George Lakoff in his work over the last thirty years makes a serious attempt to lay the groundwork for Progressives to reassert their influence in the U.S., a country today whose narratives are otherwise dominated by Conservatism and Neoliberalism. He argues that all thinking is governed by foundational or deep metaphors that are embodied, i.e., are not just "ideas", but are our neural circuitry. A broad acceptance of a progressive narrative requires a change in the nation's mental habits, which means changing the neural circuitry in their brains.
Habits, i.e..our neural circuitry, can be changed. It's not easy, but it can be done. The brain isn't infinitely plastic, and as with the breaking of bad habits or the adopting of new good habits, it takes effort and commitment. But social change comes with changing minds, and changing minds requires changing mental habits, and so that will required effort and commitment. Like the development of any habit, it's about repetition. Conservatives get this; Progressives don't.
Conservatives and Neoliberals changed the political mental habits of the U.S. over the last thirty to forty years, and they did it because they knew how to change the frames in their favor, and whoever owns the frame wins the argument. Conservatives understand how to cognitively frame an issue so that any debate about it is on terms that must accept their basic value assumptions and metaphors. Liberals don't understand frames and think facts and reason are enough.
For Lakoff, and for me, Conservatism is rooted in a dysfunctional metaphor. He calls it the 'strict father' metaphor, and argues that it is dysfunctional because it undermines democracy and lays the foundation for authoritarianism. This supports my contention in Part 1 about how secular Liberalism's ontological agnosticism, insofar as it has a tendency to promote an anything-goes cultural ethos, promotes the conditions for the kind of backlash in which societies too often are inclined to embrace the authoritarian strong man. The evidence for this backlash is all around us, and the conditions for its worsening are getting stronger, not weaker. Liberals and secular Progressives see the backlash as comically absurd, and it would be if it weren't so dangerous. And Progressives and Liberals are deluding themselves if they think the country's changing demographics favor them in the long run.
Ordinary people, most of whom are not Leftist Intellectuals, don't want to live in an anything-goes cultural ethos, they crave 'positive' norms to provide identity and purpose; they need to feel that they are part of a solid social consensus on what is right and what is wrong. And the hard right meets that need in a way that agnostic secular liberalism does not. That's why the hard right will remain a powerful force in American and global politics no matter how crazy and foolish its policy prescriptions. It's not about what makes practical sense; it's about feeling ontologically grounded in something bigger than one's own puny sense of impotent individual freedom. The more impotent people feel, the more they are attracted to demagogues.
Now Lakoff's solution is to promote a positive Progressive counternarrative that uses empathy, care, responsibility, protection, and empowerment to ground the deep metaphors for it political program. He argues that these are the deeper positive foundational values that shape American democracy, and that there are enough people in the country who have these values wired into their neural circuitry--people who tend to vote blue--and enough of them also who, though they tend to vote red, are what he call as 'bi-conceptual' i.e., people who are wired with both conservative and progressive circuitry. Biconceptuals can hold views that seem contradictory, but the contradictions need not be apparent to them. What's needed, then, is for the Progressive circuitry to be activated more extensively in the brains of such bi-conceptuals by more aggressive, repetitive, positive Progressive messaging. This is the way new collective mental habits are formed.
I am very sympathetic to this project, but it is a very heavy lift when the hard right has the fear card to play over and over and over. Fear usually wins because of the way it floods the neural circuitry. Fear wins when there is no robust possibility for noble aspiration. The real problem is is not conservative messaging, but the way that messaging is so deeply linked to fear.
The paradox, of course, is that the more the country adopts the conservative agenda, the more insecure the collective psyche becomes. Conservative domestic policy is all about removing the protections and regulations that keep us safe; conservative climate change denial leads to policies that increase the chances of ecological catastrophe. And conservative foreign policy, because it is so paranoid and destabilizing, leads to our current state of endless war on terror, a war mentality that in fact increases terror rather than reduces it. We're in a kind of fear-fueled vicious circle, and it's hard to see how we can pull out of it. It's going to take more than Progressives mounting a more robust counterframe strategy. They have to find a way of inoculating the collective psyche from fear.
Progressives now are at a disadvantage in the political sphere and will continue to be until some consensus can be formed around a commitment to an ideal that calls for courage and sacrifice. Secular Liberalism, with its utilitarian-dominant ethos, offers no robust possibility for collective noble aspiration. Utility does not inspire heroic effort, and heroic effort is what is called for. An appeal to empathy, protection, and empowerment are not in themselves powerful enough to do the job when fear floods the neural circuitry. The only antidote to fear is courage, and we humans are capable of courage, but we find the capacity for it only when there is a positive ideal that warrants the sacrifice of one's utilitarian interests for that ideal.
To provide the fuel for their revolutions, idealists on the secular left have always had to make a bargain with the devil, i.e., to recruit the anger and resentment of the oppressed. Moral outrage is a good thing, but that is different from resentment and the violence that inevitably follows from it. Resentment-fueled violence, even if justified by noble ideals, in almost every case, leads to regression. It leads to a new set of oppressors replacing the old set. It's not progress; it's the same-old, same-old.
I don't think that real progress in the U.S happens until someone emerges, a figure like Gandhi or MLK, someone who is a Prodigy of the Transcendent Real, who is not just about the right kind of messaging, but who awakens something more, something deep in the human spirit that longs for the Real. The brain circuitry will follow.