Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea

By George Lakoff

Book Overview

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word "freedom." Al-Qaeda attacked us because "they hate our freedom." The U.S. can strike preemptively because "freedom is on the march." Social security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms. The 2005 presidential inaugural speech was a kind of crescendo: the words "freedom," "free," and "liberty," were used forty-nine times in President Bush's twenty-minute speech.

In Whose Freedom?, Lakoff surveys the political landscape and offers an essential map of the Republican battle plan that has captured the hearts and minds of Americans--and shows how progressives can fight to reinvigorate this most beloved of American political ideas.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031242647X
• ISBN13: 9780312426477
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Picador
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

It's one thing to lose freedom, it's even worse if you can't realize what of freedom you lost.

As much as Lakoff's critics would love to bash this book, it's hard for them to disprove the hard cold fact that there is indeed a real difference between losing freedom and losing the definition of freedom to anti-freedom, much like what happened in George Orwell's "1984" whereby slavey is somehow "freedom" even when it ain't really so. History has shown that in a nation where people are aware that they have lost their freedoms, they'll fight their leaders to death to get it back. Yet in a dictatorship whereby a person or a group of people subvert the idea of freedom to the point that everything that used to be against freedom is somehow part of the definition of "freedom" where as everything that really stood for freedom is now defined as "anti-freedom" even when it ain't so. This is what Lakoff warns the readers about when he perfectly explains how the "conservatives" define "freedom". Just recently, our Congress and the White House have agreed to do away with Habeas Corpus as another assault against civil liberties goes unreported by most of the media that are Bush/Limbaugh puppets. We may not loose the Constitution but there's no stopping the traitors in Washington from subverting it to the point that it is there but it is not there just like they do with freedom. It's time for progressives to get their heads off the media cameras and learn from Lakoff and UNITE if they care to save America from losing its status as "Land of the Free".

A must read for any thinking progressive person.

I listened to this on CD and was very impressed with the insights that Greorge Lakoff has about the way propaganda and today's media works for the Republician Party. The conservs are winning the battle of getting their ideas accepted, and unless enough progressives wake up to what the hell is going on, we won't have any individual freedom. The only free people in our society will be the upper 10% income earners. The rest of us will be serving them for crumbs or starving. Read this book or listed to the CD's.

The richer you are, the more freedom you get.

A lot of times the meaning of "land of the free" comes under question. Conservatives have a very nasty habit of misusing social issues like abortion, guns, war, patriotism, etc ... to promote fake "freedom" when in fact their real goal is to pay their corporate devils their dues any way they can. Lakoff has warned us in the past in "Moral Politics", "Don't Think of an Elephant!", and on his Rockridge Insitute website that more than following their own conservative rules, conservatives will stoop to the worst forms of faking nicety to window-dress their real intents just like the way the Taliban in Afganistan mixed in with the poor village folks and conned them into giving up their freedoms. For the past 26 years, conservatives and even some liberals continue to play the phone culture wars on the very same voters who vote them in only to see their genuine freedoms and securities robbed all the while being extra nurturent on the wealthy elite. No wonder people like Ken Lay of Enron get unlimited freedoms no matter how much atrocities they commit against the working class while the same working class folks end up getting the shaft no matter what. If there's two books that must be read on the Fourth of July, make it this book and David Sirota's "Hostile Takeover : How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back".

The War Over the Idea of Freedom

George Lakoff's work on language and politics has already transformed the progressive movement. Simply by creating a new awareness of how language works -- from the perspective of a politically savvy cognitive scientist -- Lakoff has demystified the power of words and political media. At the grassroots, activists are much more aware that the manner in which we structure our arguments, the frames we use, make a difference, an ultimate difference. Lakoff's "Moral Politics" and "Don't Think of an Elephant" -- and his ongoing work at the Rockridge Institute -- do much more than create awareness. A new political language is getting written. Lakoff is now pulling the cognitive curtain back on the nation's most important idea: the idea of freedom. "Whose Freedom" describes in clear detail how the nation's radical conservatives are redefining political freedom as something much smaller and meaner than the freedom embodied in our American tradition. To many of us, it seems paradoxical that greatly increased domestic surveillance by the government, loss of voting rights, and government intrusion into private life are seen by the radical right as paving stones to freedom. How can this be? Lakoff tells us how. And he tells us how to redeploy a language of freedom that is open and dynamic, that speaks of opportunity to achieve, of freedom from want, and of freedom from fear. The progressive concept of freedom is creative and forward looking. The form of the U.S. Constitution describes freedom even better than that great document's words. The Constituion is written so that it's real meaning must be continually discovered. It is written so that our commitment to justice will evolve. We don't obey the Constitution. We live through it. When it was written, its authors did not know how we would be living more than 200 years later. They hoped we would live freely. This book will help us rededicate ourselves to that cause.