MB Civic

Review by TOBIN HARSHAW

To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke overestimating the self-absorption of the Democratic Party. Of late, authors like Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (“Crashing the Gate”), Peter Beinart (“The Good Fight”) and Joe Klein (“Politics Lost”), as well as magazine essayists like Michael Tomasky and Paul Starr in The American Prospect, have offered magic formulas to turn Democratic dross into electoral gold. Add to the list the odd couple of David Sirota, a Montana-based blogger with a take-no-prisoners mind-set, and George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist with a grab-no-readers prose style.

Sirota, a former Democratic staff member on Capitol Hill, has achieved relative fame writing a blog and contributing to progressive Web sites and The Nation. For a populist rabble-rouser, he has an admirably organized mind: “Hostile Takeover” is structured as a comprehensive guide, neatly arranged by topic (the first chapter is on taxes, the next on wages, the third on jobs, and so forth), to the “myths” perpetrated on us by our soulless elected officials, coupled with suggestions for how his readers — people who know in their hearts that “almost everything you read or hear about politics is just another greasy, burning lie designed to manipulate you” — can take government back.

Sirota’s facts may be accurate, but the suppositions he draws from them are often questionable. In a typical example, while it’s true that financing for the Army Corps of Engineers was lowered at the same time the Bush tax cuts were being enacted, it’s something else to see a direct causal relationship with the devastation of New Orleans by natural disaster: “Hurricane Katrina is only the latest real-world consequence of the war against ‘tax and spend.’ ” And while he’s right that many among the working poor are trapped in a cycle that doesn’t reward their efforts, his single-minded focus on raising the minimum wage ignores studies like the University of Michigan’s Panel Survey on Income Dynamics that have shown that the vast majority of low-wage employees manage to move up the job ladder.

Still, it’s understandable that Sirota wants to throw a little red meat to the faithful. And his prescriptions, while somewhat unpalatable as a complete package (unless we’d like tax rates equivalent to those of the Nordic countries combined), are admirably specific, occasionally realistic and arguably on the side of the angels. Many would even find some support on both sides of the aisle: regulating malpractice insurance for doctors; restoring state control over class-action laws; forcing chief executives to certify corporate tax returns so they face liability for fraud.

While Sirota urges his readers to “remember the real fight, and forget the cocktail party arguments,” his venom seems directed less at the ruling Republicans than at their main opposition, mainstream Democratic centrists, the difference-splitters associated with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. (“Whenever politicians write a bill selling out ordinary citizens, they are labeled ‘centrists.’ ”) As such, the book Sirota has written is not so much a manifesto for change as a crib sheet for the Democrats’ intramural squabbling.

This debate, at least from Sirota’s side, is notably lacking in lofty rhetoric. Perhaps it’s unavoidable when a blogger tries to write at length, but the verbal mannerisms that may seem like an invigorating shot of espresso on a brief daily basis become a bathtub of stale Nescafé when stretched out to more than 300 pages. The clichéd revolutionary language (political TV programs offer “a flood of Orwellian messages from the Establishment that deny the existence of our very own beliefs”), the wafer-thin allusions to popular culture (a single paragraph includes references to Rocky Balboa’s trainer, Luke Skywalker’s light saber and Superman’s Fortress of Solitude) and the childish taunts (Tom DeLay is “slime”; Mickey Kantor, who served as Bill Clinton’s trade representative, is a “hack”) quickly become oppressive.

Unlike blogs, books need editors, but there is no evidence in “Hostile Takeover” that Sirota has ever met one. Despite his creditable analysis, the end product too often reads like the work of a high school newspaper editor going through his Marxist or logical positivist phase: to the author it speaks of revolution; to the reader it resonates immaturity.

Immaturity is not one of George Lakoff’s problems. A cognitive scientist by training, Lakoff made his political reputation during the 2004 presidential race by advocating a new lexicon for Democrats to duplicate the conservatives’ success at “framing” issues through linguistics (think “death tax” and “compassionate conservatism”). His suggestions included renaming the national debt the “baby tax,” calling income taxes “membership fees” and referring to trial lawyers as “public-protection attorneys.” Remarkable that John Kerry largely ignored him and still came within one state of the White House.

Now comes “Whose Freedom?” and it’s a sort of big-think companion to Sirota’s liberal laundry list. America, the professor tells us, was founded on a “progressive” idea of freedom, and conservatives are using language tricks to debase the concept. “It is tempting to dismiss Bush and members of the radical right as liars and hypocrites — but this is too easy,” he explains. “It is much scarier to think of Bush and others on the right as meaning what they say — as having a concept of ‘freedom’ so alien to progressives that many progressives cannot even understand it, much less defend against it.”

Lakoff uses a parenting metaphor to explain the worldviews that produce these anathematic ideas of liberty: progressive thought stems from the “nurturant parent family” model (based on “empathy and responsibility”), while the conservative outlook is shaped by the “strict father family” model (in which the “moral authority . . . of the father must not be seriously challenged”). In case you’re wondering which household is more promising for the family politic, Lakoff helpfully informs us (without statistical attribution) that “strict father families have high rates of spousal and child abuse and divorce.”

So how does the strict father morality devolve into a political agenda? According to Lakoff, conservatives believe that “fundamental” freedoms to be cherished include “freedom from coercion by the state or by the liberal elite”; “the freedom to use any kind of vehicle anywhere”; “the freedom to hunt — regardless of whether I am hunting an endangered species.” After they get back from riding snowmobiles over northern spotted owls, these troglodytes apparently have bigger game in mind: “What they want to conserve is, in most cases, the situation prior to the expansion of traditional American ideas of freedom: before the great expansion of voting rights . . . before Social Security and Medicare.”

O.K., we can stipulate that conservatives share a distrust of government and would love to slash programs that have improved the nation over the years (as well as, perhaps, some that haven’t). But does anybody not wearing a tinfoil hat believe that Republicans really want to take the vote away from women, blacks and non-landowners? Or that President Bush’s poorly managed Medicare prescription-drug expansion was a clever ruse to destroy the program?

While Sirota apparently never met an editor, Lakoff seems never to have met an actual conservative. His failure to paint his opponents as anything but the most risible of cartoons stems from a larger incapacity (one shared by Sirota): a refusal to believe that the other side might be making its case in good faith. Caricaturing your opponent’s stances is an easy way to win an argument, I guess, but it’s not going to sway many readers — or win many elections.

Tobin Harshaw is an editor with the Op-Ed page of The Times.