BuzzFlash Reviews

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Lakoff writes his books urging a new style and format of progressive communication in a straightforward, informative and compelling fashion.

So don't let his credentials intimidate you.

Lakoff is an internationally respected professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, with numerous honors and accomplishments. Although his linguistic theories are complicated and pose innovative perspectives on human cognition and communication, he is best known to BuzzFlash readers for his work on "framing."

Suffice it to say, Lakoff comes to framing with an extremely accomplished and complex analytical perspective. But one of his singular accomplishments has been making the results of arcane linguistic research and theory accessible to progressives for use in articulating their goals, values and visions.

"Thinking Points" is another highly valuable -- and readily accessible -- contribution by Lakoff -- and the Rockridge Institute, a think tank that he helped found. It is appropriately subtitled "Communicating our American Values and Vision."

If you have been hearing Democratic candidates repeat the phrase "the common good," it is no accident. This is a frame that Lakoff believes is important in representing the value of local and national community that are central to the progressive vision.

BuzzFlash was an early champion of Lakoff's efforts to change the political discourse of the Democrats away from dry recitations of public policy and more toward the framing of metaphors (a concept central to Lakoff's linguistic theories) as linguistically symbolic lodestars.

All this academic talk aside, we want to emphasize that "Thinking Points" -- like "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives" and "Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea" -- are written for the progressive on the front lines, not for an academic audience.

As a linguist specializing in the cognitive process of communication, Lakoff is keenly aware of how he must communicate to different audiences in order to be effective. So don't let his impressive university credentials scare you away.

In "Thinking Points," he is direct, succinct and eminently persuasive.

Lakoff, and his colleagues at the Rockridge Institute, raise your mind above the clutter and information flak of the GOP propaganda and headline news. In doing so, they offer some tantalizing possibilities of redirecting the prism through which news and the public debate are "framed."

Lakoff has had his detractors, but we are not among them. When we interviewed him, he was quite emphatic in emphasizing that the strategic redirection of the debate through "framing" had to be accompanied by concrete accomplishment.

In short, words and phrases, however shaped, must reflect deeds in the end.

Otherwise, as the Republicans are now showing us, the empire of slogans and false emotional triggers will eventually implode.

Lakoff is a classic example of a guru whose words of wisdom depend on what you make of them. He understands better than almost anyone the value of a progressive approach to political discourse, one that includes an emphasis on the shared community and public commons of being American.

The reality is that America, in its heart, is a progressive nation. Progressives have just abandoned the battle of patriotic, emotional and issue metaphor to the right wingers. Lakoff offers a pragmatic primer on how to put the common good back into the frame of our nation's political future.

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