From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Wed Jun 18 2003 - 11:46:40 MDT
This is from 1995, but I thought it was interesting.
Metaphor, Morality, and Politics,
Or,
Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust
http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
Some (possibly) illustrative snippets:
<<Liberal politics also centers on a family-based morality, but liberals
are much less aware than conservatives are of the unconscious mechanisms
that structures their politics. While conservatives understand that all
of their policies have a single unified origin, liberals understand
their own political conceptual universe so badly that they still think
of it in terms of coalitions of interest groups. Where conservatives
have organized for an overall, unified onslaught on liberal culture,
liberals are fragmented into isolated interest groups, based on
superficial localized issues: labor, the rights of ethnic groups,
feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, homelessness,
health care, education, the arts, and so on. This failure to see a
unified picture of liberal politics has led to a divided consciousness
and has allowed conservatives to employ a divide-and-conquer strategy.
None of this need be the case, since there is a worldview that underlies
liberal thought that is every bit as unified as the conservative worldview.
[...]
The resulting picture of the priorities of the Strict Father and
Nurturant Parent moral systems is as follows:
* Strict Father Morality (Basic Conservative Morality):
o The Strength Complex
o Moral Self-Interest
o The Nurturance Complex
* Nurturant Parent Morality (Basic Liberal Morality):
o The Nurturance Complex
o Moral Self-Interest
o The Strength Complex >>
Enjoy,
-Mike
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