I’ve been meaning to write more about George Lakoff, the linguistic guru who’s all the rage among Democrats in DC. We criticized Lakoff and his Rockridge Institute in All the President’s Spin (here’s the Amazon Inside The Book link) for trying to win the debate with linguistic manipulation rather than better ideas.

Since then, he’s become a mystical swami figure to a party desperate for answers, as The Atlantic’s Josh Green explains:

Lakoff offers no new policy ideas. Instead he suggests that the Democrats reposition the ones they already have, and spruce up some unpopular terminology while they’re at it. He advocates referring to “trial lawyers” as “public-protection attorneys,” replacing “taxes” with “membership fees,” and generally couching the entire Democratic message in palatable—even deceptive—language in order to simplify large ideas and disguise them behind innocent but powerful-sounding phrases.

Cognitive linguistics may not rate with Iraq, terrorism, and health care in surveys of voters’ concerns (it doesn’t rate at all, actually), but it has achieved that status among a surprising number of Democratic leaders. Lakoff has twice addressed the caucus on how to frame its policies, and his book is a surprise best seller in Washington; it has become as much a partisan totem as the lapel-pin flags worn by Republicans. Lakoff and a handful of other self-appointed gurus have raised tactical phrasing to something approaching a religion.

With “messaging efforts” under way throughout the party, more Democrats appear to be coming around to the belief that—election results be damned—what they stand for may not be the problem after all…

Strangely, the Democrats’ fixation with messaging has grown so intense as to revive, in their eyes at least, the standing of an avowed foe, the Republican pollster and message-meister Frank Luntz. The wunderkind strategist who helped develop the terminology for Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Luntz has since drifted far from the inner circles of Republican power. Most GOP insiders question both his skills and his professional priorities, which seem to put his own celebrity above his party. But superstitious Democrats, cheered on by Lakoff, now credit Luntz’s framing and wordsmithery—calling for “tax relief” rather than “tax cuts,” for instance—with much of the Republicans’ success over the past decade.

Not long ago, when a memo Luntz had written on how Republicans should talk about Social Security leaked to the media, there seemed to be only a single suspect (Luntz, of course), and a single—if singularly unlikely—audience for its wisdom. Most Republicans ignored the memo, but the Democrats went into paroxysms of envy. In a private meeting of officials the new party chairman, Howard Dean, vowed that he would “make George Lakoff the Democrats’ Frank Luntz.” That’s the kind of idea that passes for visionary when you’re committed to the pretense that your party isn’t short of ideas.

It’s not too early to examine the results of all this linguistic plotting and scheming. One of the opening salvos from the brand-aware Democratic Party was the “New Partnership for America’s Future.” (Heard of it? No?) The plan, outlined in a handy brochure, is a predictable rejoinder to the Contract With America—attention-getting only in its lateness. It consists of six “core values to promote a strong and secure middle class”: “Prosperity. Opportunity. Community.” To my untrained ear, many of these core values are indistinguishable from the earlier, outmoded ones recklessly put forth in the days before the linguists’ role was properly understood. That is to say, they’re the sort of thing you normally see plastered beneath some purposeful-looking minority student on a subway poster pitching continuing-education night classes.

Rather than defining the Democrats as a group powerfully apart from the Republicans and their alleged linguistic sorcerers, the terminology in this brochure sounds—well, it sounds like Frank Luntz might have a very good case for copyright infringement. His memo offers, with scarcely Einsteinian originality, this thought: “The best way to communicate values is to use words and phrases that no Coke-drinking, apple-pie-eating American could disagree with. Family. Freedom. Opportunity. Responsibility. Community.”

Of course, buzzwords are not going to rescue a failing party. That so many Democrats have achieved the Olympian state of denial necessary to believe otherwise suggests that the tempting abstractions of language and messaging have diverted them from a truth that ought to be perfectly clear: rather than being misunderstood, they were understood all too well.

And not only are buzzwords insufficient to reverse Democrats’ fortunes, but Lakoff’s politics are going to point them in the wrong direction, as Kenneth Baer wrote a few months ago in a Washington Monthly review of his book:

I am not a cognitive linguist (the limits of my expertise in the field begin and end with the Wittgenstein quote above), and I cannot critique Lakoff’s linguistic analysis. But I can say confidently that his political analysis is severely lacking. Don’t Think of an Elephant is a small volume big on assumptions and short on the historical and political context that would shed light on why Americans respond to certain language in the ways that they do. In some places, Lakoff offers superb advice to candidates, but after reading this book—which, as a collection of many previously released articles, is disjointed and repetitive—it seems that Lakoff is primarily concerned with using linguistics to make the case for his liberal-left politics. That may bring comfort to his neighbors in Berkeley, but there’s little evidence that it will win elections.

…By reducing American politics to language, Lakoff ignores the context that gives meaning to those words. Language only motivates people if the ideas and policies it’s connected to resonate with a majority of Americans. It has to be consistent with the realities of American history and the American national character. Throughout his book, Lakoff ignores this context, using his theories to push for an agenda that resonates with him (and possibly his friends at the fringes of left-wing politics), but reflects neither what most Democrats—nor most Americans—believe.

…When it comes to foreign policy, Lakoff shows not only a misunderstanding of America, but also of the history of liberalism and the Democratic Party today. In a chapter written immediately after the attacks of September 11, Lakoff argues that President Bush quickly framed the attacks as a strong father would: It’s about good versus evil, and we need to wipe out this evil even if people get hurt. While an earlier chapter admonishes progressives for ignoring the importance that nurturant parents place on protecting those that they are responsible for, in this discussion he argues that progressives should offer a frame on entirely different terms: “Justice is called for, not vengeance. Understanding and restraint is what is needed…we should not take innocent lives in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Massive bombing of Afghanistan—with the killing of innocents—will show that we are no better than they.”

If this is the type of advice Democrats are listening to, they will soon go the way of the Whigs and the Know-Nothings. To draw a moral equivalency between the invasion of Afghanistan and the attacks of September 11 between the United States and al Qaeda is disgusting. Beyond that, Lakoff’s apparent view of the United States as a malevolent force in the world and the accompanying reluctance to use American power to ensure national security was as out of step with Americans’ belief about themselves when it was propounded in the 1960s and 1970s as it is now.