Linguist George Lakoff Explains How the Democrats Helped Elect Trump

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 17, 2017 at 9:56:40 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Linguist George Lakoff Explains How the Democrats Helped Elect Trump
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Linguist George Lakoff Explains How the Democrats Helped Elect Trump
> Democrats played into Trump's hands, Lakoff says — and they won't win until they learn how to frame the debate.
> By Paul Rosenberg
> Jan 16 2017
> <http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dont-think-rampaging-elephant-linguist-george-lakoff-explains-how-democrats-helped>
>
> George Lakoff didn’t start off in the world of politics. He was a founding father of cognitive linguistics, starting 
> with his 1980 book, “Metaphors We Live By“ (co-authored with philosopher Mark Johnson). The book showed how 
> immediate, concrete experience — bodily orientation, physical movement, and so on — structures our understanding of 
> more complex and abstract experiences via “conceptual metaphors” such as “Consciousness Is Up,” “Love Is a Journey,” 
> etc.
>
> Facing the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s and bewildered by how he and other liberals could not make logical 
> sense of conservative ideology (what do gun rights, low taxes and banning abortion have in common?), Lakoff found an 
> answer in conceptual metaphors derived form two contrasting family models explicated by Diana Baumrind as 
> authoritarian (“strict father” in Lakoff’s terms) and authoritative (“nurturant parent”), as described in his 1996 
> book, “Moral Politics.” His 2004 book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” drew on a 
> wider range of cognitive science and gained a mass audience, but failed to fundamentally change how liberals and 
> Democrats approach politics, as was richly illustrated by the recent election of Donald Trump.
>
> But Lakoff is nothing if not persistent, and has penned an election postmortem like no other, “A Minority President: 
> Why the Polls Failed, and What the Majority Can Do.” It rearticulates the arguments of his earlier books — including 
> others like “The Political Mind,” Whose Freedom?“ and Philosophy in the Flesh — along with fresh analysis and new 
> insights that push hard for opening up a new realm of possibilities, instead of retrenching, retreating or repeating 
> strategies and tactics that have failed in the past. In it, Lakoff displays both an intimate familiarity with 
> detailed examples and a broad-based visionary outlook.
>
> Salon spoke with him to explore both, with an eye toward expanding the horizon of the possible on one hand, and 
> avoiding potholes on the other. He’s talking with Chelsea Green about expanding the essay into a book, but the ideas 
> in it really can’t wait. The Democratic establishment needs to be shaken up, and the rest of us need to be stirred.
>
> Q: You’ve been writing about politics from a cognitive science perspective for more than 20 years. A lot of people 
> have listened to you, but the Democratic political establishment as a whole has not, and that was reflected in the 
> election of Donald Trump. As you note in your article, “The polls, the media, and the Democratic Party all failed to 
> understand conservative values and their importance. They failed to understand unconscious thought and moral 
> worldviews. While hailing science in the case of climate change, they ignored science when it came to their own 
> minds.” So let’s start there. What do you mean by that, and how did it happen?
>
> A: If you’re a conservative going into politics, there’s a good chance you’ll study cognitive science, that is, how 
> people really think and how to market things by advertising. So they know people think using frames and metaphors and 
> narratives and images and emotions and so on. That’s second nature to anybody who’s taken a marketing course. Many of 
> the people who have gone into conservative communications have done that, and know very well how to market their 
> ideas.
>
> Now, if instead you are a progressive, and you go to college and you’re interested in politics, what are you going to 
> study? Well, you’ll study political science, law, public policy, economic theory and so on, but you’re not going to 
> wind up studying marketing, most likely, and you’re not going to study either cognitive science or neuroscience.
>
> What you’ll learn in those courses is what is called Enlightenment reason, from 1650, from Descartes. And here’s what 
> that reasoning says: What makes us human beings is that we are rational animals and rationality is defined in terms 
> of logic. Recall that Descartes was a mathematician and logician. He argued that reasoning is like seeing a logical 
> proof. Secondly, he argued that our ideas can fit the world because, as he said, “God would not lie to us.” The 
> assumption is that ideas directly fit the world.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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