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November 23, 2004
Boyte on Lakoff
I haven't read George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, although it's been urged on me more than once. His book and Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? seem to be the two most influential works on the left right now. Amazon says that people often buy them together. I shouldn't criticize something I haven't read, but Harry Boyte's critique rings exactly true. (This is from the latest Civic Engagement News. I don't think it's on the web yet, but it will go here, with the past issues.)
Liberal "527" groups on the Democratic side took their cue from George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguist who has become a Democratic guru for what is called "frame theory," or the idea that politics needs to convey simple metaphors. To counter what he calls the Republican view of "government as punitive father," Lakoff argues that the core progressive message is "government as nurturant parent" that expresses its care for the citizenry through social service safety nets and regulation. In Lakoff's view "protection is a form of caring. The world is filled with evils that can harm a child* and protection of innocent and helpless children is a major part of a nurturant parent's job." Government-as-nurturant-parent protects against "crime and drugs, cigarettes, cars without seat belts, dangerous toys, inflammable clothing, pollution, asbestos, lead paint, pesticides in food, diseases, unscrupulous businessmen, and so on." ...
Government-as-nurturant-parent is a crisp summation of the idea of benevolent institutions taking care of citizens through service. It also reflects the shift of the Democratic Party's center of gravity from working people to professionals. Yet "service" means one thing in the context of close-knit, personal relations in communities. In large bureaucracies with thin transactions between experts and clients or customers, it has an entirely different set of resonances. It sounds to many like disingenuous self-justification. It also calls to mind the displacement of community networks, what scholars such as Robert Putnam term "social capital," by impersonal ties. Ferdinand Tönnies called this the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.The ideology of service means "the able" taking care of "the needy." But citizens are not children and many resent being conceived as full of deficiencies. The paternalism of service politics goes counter to the ideal of a free, self-reliant citizenry that uses government as its instrument but is not awed by government as its savior - an ideal that has been the wellspring of America's democratic tradition.
In contrast, Republicans offer a politics of grievance against government run by experts. Thus, Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation declared that "Americans are sick and tired of being told they're incompetent to run their own affairs. They're sick and tired of being treated as passive clients by arrogant, paternalistic social scientists, therapists, professionals and bureaucrats." Such sentiments shaped Mr. Bush's 2004 charge that John Kerry was a "big government liberal." I could hear the echoes on conservative radio stations as I drove through rural areas this fall. "The Democrats make us sound like victims," said one woman on a Christian radio talk show. "They act like we can't do anything for ourselves."
The politics of grievance is full of dangers. It ends up weakening government and threatening all public goods, including schools and public universities, once understood as part of the commonwealth. Yet there are also signs of an explicit alternative both to service politics and to the politics of grievance.
Harry proceeds to describe the very powerful model of service politics that Colgate University has created. I heard Colgate's Dean, Adam Weinberg, describe the Colgate model last spring, and his written description is here.
Posted by peterlevine at 2:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack