In the fall of 1970, Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau found himself facing a dilemma. Prior to entering politics, he was best known as a forceful champion of Canadian federalism against the rising tide of Quebec separatism. At the time, he had presented the choice between federalism and nationalism as a straightforward contest between reason and emotion. Quebec separatism is, and always has been, driven by the ethnic nationalism of so-called pure laine Québécois—descendants of the original French colonists, who were conquered by the British during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and went on to form a French-speaking minority within the Canadian federation. Nationalism of this form is a classic expression of our tribal social instincts; it creates a powerful sense of community and solidarity by drawing a distinction between “us” and “them.” Thus the rapid modernization of Quebec society in the ’60s, which brought about substantial collective achievements, came with increased antagonism toward outsiders and growing demands for political independence.
What Trudeau disliked most about this nationalism was its backwardness. “The history of civilization,” he wrote, “is a chronicle of the subordination of tribal ‘nationalism’ to wider interests.”1 And yet he saw clearly that, in contrast to nationalism, “federalism is by its very essence a compromise and a pact.”2 The arguments for federalism were just that, arguments. They referred to political principles or long-term interests; they had no gut-level appeal. “Federalism has all along been a product of reason in politics,” as Trudeau put it. “It was born of a decision by pragmatic politicians to face facts as they are, particularly the fact of the heterogeneity of the world’s population.”3 Thousands of different languages are spoken in the world and there are more than 800 major ethnic groups, yet there are only 160 full-scale states.4 Insisting that every group have its own state is a recipe for fragmentation and chaos. What sort of a message would it be sending to everyone else in the world if Canadians, despite enjoying practically ideal conditions for mutual toleration (the country is wealthy, industrialized, with two historically liberal cultures and no history of atrocity toward one another) found themselves unable to live together in a shared state?
Defending federalism, in Trudeau’s view, meant defending the principle of reason in politics. “Reason before passion” became his personal motto. And yet, over the course of his first term as prime minister, this commitment became increasingly difficult to maintain. Throughout the late ’60s, the militant wing of the separatist movement became more and more violent, moving from fairly random robberies and attacks to targeted bombings, most importantly against the Montreal Stock Exchange and the home of the mayor of Montreal. The breaking point came with the kidnapping and killing of the Quebec minister of labor and the kidnapping of the British trade commissioner. Both were taken at gunpoint from their homes—Pierre Laporte, the minister of labor, had been playing catch on the front lawn with his nephew, and was later strangled to death. After the kidnapping, the group responsible released a manifesto, which among other things, referred to Trudeau as “la tapette,” which is often translated as “the pansy” but would be accurately rendered as simply “the fag.”
This episode illustrated, in the starkest form possible, the conundrum faced by proponents of reason in politics. Violence is, of course, at the furthest extreme from reason when it comes to resolving political disputes. But what more is there to say when your opponents, given a chance to speak their piece, can’t manage much more than to call you a fag? In order for reason to win, you need to have opponents who are willing to engage in rational debate. So what do you do when confronted with a movement that relies not upon reason for its central appeal, but upon a visceral sense of blood and belonging?
Early on, Trudeau had in fact laid out quite clearly what the strategy would be under such circumstances. The solution would be to fight fire with fire: “One way of offsetting the appeal of separatism is by investing a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in nationalism at the federal level … Resources must be diverted into such things as national flags, anthems, education, arts councils, broadcasting corporations, film boards.”5 One of the peculiar things about Canada was that, at the time Trudeau came to power, it didn’t really have a distinct form of nationalism at the national level. The country was instead the home to two rival national identities, French in Quebec and British in the rest of Canada—the latter based largely on loyalty to the monarchy. For example, there was at the time no national anthem: the French “O Canada” was sung in Quebec, with “God Save the Queen” being sung throughout the rest of the country. The red maple leaf flag had been adopted in 1965 but was still used interchangeably with the Union Jack.
With the conflict between French and English growing more and more intractable, a frustrated Trudeau finally gave up on his old motto, admitting that his faith in reason had been mistaken. “If they want blood and guts,” he said, “I’ll give them blood and guts.”6 To this end—and with varying degrees of cynicism—he set about creating a new national identity, in part by co-opting traditional French Canadian culture and imposing it at the national level. His efforts began with the aggressive promotion of the national flag (with the Parliamentary Flag Program of 1972, which gave each representative a quota of flags to be distributed to constituents), the designation of “O Canada” as the new national anthem, and the creation of a national holiday (with Dominion Day being renamed “Canada Day”), and which culminated in the repatriation of the Constitution and the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. All of this served to create a new Canadian identity distinct from the British one that had previously been dominant at the national level.
