Mark Schmitt has a wonderful post that has an interesting set of comments (including from prak and Billmon). Although not explictly such, the post can be seen part of a related series The Decembrist has been publishing about how Democrats think and communicate policy.

The most recent installment is on the phenomenon of Democratic consultants and politicos of all ilks who are eagerly embracing the advice found in George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives.

You can get an idea of Mark's take on the Lakoff-phenomenon from the title of his Decembrist post: No Guru, No Method, No "DaVinci Code." Yet this post is as much a defense of Lakoff as a take-down. He puts primary blame for the epidemic of silliness on the people doing the embracing, rather on Lakoff himself.

My comment at The Decembrist was sufficiently lengthy and "standalone" that I republish it here [minor edits made only for readability]. I'm rather pleased with the title I've given these remarks, even if I do says so myself.

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My favorite Lakoff -- and where I think the best nuggets of insight are found -- are where he doesn't try to apply his cognitive approach to politics per se.

I'd reach even further back in time than Mark -- to the seminal Metaphors We Live By. It was one of the core applications of related ideas in Berger & Luckmann's equally seminal The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's "metaphors" were an epiphany. By now, the perspective they presented has been thoroughly incorporated into how Americans see things in their information marketplace, even if some of us aren't totally "fluent" yet in metaphors, narratives and frames. Certainly this stuff is mothers milk today for the successful marketing and advertising hacks Billmon's talking about, whether they work in the political sphere or are just flogging commercial products.

The research program of Lakoff and his co-authors over the past few decades, or of cognitionists (somebody help me out, what's the right term?) who are heavily influenced by his core ideas, is similarly rich with ways of understanding how the process of talking about what we think has such a reciprocal effect with the way we think, and even what we think/believe. Those concepts have endless application to politics.

The giant Lakoff-hug happening now just illustrates that we always need somebody to be the popularizer of these sorts of ideas. Most political hacks -- Democrats or Republicans -- aren't going to trawl through the rather dense pages of current debates on such relevant issues as epistemology, heuristics and decision-making in quick-time, and how all of that is being affected by the acceleration of the unintermediated horizontal flow of information and ideas represented by the internet.

We need the Malcolm Gladwells and James Surowieckis to do that for us, as in their week-long BookClub discussion in Slate earlier this month. But even that step isn't enough. We then we need another round of popularizing -- to take the concepts and insights that have been boiled down and reframed by the Gladwells et al and then show how they apply in a particular setting. In the case at hand, the realm of domestic politcs.

This process isn't somehow unique for the fighters and their managers in the arena of political combat. It's the same for the business managers and marketing professionals who apply new insights emerging from cognitive neuroscience and its various "liberal arts" counterparts -- whether linguistics, rhetoric, neuroeconomics, etc. The business-types have one big advantage over the political-types, however. The B-schools produce first-rate popularizers of these concepts. The B-school professors do the trawling for nuggets for the managers, and do the digesting, synthesizing and finding real-world case studies to apply these ideas.

Business types and politicos have this behavior in common: thinking they've found the guru and the silver bullet when all they've found is the "flavor of the month." A favorite object of B-school studies is the company that got screwed up by management's over-eager embrace of "lessons" taken out of context from the latest business-best-seller. So the fact that practitioners of Democratic strategy and communication think they have found the recipe for gold shouldn't come as a surprise.

I certainly agree with Mark that we need people who digest insights "...like Lakoff's, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them." I also think he makes a very important point that it takes an old-fashioned cross-disciplinary "liberal arts" mentality to do that. We all pay a price for the narrowing academic professionalization/specialization of the humanities and social sciences.

I'd add that it's not just a matter of finding people with the right breadth of mind to do the digesting and thinking for the vast majority of us who aren't going to do it ourselves. I'd suggest an equally important part of the overall problem is the absence of a group of competent popularizers who can do the same thing for politics as the B-school professors do for business and marketing.

As Mark points out, it's really rather unfair to Lakoff to expect him to be intellectual innovator, applied research scientist, and popularizer all in one. Unfortunately, I think Lakoff's not applied some lessons from his own important work to himself. But he's not the first intellectual to be blinded a bit by the bright lights of the public stage.

Maybe while we're talking about expanding Democratic-oriented policy centers and think tanks we should add a "Policy Center for Epsitemology and Rhetoric" to do the popularizing?

MC MasterChef's post on modernity and terrorism spun off an entire tangent about comparative religion as an area of knowledge, and how part of solving some of our conflicts will involve being open to learning about the "other" or the "alien". The discussion has been asking why this is especially a challenge in the field of religion, and some of the areas where greater learning should be promoted.

The topic is getting increasingly long and complex, so I thought moving it to the front page might help. The main part of the conversation starts here between Oscar and me.

