the political worldviews of conservatives and progressives in America

"Lakoff's Moral Politics (1996) analyzes the political worldviews of conservatives and progressives in America. Lakoff asks why their respective views on abortion, gun control, the death penalty, taxation, social programs, the environment, and art fit together into two opposing frameworks that are each sensible and coherent. The answer is that these views are held together by pervasive metaphors for morality that are in turn organized by opposing idealized models of the family. Conservative intellectuals have explicitly articulated the main outlines of the family-morality-politics connections, but, for the most part, progressives have not. The book provides progressives with a guide to understanding their own moral system. It shows how that system unites various kinds of progressives and what the overall moral basis is behind progressive as well as conservative politics. The analysis applies to every major social issue in America." (#60 4363)