So that is how, in a case of not inconsiderable historical irony, Trudeau—the avatar of pure reason—became the father of modern Canadian nationalism, in all of its most boisterous and vulgar manifestations. One wonders how he would have felt had he seen the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, with its giant inflatable beavers, table-hockey players, moose hats, dancing lumberjacks and voyageurs, and Michael Bublé dressed as a Mountie singing “The Maple Leaf Forever.” The phrase “What have I done?” might have sprung to mind. And yet, almost forty years after Trudeau made the initial moves, one could see the power of the strategy. Quebec artists essentially boycotted the Olympic ceremonies, refusing to participate in what they rightly anticipated would be an orgy of Canadian nationalism. And yet when the curtain closed, they proceeded to complain about the lack of “French content” in the program. A principled commitment to national sovereignty is all well and good, but no one likes to feel left out of a party. As far as political dilemmas go, the shoe had been moved to the other foot.
Democrats in the United States are used to getting thrashed by the Republicans. They are obviously afraid, and for the most part it shows. Even when taking positions that are clearly supported by a majority of Americans, they hesitate, obfuscate, and fudge. This timidity is one of the things that drives American liberals crazy about their favored party. Consider, for example, that Republicans were willing to impeach President Bill Clinton over a sexual impropriety, whereas the Democrats chose not to pursue criminal charges against former president George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney, despite prima facie evidence of far more serious wrongdoing (most obviously, of having authorized the use of torture, but also of wiretapping without judicial approval).
There is fairly widespread agreement about the reasons for this. Republicans are incredibly good at framing issues and at articulating their views in a way that grabs the attention of both the media and the public. Consider, for example, the way they were able to sidetrack the debate over health care reform in 2009, turning it into a referendum on the desirability of creating “death panels.” Sarah Palin set the whole thing off with a simple Facebook post: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”7
This is, quite literally, crazy talk. The “death panels” in question were entirely a figment of Palin’s imagination—no one was ever able to point to anything in the legislation that could be even vaguely construed this way. (The quotation marks in Palin’s comment were more like scare quotes, since the passages they marked weren’t actually quoted from anywhere or anything.) And yet Palin’s allegation managed to completely dominate media coverage of the legislation, crowding out almost all discussion of the actual contents of the bill. As Thomas Frank put it, against the “amplified righteousness” of conservative accusations, these little factual corrections “had as much chance of being heard as a kitten’s gentle purring while a freight train roars by ten feet away.”8
The “death panels” episode was just an extreme example of something that the Republicans are able to pull off routinely, which is to present their own case in a vivid, intuitively accessible way that captures everyone’s attention. Even when disconnected from reality, their accusations are enough to put their opponents on the defensive. Part of this is simply through careful choice of terms: “enhanced interrogation” instead of “torture,” “tax relief” instead of “tax cuts,” “energy exploration” instead of “oil drilling,” “Operation Enduring Freedom” instead of “the invasion of Afghanistan,” and so on. Democrats try to do the same thing, but Republicans are unquestionably better at it. To take just one small example, Democrats gave their health care legislation the title Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The name that stuck, however, was the slightly derisive Republican expression “Obamacare.”
The observation that Democrats are terrible at framing is what made George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, an overnight star with the party. What he told the Democrats in his runaway 2004 bestseller Don’t Think of an Elephant! is that all they need to do in order to win elections is to present their ideas better.9 In many cases, he argued, Democrats were losing the debates even before getting started, by accepting the way that Republicans were presenting the issues and the terminology that Republicans were using. To cite one of Lakoff’s examples, merely using the term “tax relief” constitutes tacit acceptance that Americans are somehow “burdened” by taxes, even though the taxes paid by the overwhelming majority of Americans are only enough to cover a small fraction of the government services they receive.10 Democrats, he argued, need to learn to pay less attention to the literal meaning of what they are saying and more attention to the emotional resonance that their words have.