This post responds to ideas Bondra presented about the frequent tension between personal faith and knowledge about other religions.

It is also a very belated attempt to respond to some of the observations JC made last week, responding to MC MasterChef's Christianism post, about the tensions between the personal and political in religious experience and matters of faith.

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When we deal with faith or religiosity at the individual level, rather than at the level of a religion's theology, institutions, history, etc. there are clearly a bunch of factors that come into play. Here are a few observations tossed out. Not as well organized as I'd like, but you'll get the drift.

One of the big problems we've had with this whole post-election brouhaha is that nobody pays attention to level-of-analysis. Here we're dealing with indvidual voting decisions and trying to claim causality from an institutional affiliation, where we keep focusing on personal attitudes on one topic (religion) being extended to other topics (abortion, gay marriage, etc) and we're paying less attention to the institutional affiliation aspects.

By that I mean that we don't know what the actual beliefs are of a voter who "belongs" to a specific denomination, who "regularly practices" the religion (which we measure by the proxy of church attendance), how strongly those beliefs are held, the degree to which the beliefs are internal (related to the experience of faith) or external (related to membership or loyalty to group), and so on and so on.   more »

One of America's increasingly prominent scholars in the fields of international relations and national security is none other than MC MasterChef's own professor at BU, Andrew Bacevich (specialty American military affairs). His op-ed today in the LATimes, "Unsafe for Democracy," is a timely reminder of a dimension of the recent election that has not received enough attention. With most post-mortems focusing on why Kerry came up short -- why Bush voters didn't pull the lever for Kerry, rather than an assessment of why Kerry voters rejected Bush -- no serious appraisal of the foreign policy voting patterns has received any prominence so far.

The President and his supporters have claimed bluntly that because he won, the Democrats should be expected to "stop campaigning" and support his foreign policies to promote "healing" and "national unity." All well and good from a "rally 'round the troops" standpoint, especially as serious fighting has just been launched in Fallujah. But in terms of how America should position itself in the world going forward, a substantial portion of Democrats and independents who voted for Kerry believe continuing down the road that the Bush Doctrine has placed us on would be a profoundly dangerous mistake.

Although a large portion of the electorate has begun to feel that the US got off was unwise to invade Iraq, a fundamental debate about the role of the US in a unipolar world has not yet been joined. During the election campaign, most of the pointed critique of Bush Admin policies and actions -- from either Democrats or the press -- involved relatively narrow issues, such as the feebleness of the grounds for the invasion of Iraq or the lack of competence in planning and execution of the post-invasion phase. Even those claims didn't receive a great deal of public attention until late in the campaign because of the slow process by which concrete evidence emerged that countered the Admin's fantastically rosy pictures of reality. (See discussions in "Media Tipping-Point " and "What will those dumb Americans do next?"

Bacevich argues, along the same lines as John Ikenberry's "Liberal Leviathan" analysis, that the witches brew of traditional conservative US foreign policy principles with Wilsonian idealism is neither sustainable at home nor acceptable abroad. Bacevich does not outline his preferred approach -- whether to shift from conservative to liberal traditional principles and/or to jettison Wilsonianism in favor of some version of realism or a new idealism . But that political elites must recast the discussion in terms other than the "false coinage" of "freedom" and "democracy" cannot be disputed.    more »

[UPDATE] This essay is one of three on the recommended reading list of the "Grand Strategic Choices Working Group" of the Princeton Project on National Security (Woodrow Wilson School). The group is one of seven organized for the academic year 2004-05. John Ikenberry is co-chair of this working group along with Francis Fukuyama. The other two recommended essays are Fukuyama's article from the Summer 2004 issue of National Interest, "The Neoconservative Moment," (sub reqd) and "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World" by Charles Krauthammer (Speech to American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004) .

See praktike's Democratic Realism is a Joke, which discusses this debate.

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John Ikenberry's piece from Britain's Prospect magazine, written prior to the election, sets out the case for liberal hegemony. It is a vision in sharp distinction to the conservative hegemony that the Bush Administration has been pursuing, especially since 9/11, and which Ikenberry explains will lead to tears. The shape of his overall argument, reflected in the excerpts selected below, is of more interest than his descriptions of the familiar set of actions and attitudes of the Bush Admin that he uses to illustrate and reinforce his analysis. We

Let's start with his conclusion, also the title of the piece.

A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance of power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is quite unrealistic, particularly given unipolarity and the character of the new security threats. There is no going back.

What the world needs is an order where the US continues to underwrite global security but does so within a framework of rules and bargains that render the resulting system legitimate and sustainable. We need to move beyond balance of power and empire towards an international order that combines American unipolar power with widely agreed upon rules and institutions. The world needs a liberal leviathan.

