A potent conservative hegemony hangs over American political discourse.  Progressives from near and far have been responding in various vague and insipid ways, but are failing to mount a truly effective opposition.  Intellectuals on the left speak to competing values, pitting modern reason against primitive revelation in an epic battle to define our zeitgeist.  A battle in which, given historical precedent, reason will inevitably crown them victors.  Despite this foregone conclusion determined by the God of Reason, progressive politicians remain incapable of enlightening Middle America about the obvious superiority of their values.

Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff has deciphered the Democrat Party’s failure as an inability to “frame” the public debate as effectively as the Republican Party.  “Frames” are the conceptual structures, the grander metaphors, in which political discourse is expressed. A prime example of frames, according to Lakoff, is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s acceptance speech in which he says, "When the people win, politics as usual loses."  This immediately frames the Republicans as “the people” and the Democrats as “politics as usual.”  Henceforth, the Democratic legislators become, in Lakoff’s words, “enemies of the people.”

On a micro-scale, frames can be seen in the moralizing of issues, e.g., the crusade to remove the “evil” Saddam Hussein or Senator Reid’s reply to the 2004 State of the Union address in which he rallied against an “immoral budget.”  But the innovation of Lakoff’s approach is not simply in demonstrating that good political rhetoric descends from casting issues in a framework of personal values; that’s an old trick.  Rather, Lakoff proposes that Republicans and Democrats differ in their respective “meta-frames,” the conceptual systems which encapsulate each side’s political rhetoric.  These “meta-frames,” he argues, are to be found in the distinctly Jungian archetypes of the “strict father” against the “nurturing parent,” politically correct code-speak for “soft mother.”  By evoking these primordial human codes, the modern political machine incurs our loyalties to either side. 

Assuming these meta-frames to be accurate descriptions of the ideological meta-structure of contemporary American politics, we must then question their applicability.  In what ways would their exegesis contribute to liberating the Democratic Party and its devotees from the tyrannical grip of Karl Rove and his minions?  Lakoff replies that Democrats must simply, like the Republicans, embrace their archetype, framing all discursive output with those terms.  When asked how exactly the Republicans have done this, Lakoff explains:  “[T]hey've put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years their think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language.”  Thus financial backing secures a competitive ideology. 

Ignoring for a moment Lakoff’s outright denial of language’s claim to transcendence, it is still obvious that in his world, political success derives from constructing a well-funded infrastructure for producing ideological fences to keep the “cattle” in.  Even leaving aside what Lakoff stands to gain personally from increased contributions to progressive think tanks such as his own Rockridge Institute, framing the American people as cattle merely reminds them that the “liberal elites” who run the Democratic Party really do despise them. 

For the Democratic Party, buying into Lakoff’s frames would be tantamount to accepting that voters are won only through savvy statistical analyses and semiotic manipulation. Democrats would be acquiescing to a nihilistic cynicism that would ultimately separate the “educated” elite from the herd of “common” Americans who still find meaning in their day-to-day lives.  That the ignorant masses might ascribe to a higher truth and not be beholden to well-researched sound-bites is inconceivable to the scientifically-minded Lakoff, who views language as mere philology and its cognitive correlatives.  On both sides of the aisle, this sort of thought only encourages politicians to be aloof from voters, since it allows them to believe that they are knowledgeable while their voters can be gently corralled by sweet nothings.  As Monsieur Colbert might chide, if Lakoff hates democracy so much, why doesn’t he say so in so many words?

Unfortunately, Lakoff’s broader analysis is little more than an expression of the current moral streams underlying American politics today.  Lakoff, offering only a picture of two themes equivalent in might, fails to demonstrate a coherent strategy by which one side could outflank the other.  In fact, the solution from Lakoff’s model only leads to increased funding for his own pursuits at the expense of the Democratic Party’s relationship with the electorate.  To address the true reason for the dominance of the Republican political discourse, we must examine the potency of political language and therein find the key to unraveling it. 

While context is, no doubt, partly responsible for both the intended and the implied meaning of the political sound-bite, its potency lies in the concreteness of idioms, which are best utilized by the Republican Party.  The current party-line, propagated by Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, is that the Republican strategy in Iraq is “Adapt-to-Win,” which is set against the supposed Democratic alternative of “Cut-and-Run.”  Such phrases are a literalist’s wet dream, with so little leeway for interpretation.  One does not need to think what such phrases might, would or could mean, given different circumstances.  It is common sense that a losing team must “adapt to win,” just as it’s common sense that to “cut and run” is a cowardly departure from battle. Whether these taglines accurately describe the party’s strategies is irrelevant—the truth hurts.

The closest thing that Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, gives us as the current sales pitch of the Democratic Party is that “Republicans have failed America” and that Democrats can provide “a new direction.”  These vapid pppppppronouncements lead to questions that would trouble even old Socrates.  How have they failed?  How are we to measure success?  Is failure necessarily its opposite?  What sort of new direction is this?  Does this new direction lead to the good life?

Despite the efficacy of the conservative machine, the progressive movement should not follow in its wake.  Whether it’s the Democrats’ lack of investment in ideas and language, or simply their inability to comprehend the common man’s quest for graspable meaning in a world still mourning God’s death, inventing pithy catch phrases just isn’t the Democrats’ bag. 

Rather, they must destroy their opponent’s weapons by doing the only thing that can be done to concrete things:  blowing them up.  If progressives hope to reassert influence over America’s ideological discourse, then they must explode the well-researched sound-bites that the Republicans use so well.  This does not consist of asserting parallel sound-bites like Dean’s “War on the Middle Class,” but of directly reappropriating the idioms, as in a proper “War on Terror” directed at Bush himself, accusations that Republicans are “cutting” social spending and “running” and pronouncements that Democrats are committed to “adapt and win” “the hearts and minds” of “ordinary people” the world over by not “shocking and awing” them with tomahawks in their living rooms.  Sound trite?  Perhaps, but these phrases do demonstrate the ease with which hard, firm and fast phrases imbued with virtuous simplicity can be exposed as purely formal expressions devoid of any valid content.

While I certainly have not done full justice to Lakoff’s political theories, which can provide some insight into demographic trends and cultural codes, the Democratic Party’s salvation does not lie in outsmarting the people they hope to govern, but in speaking their language.  The major difference between Democratic and Republican rhetoric is not “values” but the potency (dare I say virtue?) of the word. 

The appeal of any political sound bite is in the singularity in meaning and the resultant ease of the word’s comprehension.  If the Democrats hope to gain victory, they must explode this autocratic language by using it precisely where the Republicans had intended them not to—in talking points endlessly disseminated by the 24 hour news cycle.  The one thing to be learned from the Iraq War is, quite simply, that one may not need the most expensive equipment to win a battle, but one certainly shouldn’t take instructions from sycophants.

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