The situation that Democrats find themselves in is hardly unique, it is a dilemma faced by intellectuals and eggheads everywhere. There was a particularly nice portrayal of the core problem in the ’90s television show Frasier. For those who missed it, Frasier was a long-running comedy series that constituted essentially an extended portrait of what ordinary people think smart people are like. Superficially, the show was merely anti-intellectual, but deep down it was also quite ideological. (It is no accident that Kelsey Grammer, the executive producer and star of the show, is a politically active far-right Republican.) The show played on the contrast between two lead characters, Dr. Frasier Crane and his brother, Niles, and three “ordinary folks”—their father (a retired policeman), their housekeeper, and the producer of Frasier’s radio show. The two brothers, although supposedly both Harvard-educated psychiatrists, were essentially clowns. Over the eleven-year run of the series, not once did either use his supposedly superior intelligence to solve any problem or to do anything remotely clever. Their “intelligence” and education gave them nothing more than a habit of using big words, pretentious taste, and a lack of common sense. (In one particularly memorable scene, Frasier criticizes his housekeeper for having incorrectly dusted the bookshelf—which, like most bookshelves in American homes, contains no books—“You forgot, this objet does not face front but rather askew … askew.”) The conservative ideology of common sense was a barely concealed current running throughout the series. Unlike early conservatives, who distrusted intellectuals because they considered them dangerous, Frasier suggests that the problem with intellectuals is that they’re not actually smart.
In one episode, Frasier becomes the butt of a series of practical jokes played by two new shock jocks hired at the radio station where he hosts an on-air counseling show. They wake him up in the morning and pretend that he’s just received an award, or they call him while he’s in the bathtub and ask him to describe his effete beauty regimen, all the while broadcasting the conversation to the entire city. After one particularly humiliating episode, which turns him into a public laughingstock, Frasier finally loses his cool. His response is to compose a written “rebuttal,” which he plans to read on the air during his own radio show. It begins with a “devastating” quote from de la Rochefoucauld, followed by a quip from Dorothy Parker. His brother, Niles, of course thinks that the rebuttal is deadly. The job falls to their father to explain to them that quoting de la Rochefoucauld is probably going to make things worse, and that the two of them are responsible for bringing this ridicule upon themselves because of their habit of putting on airs and acting as though they’re better than everyone else.
American Democrats watching the show must have felt sympathy for Frasier. The relationship between the shock jocks and the pretentious psychiatrist was more than a little reminiscent of the one between American talk radio and Democratic politicians. John Kerry, for example, the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, was relentlessly mocked by the right-wing press for having “nuanced” views on various issues. This quickly turned the word “nuance” into a general term of derision, used like a schoolyard taunt. They called him the “International Man of Nuance,” “the Man of a Thousand Nuances,” and, with thinly veiled homophobia, “nuancy boy.”11 This wasn’t just a pose. Many common sense conservatives actually believe that having nuanced views is a sign of weakness or duplicity. They believe that complaining about “complexity” is nothing more than an excuse made by intellectuals to explain away their unwillingness to take forceful, effective action. Unfortunately, the accusation is difficult to respond to without displaying precisely the characteristic that one is being made fun of for having.
The problem is that some positions are inherently more complicated to explain, and hence involve more nuance, than others. During wartime, for instance, there is always intense pressure on everyone to rally together and show support for the troops. This puts opponents of the war in a tight spot. On the one hand, they typically do not want to see any harm come to their own nation’s soldiers. (They are not, in other words, literally cheering for the other side.) At the same time, they believe that the mission is fundamentally unjustified. Thus they necessarily hope that the troops will fail to carry out their central objective, which is to kill people on the other side. In most cases, it is simply not possible to support the troops without supporting, to some degree, the mission, just as it is not possible to oppose the mission without at the same time opposing the troops. The people who run around tying yellow ribbons on trees and hanging banners on overpasses know this full well, which is why they are so aggressive at forcing everyone to pay lip service to the “support the troops” mantra.
People who are opposed to various foreign wars have been trying, at least since the 1960s, to find some way of articulating their position that is direct, pithy, and intuitively appealing. The effort has been without success. (The slogan “Support our troops: Bring them home” is probably the closest anyone has come. I think we can all agree, however, that it doesn’t work. Compared to “Kill ’em all and let God sort them out,” it sounds confused and contradictory.) In any case, for a huge number of people, war brings out the old friend/foe distinction, polarizing the world into those who are “with us” and those who are “against us.”12 The in-between position, whereby one opposes the war but stops short of supporting the enemy, is a complex construct that can be sustained only at the level of explicit, rational representation. Most people find it profoundly unintuitive, and so treat it as just a “nuanced” way of expressing support for the enemy.
