Lakoff revisited

The Guru of the American far Left would have to be Noam Chomsky, and, like most gurus, he makes a good thing out of it. But he is marginal to mainstream politics. For the American mainstream Left at the moment, the guru seems to be none other than the hilarious George Lakoff. Lakoff has hitched his wagon to a rather wacky idea that even a few conservatives fasten on to at times: The idea that Leftism is feminine and conservatism is masculine. How GWB and John Kerry split the female vote roughly 50/50 in the last presidential race, such people never seem to explain. And that Joe Stalin sure was a motherly, feminine character wasn't he?

I think you could make a case that the conservative concern for the individual makes conservatives more motherly but the whole debate takes place in a fact-free universe so is not really worth having. For what it's worth, however, I have put together a more extended look at Lakoff's claims here.

What prompted this post is that Lakoff has recently written a book in which he purports to tell Leftists how to win elections and there is a good review of it here. What the review points out is that Lakoff is openly advocating the twisting of language. One would have thought that the Leftists who have renamed racial discrimination as "affirmative action" and killing babies as being "pro-choice", would hardly need to be taught that lesson! Long ago, however, Orwell warned us about the Leftist twisting of language to mean the opposite of what it appears to say so Lakoff is nothing new. That Lakoff is openly advocating what Orwell satirized is however a sad testimony to his personal self-absorption and the general Leftist inability to learn from history.

Speaking of history, one of Lakoff's central proposals is to redefine "freedom" to mean more or less its opposite. Who does that remind you of? It reminds me of an essay called "The Nature of Spirit" by G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel's basic idea there was also to redefine "freedom" to mean its opposite. See here (or here). Hegel was of course the inspiration of Karl Marx.

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