The blogosphere is creaming about this. Worry not.

Pinker has descended from a humane scientist to a troglodyte hack. His review isn't above your head, it's beneath your fundament.

Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com

The core reason why conservatism is failing is also easy to explain. The job of elected officials is to govern. But the conservative movement, which flourished from the seeds of deep hostility toward government, produced ideas implicitly designed to weaken the public sector. The right paid lip service to goals like fiscal responsibility, better schools, health care, retirement security, and so on, but that rhetoric’s purpose was mainly to generate political support for actions that would have the effect of rolling back government – the right’s overriding priority.

Nonsense.

You have bought the myth and repeat the catechism in spite of your lying eyes.

Government size and spending increased dramatically under Republicans. The power and reach has been extended until George Bush governs like an emperor without any controls whatever.

Liberals have always feared the power of government. They want to channel and control it, not let it grow like a noxious weed.

Perhaps you are discussing progressives. :-)

Best, Terry

See Alan Wolfe's Washington Monthly article from July, 2006 for more support for this argument:

It's the fact that Pinker has done such good work in the past - and has offered parents solace and advice as well as just science, that has made his grasping at being a public pseudo-intellectual so disappointing. It is almost as if the Pinker now needs to go back and read the Pinker of before.

Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com

This is what conservatism always aimed at. The point wasn't to remove government, but to remove government's ability to interpose itself between religious and economic elites and the people they exploited.

Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about... not framing precisely, but analogies and catchphrases and more effective means of scoring rhetorical points, since we'll be waiting a very long time if we're counting on a consistent philosophical approach from elected Democrats. Here's how to demonize conservatism, or, more relevantly, the GOP: it's all about dirty little secrets. Not just the obvious ones like preying on teen boys or dragging one's wife to sex clubs (remember the Ryan thing?), but secret meetings and secret detentions and secret prisons and just generally covering up, denying, equivocating, and outright lying about every issue that speaks to our real sense of moral obligations as American citizens. And when you get right down to it, the real emotional appeal of conservatism, at least the cultural variety, is that keeping dirty little secrets out of the public eye is more comfortable for those who aren't directly affected by them and really don't want the moral responsibility of having to deal with them. Still, as anyone who has ever lived in a small town-- or even read a fair amount of American literature-- knows, those little secrets have a cumulative effect, bubbling up and devastating families and entire communities. That's what we're facing these days, on an almost epic scale, and it's time to peel back the semi-respectable facade and get this stuff out in the open before the rot takes over.

Greg, it doesn't sound like you understood the thrust of Pinker's criticism. The main issue here is Lakoff's contention that metaphor is the end all, be all of political communication. As a researcher in cognitive neuroscience with experience in politics, I totally agree with Pinker. Lakoff is part of a school of thought in psychology that says "metaphor" can explain a great deal of how we think and use language, but the experimental data are equivocal on this at best. I remember introducing Lakoff's work to a political consultant I worked with in 2002, and his first question was "how can we use this?" I told him the truth, that you can't. This whole thing about "framing" that Democrats have been talking about is based on a shallow understanding of where that concept comes from, and generally, the leap from theoretical psychology to applied campaign communications is huge, so huge that its naive to think that one can divine the role of metaphor in campaign politics the way Lakoff has. As Pinker correctly points out, Lakoff doesn't even seem to have a strong understanding of the current literature in political science.

Of course, Pinker's proactive suggestion, not to "abandon reason or logic" is equally naive, because he seems to assume that reason is somehow currently a part of our national dialogue. Whatever. Not everyone's a damned genius who gets every aspect economic and foreign policy, so a big question is how to distill stuff in ways that everyone can understand (which, as Pinker should know, is a basic task even in science).

Here's a good rule of thumb: be VERY skeptical of any scientist who talks like they have all the answers.

What howard said with the caveat that if they got rid of the crazy right-wingers would there be enough people left to make up a party?.

Stop reading my mind, howard, it's disconcerting.

Pinker has always been something of a public pseudo-intellectual. Blank Slate was about 60% thoughtful and engaging science writing, 30% over-reaching for political purposes, and 10% unfiltered egomania. The proportions seem to be trending in the wrong direction with each additional piece he writes.

Pinker is part of past fashion on linguistics. In the cognitive linguistics movement, which Lakoff had a role in founding, today the most vital work is being done by Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner - work whose explanatory worth is both broad and deep in ways which are both obvious, when you work through their analyses of the evidence, and destructive of some of the prejudices the post-Chomskian linguists, Pinker among them, have long clung to. (Pinker is also part of past fashion in hair styles; go figure.) Metaphor isn't the central term of the science these days, but rather "cognitive blend." "Framing" plays a role in cognitive blends - but the technical examples of how it all works, in their minute and well-described specifics, go much futher than Lakoff's use of that term in his popular political works.

