This article is hiliarious. Strict father vs. nurturing mother? Neo-Freudian-Progressives? Idea-envy? Repackaging 'vaporware' to speak to the unconscious? Can you imagine a party more nakedly bereft and adrift?

I couldn't even read the second page of the review, this guy annoyed me that much. This is the bane of the social sciences that academics like to go in and freely name aspects of behavior, and then bore us all with them - it's unusable information. If the Democrats are buying any of this bs, no wonder they are losing.

Meanwhile, the advertising agencies just get it down to numbers and focus groups and then exploit the hell out of the results. It's no accident that Republicans have taken on the tactics of a grand ad/PR campaign, which is all about branding and creating public demand, since it's the corporations that are now pulling the strings of our so-called representative government.

I say, get the ad agency that does Apple's iPod ads (Chiat/Day?) to do a complete reworking of the Democratic message, and then we'd have a fighting chance! And while we're at it, how about the Truth/Out group that fights Big Tobacco? How about some other suggestions; we can send them to the DNC.

I am really in shock from reading previous 2 letters. This article pinpoints exactly why republicans are so successful at getting into the minds of non-intellectuals and why democrats aren't. Even those 2 letters above are part of that liberal arrogance (and don't get me wrong, I am a liberal) that is so loathed among regular folks. Great article. I wish more people read it, and I hope more liberals get it. Sooner, the better.

A good review of the excellent work of Professor Lakoff.

One thing, though. Moral Politics was published on 1996, not 1980.

Lakoff's core issue - the right wing's mastery vs. the left wing's ineptitude regarding language - is crucial regarding political success. And the distinctions he draws about how terms like freedom are respectively used have profound implications. No doubt, if the left wing had been more sensitive to these concerns, it wouldn't be associated so frequently with fringe interests and "liberal" wouldn't have become such a commonly disrespected label. But his overall linguistic analysis doesn't comprehensively characterize the perplexing political mess America finds itself in today.

For instance, what do words such as conservative, liberal, and progressive truly mean? They seem to clearly delineate one faction from another into neat, essentially polarized camps. In fact, they are labels largely imposed by an unreflective tradition for the sake of streamlined understanding. Poke a little deeper, however, and they are much more relativistic than they seem to be in everyday usage.

To begin with, America and much of the West are, when compared to other parts of the world, and certainly other eras, definitively liberal entities, politically, culturally, economically, and religiously. So regardless of which party one is aligned with, if you are not a zealot or an anarchist, you are unavoidably liberal with common roots in history's most liberating movement - the Enlightenment. Basically, "conservatives" have traditionally been conserving a liberal form of governance. And to some extent, since the libertarian core of that original form of governance was so skeletal, "liberals" have been seeking to conserve certain traditions, e.g., unions = guilds, social welfare = tribal connectivity, that were abandoned to a great extent by the new liberal scheme. What specifically made it liberal was the abandonment of those traditions, along with the separation of State from Church.

Accordingly, it's not a stretch to insist that in actuality, America's traditional conservatives have been politically liberal while traditional liberals have been seeking to conserve what was lost in the adoption of that liberal model. Dizzy yet? How about "progressives"? That's even more confusing because it's more relativistic. Is it progressive for a society to provide welfare for most of its members? Today, it seems to be, because modern conservatives expect self-sufficiency and, in turn, penalties for those unable or unwilling to sustain it. Indeed, that sense of individualism - largely a product of Enlightenment, especially Anglo, philosophy - was a departure from the tribal sense of conservatism that protected the welfare of the community. Granted, the protective tribal model wasn't universal, but it served as a normative way of life for many diverse people, ranging from native Americans to nomadic Muslims.

So what does the term, progressive, more accurately define, individual initiative and success, or the overall welfare of the community? Either way, it can't be proved empirically. For the sake of simple categorization, however, concentrate on two elements, authority and money, and disregard many other complexities. Soon, the ambiguities mostly disappear.

Lakoff cites a rudimentary Freudian dynamic - the authoritative father - as a motif to explain the success of conservatives. The facts are more simple, though still not very well understood. Briefly, the success of the modern conservative movement, as well as the neoconservatives, has its roots in the college protests in the '60s, particularly the takeover of Columbia U. Indignant professors, many with a Marxist streak, turned their attention to the concept of lost authority (see Hannah Arendt's "What is Authority" in the book, "Between Past and Future"). This search for the restoration of authority began mainly as a secular movement that, after Reagan, morphed into an uneasy marriage of Republicans and evangelicals since there wasn't much traditional authority to be found in modern secular philosophy.

Additionally, Republican intellectuals sought to discredit Keynesian economics through the work of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Freidman, Jude Wanniski, and others who brilliantly substantiated Say's Law (supply side economics). The Democrats, unaware of the magnitude of that assault, have been dumbfounded ever since. The best they could do in the past 30 years was Bill Clinton, who enacted much of the Republican's Contract with America while using the Republican strategist, Dick Morris, to handle public relations. Lakoff's Freudian motif is relevant in this regard: For years the Republicans have been asking this rhetorical question, Who's your daddy now?

Until the liberals or the progressives or the left wing or, more precisely, the Democrats effectively respond to the pervasive, lingusitic/political mislabeling, the loss of authority in the modern age, and the widely perceived success of supply side economics, they're going to stand little chance of reclaiming the supremacy they once enjoyed before those boisterous Columbia students shut down their campus.