What should progressives say? That conservatism is “fundamentally antidemocratic.” It “tells us to save your own skin and not to care about your neighbor,” so “conservatives don’t pay that much attention to injured veterans.” As an exemplar of conservatism, Lakoff cites the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

It’s hard to take all this seriously if you know any conservatives, just as it’s hard to take Lakoff’s neurodeterminism seriously if you know any science. As he acknowledges, current brain-imaging technology is far too crude to see specific neural activity. Cores? Narrative structures? Issue-to-worldview binding? It’s all speculation.

Lakoff’s historical claims are easier to assess. They’re demonstrably false. In his quest to explain the 21st century, he seems to have forgotten the 20th. He writes that progressives have opposed presidential power, that Roe v. Wade “seemed settled” in the early 1970s and that Democrats have neglected to preach responsibility, community and empowerment through government. It’s as though the New Deal, the Roe backlash and the Clinton administration never happened.

When you fancy yourself a scientist of humanity, it’s easy to mistake the patterns of your era for natural laws. In Lakoff’s taxonomy, conservatives exalt “obedience to authority,” insulate leaders from accountability, oppose checks and balances against the president and rely on fear. The myth of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he writes, was “invented by the Bush administration to strike terror into the hearts of Americans and to justify the invasion.”

Except it wasn’t. President Clinton, Senator John Kerry and other Democrats warned of such Iraqi weapons in 1998. It’s easy to forget this, since conservatives spent that year impeaching the president for lying under oath. Then Clinton pardoned Susan McDougal, who had refused to testify about his role in the Whitewater affair. Lakoff ignores this, even as he attributes Bush’s commutation of Lewis Libby’s jail sentence to authoritarianism. And what about conservative suspicion of government? Isn’t that anti-authoritarian? Lakoff quotes Senator Bob Dole’s mockery of the idea that “Washington knows best,” but he never draws the connection.

Lakoff is a puzzle. No one has more brilliantly dissected conservative spin. “My goal as a scientist and a citizen is to make the cognitive unconscious as conscious as possible,” he writes. But each time Lakoff the scientist exposes a right-wing frame, Lakoff the citizen substitutes a left-wing frame. First he shreds Bush’s depiction of Iraq as a “war” that can end in “victory” over a united “enemy.” Then he repeats each of Bush’s fallacies, oversimplifying the conflict as an “occupation” in which the United States is “losing” to a united “resistance.” It’s as though Lakoff were lobotomized.

But he isn’t. To dismiss his politics as a brain defect would do him no more justice than he’s done voters. His proposal to re-engineer our heads is neither democratic nor scientifically warranted. It defies public accountability, the very principle he purports to serve. It also underestimates our intelligence. The fact that brain formation materializes mind formation doesn’t simplify their relationship. To the extent that the brain is the mind’s recorder, physical laws constrain the writing process. But maybe the power of rationality isn’t in the writing. Maybe it’s in the editing. The mind, through the brain, revises itself.

We’re capable of changing our minds. Just give us a good reason.