Cogito ain't the whole sum

Over on the Huffington Post, George Lakoff, one of the leading Democrat sages of the day, puts up a very handy list of 12 traps for progressives in the US to avoid ahead of the mid-term elections. I think it is possible to oversubscribe to Lakoff’s political model, yet his work is hugely valuable as a challenge to the most sacred assumptions of modern politics. He depreciates the whole process of gauging what issues people care about most by polling and focus-grouping, then constructing and communicating policies that answer those concerns. What else, you might ask, is politics about?

Instead he argues that people have both progressive and conservative world views and values within them and either can be addressed and drawn out by the way in which a subject is framed. Enough précis! It’s a useful read at this time when there’s been a mass outbreak of public political cogitation from all parties.

And now Labour has wrapped a cold towel round its head and joined the Liberal Democrats and Cameron’s Conservatives in the speculation about today’s issues, tomorrow’s problems, modern values and the world-we-leave-out-children, it’s right to remember that parties in government have to ponder things in a different way than opposition parties.

Labour has to be very careful of the year zero approach. If, after 9 years of government,  they sound like they are only just working out the right way to conduct business the voters are going to wonder, rightly, quite what they’ve been up to over the last decade. Renewal, that much discussed and little defined term, must connect to the work that has gone before. If the record of government is thrown away and new PM is pushed largely on their new ideas and personal background, that radically levels the playing field for opposition parties at the election and it squanders the incumbency advantage. When Al Gore threw away the record of the Clinton years he was vulnerable to Bush’s charge of ‘8 wasted years’ – see Cameron trying that here. Governments should never presume on a grateful electorate, but equally they can’t give the impression that they were on the wrong track until about last week, and have just now seen the light.

Finally the way governments should ‘think’ is by enacting policies and communicating them as part of a succession from previous policies and approaches. Not by stopping in the middle of the motorway and popping the hood to ponder the engine for a few years. The duty and the advantage of government over opposition is enacting ideas.