George Lakoff is an American who thinks. The UCLA Berkeley professor was in Toronto last week. We missed a chance to meet him. He is reported to have told his audience there is no such thing as the political centre. That must have been bad news for the New Democrats who came to see him. Their federal Leader Tom Mulcair has been busy trying to find the political centre and in the process he has lost touch with the left. Lakoff could have told him that the centre is just a hypothetical point on a bell curve, drawn by statisticians.
In the same way, maybe Babel-on-the-Bay is just a hypothetical place. It stands on a lonely island where we are constantly besieged by the insufferable Whigs of Canada’s right-wing liberalism. Alone, we have to take on the harsh reality show known as Stephen Harper’s Conservatism while observing the wanderings in the wilderness of Tommy Douglas’ child-like socialists.
What do you have to do around here to get the system working for Canadians? Do we have to copy Preston Manning and start our own political party? Manning did that and his Reform Party turned around and ate the Conservative Party’s lunch. In response to that the Liberals and New Democrats should have merged into the Canadian Social Democratic Party. It was just neither party had the leadership, the will nor the smarts and Canadians have suffered ever since.
Maybe Lakoff would have known how to solve that. He might have sent the muddled moderates off to fornicate and produce offspring that could appreciate the necessity for more and more intrusive government and more taxes. Just not in our lifetime.
He thinks the basic difference between Democrats (progressives) and Republicans (Neanderthals) is that the Democrats went to college and the Republicans went to church. They are both mislead and confused.
Lakoff gives the right-wing full marks for marketing their product. He says they frame their proposition better because more of them must have gone to business schools. Moderates might understand philosophy but they seem to know squat about selling. Lakoff laughs at them for thinking reason will win.
What, regretfully, Lakoff cannot explain is the growing intransigence of the right and left of the United States of America. There is hatred in Washington that you can smell from the Beltway. Let us fervently hope this political vehemence does not spread into Canada.
-30-
Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]