George Lakoff is a Professor of Cognitative Linguistics and was, for a short time, the darling of the Daily Kos scene, coincidently at the same time I was very much interested in this new “Progressive” movement in the states – you know, the one that ended up with Obama going into the White House. That movement. 

I thought this Lakoff fella was the bee’s knees too. I had both his books, “Don’t think of an Elephant” which is useful for pointing out a useful rule in political discourse – never, ever tell people what you’re not, because it plants the idea in their heads and that’s all they can think about. I also had the more academic book, “Moral Politics” which investigated the subconcious world views of both liberals (in the Liberal Conspiracy sense of the word) and conservatives, and the metaphorical constructs that make those world-views complete and coherent. 

Lakoff was (and presumably still is) concerned with the way that the Conservative movement in the US were expert at using metaphor in political language to ‘frame’ debates within a conservative world view to win arguments by default, and proposed the concept of reframing using alternative metaphors designed to hook into the liberal world view, so that progressives could win by default instead. 

He argued that consistently applying these ‘liberal’ frames and not falling into the trap of using conservative frames, they wouldn’t be constantly undermining their own arguments. For example, ‘tax relief’ is a conservative frame, it suggests that tax is a burden to be relieved. When a progressive uses ‘tax relief’, they subconsciously undermine their arguments to want people to pay more tax for, and to use the technical term, “sound like dickheads.”

Chris Huhne fell into this trap during both his Leadership bids, constantly referring to one of his pet metaphors of “the broadest shoulders should carry the heaviest burden (of tax)”, which, you know, doesn’t really sound very cool. Why’d you want to burden people, Chris? 

But I’ve digressified. Oh, see, I’ve been writing about American politics for an hour and I’m already doing Bush-Speak. I’ve digressified again, too. 

So, being very much impressed and enthused in the way only activists can be, I made a concerted effort to apply the theory (and the metaphors) in the real world, using some of the ideas in Focus leaflets, and found something curious: In focus leaflets they sounded like typical political bullshit and had a net negative effect, but they had a powerful effect on Labour supporters when used face to face. I mean, really powerful. It made a few people become uncomfortably obsessed with me, thinking I was the second coming and insisting I had to stand as an MP. I ended up hiding in my flat not answering the phone at one point. I’d unleashed this horrible monster and I just wanted it to go away.

What did stick though was probably the most important political revelation of my life: conservatives aren’t evil people. They believe what they believe and think what they think because they believe wholeheartedly that they are doing the Right Thing, that they are acting from a moral position. This, as ridiculous as it sounds, blew my mind, and opened the door towards empathy and understanding of other people’s political beliefs, and a reassessment of my own moral high ground and opinions.

That I got this from someone desperately trying to help the progressive movement is just the law of unintended consequences again. And, eventually, I realised that both these ‘world views’ were utter nonsense, that to decide policy based on metaphors is a stupid thing to do and is everything that’s wrong with modern politics. Fighting truthiness with truthiness? Lakoff needed to go in the bin.  

But it allowed me to start thinking rationally about my politics for the first time, to not feel afraid of exploring certain concepts or ideas -realising that neither ‘side’ had a monopoly on morality, or even on ideas, and so I arrived at the conclusion that liberalism for both the brain and the pocket was the only political creed for me. There’s no metaphorical world-view for that in Lakoff’s books.

That’s because it doesn’t depend on metaphorical world views, doesn’t depend on subconscious appeals to ‘common sense’ – instead was based on reason and rationality – which for me is the moral way of approaching politics. Appealing to people’s brains instead of their hearts. Apparently it’s impossible. According to conventional political wisdom, all you lot are far too cretinous to understand intellectual arguments and insist on having all messages communicated through cartoon characters, preferably in the form of a song, or a picture of a child with a tear running down her face.  Christ you won’t even buy insurance unless it’s being sold by something animated, will you? Don’t make me send Charlie Brooker round your house because he gets a lot angrier about this infantilisation of our society than I do, and I’m flippin’ furious about it. 

But, hey, let’s exploit it. The plan is quite simple – sell the British public Liberalism by saying absolutely nothing and leaving all communication to a cartoon dog singing, “happy happy happy”, the new infuriatingly annoying Ringtone sensation! Vote Happy Happy Happy Happy!! 

Well, assuming it’s moral to do such a thing.