The Obama Code

Via FiveThirtyEight, a thoughtful piece from George Lakoff, professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, on what he terms the "Obama Code," which is the President's dual system of communication and morality. Lakoff lays out his claim in seven parts:

1) Value Over Programs
2) Progressive Values Are American Values
3) Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship
4) Protection and Empowerment
5) Morality and Economics Fit Together
6) Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk
7) Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language

The article is worth a read. It's a decent length but Lakoff is fairly concise in his points. I liked how he framed Obama's values as fundamental "American" rather than "progressive" values:

Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called “progressive” values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.

Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider—who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states—with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.

I really liked his treatment of patriotic language in #7:

In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” over and over—first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending “freedom” as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a “free market” based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women’s health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of “freedom.” It was anything but a progressive’s view of freedom—and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

“Freedom” will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama’s inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration.

Economics as morality - this was perhaps the most important section to me, encapsulating what I had been feeling on some subconscious level but had not formally conceptualized until I read Lakoff's take on it:

5. Morality and Economics Fit Together

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

Lakoff gets a bit over-the-top anti-conservative towards the end - I'm heartily unconvinced that Limbaugh and his ilk will necessarily destroy the world - but on the whole he makes some excellent points. Commenter Mr. E. actually has a great response to Lakoff's life-or-death call to combat the ultra-conservative media machine:

I liked the linguistic analysis. I am not particularly convinced by the need for a call to action to create a response to the Republican media machine. What he envisions would be nice, but recent history and demographics belie its necessity. The Dems won big in 2006 and 2008. Any reader of this blog knows that all lines point to continued Republican losses in 2010 and beyond, unless the Republicans do the unlikely and change direction, away from their shrinking base.
The movement conservatives attacking the moderate Republicans make it more likely that those seats will flip to Democrats. If Snowe, Collins or Specter lose in primary challenges to more conservative Republicans, Pennsylvania and Maine are more likely to vote for a Democrat. With a commanding lead in the House and an increase of just 3-4 in the Senate, the Republicans will become both more shrill and more irrelevant. The current group will not wake up and become more pragmatic, they will scream louder, and be quicker to wield their long knives. Instituting a firing squad while circling the wagons creates a circular firing squad.
So long as Obama and Republicans continue their current trajectories, the message gets out, even against the tide of the conservative media

It's worth reading the entire thing.