Tom Mills, 22 October 2008

Review of The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain, George Lakoff, Penguin, 2008

George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist and linguist who in The Political Mind, tries to apply his field to gain a better understanding of politics. Not for the most part politics in the broader sense, but rather in the electoral failures of the Democrats in the Bush era. It is a book aimed at restoring Democratic control of the White House, and is highly prescriptive. Why so far have they failed? And why do so many Americans apparently vote against their own interests? This is a popular topic amongst liberal commentators in the United States, and the answer, Lakoff believes, lies in the workings of the human brain.

According to Lakoff, the Republicans have successfully framed political debate so as to ensure the primacy of their conservative ideology. The same propaganda is repeated again and again until the brains of voters have been literally hard wired into a conservative worldview. Metaphorical language, Lakoff explains, powerfully shapes our political understanding. Our brains, which operate largely unconsciously, absorb this information whether we like it or not. Concepts and associations become fixed. His favourite example is the phrase ‘tax relief’; a concept which of course implies that tax is necessarily a negative force from which one should seek ‘relief’. Concepts such as these invoke an instinctive narrative which the brain will latch onto. In this case it is what Lakoff calls the ‘rescue narrative’. In the case of tax relief, the victim (businesses and hardworking American families) are rescued from the villain (big government) by the hero (George Bush). Similar narrative structures are used in all sorts of ways to promote right-wing economic policies and a militaristic foreign policy.

Whilst the Republicans cheerily indulge in this political brainwashing, Democrats are stuck in what Lakoff calls ‘Old Enlightenment thinking’. They are preoccupied with rational debate, facts, figures and refutations, unaware of the redundancy of this approach in influencing voters. Well meaning but naïve, they enter into political discussions where the framing of the argument has already narrowed the debate to favour conservative assumptions. You cannot argue against tax relief, for example, by accepting the underlying assumptions of the term. Similarly you cannot effectively argue against the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan if you accept the framing that America and Britain are invading those countries to liberate their populations: the rescue narrative again.

Lakoff believes that if what he calls ‘progressives’ understood the brain better, they would approach politics differently. They would recognise the power of narrative, metaphor and framing, and form their own alternative narratives based on progressive values. In the case of tax relief, the alternative might be that the victims (hardworking American families) are saved from the villains (big business and a corporate dominated economy) by the hero (public funding programmes). Lakoff applies this sort of thinking to various areas of policy seeking to explain how our internal metaphorical world shapes our political understanding.

There are some interesting insights in the book, mostly in the earlier chapters where he focuses more generally on narratives, framing and metaphor. His discussion of the relationship between family politics and national politics – developed in more detail in earlier work – is interesting and insightful. However, his conviction that his field of scientific study has important bearings on politics is not always convincing, and his arguments could have been made by appealing to more traditional psychology and linguistics without constantly referring to neural binding and somatic markers. Still his use of brain science does at least serve as a powerful reminder of the power of political ideology – to be hoodwinked is one thing but to have your brain literally shaped by political propaganda seems far more sinister.

There are deeper flaws. It is a book about the brain and not society, but his apparent disinterest in the latter makes it in places a superficial read. Is the problem really that centre-left parties cannot communicate effectively? In Britain New Labour have been very good at sounding progressive and compassionate, as are David Cameron’s Conservatives, but the proof, as they say, of the pudding is in the eating. When Democrat administrations and legislators have failed to live up to the politics of compassion – which Lakoff sees as central to their political vision – he portrays them simply as dupes of conservative framing. For him the Democratic Party are the embodiment of progressive politics and at no point does he question the Party’s right to represent America’s poor and marginalised. All this begs the question: is Lakoff interested in strengthening progressive politics or in just the political rhetoric of the Democratic Party.