Taking Liberties

WHOSE FREEDOM?

The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea

By George Lakoff

Farrar Straus Giroux. 277 pp. $23

If I had to guess at the virtues that future historians may attribute to George W. Bush, I think they'll say something like, "He tried to advance freedom." Even the president's critics (like, say, me) will admit that Bush has placed the concept of worldwide freedom before the people regularly and emphatically.

George Lakoff, unquestionably a presidential critic, would grant Bush that much. But for Lakoff, Bush's idea of freedom is deeply problematic -- antithetical, in fact, to the "progressive freedom" that Lakoff argues has defined America and made it great. This progressive definition of freedom -- the more or less continuous expansion of rights, opportunity and citizen enfranchisement -- stood unchallenged for many years. But now, that freedom is "up for grabs," and Lakoff is worried: "To lose freedom is a terrible thing; to lose the idea of freedom is even worse."

Lakoff is a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and well known among liberals as a sort of Democratic savant. He first captured attention with Moral Politics , a groundbreaking 1996 analysis of the different value systems that inform liberal and conservative political attitudes. Subsequent attention made him a star in progressive circles. By 2004, he was advising House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on "framing" language that would counter rather than buy into conservative attempts to frame issues (e.g., the "death tax"). His 2004 book, Don't Think of an Elephant! , became a whopping bestseller. In the meantime, in more elite liberal circles, something of an anti-Lakoff backlash set in; some critics began to suspect that he'd already said what he had to say, and that his new work was getting to be less than met the eye.

Certainly, Whose Freedom? is made to a considerable extent out of recycled material. The progressive and conservative definitions of freedom that Lakoff lays out here are rooted directly in the categories he first discussed at length in Moral Politics . Conservatives, he argues, believe in a "strict father" morality in which the male parent has unquestioned authority over dependent children, while liberals believe in the "nurturant parent" model, in which a less hierarchical parental authority allows for more empathy, more caring, fewer orders.

With regard to freedom, these two thought-habits lead their adherents toward very different conclusions. To progressives, freedom means the expansion of rights and opportunities; it includes not just freedom to do positive things but freedom from certain negative aspects of life (want and fear, as Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said in 1941).

Conservative freedom, in contrast, is dispensed by the father figure, and it cannot survive without morality and order -- that is, immorality and disorder threaten society so profoundly that freedom cannot be maintained in the face of them. From the conservative point of view, writes Lakoff, abortion and gay marriage "represent threats to the very idea of a strict father family -- and threats to their idea of freedom."

In a series of chapters on economics, religion, foreign policy and personal freedom, Lakoff compares the implications of the liberal and conservative definitions of freedom. The book's best chapter is devoted solely to a close parsing of Bush's second inaugural address. Calling the speech "a work of rhetorical art," Lakoff notes that more than half of the president's uses of the words "freedom," "free" and "liberty" could appeal to liberals as well as conservatives. But he then goes on to show the hidden ways in which the speech advocated the conservative conception of freedom: how a line such as "history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty" defines freedom as impossible without God and democracy as unworkable without religion.

This shrewd dissection comes before Lakoff's concluding, prescriptive chapter, which is a little disappointing. His suggestions about how liberals can reclaim freedom are more personal than political or policy-oriented: He wants individual progressives to achieve a "higher rationality" in which they let go of the idea that they can fight conservative rhetoric with facts (because no one cares about such trifles). He urges progressives to "see the ideology behind the language" of the right, understand how it asserts a strict father morality and try to counter it with more nurturant language. That's very good advice for the parish hall but rather less so for cable television.

Lakoff is right to identify freedom as a concept that liberals need to think about more. It's to liberals' shame that the words "freedom" and "liberty" are more closely associated with today's American right than with today's American left, so I admired the polemical intent of Whose Freedom? If you're a liberal who has never read Lakoff, you might find this book as revelatory as I and many others found Moral Politics years ago. But if you're familiar with his work, Whose Freedom? won't provide many eye-opening moments. And in either case, despite its many moments of insight, it won't quite tell liberals how to take back the idea of freedom. ?

Michael Tomasky is the editor of the American Prospect.