[Spliff]

Three great interviews with George Lakoff, UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, on how liberals/Democrats/Progressives need to improve their rhetorical and debating skills, which lag far behind those of conservatives.

With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.

The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive.

how conservatives use language to dominate politics

Dissecting Conservative Catchphrases

"The 'free market' doesn't exist"

Inside the Frame

A tutorial on framing

For more articles and interviews, click here


Here are a couple of excerpts:

They [Democrats] don't have a central vision. The Republicans do. The Republicans understand what they're about, and everything they do evokes what they're about. So they know how to talk and think as conservatives. They know how to build a conservative brand. The Democrats don't have a brand. They don't have a vision that they can articulate clearly and say what that vision is. What they have is a long list of programs. You say: Okay, what is your vision? And they'll give you 50 programs. That's not a vision, because the programs change from year to year. They are always going to be adjusted and fixed, and compromised, and so on.

Recently I've been talking about taxes as investments for the common good. In the past the government made certain wise investments in things like the interstate highway system. You just get in your car and drive; you don't think about how every time you use the highways you're getting a dividend on that previous investment — and so is every business that sends a truck over the interstate highway system. The Internet is another example. It started out as a network funded by the Defense Department, by the government investing taxpayers' money. Now, every time you surf the Web, you're getting a dividend. Drugs and medical advances that come out of National Institutes of Health grants are financed by taxpayers. Computer chips in our computers and cars exist because of the government's early investment of taxpayers' money in semiconductor research.

But wouldn't conservatives argue, as they have with Social Security, that individuals can invest their money better than the government?

That's simple. Would you prefer to have the government build and maintain the highway system, or do it yourself? Would you rather have a private company owning the highway system and the Internet, and charging you God knows how much to use them? You like the army, but do you want to build your own? How about your own police and fire departments? No. You want a government that can do the things you need, in the areas where private companies can't or won't do them or simply can't be trusted to do them right. One of progressives' main goals is a better future for all. A wise and efficient government is needed for that in hundreds of ways.

When it comes to government investment of your tax money, businesses benefit even more than ordinary people. To start a business, you don't have to invent computer science or the telephone network, you don't have to build a highway system. They're just there for businesses to use, as is the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the SEC, the Commerce Department, and the courts. A company doesn't have to make up a way to adjudicate its disputes with other companies; we paid for it already. Nine-tenths of the courts are there for corporate law. Corporations get enormous benefits paid for by other taxpayers, but they've stopped paying their way. Corporate income tax used to make up about 38 percent of all U.S. taxes. Now it's less than 10 percent. Ordinary taxpayers are making the investments in infrastructure, and corporate stockholders are getting the dividends. And that's just not fair.

[killer_735]

Originally posted by Spliff:
Three great interviews with George Lakoff, UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, on how liberals/Democrats/Progressives need to improve their rhetorical and debating skills, which lag far behind those of conservatives.

Right.

Fscking.

On.

[Sven G]

Would you prefer to have the government build and maintain the highway system, or do it yourself?

First of all, I'd like a (high-speed, optionally) railway instead of the highway; and then, of course, it would indeed be better if it could be done in a "do it yourself" way - which, obviously, for such large-scale projects, really requires some form of "government".

The problem, rather, is: what kind of government? An essentially self-managed one, or an inefficient, overly bureaucratised, "ordinary" government?

With such projects, the main problem today is that the ordinary government usually requires ages to accomplish the thing - while something self-managed by motivated people - together! - would make things much more fluid...