The Terrible, Atrocious, Unforgivable Normalization in George Lakoff's Moral Politics

 

George Lakoff is one of the great contemporary thinkers and has commensurately influenced my own worldview.  However, in his classic Moral Politics: What conservatives know that liberals don't, he offers one of the starkest examples of trivializing wrong action that I have ever seen.  In so doing, he normalizes atrocious rightwing behavior, making it look acceptable, merely a counterpoint to a liberal platform.

 

Normalization--the concealment of evil by cloaking it in the ordinary and acceptable--has been widespread for a long time in US politics.  Donald Trump's party, for example, is still often presented in the media as a legitimate option to Democratic values.  The prevalence and effectiveness of this insidious technique makes it all the more important to call it out.

 

Lakoff's view in the book, perhaps stunning to some, especially in current times, is that rightwing and leftwing politics are, ultimately, moral agendas.  More than anything else, morality is fueling what both sides believe. 

 

This becomes jarringly disharmonious when, for instance, Lakoff argues that conservatives are willing to support a totalitarian dictatorship, if it doesn't challenge the central premise of their way of conceptualizing the world:

 

For Reagan ... Soviet totalitarianism was evil, but the U.S. had supported capitalist totalitarian dictatorships willingly ... The main evil of communism, for Reagan, as for most conservatives, was that it stifled free enterprise.  (p.195)

 

Actually, "had supported" is inaccurate.  During Reagan's presidency, the US continued to support multiple dictatorships in Central America, not to mention the vicious civil war in Nicaragua, where the US-backed side destroyed communities, schools and hospitals as part of a terror-rampage strategy.

 

Leaving this aside, let Lakoff's statement sink in.  The so-called conservative "morality" embraces the support of totalitarian dictatorships in service of free enterprise.

 

Embraces.  Totalitarian.  Dictatorships.

 

Is such a mindset really worthy of the label "moral agenda," as Lakoff proposes?   Make no mistake, totalitarianism here means death squads, torture, kidnapping and general terrorizing of the population.  Think Darth Vader.

 

Lakoff, then, is in the awkward--and despicable--position of blessing evil actions, premeditated actions, perpetrated against entire countries, as components of a moral agenda.

 

This twisted bit of theorizing, moral = evil, is awful in itself.  It offers a reductio ad absurdum of Lakoff's whole book. 

 

Making it worse, though, he goes on and disguises what he has done--he normalizes it--by giving the conservative "moral" view equal status alongside the liberal human-rights view. 

 

Please indulge a slight digression.  Noam Chomsky has gained much intellectual traction by pointing out hypocrisies of this kind.  Hypocrisies that infest US institutions, including academia.  Hypocrisies that sweep US-supported torture and terror under the rug.

 

In the end, Lakoff's thesis can only be salvaged by retreating a step.  He could argue that what the rightwing is doing isn't moral--but--they think it is moral.  And so, he could conclude, given this tweak, that morality is at the heart of conservative politics in some significant way.

 

However, there's a real problem with this correction.  To think that what you're doing is moral is not to actually make it moral.  I'm sure Hitler thought that what he was doing was moral.  Does that make Hitler's actions right?  Should the Final Solution be offered up as just one hors d'oeuvre on a silver plate of legitimate perspectives?

 

Again, we're stuck in that ridiculous spot where, in Lakoff's view, so-called moral politics can epitomize evil.  Satan, construed as a paragon of immorality, could be moral on this view, as long as Satan asserts that what he, Lord of Evil, is doing is right.

 

Maybe Lakoff is okay with that.   Maybe "moral" for him is just intention, not deed.  But that just plays into my point--that evil has been normalized.  In a Lakoffian wonderland, the cruellest crimes of leaders become hidden in fancy semantics and tricky comparisons, tied with a pretty, lying bow of righteousness and good.

As far as I can tell, this is Lakoff's lowest moment in all of his writing.  As a cognitive psychologist, he seems to bring some sort of science-ish relativism into his discussion of politics.  Okay, if you're a relativist, fine.  But don't assume relativism is the only possible way to go .  There is, after all, this thing called the Declaration of Independence.  There is a great deal of sound philosophical support for universal human rights.  

So please, don't surreptitiously impose your relativism on those of us who think totalitarian dungeons should not be framed as an option on a menu of moral choices. 

 

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