This is why it was a terrible mistake for John Kerry to emphasize his military record when running for president (for instance, by starting his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination by saluting and saying, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty”). Unlike the Republican John McCain, who was famous for what he did while in the service, Kerry was best known not for what he did while in uniform, but for having been a high-profile opponent of the Vietnam War after having finished his tour of duty. In particular, he testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, criticizing not only American policy in Vietnam, but also the conduct of American soldiers. This made him, in the eyes of many Americans, a traitor pure and simple. (A doctored photograph, showing Kerry sitting next to Jane Fonda—who actually was a traitor, in the sense that she traveled to North Vietnam during the war and offered what could only be construed as support for the enemy—revealed quite clearly what mental pigeonhole Kerry was being put in. The fact that the photo was a fake meant nothing in an age of truthiness. So what if the two of them had never sat side by side at a rally? They may as well have, since they were on the same side.)
This is why the infamous Swift Boat ads succeeded. They gave explicit articulation to what many Americans were already feeling in their gut about Kerry. They reminded everyone that while many American prisoners of war were tortured because of their unwillingness to sign statements admitting to war crimes, Kerry went on national television and accused them of precisely that.13 “I felt betrayed,” said one veteran in the ads. “He dishonored his country,” said another. Soon Republicans were openly mocking the Purple Heart that Kerry had received for having been wounded in combat (while supporting George W. Bush, the quintessential upper-class coward, who had used his father’s connections to avoid having to do a tour of duty in Vietnam).
How is one supposed to respond to this? What exactly is there to be said? Kerry might as well have gone on television and cited de la Rochefoucauld in his defense (perhaps, “On ne peut répondre de son courage quand on a jamais été dans le péril”).
Here is the central problem faced by progressives: most of their political positions and policy proposals are inherently more difficult to frame than are those of their opponents. Effective framing creates emotional resonance. Consider, for example, one of Frank Luntz’s most famous: trying to rebrand “drilling for oil” as “energy exploration.” The problem with “drilling for oil” is that is sounds like something bad. First of all, when people think of oil they picture something black and dirty, and probably think of oil spills. Most people also don’t use oil in their day-to-day lives, and are only tenuously aware of the connection between oil and the gasoline that they put in their cars. “Drilling” is likely to remind them of the way that oil is extracted and its environmental consequences. “Energy,” by contrast, is something that everyone uses, and it carries positive associations. “Exploration” sounds adventurous and progressive and says nothing about extraction, nor does it say anything that will trigger thoughts about the environmental consequences. So this way, when you say “We should cut some of the red tape, so that companies are free to engage in energy exploration,” you are saying something that feels intuitively correct.
Effective political framing generates the same type of emotional resonance, by appealing to a basic set of social instincts, such as helping friends and family, reciprocity, teamwork, fair dealing, and punishing one’s enemies. These ideas can be found in every single human society, throughout all of human history. The problem is that our innate social dispositions are able to sustain only small-scale societies or decentralized tribal federations—which is precisely why people lived this way throughout most of human history. It is only with the rise of the state, within the past 5,000 years, that we have begun to exceed our programming in this regard. The state, however, is a highly artificial construct, created by subordinating and manipulating these social instincts in order to create large, hierarchically integrated institutions.
Much of what we call progress or development consists in finding new ways of resolving the collective action problems that our tribal instincts fail to address or else exacerbate. For example, in a small group, it is possible to punish anyone and everyone who breaks the rules, and therefore to maintain a zero-tolerance attitude toward free-riders. As society becomes larger and less closely knit, it is inevitable that there will be people who break the rules, if only by accident. When we see someone who is lazing about, deriving all the benefits of our labor without contributing anything, our natural reaction is one of outrage, combined with a desire to punish the offender, or at least cut him off from those benefits. And in cases where we are not able to single this person out for punishment, then the natural impulse is to withdraw our own cooperation (“If he’s not going to help out, then neither am I!”).
This is fine, as far as it goes, but the problem is that we respond in exactly the same way regardless of how big the group is. It could be six students doing a class project or millions of people participating in an unemployment insurance scheme. This is why Reagan’s “welfare queen” story was so effective—even though it was only a story about a single individual, it made people want to shut down the entire U.S. welfare system. The problem is that with the larger group, there is always going to be someone who takes advantage. If one maintains a zero-tolerance attitude, then cooperation will inevitably break down or collapse in a cycle of mutual recrimination. Maintaining cooperation therefore requires the ability to look at the big picture and to let a few offenses slide—to override our more punitive impulses.
This is the major reason that people cannot be counted on to spontaneously engage in large-scale cooperation. Our punitive impulses, which are actually quite effective at maintaining cooperation in small groups, become an enormous impediment to cooperation as group size increases.14 Tribal societies typically split up into new groups as the population increases. Our instinctual forms of social behavior produce a basic institutional structure of society that lacks scalability. To the extent that we are able to create more advanced systems of cooperation, it is almost always by supplementing individuals’ pro-social instincts with the force of law (or some other hierarchically constituted authority). Thus we encourage people to cooperate of their own volition, but we also threaten to punish those who fail to do so. A lot of what government does therefore involves getting people to obey rules that are ultimately to their benefit but that don’t correspond to anyone’s natural sense of what is right and wrong.
