our language." Furthermore, the progressive notion of freedom is identical to "traditional American freedom," which "still reigns in the American mind." Progressives really are in tune with what many average Americans believe, Lakoff insists, but conservatives are so good at hijacking the language to peddle their own radical redefinition of "freedom" that the other side can't get its message across.

Lakoff's political thinking turns on several ideas gleaned from his background in cognitive science. First, rooted in his early work in linguistics, is the idea that most thought is metaphorical. We understand abstract concepts by "mapping" them onto concrete, physical experiences. The language we use to describe freedom (or the lack of it) is grounded in metaphors of bodily movement and of coercion and restraint: groups are "held back," the press is "gagged," people gain "access" to higher office, etc. That's why, Lakoff writes, our feelings about freedom are "visceral," because they're based on our animal desire to move about as we please. These feelings, like most feelings, are essential to the judgments we make about what we do, but they aren't strictly rational.

More important to Lakoff's political influence is the idea of "frames," the underlying structures of abstract concepts. A concept like freedom has an "uncontested core" -- a central nugget of ideas that almost everyone can agree on -- while different people can harbor radically different notions about the form the concept takes in real life. For example, the left and right in America may both agree that freedom is good, but while the left sees poverty relief programs as offering the poor freedom from want and fear, the right usually sees them as fostering a dependency on the government that lessens their freedom.

In Lakoff's scheme, there are deep frames -- larger structures that define how someone understands a whole range of questions -- and surface frames, which determine how they view specific issues. Probably the most resonant of Lakoff's ideas contrasts conservative and progressive beliefs about how governments relate to their people. These frames are metaphors based on family models. Conservatives, as he sees it, subscribe to a "strict father" ideal, a model in which the leader leads with a moral authority that "must not be seriously challenged," protecting the family from the very real evils of the outside world. He teaches the children using a demanding system of laws and punishments, instilling in them the self-discipline to succeed in a ruthlessly competitive and morally dangerous world. They learn that if they don't play by the rules, they will lose out, and deserve it.

Progressives, by contrast, subscribe to the "nurturant parent" model. This concept seems somewhat foggier, "authoritative without being authoritarian," based on mutual respect and the idea that discussion and explanation, rather than simple decree and force, are the best way to set rules. Adhering to key principles like fairness or kindness according to the situation is more important than following the letter of the law in every circumstance. The reward for behaving well is affection, togetherness and help when you need it. It holds that the "citizens care about their community and each other and act responsibly toward their community and each other." The nurturant-parent model puts its emphasis on the carrot, while the strict-father model is all about the stick.

Lakoff wants his progressive readers to understand that when conservatives like George W. Bush talk about "protecting our freedoms" by, say, trying to eliminate Social Security, they aren't being simply hypocritical, cynical or "mean"; within their own moral framework, what they are saying is true. It's just that their concept of freedom is "so alien to progressives that many progressives cannot even understand it, much less defend against it." There is no single, shared definition of what "freedom" looks like because it's a contested concept. And in the past 30 years or so, when it comes to running America, the right has been winning the contest.

In the strict-father model, discipline and morality are the same thing, and the free market is the ideal, natural forum in which they can prove their worth. People become rich and powerful because they are disciplined and therefore moral; people become poor and weak because they are undisciplined and therefore immoral. To "reward" the poor for this by giving them resources taken from the rich is immoral. Because the free market supposedly rewards morality and discipline, it's immoral to interfere with its operation. For some conservatives, all of this has been ordained by the ultimate in strict fathers, God, and to suggest that it should be done otherwise amounts to blasphemy.

Next page: Can progressives win over others without betraying their ideals or skewing right?