Linguistics and cognitive science are to our politics what political philosophy and economy was [sic] to the politics of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Labour doesn't need Marxism but it sure needs some Marxist analysis to gets itself straight. But you can't have any of that, Painter's sentence rules it out.

But starting at the beginning:

They won a psychological battle with the prize being the American brain. Through reinforcement, repetition and the manipulation of trauma, eg 9/11, they skewed neural bondings towards a conservative outlook and ideology: authority, discipline, moral order, individual responsibility, and competition.

I was there, there was no battle. There was and still is the usual conservative 'fear' narrative, amplified, and either 'no comment' or more usually echoing/compliance by the official left in the U.S. The official left, of course, did not and does not offer a counter-narrative cuz it is on the same side as the right.

There is something that is reflexive and direct about conservative politics. The politics of the left tends to be reflective and systemic. The left appreciates that we live in complex social, economic and environmental systems and our well-being is dependent on understanding that.

Spouting again this old tired opposition -- the conservatives're direct, simplistic and reflexive and 'we leftists' are the intelligent ones who deal with complicated real reality -- is such a strategic loser. As advice the preceding just tells left politicians to "make sure voters see that you're the professorial intellectuals and the other guys ain't." Yeah, that'll work, NOT. Instead, you have to provide gut emotions for liberals/leftists to fire back at the gut emotions the other side fires at the left/liberals/Labour. More on that down further.

Crime, welfare dependency, national debt, terrorism, despotism, educational failure and the cost of fuel can be articulated within the reflexive, authoritarian conservative frame. But they can also fit in an empathetic, compassionate, and systemic leftist frame. This is not the contest of the rational versus the emotional. It is a contest of two different emotional rationalities. Which one outs is dependent on which one can win the battle of the mind.

My gawwd, we've known for a couple decades at least that this "empathetic, compassionate, and systemic leftist frame" simply doesn't work. It simply doesn't fit the times for the vast majority of people in the middle and at the bottom economically. Again, you have to provide provide a response to the gut-level fear-based emotional appeals of the right.

Solution: When the right does its fear thing, a real left should do its anger thing. Anger at the unfairness and the economic elites. This leads directly to appeals for populism, egalitarianism, and social democracy, which most people of the largest classes have a natural, reflexive attraction to. That the official left can't even say, loudly, the words "populism, egalitarianism, and social democracy" tells you all you need to know: they're really on the same side as the right, but want to carve out a space as the party of 'slightly more charitable and empathetic rightists.' Screw them and that.

fairleft