Maybe I just like to say that: Professor Booty. Or I just like the backbeat.

“Grund ist tot” – Lakoffustra
No, It is not! – Banana

plover! plover! plover!
~

“Thank you for your helpful webpage. I will think about it. Allow me to share this link [whale pen*s]”

Has anyone referred to RP as shadowy before? I think shadowy tops dangeral. Shadowy=cabal of one.

On a more serious note, I wonder what Rick’s take on this one-star review would be?

The review:

I was really looking forward to “Nixonland” — ‘though not anymore — and in anticipation I thought I’d try Pearlstein’s Goldwater book, mainly because of all the great Amazon reviews, and because I’m a junkie for presidential campaign books.

Wow, what were the other reviewers looking at when they read “Before the Storm”? Let’s just say that Pearlstein’s “depth” makes Teddy White seem like Suetonis. In Pearlstein’s background as to the causes of the rise of the American Right to total and complete dominance, there is nothing about 1950s culture and the sexualization of what was pretty neutral stuff pre-rock and pre-TV, nothing about TV itself, nothing about the rise of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, nothing about the Dulles Brothers(et al), nothing about the vast nationalist movements across the world, nothing about the militarization of the society and culture, nothing about the rise of the Western Cowboy economies(space, oil, weapons, big agriculture etc), nothing about class, nothing about capitalism itself(the word is not even mentioned in a book of almost 700 pages), and nothing about the slow takeover of media by the far right.

There is a lot of mention, however, of Barry Goldwater’s brawny arms, magnificent chin, and deep glistening tan.

An amazingly stupid book, supposedly written by a “leftist” in hopes of understanding the right. Which I guess means to become as dumb as they are. At that, Pearlstein has magnificently succeeded.

Now I definitely need to read the book.

Um, I’m saying Republican success has not been antagonistic to the embodied idea of reason, but rather has been antagonistic to the liberal idea of reason when taken as universal. The point of people like Damásio and Lakoff is that you can’t start from an idea of reason: the types of cognition that we call reason are dependent on the types of cognition that we call emotion or moral judgment, and in any case, most cognition is unavailable to the conscious mind.

The public all has embodied minds. Republican success is, in part, because the model of the mind they use for politics is actually more like how people think than the Kantian abstraction used by liberals. This is not because the Republican one is derived from neuroscience, it is because some of the aspects of the Enlightenment model that liberals cling to most tightly are demonstrably, scientifically false.

None of this reduces or simplifies well. In economics, say, it is the progressives who have the better model of the mind. (And by Lakoff’s reading, the people who more or less use a screwed up version of reason for everything are the centrist neo-liberals.)

BEFORE THE STORM IS BACK IN PRINT BITCHEZ!!!!

http://www.amazon.com/Before-Storm-Goldwater-Unmaking-Consensus/dp/1568584121/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236493313&sr=1-2

In a simplified but seemingly standard guise, the mythology of the netroots runs something like: prior to the Dean campaign, left politics (on the organizational level anyway) was mostly divided between ineffective establishment politics within the Democratic party and ineffective anti-establishment politics outside of the party. Then out of the Dean campaign, the liberal blogosphere/netroots coalesced around a strategy of movement building and the idea that American political parties were less obdurate poles of an unchanging establishment order and more power bases that could be captured by strategic, long term organizing. From what I’ve seen from digby, Markos, et al. over the past couple of years (especially around the time Nixonland came out) exhibit #1 in favor of that last notion was apparently Before the Storm.

In any case, that’s more or less the appearance from my standpoint largely outside the maelstrom. I should add that I have, sadly, not read BTS, and thus my impressions of it derive from those same readings of other bloggers and from your own articles and video appearances.

In the post above, I (rather telegraphically) recast that basic mythos in terms of Lakoff’s notions of the New and Old Enlightenments. In order for BTS to play the role that it does, it seems necessary (whether consciously or no) that netroots figures reject on some level the Old Enlightenment ideal that requires the conservative movement to be irrational because it does not conform to liberal models of rationality. As I understand it, one of the things accomplished by BTS (how explicitly I don’t know) is to demonstrate that the model of reason used by the conservative movement is entirely adequate for manipulating the parts of the world they are interested in manipulating, and that it is indeed — however nonsensical its premises appear to liberals — a rational model and not simply an appeal to “emotion” or to “instinct” (or some other faculty that Old Enlightenment reason treats as being outside the intellect but which neuroscience demonstrates as being an integral component of embodied cognition). Your success at this was, arguably, most clearly signaled by your invitation to that conservative conference at Princeton a few years ago (which (viewed on C-SPAN) was my first meaningful encounter with your work — though any coherent sense of what you were really about and my impression of the role played by BTS is more recent).

As you, I assume, know rather more intimately than I, there were various dynamics at work in the 90s seeking an exit from the rather static form of progressive politics at the time. That BTS could serve as one of the catalysts of the netroots has to do with the collective political experience and historical perceptions driving those dynamics. I take Lakoff’s work as confirming that the sensibility that emerged from those dynamics can, in a fairly straightforward way, be put in accord with current models in cognitive and neuroscience. That Lakoff often struggles for a hearing among many progressives, and that others seem to misunderstand him, is a measure, as I see it, of how entrenched the language and habits of the Old Enlightenment are. (Also as an interplay between the descriptive way that scientists tend to talk and the prescriptive way political types apparently tend to hear things.)

Whether or not Lakoff’s approach to formulating the insights of his field in a political context is on the mark, I think his arguments that it can be done in a fairly natural fashion compelling. And while I often agree with those who find his approach questionable, since reading Lakoff’s book a month or so ago, I have yet to encounter anything to dissuade me that his frame of Old Enlightenment vs New Enlightenment rationality is a good way to express the importance and possibilities of recent brain science to a non-science-oriented audience, and may be a meaningful political tool too.

As for the “not terribly visible” line from my post: it is meant to reflect my own (possibly idiosyncratic) early impressions of you as a respected, but somewhat shadowy figure. I’m not sure quite what brought together the scattered impressions I had, but it probably coincided with something digby wrote about the importance of BTS when she was posting your advance excerpts of NL. And then suddenly, at some point in the runup to the release of NL, it seemed like everyone was talking about how indispensible BTS was to the ideas of the netroots. For Markos in particular, it seems to have been a touchstone. The story everyone told of the story BTS told made it seem like the hieratic ur-text of the liberal blogosphere. For me, this discussion provided an important structural explanation for some of my observations about the blogosphere. I guess my point is that, unlike other people whose thinking seems to be central to the netroots sensibility, your role is less obviously overt. One has to dig a little for it to become clear. I imagine this is simply a result of your most influential work being in book form rather than played out on people’s screens every day.

Am I making any more sense yet? Am I providing an alien portrait that’s impossible to recognize as your career? Thanks for taking an interest.

Wouldn’t that be plover? I was referring to Pinko Punko and the use of quotes around the word liberal, from back on the Thers blog.
~

Also, ITTDGY, it’s “Mr./Ms./Bird p.”

² Did I do that right, Mr. P.?
~

My take on plover’s comment about the invaluable work done by Perlstein is that while it is respected, it seems like it should be more omnipresent or front-and-center than it is. Even if it is well known and all the big bloggos hopefully have well-thumbed review copies of Nixonland, it doesn’t seem to shape the day-to-day discussions as much as it should. A lot of the daily discourse about conservatives seems to be about point scoring at a junior high debate level.

Can you elaborate?

*I wish this high-minded notion were true.