Lakoff : Work Will Go On After Rockridge

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

George Lakoff
Co-founder
Rockridge Institute

My years at the Rockridge Institute have been enormously productive: four books in the past four years, a lot of other writing, and perhaps most important, my colleagues there and I have worked out a great many of the technical details of the cognitive science of political thought in America. I plan to build on that foundational research.

On June 2, 2008, my book The Political Mind will be published. It is a popular introduction to what has been discovered about the brain and the mind over the past 30 years and why it matters for politics. I will be on a book tour during the month of June, and will spend considerable time after that promoting the ideas in the book.

I plan to do more writing, mostly short pieces on timely subjects, and to go seriously into digital media with podcasts and videos -- and to do media interviews and talks around the country.

My years at Rockridge have also put me in a position to do some socially useful consulting. For advocacy groups doing full service communications, I'll have the opportunity to help through Fenton Communications. I will also be available for other progressive consulting work, both inside and outside of politics per se. Since I will no longer be part of a 501(c)(3) organization, I will now be free to work directly with political groups and candidates and on issues of legislation.

The accumulated Rockridge research puts progressives in a position to do the Big Job, namely, seriously challenging conservatives on the major ideas in American political life that they have been dominating in public discourse: the nature of security, government, the market, taxes, foreign policy, freedom, fairness, morality, religion, patriotism, education, character, responsibility, and on and on. What is needed is a major progressive effort to build a progressive cognitive infrastructure, so that progressive legislators need never hesitate to express their beliefs out of fear that the conservative message machine will attack them for it. I will be campaigning for progressives to support the development of such an infrastructure.