The liberal blogosphere has been smitten with George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant. Indeed, Lakoff writes with such lucidity and passion that I think it would be fair to place this book in a privileged list of great American political pamphlets. History will determine if my judgment about that is foolish, since it will depend upon how much this book actually influences changes in the future, which I have no way of predicting. But should it come to influence a new progressive movement, I suspect the book will be around for a long time.

A quick synopsis: Lakoff argues that political ideas are not influenced as much by facts as they are by linguistic frames, or ideas invoked by words. Since large social organizations like nations are too big to grasp intimately, humans tend to understand nations as they do smaller social groups, particularly families. These two observations lead him to conclude that ideas about family organization intimately influence our politics.

He argues that there are two main approaches to family politics in America: the strict father approach and the nurturant parent approach. Both of these approaches flow from different values and views about the way the world operates, what it means to be happy, moral and healthy and so on. While all people have elements of both approaches in their private lives, Lakoff's key insight is that dedicated political activists are people who have decided which approach will roughly govern their political views. Liberals are decided nurturant parents. Conservatives are decided strict fathers. Swing voters are thus people who have not decided which family approach they will apply to the political realm. Activating the progressive, nurturant parent frames in them is the key to victory. This is incidentally also the reason why playing to your political base works: you reaffirm the values of your dedicated activists and also frame the debate in a way that sets off those frames in undecided people.

I have not yet seen a review that challenges Lakoff's essential prescription for the Democrats: to activate progressive frames in people who have not decided which set of frames will govern their politics. You can read some blogospherage here and read a review here. Please point out a critique if you find one. I did not look aggressively for one.

I do not disagree with the idea that we need to fight a linguistic turf war. I do hope, however, that this book does not become something that people rely upon for easy answers. While Lakoff is correct that changing the language is social change of a sort (and he is particularly interesting in his discussion about how we spend our money because of our frames), I hope that liberal activists do not neglect a sorely needed policy debate. As I have argued before, we are facing a crisis on the left that emerged around the end of the Cold War. When communism was widely discredited, the free market right sought to expand their war against "pinkos" to include all government regulation of the economy. "Deregulation" and welfare "reform" were made possible by the uncomfortable position of American liberals, who were very rarely communists, but nonetheless believed in ideals and values supported by socialism as a competing economic system. When this foundation came crumbling down, liberals were in retreat for simply being liberals, whether they were espousing workable economic policy or not (see my discussion of Sweden and The 700 Club). The right claimed victory in the Cold War (and we only need to recall the "Reagan won the Cold War" media circle jerk to understand this) and has used it to pillage the left ever since. And they have done it by claiming falsely that we were too weak or too communist ourselves to stand up against the obvious evil of the Soviet system.

Given this recent history, it will take more than simply activating our frames to gain widespread support for liberalism again, so liberals should not be lulled into believing that Lakoff's book is carte blanche to ignore our serious lack of an economic message that makes sense. The global economy has undergone revolutionary change in the last 15 years, particularly with the growth of the internet. Job security in the way our grandparents knew it is a thing of the past. Company loyalty is a thing of the past. Our economy is fast paced. The blue collar world is shrinking. Given these realities, many people view our very frames and our family values as being hopelessly naive. Simply activating these frames will not work, we must also defend them. Over the long term, we cannot sustain ourselves by repackaging protectionism, we just have to find a new way to unlock the potential of ordinary people and care for them in a free market world. Our policies need new ideas, in other words, to assist us in the credible defense of our frames.

I think the place to start is to focus on three values of the new economy: optimism, accountability, and innovation. Republican policies in the face of the information revolution have centered on fear (the Y2K paranoia, war on terror, internet speech crackdowns), secrecy (use of the media to destroy people's belief in the value of a skeptical free press), and crony capitalism (which stunts innovation on the part of fledgling competitors). We do not need promise jobs, but policy visions that unlock the opportunities inherent in the new world, not foster fear of it. Let's rethink education in light of the internet and think about ways to bring people into the bounty. There is so little discussion about the hopeful side of globalization anymore that it is really our opportunity to invent new connections that have truly beneficial effects for regular people.

We must invoke out frames, but we also must create credibility by understanding basic truths about our economy and the future of it or we will be framing ourselves a box in the corner of the room.