Yesterday WBEZ’s Worldview invited linguist and author George Lakoff, whose many books include Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second Edition and Metaphors We Live By, to discuss the Obama administration’s attempts to wage a “political war of words” to combat the conservative political rhetoric that, according to Lakoff, has entrenched itself in the popular American idiom.
In the discussion Lakoff focuses his attention on the radically different rhetoric the Obama administration has used to approach the concepts like torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques” in Cheneyese), and “Islamic terrorism,” (“violent extremism” as the Obama administration has phrased it), arguing that in order to win over the American public on many of the hot button issues of the day the president must formulate rhetoric that reconnects them to the personal realities of the issue they face.
Listen to the archived audio of the conversation on the WBEZ website or find out more about Lakoff’s books on our website including this excerpt from Moral Politics.