His conclusion is not surprising -- it reflects the basic premises of those who set the grand strategy for the US, and therefore defined the key structures of the liberal international system in the West, during and after WWII. With the interim Cold War brought to an end, there is a return to the logic of the system that was installed by the Western allies and elaborated through building regional and international institutions and arrangements.

As such, his analysis is part of the overall "empire" debates that have sprung up, especially post 9-11. Falling in the camp of "in a unipolar system the world needs a hegemon" he takes the argument further beyond debates that view the world through the US perspective -- type of empire, whether empire is the right term, whether managing an empire is consistent with other key features of the American character or system -- and instead discusses the US role within the context of a new and challenging international system.

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This is a fascinating conceptualization of things, one that we've edged around at a few points in the course of my Political Islam in South Asia class but haven't yet tackled full-on. (One recommendation, made with qualifications, on the subject that Prof. Haqqani did make last week was a book by Tariq Ali called The Clash of Fundamentalisms which I gather elaborates more on the identities and goals of the major world fundamentalist ideologies.) Comparisons between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism often raise ire early on that prevents much further discussion, but I would really like to see this expanded upon. Unfortunately, I have a paper to be writing at the moment, so my thoughts will have to wait.

I started to write a quick response to praktike's challege that the Dems loss was strategic rather than tactical, and it became a good deal longer and covered more ground than I'd planned. So it's easier to post separately.

I guess given the political history we've lived through, Trickster and I are responding viscerally to the prospect of the typical self-destructive Democratic reappraisement instincts we've witnessed time and again. Hence, the emphasis on the tactical rather than the strategic.

55 million people voted against GWB we have to remember. The election could have gone either way. There are reasons why future elections may continue to follow that pattern, of having about half the population support each party but the Republicans take all the marbles. So it's not that the defeat shouldn't stimulate some major changes by the Dems, but it's just as dangerous and, fundamentally, irresponsible to forget about those 55 million people who pulled the Dem levers. One could argue that the Rove approach has just about maxed out what the Bush/DeLay Party can mobilize unless they are able to get some of those Dem voters to move to one or another of their "fear" columns. To do so will take some unintentional collaboration by the Dems, which the opponents of the Bush/DeLay Party should do everythiing to guard against.
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The absurdity of campaign rhetoric's disconnect from either reality or intentions is further highlighted by AP's extensive interview with President Bush on Airforce One. Please tell me how the following differs in any material respect from Kerry's stated policy objectives, especially when taken together with recent remarks by Rumsfeld on troop draw-down after January elections.

President Bush says he doesn't envision a longtime presence of U.S. troops in Iraq similar to post-World War II deployments in Europe and South Korea that continue today.

"I think the Iraqi people want us to leave once we've helped them get on the path of stability and democracy and once we have trained their troops to do their own hard work," Bush said Monday in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press.

Still, Bush said, "It's very difficult for me to predict what forces will exist although I will tell you that Iraq's leadership has made it quite clear that they can manage their own affairs at the appropriate time."

If free and open Iraqi elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Islamic government, "I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy," Bush said. "If that's what the people choose, that's what the people choose."

Why can't our leadership -- from both parties -- speak to Americans in something other than sound bites for second graders? Why can't Bush take advantage of the debates to articulate a sensible view of the "vision" that informs his expectations about future steps the US is likely to take in Iraq? Has the White House campaign strategy relied so totally on being able to demonize Kerry's approach as nothing but "cut and run" in disguise that they have abandoned the public conduct of US foreign policy from the White House?   more »

There are several closely related themes floating around the political ether:

1. the increasingly evident disconnect between fact-based reality and the policy decision-making and execution by the Bush Administration over the past three years, especially in relation to Iraq
2. the credibility gap, which is becoming a chasm, between fact-based reality and the claims of the Bush Administration regarding its policy and the results of its policy
3. the apparent continued credulousness regarding the Bush policies within a substantial portion of the pool of potential voters in November's presidential election, and
4. the failure of the US mainstream media to identify and communicate effectively these various disconnects.

Sunday's NY Times Magazine piece by Ron Suskind is the talk of the day, and both bondra and praktike have offered their personal takes on the tale of why a president, and the apparatus structured to serve him, have become so disconnected from a world view and an intellectual process that are the sine qua non of governance for the country's professional elites. Relying on the explanation of "faith" (not necessarily religious, but at least moral certainty) for the president's attitudes and behavior, Suskind extends this explanation to the portion of the public who not only continue to support Bush's re-election, but share his assessment of both the primary foreign policy goals of the US and how the US is and should be going about achieving those goals.

