To many readers, this is old stuff. But it is also very very good. If you
don't know Lakoff, you ought to read this. Liberals and conservatives both.
In this article:
http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
Lakoff's thesis is that Americans view the political climate as a
metaphorical analog to the nuclear family. Conservatives respond more to the
strict father style of family, liberals to the nurturing parent style. This
metaphor is deep and lush; it seems to have a place for all current
political phenomena.
This is the the clearest exposition and delineation of American
moral-political landscape I have ever seen. Lakoff's critique of
conservative moral philosophy is devestating.
I have told all my friends about this article. It's time to beat the GOP
with it's own switch, and then have empathy for them. And then lose the
switch and start helping them see the error of strict father Puritanism.
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http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
Metaphor, Morality, and Politics,
Or,
Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust
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by George Lakoff
© copyright George Lakoff 1995
George Lakoff is professor of cognitive sciences at the University of
California at Berkeley. His publications include Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Univ. of Chicago Press,
1987), and, with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980) and More Than
Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989).
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This essay was first published by the Graduate Faculty of the New School for
Social Research in its quarterly Social Research (Volume 62, no. 2) in the
summer of 1995.
A fuller treatment of the ideas it outlines will appear in Lakoff's
forthcoming book, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals
Don't, due out in March 1996 from the University of Chicago Press.
http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
Shrinking Violence
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