A Strategy of "Willed Ignorance"

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal reflects shrewdly on a new book by UC Berkeley linguists George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling, The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. It presents itself as a kind of strategy manual for Democratic and liberal activists, based on what the authors portray as their own scholarly expertise. Among their recommendations, as Taranto puts it, is a kind of "willed ignorance." Lakoff and Wehling advise their readers:

The most...