...even if the intelligence of a single person can be buffeted by framing and other bounds on rationality, this does not mean that we cannot hope for something better from the fruits of many people thinking together--that is, from the collective intelligence in institutions such as history, journalism, and science, which have been explicitly designed to overcome those limitations through open debate and the testing of hypotheses with data. All this belies Lakoff's cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality...

...Bush has capitalized on the concept of freedom in two ways. He has preserved the perception that Republicans are more economically libertarian than Democrats, and he has waged war against a foreign movement with an unmistakable totalitarian ideology. This still leaves his opponents with plenty of ammunition, such as his hypocritical protectionism and expansion of government, and his delusion that liberal democracy can be easily imposed on Arab societies. But his invocation of "freedom" has a semblance of coherence, and, like it or not, it resonates with many voters.

The same cannot be said for Lakoff's conception. "What I am calling progressive freedom," he writes, "is simply freedom in the American tradition--the understanding of freedom that I grew up with and have always loved about my country." Such an equation fails to acknowledge the possibility that Lakoff's preferences and the American tradition may not be the same thing. His understanding is pure positive freedom, while acknowledging none of its problems. It consists of appending the words "freedom to" in front of every item in a Berkeley-leftist wish list: freedom to live in a country with affirmative action, "ethical businesses," speech codes, not too many rich people, and pay in proportion to contributions to society. The list runs from the very specific--the freedom to eat "food that is pesticide free, hormone free, antibiotic free, free of genetically modified ingredients, healthy, and uncontaminated," to the very general, namely "the freedom to live in a country and a community governed by the traditional progressive values of empathy and responsibility."

"You give me a progressive issue," Lakoff boasts, "and I'll tell you how it comes down to a matter of freedom"--oblivious to the fact that he has just gutted the concept of freedom of all content. Actually, the damage is worse than that, because many of Lakoff's "freedoms" are demands that society conform to his personal vision of the good (right down to the ingredients of food), and thus are barely distinguishable from totalitarianism. How would he implement "pay in proportion to contributions to society through work"? Will a commissar decide that an opera singer deserves higher pay than a country singer, or that a seller of pork rinds should earn less than a seller of tiramisu? And his freedom not to be harmed by "hurtful language" is merely another name for the unlimited censorship of political speech. No doubt slaveholders found the speech of abolitionists to be "hurtful."...