Oliver Willis

For some time now, I’ve believed that the raving over George Lakoff is silly stuff. This article further confirms that to me. Lakoff is useful to dissect the linguistic trickery of the Frank Luntz school – but his work is absolutely useless in prescribing Democratic alternatives and they tend to resemble the sort of ivory tower college liberalism that we get parodied for. I do believe that about 90% of the last election was decided on the GOP’s skill at marketing and message discipline, while the Dems were running around with chickens whose heads had been sliced off. I also reject the idea of “we need new ideas”, and instead would propose that many Democratic ideas have completely won (social security, for instance) and that’s what makes it hard to propose “new” ones.