I also have a personal take, which is consistent with bondra's and praktike's views but comes at the conundrum of Bush and his supporters from a bit different angle than Suskind's. I began to sketch it out in an earlier response to bondra using a Viet Nam analogy as a sort of typology of politicians and opinion groups. I'll try to get to fleshing that out a bit further in the next few days after I finish some more of Charles Kupchan's The Vulnerability of Empire, which deals explicitly with the dynamic between elite decision-making and public opinion in foreign policy. But in the meantime, I want to go back to the issue of the "credibility gap" itself.
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Such are the kinds of questions floating around in my head after reading Ron Suskind's jaw-dropping article in today's New York Times Magazine.

I agree with bondra that Suskind is not necessarily a neutral interlocutor. But as bondra says, too much of the piece accords with what we outsiders can observe with our own eyes and ears. Now, honest conservatives like bondra and Daniel Drezner and Greg Djerejian are grappling with this reality, and coming out on different sides of the debate. Djerejian, for instance, seems to think that in a second term Bush would come back down to Earth and empower his reality-based advisors like Robert Blackwill, Colin Powell, and Richard Armitage (I don't include Condi here because I think she's incompetent). Djerejian, oddly, thinks that George Bush's so-called "understanding of the stakes" with regard to radical Islam and terrorism is some kind of amazing, unique quality. Interesting, then, that the author of a book about the Islamic world entitled, ahem, The Stakes, is a Kerry advisor. More on what a Kerry counterrorism strategy would look like here. It's also worth noting that almost all of the world's top experts on Al Qaeda and radical Islam, including Rohan Gunaratna, Olivier Roy, Peter Bergen, John Cooley, Ahmed Rashid, Bruce Hoffman, Jason Burke, Michael Scheuer, and, despite some wishful thinking on the part of certain Op-Ed columnists, Gilles Kepel, all believe that the invasion of Iraq has given the jihadists a second wind after their defeat in Afghanistan. Even our good friends Pervez Musharraf and King Abdullah of Jordan think so. Suskind and his fellow "Bush as delusional zealot" watcher Nicholas Lemann see signs that Bush would embark on a radical, transformational agenda in his second term. But the truth is, nobody knows which way Bush is headed. It all depends on who stays. One thing that it is quite clear, regardless of what happens to Colin Powell, is that the chief source of insanity and incompetence, Dick Cheney, will remain as Vice-President and will therefore retain a great deal of power. I see no signs that Bush has lost any confidence in him.

Remember, it was Dick Cheney's allies in the administration who are responsible for this. Bush didn't fire them, nor did he hold anyone of consequence's feet to the fire for this. Donald Rumsfeld is, apparently, the best Secretary of Defense America has ever had. Two of the leading candidates for Secretary of State are apparently Pauls Bremer and Wolfowitz, neither of which inspires a modicum of confidence. A third option is Condi Rice, who is chronically incapable of getting different agencies working towards a common policy. Rick Sanchez is getting his fourth star. Barbara Fast got promoted. The general who dreamed up using MPs to help "set the conditions" for interrogations in Guantanamo was sent to fix the problems in Iraq. A toadie has been put in charge of the CIA, not to fix our intelligence problems, but rather to ride herd on the groans of dissent coming out of Langley. And the man who wrote that "the power to set aside the law is inherent in the President" got rewarded with a plum judgeship.

I don't think any of this bodes well for a second term.

bondra -- Responding to your "Bloody hell, can those Americans get any dumber?" I'm amazed that you managed to get through that tendentious gobbledygook from the Guardian. Jonathan Raban has concocted an exotic brew of American exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, nativism, and charismatic evangelicalism. Did he leave out millenialism? I got lost. And he lays this unholy mess at the feet of our Pilgrim heritage, the victor over our enlightened Virginia tradition in the eternal manichean conflict between "religion and reason." Whew!

I understand the impulse of Europeans (in this case I include Brits) to try to apprehend the value systems and belief structures that could produce a re-election victory for someone they view as demonstrably and odiously unqualified not only to be President of the United States but leader of the world. They don't get a vote, yet their futures are certainly affected by the resident of the White House. The objective of analysis, however, is to "demystify," not produce some incoherent kabbalistic theory to prove the inherent incomprehensibility of the "other". (One could make the same comment about most writing on followers of Islam.)

I must pick a quarrel with you a bit on the "merits" (not of Raban's piece but of why Bush retains a considerable base of support on foreign policy, even from people who have concluded that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket). First, from polling data on specific beliefs**, it's clear that there indeed remains for at least a third of the population a considerable disconnect between perceptions of the entire Iraq saga, as narrated by the Bush Admin and the BC04 campaign (with constantly shifting details, to put it most charitably), and the accumulating evidence from official reports and credible information from the ground.

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