Lakoff's turn to politics is in part because he recognizes that a younger generation is now in the forefront of the field he cofounded - leaving old farts like him time to turn towards the practical extensions of the work. The main thing for someone trying to honestly refute Lakoff to deal with is the prevasive pattern of co-occurrence of political positions: Why are "pro-life" people as a rule indifferent to child nutrition and for capital punishment, for example. Lakoff's proposed explanation of the specific clusters of positions that otherwise inexplicably end up held by self-identified conservatives or liberals in terms of deep conceptual structures which draw from metaphors of the family is, to my knowledge, the only one standing.

But I can't get to Pinker's article to know if he presents a contrary explanation of this primary data, since I won't pay to get beyond TNR's firewall.

I'm not a political strategist and no expert in what makes people vote one way or another, so this post could come across as a bit naive, but my question is this - what will a concerted tactic of demonizing conservatism actually achieve?

To me, the single most defining outcome of the demonizing of liberalism is that you now have swarms of semi-literate political crackheads who criticize anyone who disagrees with them as a liberal. These people are oblivious and uninterested in having any kind of intelligent policy debate; think Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and John Gibson, three of the dumbest people on the planet, yet they host some of the more popular cable news shows. And why? Because smearing liberals is popular in its own right.

So here's my beef - do you want liberalism to incarnate its own versions of O'Reilly and Gibson? Do you want serious conservative thinkers to be crapped on just because they are conservative? To me, that would seem to be a backward step, another cycle in this country's downward spiral of dumbness.

Maybe it's a political necessity for Dems to do this, but honestly, I hope it isn't.

Eddie-george,

I guess I'd put it this way. The people you mention and many of the activist groups supporting movement conservativism have gotten a lot of mileage out of demonizing different groups -- a list so long that it's impossible to be all-inclusive, but covers not just liberals, but also bureaucrats, unions, trial lawyers, homosexuals, "illegals," feminists, abortionists, "class warriors," the "undeserving poor," atheists, the French, Ivy Leaguers, appeasers, "swarthy males," and so on.

Those of us on the left by and large really haven't resorted to mocking groups of people. To me, the best response would be to identify one and only one group as standing in the way of progress in this country -- "conservative ideologues." And one of the ways they have led us astray is by attacking one group after another. But we want to move beyond that -- to end all the divisiveness. And the only way that's going to happen is if the conservative ideologues who have been responsible are removed from power. To me, that would be more likely to be effective politically, and avoid the escalation of vitriol you warn against, than Tom Frank's populism or David Sirota's hyperaggression. --Greg

Without going into details, political labels, and political situations, ever evolve. Liberals want to preserve many institutions they hold dear, like Social Security, habeas corpus or reproductive freedoms that most of self-styled conservatives do not.

Actually, "reactionaries" were not acting -- as to change things, but reacting -- to prevent changes; I do not recall any particular distinction between the conservatives and reactionaries, except that reactionaries never liked to be called that way.

Rome had Populars (like Marius) and Optimates (like Sulla) who approximated Democrats and Republicans to a degree. Nihil novi sub sole.

Now, if we can destroy GOP as it is now and force DLC types to take over and become RLC, I am all for it.

"You give me a progressive issue," Lakoff boasts, "and I'll tell you how it comes down to a matter of freedom"--oblivious to the fact that he has just gutted the concept of freedom of all content. Actually, the damage is worse than that, because many of Lakoff's "freedoms" are demands that society conform to his personal vision of the good (right down to the ingredients of food), and thus are barely distinguishable from totalitarianism. How would he implement "pay in proportion to contributions to society through work"? Will a commissar decide that an opera singer deserves higher pay than a country singer, or that a seller of pork rinds should earn less than a seller of tiramisu? And his freedom not to be harmed by "hurtful language" is merely another name for the unlimited censorship of political speech. No doubt slaveholders found the speech of abolitionists to be "hurtful."

What exactly is wrong with this paragraph?

I'm not familiar with Lackoff's work, but if this book review is anything to go by, he's incredibly naive & ill thought on Political matters. I don't know whetehr Pinker is a genius or a Hack, but his revioew pointing out the flaws of Lakoff's book & his conception of "Freedom" have nothing to do with it.