Take a simple example like gun control, which is about as straightforward a collective action problem as you can get. Your chances of getting shot are very strongly correlated with the number of guns out there in the population. At the same time, it never hurts to be better armed than your neighbor. So while the ideal world might be one in which no one has a gun (this is the “cooperative” outcome), an even more ideal world is one in which you have a gun and no one else does. This gives each individual a free-rider incentive to go out and buy a gun. And yet the more people get guns, the more violent and insecure the society becomes. As a result, many people who don’t have any particular desire to own a gun will begin to feel like suckers, and so will go out and get one, simply to defend themselves against those who already own one. (In other words, seeing others defect from the cooperative arrangement leads them to defect. This is a perfect example of how the limited scope of pro-social attitudes among humans can lead to an unraveling of cooperation.)
Thus every large-scale outbreak of public disorder in America (such as the L.A. riots, Hurricane Katrina, or even a high-profile school shooting) is followed by a big spike in gun sales. And there is always a constituency prepared to argue that the solution to gun violence is more guns. If deranged psychopaths are attacking schools, the solution must be to let students and teachers bring their guns to class so they can fight back. If masked gunmen are attacking movie theaters, people should bring their guns along to the movies. If jihadis are hijacking airplanes with box cutters, the solution must be to let passengers bring their own weapons on board. But this simply turns the collective action problem into a race to the bottom—like turning up your music in order to drown out your neighbor’s. A dynamic of this sort is precisely how civilization declines into barbarism.
Getting people to accept the civilized arrangement—strict control of firearms—is tricky, though. First of all, you need to get them to refrain from acting on their narrow self-interest. They need to be willing to forgo the advantages of personal gun ownership. Second, you need to persuade them to trust others to do the same. They need to believe that if they do their part, others will do their part, and so the cooperative outcome—mutual disarmament—really will be achieved. And finally, you need to persuade them to refrain from retaliating when the inevitable violations occur—to stop people from running to the gun shop every time a gun crime is committed.
Gun advocates in the United States have been extremely effective at undermining all three of these conditions. Consider the simple but effective slogan “If guns were illegal, then only criminals would have guns.” This suggests that the second condition will not be met—even if ordinary citizens give up their guns, “criminals” will not—so mutual disarmament is not possible: gun control amounts to unilateral disarmament. It also makes an appeal to the retaliatory impulse by tapping into the distinction between ordinary citizens and criminals, posing the issue in terms of “us” versus “them.” None of this is contained in the literal meaning of the slogan: when interpreted literally, it is vacuous—if guns were illegal, then everyone who had one would be a criminal, by definition. So it’s not about the meaning, it’s all about the intuitions that it triggers.
Lakoff’s suggestion is that, in response, proponents of gun control need only come up with a better way of framing their opposition to gun ownership. But how exactly is that supposed to work? The visceral reaction that people have to mass murders is clearly ambivalent: it makes some people want to ban guns, but it makes just as many other people want to go out and buy guns. The basic point gun control advocates need to make is that modern, civilized societies have it within their power to achieve something very close to a complete elimination of lethal violence. This point, however, is incredibly hard to make in a way that has visceral appeal. So the best that gun control advocates can do is recite a bunch of statistics, about how low the murder rate is and how rare it is for anyone to be killed by a gun in, say, Germany. Or how much friendlier the police are and how much less likely they are to shoot you if they themselves are not worried about getting shot.
Yet no matter how much data one puts forth, all of it can quickly be undermined by an opponent willing to point to the occasional atrocity committed by a lone gunman, such as the Winnenden school shooting in Germany or the Breivik murders in Norway. In desperation, gun control advocates in the United States have taken to emphasizing the dangers that a gun poses to occupants of one’s own home—pointing out how common it is for children to accidentally shoot themselves, or how often burglars or home invaders find and use a homeowner’s own gun against him. But this is basically changing the subject, focusing on a private fringe benefit that happens to be more emotionally salient while ignoring the huge cooperative benefit that comes from limiting gun ownership.
