Perhaps Lakoff understands that the unpleasant facts of Democratic leaders' actions must be obfuscated or ignored if progressive people are to be persuaded to spend their time and money helping to put those same folks back in power. Some of the book's most embarrassing material comes in this arena, concerning Bill Clinton.
In that section on religion, Lakoff asserts that morality "is ultimately about recognizing and responding to others' needs -- it is about empathy." Again, I couldn't agree more. That might lead us to ask questions about the empathy underlying some of the Clinton policies that Lakoff valorizes. For example, he gives high marks to the Democrat's Iraq policy, "Clinton's military containment of Saddam Hussein inside Iraq's no-fly zones, which indeed succeeded in keeping Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction" (p. 232).
Lakoff conveniently ignores the fact that these no-fly zones were imposed illegally by the United States and Great Britain (initially along with France, which eventually pulled out of the deal), and the routine U.S./U.K. bombing that occurred in those zones had no legitimacy in international or domestic law. That is to say, they were crimes against peace. While Republican crimes demand condemnation, apparently Democratic ones are praiseworthy.
Legal considerations aside, a moral question pops up as well, which Lakoff also conveniently ignores. Key to Clinton's policy on Iraq was the continued imposition on Iraq of the harshest economic embargo in modern history, which virtually the whole world wanted to lift -- except the United States and its U.K. ally (which was every bit as much a lapdog to Clinton as to Bush). While Hussein shares the moral responsibility for the devastation caused by those sanctions, that Clinton policy is directly responsible for the deaths -- by conservative estimates -- of hundreds of thousands of civilians, maybe more than 1 million. Predictably, the most vulnerable -- children and the elderly, the sick and the poor -- suffered most from the economic sanctions. Clinton administration officials made it clear that no matter what Iraq did to meet the specifications of U.N. resolutions on weapons -- the condition for ending the embargo -- the sanctions would remain in place until Hussein was out of power, which effectively condemned to death those hundreds of thousands.
Remember, according to Lakoff, morality "is about empathy." Yet when activists tried to build a movement in the late 1990s to change this cynical and cruel Clinton policy, we found few Democrats willing to listen. The longstanding U.S. goal of controlling the politics of the Middle East -- consistent through Republican and Democratic presidents since World War II -- trumped any empathy that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright, or other individuals in that administration might have felt.
I suppose I can empathize, in some sense, with Lakoff: If he wants to help create the conditions for the return to power of the Democratic Party, perhaps its sins are best ignored. But it's difficult to see how this serves the "higher rationality" that Lakoff invokes at the beginning and end of the book.
Though this critique may seem harsh, it is a friendly one. I agree with many of the policy prescriptions that Lakoff labels as "progressive," though I would want to push his analysis to the left and move past the predictable and uninspiring liberal ideology. I would highlight the more fundamental issues around illegitimate systems and structures of power, primarily the corporation in capitalism and the nation-state in the imperial era. Such suggestions are typically derided by those in Lakoff's camp as unrealistic and/or idealistic. Yet no one has ever explained how a progressive politics that entrenches support for failed systems is a realistic option for the future. Whatever short-term strategies we might devise to try to roll-back the advances of the reactionary right, those tactics have to be informed by honestly facing the depth of our problems.
If this does seem harsh, that's good -- because it's crucial that someone with Lakoff's public platform be critiqued sharply when such weakly argued and thinly supported ideas are tossed off in this shallow a book. Being rational -- along with being clear and honest -- are important if we are to create the needed shift in fundamental thinking necessary to make it possible to pull this world back from the brink of multiple disasters on ecological, cultural, political, and economic fronts.
In his concluding call to a higher rationality, Lakoff writes, "Perhaps the hardest reframing problem is reframing our own minds" (p. 259). Ironically, it turns out that his book is evidence for that very claim, which may be the value of Lakoff's recent work. As he states at the end of Whose Freedom?, with no apparent sense of that irony: "Transcending the ideas that we were raised with -- growing to see more -- is the cognitive work of achieving freedom" (p. 266).
In that section on religion, Lakoff asserts that morality "is ultimately about recognizing and responding to others' needs -- it is about empathy." Again, I couldn't agree more. That might lead us to ask questions about the empathy underlying some of the Clinton policies that Lakoff valorizes. For example, he gives high marks to the Democrat's Iraq policy, "Clinton's military containment of Saddam Hussein inside Iraq's no-fly zones, which indeed succeeded in keeping Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction" (p. 232).
Lakoff conveniently ignores the fact that these no-fly zones were imposed illegally by the United States and Great Britain (initially along with France, which eventually pulled out of the deal), and the routine U.S./U.K. bombing that occurred in those zones had no legitimacy in international or domestic law. That is to say, they were crimes against peace. While Republican crimes demand condemnation, apparently Democratic ones are praiseworthy.
Legal considerations aside, a moral question pops up as well, which Lakoff also conveniently ignores. Key to Clinton's policy on Iraq was the continued imposition on Iraq of the harshest economic embargo in modern history, which virtually the whole world wanted to lift -- except the United States and its U.K. ally (which was every bit as much a lapdog to Clinton as to Bush). While Hussein shares the moral responsibility for the devastation caused by those sanctions, that Clinton policy is directly responsible for the deaths -- by conservative estimates -- of hundreds of thousands of civilians, maybe more than 1 million. Predictably, the most vulnerable -- children and the elderly, the sick and the poor -- suffered most from the economic sanctions. Clinton administration officials made it clear that no matter what Iraq did to meet the specifications of U.N. resolutions on weapons -- the condition for ending the embargo -- the sanctions would remain in place until Hussein was out of power, which effectively condemned to death those hundreds of thousands.
I suppose I can empathize, in some sense, with Lakoff: If he wants to help create the conditions for the return to power of the Democratic Party, perhaps its sins are best ignored. But it's difficult to see how this serves the "higher rationality" that Lakoff invokes at the beginning and end of the book.
Though this critique may seem harsh, it is a friendly one. I agree with many of the policy prescriptions that Lakoff labels as "progressive," though I would want to push his analysis to the left and move past the predictable and uninspiring liberal ideology. I would highlight the more fundamental issues around illegitimate systems and structures of power, primarily the corporation in capitalism and the nation-state in the imperial era. Such suggestions are typically derided by those in Lakoff's camp as unrealistic and/or idealistic. Yet no one has ever explained how a progressive politics that entrenches support for failed systems is a realistic option for the future. Whatever short-term strategies we might devise to try to roll-back the advances of the reactionary right, those tactics have to be informed by honestly facing the depth of our problems.
If this does seem harsh, that's good -- because it's crucial that someone with Lakoff's public platform be critiqued sharply when such weakly argued and thinly supported ideas are tossed off in this shallow a book. Being rational -- along with being clear and honest -- are important if we are to create the needed shift in fundamental thinking necessary to make it possible to pull this world back from the brink of multiple disasters on ecological, cultural, political, and economic fronts.
In his concluding call to a higher rationality, Lakoff writes, "Perhaps the hardest reframing problem is reframing our own minds" (p. 259). Ironically, it turns out that his book is evidence for that very claim, which may be the value of Lakoff's recent work. As he states at the end of Whose Freedom?, with no apparent sense of that irony: "Transcending the ideas that we were raised with -- growing to see more -- is the cognitive work of achieving freedom" (p. 266).
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
