New Messages Or New Ideas?

30 May 2005 |permalink | email article

While there are signs of a developing fissure between the right and moderate wings of the Republican Party, a more interesting phenomenon is occurring within the ranks of the party opposite. The struggle for the hearts and minds of Democrats began soon after the November elections when party leaders decided to tranquilize the faithful with grand new delusions.

Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, the House Minority Leader, invited UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, the liberal flavor of 2005, to come in and coach the Democratic caucus about a magical new language of persuasion known as “messaging.”

In two must-read pieces in The Atlantic Monthly, by Marc Cooper (April 2005), and Joshua Green (May), the fallacious thinking of the Democratic leadership and its lack of authenticity are examined.

Cooper, an author, contributing editor of The Nation, senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communications, a columnist for LA Weekly and blogger, reviews three books, including positive comments about Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas and Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. His biting critique of Don’t Think Of An Elephant! exposes the shallowness of messaging.

In Lakoff’s best-seller, a virtual bible among hundreds of House staffers and Democratic groupies, he asserts that political consciousness, and therefore voter choice, is determined by deeply wired mental structures - “frames” - that reflect more general views and values. The suggestion is that reframing American politics according to liberal values is, in essence, a matter of simple wordplay. Where conservatives invoke “strong defense,” Lakoff says liberals must use the reference “stronger America,”  Likewise, “smaller government” must be recast as “effective government.” You get the drift.

Noting that Lakoff offers not a single word on reshaping the Democratic Party by blunting the influence of corporate cash, the advice of discredited consultants, finding decent candidates, etc. Cooper asks, “So what’s an honest liberal to do when nobody wants to hear the truth? Why not turn to personal therapy disguised as politics, psycho babble as electoral strategy?”

Having been exposed to the West Los Angeles party circuit for many years, Cooper shockingly describes the liberal left “as the new incarnation of the John Birch Society.” Now extinct, Birchers were an ultra-conservative, anti-Communist cult of 100,000 strong in the late 1950s. They demanded the U.S. withdraw from the U.N., and reject Social Security and the income tax. In other words, two self- righteous and whiny elites at polar extremes. Since the 2004 election, he finds liberal - and especially progressive - rhetoric is increasingly laced with paranoia.

Liberals, Cooper believes,  ritualistically identify “gays, guns, and God” as the basis for right-wing wedge politics, but are reluctant to ask how much of their own politics is based on the same formula, if not the same one exactly.

Cooper faults, for example, trendy MoveOn for not ordering its troops to meet with and listen to ten people who disagree with them instead of talking with one another. The challenge for liberals, as he sees it, isn’t to reify their differences in a mythical red America…but rather to find common ground.

Cooper writes, “The trick of effective politics - as opposed to thinly disguised self-affirming psychotherapy and aesthetically gratifying rebel poses - is precisely to unite people with different views, values and families around programs, candidates and campaigns on which they can reach some consensus, however minimal.”

Green, a senior editor of The Atlantic, and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, picks up after Cooper on Lakoff. In an essay on branding the Democrats, “It Isn’t The Message, Stupid” describes a new kind of guru who is convincing Democrats that they don’t need new ideas after all - “a snazzy new sales pitch will revive their fortunes.”

That guru is the Internet entrepreneur Richard Yanowitch. He’s described as “putting together a jargony memo and a working group dedicated to “branding” the Democrats. While Lakoff is sponsored by Pelosi, Yanowitch operates under the auspices of her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid of Nevada.

Green describes a memo that the Republican pollster and message-meister Frank Luntz wrote about how the GOP should talk about Social Security. It was leaked to the media but most Republicans ignored it. But the Democrats went into paroxysms of envy. “In a private meeting with party officials, the new party chairman, Howard Dean, vowed that he would “make George Lakoff the Democrats’ Frank Luntz. That’s the kind of idea that passes for visionary when you’re committed to the pretense that your party isn’t short of ideas.” Neither Dean, Pelosi or Reid get it.

Green concludes, “Of course, buzzwords are not going to rescue a failing party. That so many Democrats have achieved the Olympian state of denial necessary to believe otherwise suggests that the tempting distractions of language and messaging have diverted them from the truth that ought to be perfectly clear: rather than being misunderstood, they were understood all too well.”

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