Lakoff thinks that the master concept that progressives should be appealing to, in order to frame their policies more effectively, is empathy.15 Schematically, this makes sense. Empathy is clearly an intuitive, nonrational response, as witnessed by the fact that it is nonvoluntary, spontaneously triggered, and most powerfully evoked by visual stimulus. There is a clear evolutionary reason why we have this response; it is designed to motivate parental investment in offspring. But this is why empathy is also notoriously limited in scope—why we feel most strongly the suffering of children, family, and friends, in that order, and then, occasionally, strangers. It is also a notorious feature of empathy that it is triggered only through identification, which is why movies require a sympathetic protagonist and why people respond much more emotionally to stories of individual suffering than they do to statistics about mass murder.
Yet precisely because it is limited in scope—and there are good evolutionary reasons why it must be so—empathy is also notoriously unreliable as a basis for large-scale collective action. One need only look at the manipulations that aid groups must resort to in order to create any sort of sympathy for the starving and impoverished masses in the Third World. Not only must they rely heavily on pictures of single, identifiable individuals—preferably a child, perhaps a woman, but never an adult man—but the victim must be presented in a way that is stripped of any national, political, religious, or often even ethnic markers.16 Why? Because these markers may disrupt any feeling of identification that potential donors have with the victim. Furthermore, even a suspicion that the victims might have done something to bring the suffering upon themselves is enough to dissolve any feeling of sympathy that most people have. Hence the use of the stereotypical starving child in pleas for charitable donations. And yet precisely because the starving child must be so generic in order for the plea to work at all, campaigns quickly generate “donor fatigue” and the child becomes an object of ridicule (like “starvin’ Marvin” on South Park). And identification certainly cannot be taken for granted. At one anti—health care reform rally, Tea Party protestors laughed and heaped scorn a man in a wheelchair suffering from Parkinson’s disease, telling him that “if you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong part of town.” Around the same time, Ted Nugent was rallying thousands to his slogan: “Trample the Weak.”17 Empathy may be innate, but so is cruelty.
Given these limitations, how realistic is it to think progressives are going to be able to implement their agenda by appealing to empathy? It’s not even obvious that empathy plays that great a role in liberal thinking. Lakoff claims that the basic tenets of liberalism, including individual rights like habeas corpus, are anchored in empathy. This example is particularly ill chosen, since the rights of individuals accused of crimes in America are constantly under attack, precisely because they run counter to so many of our intuitions. The legal protections certainly have a rational basis, but it is not at all clear that they have an empathic one. The only way to make sense of the rights of accused criminals is to understand that the person may or may not be guilty. And even in cases where they are, as a matter of fact, guilty, we may not know that they are guilty. This is the kind of hypothetical construct that is available only to reason. Lots of people despise defense lawyers, accusing them of defending rapists and murderers. The only way to correct this is by introducing a bit of nuance, pointing out that they are actually only defending people accused of rape and murder. Naturally, if you defend people accused of rape and murder, you will wind up defending some people who have actually committed rape and murder. But the point is that we don’t know in advance who those people are. If we knew who the rapists and murderers were, we wouldn’t need the trial.
This is obviously a subtle point, and so Lakoff suggests instead that liberals should give the argument more visceral appeal by evoking empathy. The natural response is to say, empathy toward whom? Toward criminals? Even if you can duck that accusation and insist that it’s empathy for the wrongly accused, there is still the simple and devastating accusation—routinely made by conservatives—that liberals have more empathy for the accused than they do for the victims of crime. Furthermore, the unjustly accused are themselves often unsympathetic characters—petty criminals and so forth. The very same traits that led the police to jump to conclusions in their case and assume that they are guilty will tend to make the public unsympathetic to their plight as well. So even if Lakoff’s suggestion made sense, it is not obvious that it constitutes good strategy.
Indeed, one of the reasons that legal protections for people accused of crimes need to be so elaborate is that the cognitive biases pushing us in the direction of unjust conviction are so powerful. In other words, it is precisely because of our overzealousness in punishing people that we need to have these protections in place. If you look at cases of innocent people who have been convicted of various crimes, the prosecutors’ motivation is typically a mixture of belief perseverance (prosecutors jump to a conclusion, then try to fit all subsequent facts to that hypothesis), confirmation bias (they fail to think the negative, and so don’t bother to seek any evidence that would disprove their hypothesis), and punitive zeal (they more strongly want to ensure that “someone pays” for the crime than they want to ensure that the right person pays). So we have an elaborate apparatus, starting with the extremely artificial “presumption of innocence,” designed to counteract these biases.
