It took me a little over a month to finish reading Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show by Geoffrey Nunberg. In many ways, this book deservedly gets placed in the same category as Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant! Both books are essentially about the ways the English language has itself changed over the past forty or so years to the benefit of conservatives (or, false conservatives, or neo-cons, or whatever label you want to slap on today’s politicians in power).

The bulk of Nunberg’s book is what the title says it is. He effectively breaks down how language changed over the past half-century:

After conducting focus-group studies among rural voters and disaffected Bush voters in several states in 2005, the Democracy Corp’s Karl Agne and Stanley Greenberg concluded that while voters see Democrats as being more on the side of the middle class and working Americans, they “only see this manifested in costly government social programs or political alliances with labor unions and minorities.”

Then too — and these are by no means mutually exclusive — a lot of voters simply find cultural issues more compelling than economic ones. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as being determined to vote one’s social views come hell or high water: these people simply find one set of issues more stirring or infuriating than the other.

The issue of culture comes up again and again throughout the book. The issue isn’t whether Americans are divided by culture. The issue is how conservatives tend to divide America by focusing on cultural issues — and by bribing voters with the promise of lower taxes.

Despite the promise of lower taxes, conservatives tend to promise a government that costs more — thanks to defense:

You can see the difference in the changed meaning of “support the troops.” During World War II, that means buying war bonds or going on scrap drives; since Vietnam it has required only backing the administration’s policy or wearing a lapel pin. Patriotism has never been as low-maintenance as it is now.

That doesn’t mean that the word patriotism has no content, but it’s not simply a question of devotion to one’s nation anymore. If that were all there was to it, it wouldn’t be a contested notion. What passes for “patriotism” these days is really a matter of values and style, of conveying “toughness,” and of subscribing to a particularly combative view of America’s role. In that sense, it’s merely another aspect of the familiar cultural politics of the right.

Somehow, a warped view of “culture” trumped substance. And the higher cost of combative patriotism only means higher taxes down the road. The promise of lower taxes for the sake of lower taxes can only be described as bribery.

In the final chapter, Nunberg wraps up with a brief prescription for some of the linguistic problems that currently plague the party. He recommended David Kusnet’s Speaking American as “required reading for liberals.” When Bill Clinton said, “I’m tired of seeing the people who work hard and play by the rules get the shaft,” it was the beginning of a story that more Democrats should be tellling. Rather than acting as a party centered around issues (”tax fairness, the budget deficit, health care, homeland security, corruption and electoral reform, education, Social Security and pension protection, energy, corporate power, and generic Republican incompetence”), Democrats can take those issues and wrap them in a neat package — a narrative.

If the Republicans can craft a narrative that referrs to the made-up culture wars, the conflict between “regular Americans” and the “liberal elite,” Democrats can craft a narrative, too — but one that is a little less disingenuous than the so-called culture wars.