It is precisely these biases that make it impossible to “frame” legal protections of accused criminals in an intuitively accessible way. The function of these protections is to counteract and override our intuitive responses to crime, which tend to be retaliatory and overzealous. Thus they are, by their very nature, institutions that can be explained and justified only from a rational point of view. Their sole function is to override our intuitions in order to improve the chances that our justice system will actually mete out something that approximates justice. The same is true of gun control. Ultimately, support for the policy must be based on a cognitive insight into the structure of the collective action problem, not a visceral response to the damage caused by gun crime.
When Lakoff suggests that the Democrats need to learn to frame their issues better, there are no doubt some instances where he is right. Democrats do not need to be as hapless as they are. The most famous example is Michael Dukakis’s answer, during the second presidential debate with George H. W. Bush, when asked how he would feel about the death penalty if his wife had been raped and murdered. He responded simply by reiterating his opposition to the death penalty, saying, “I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.”18 This was generally recognized as having been a disastrous response, simply because it was all head and no heart. And yet even without getting emotional, he could have explained that we don’t ask the victims of crime to determine criminal justice policy—otherwise, we would still be castrating rapists and quartering murderers in the public square. Victims of crime are obviously more sympathetic than perpetrators, but the hard fact is that their perspective and their accounts are often just as biased and self-serving.19 The job of the politician is to balance all of the interests at stake, including those of society at large, not just pander to one constituency.
One might have thought Democrats would have learned their lesson from this. And yet twelve years later, John Kerry stood by in the presidential debates and let George W. Bush frame the issue of stem-cell research as a contest between “science” and “ethics”—as though stem-cell research was motivated by idle curiosity rather than the desire to cure various terrible diseases. How hard would it have been for Kerry to interject and insist that his support for stem-cell research was also an “ethical” position, perhaps even more ethical, since it gives priority to the needs of real, living and breathing people, instead of just cells in a petri dish?
So there remains a lot of room for improvement in the way that Democrats present their views. At the same time, there are clear limits to how much can be achieved through better framing. Conservatives are able to give their positions gut-level appeal because their political ideology calls for the rejection of any policy proposal that does not have gut-level appeal. Simple solutions to complex problems are easy to sell. The enemies of reason will always have the best slogans. Progressives, however, are calling for a variety of initiatives that are not straightforward. They generally support complex solutions to complex problems. Saying that all they need to do is frame their proposals better is like sending a fighter into the ring with one arm tied behind his back.
Lakoff’s emphasis on better framing comes from his more fundamental conviction that morality resides entirely at the level of our intuitions, or that it is fundamentally not rational. This is because he accepts one variant of the ’60s critique of “technical reason,” which sees it as cold, detached, and amoral. As a result, he thinks there is a basic symmetry between the left and the right—both political orientations are grounded in intuition, not in reason. In Lakoff’s view, there is no such thing as a rational politics, because all values ultimately come from the gut. From this perspective, the conflict between progressives and conservatives is essentially a contest between one batch of intuitions and some other intuitions. The problem with the Democrats, therefore, has to be that they are not expressing themselves well enough. Lakoff does not take seriously the possibility that some policies might be inherently more difficult to frame in intuitively compelling ways precisely because they are not based on our intuitions, or because they require active suppression of our intuitions in order to be understood. (Jonathan Haidt shares Lakoff’s view in this respect, except that he thinks that liberalism comes from a lopsided emphasis on two of the six supposedly innate moral intuitions. This leads him to the conclusion that liberals have to do more than just frame their ideas better: they have to actually embrace a broader range of conservative values.20)
In the end, Lakoff calls for a “new enlightenment,” one based on the supremacy of what he calls “real reason.” This is easily recognizable as just another version of the standard antirationalist template, not much different from what one can find in Herbert Marcuse or Mary Daly. Lakoff defines real reason using the standard ’60s tropes. It is “largely unconscious and appropriately emotional. It is embodied, and the way it is embodied gives rise to frame-based and metaphorical thought.”21 So far, so familiar. Calling it “reason,” though, is a bit misleading. A better word would be intuition. Similarly, when Lakoff calls for a “new enlightenment,” this is really just a rhetorically misleading way of endorsing the central dogmas of the Romantic counter-Enlightenment. It’s not even old wine in new bottles—it’s old wine in old bottles with the labels switched around.
Contrary to what Lakoff claims, the idea that reason is neutral with respect to questions of value is extremely dubious. Even David Hume, the father of modern sentimentalism, recognized that our ability to enter into cooperative relations with one another is based upon the rational insight that we can all be better off if we follow some mutually agreed-upon rules.22 This exercise of reason provides the foundation for the state, the market economy, and modern legal orders, as well as “golden rule” moral codes.
Take something as simple as accepting a compromise. Everyone always has a reason to reject a compromise, because everyone thinks that their own view is correct, their own cause is just, or their own values are more important. That gives everyone a reason not to compromise. The only way to see one’s way toward accepting a compromise is to recognize that because everyone thinks that their own view is correct, no one is likely to back down, and so everyone is better off settling for somewhat less than what they think an ideal arrangement would be. (“He may be evil, but he thinks he’s good. Furthermore, he thinks that I’m evil, even though I’m good.”) This kind of perspective-taking, along with relativization of one’s own position, is not accessible to us through intuition. Compromise is always based on a rational insight, and it is respected only by those who are able to veto their first-order impulses. Because of this, there is no way to make compromise viscerally satisfying. Indeed, the enemies of liberalism have been merciless in making fun of the willingness to compromise, always portraying it as a sign of weakness or effeminacy. The only way to sell compromise is to encourage people to assess it from a rational point of view and to recognize the dreary but persistent fact that if everyone always strives to get their own way, the results are likely to be much worse for everyone involved.
Conservatives do have a few issues that are genuinely unintuitive, mainly having to do with the way that capitalism functions. It is difficult to explain why wages bear no relation to how hard a person works or to the value of what the person produces.23 And it is incredibly difficult to explain why international trade is mutually beneficial and doesn’t create unemployment, even if wages in one country are much higher than in the other.24 Thus protectionism will always have enormous intuitive appeal, because its proponents can tap into our feelings of in-group solidarity. Frustration over the impossibility of explaining these two points to the electorate occasionally generates an outbreak of antidemocratic sentiment on the right.25
And yet, by comparison, supporters of modern liberalism have it much worse. Consider, for example, one of the defining ideas of twentieth-century jurisprudence, that there should be a distinction between law and morality. Whenever we see someone doing something that we consider deeply immoral, our immediate reaction is to say that this person shouldn’t be allowed to do it. In a small-scale tribal society, where people largely agree about what is moral and immoral, we would get our way. In this type of society, law is basically just the enforcement of morality. With the development of the large-scale bureaucratic state, however, came the gradual acceptance of the idea that not everything that is wrong should also be illegal. This is partly because people have significant disagreements about what is right and wrong, but also because the law is a blunt instrument, and so trying to regulate certain forms of behavior is likely to do more damage than any good it could create. Thus a person living in the modern world can quite consistently believe that, for example, abortion is immoral and still think that it should be legal. This is central to the idea of individual rights—that people should not be legally prevented from doing a variety of things, including some that are profoundly antisocial. This is, however, a difficult distinction to defend—indeed, it is a quintessentially “nuanced” position. Saying that something should be legal sounds like saying that it’s okay to do it. Saying that something is immoral sounds like saying that it’s not okay. So which is it?
Thus it is a characteristic feature of many conservative positions, especially in the common sense vein, that they reject any distinction between morality and law. This is why American conservatives are so keen to put up monuments of the ten commandments on courthouse steps, and why they think that homosexuality should be, if not outright illegal, then at least deprived of any legal protection. Fundamentally, the position is not complicated. They think that homosexuality is gross, which leads them to think that it is immoral, which leads them to think that it should be illegal. Intuition doesn’t draw any distinctions between these three quite different reactions. Any attempt to drive a wedge between them is seen as simply a load of fancy doubletalk, like supporting the troops but not the mission. The conservative position is, therefore, a hugely regressive political stance—it undoes one of the foundational principles of Western democracy—and yet it is also one that most people find intuitively correct.
One can see here why the “fight fire with fire” response is inherently limited. The Trudeau example, of encouraging federal nationalism to combat provincial nationalism, is something of an exception. It worked—to the extent that it did work—because at either level, nationalism is essentially a trick, designed to make people feel a heightened level of social solidarity toward people who are, in fact, strangers. There is no inherent limit on the level at which the trick can be played. These successes, however, can mislead the friends of reason into thinking that with enough attention to human psychology, anything can be effectively packaged and sold. But this is clearly not the case. The only reason Lakoff thinks it can is that he is a moral noncognitivist, and so doesn’t believe that liberal positions are in any way more rational than conservative ones. They just reflect different values, and values are based on gut feelings. Politics, in his view, is nothing but our gut feelings versus theirs.
This way of thinking is one that should make progressives extremely nervous. Apart from the fact that it generates a lot of dubious advice on how to run political campaigns, the major problem is that it essentially ratifies the current climate of irrationalism in the political sphere, making it look like a feature of the human condition, instead of a pathological state of affairs that we have allowed to develop, and that we need to take steps to reverse.