You’re trying to shoehorn Lakoff into the conservative smear that liberals only want to turn the government into a “nanny” (aka “mommy”) state. You sure put a lot of effort into trying to normalize the world into your narrow ideology (and hilariously calling the resulting mess “objective” truth).

Frankly, it’s kind of sad how your partisan fever blinds you to interesting ideas. The human notion of family is the primate tribe in miniature: It’s the atomic hierarchical building-block consisting of an alpha male and subordinate betas. We scale up our institutions and societies out of self-similar collections of that unit, all the way up to the nation with its singular leader. Even the Communists couldn’t prevent the development of a cult of personality around the inevitable alpha males who took over the Soviet and Chinese and other tribes.

The hardest thing is to look in a mirror, and understand that rabid patriotism is rabid collectivism, and that when you label dissent and questioning as treason, you are defending your parent the government. Authoritarian conservatism comes out any time our society is under stress–you look to the strong alpha male to make war on our enemies and protect us from the scary Others. You most certainly do view the government as a parent. All conservatives do, and more than liberals, really–liberals understand that the government is us, and we’re not as scary to us as your remote father figure is to you.

Lakoff provides some deep insight into human social behavior. But apparently they’re just a little too deep for conservatives.

You, of course, get to the be arbiter and judge of what’s objective truth, right TB? And if you and your rightwing ilk get to define the words we are allowed to use when we talk about politics, we’ll end up only being able to talk about the world through a hard-right filter. And so you win, without having to bother with elections and the risk of losing in a fair fight.

What bullshit, TB.

However, I’m willing to negotiate, maybe we can meet each other halfway; you know, the middle of the road.

“What we have here are two different forms of family-based morality. What links them to politics is a common understanding of the nation as a family, with the government as parent.”

A classic liberal would immediately notice the false dilemma. Lakoff apparently can’t function outside of that binary model, assuming that both liberalism and conservatism demand that the State be “parent” to the citizen. Either Fatherland or Motherland. The results are the same in either case.

Which is why he’ll never really understand. And given the vast amount of thinking on this over the past centuries, I doubt he’s really trying.

While you and others pound your own dogma down everyone’s throat on every board here. Nothing is black and white except what you want it to be, and when.

I understand your enthusiasm for the subjects. Me too. But in so far as Lakoff’s ideas might help us improve discussions here, hasn’t that well been thoroughly poisoned by the kill-the-messenger smears against Lakoff? His conclusions don’t tend to make conservatives any happier than the conclusions of climate scientists, and they’ve attacked him the same way, by smearing his results as hopelessly partisan.

As if science is obligated to produce “fair and balanced” results the way Fox reports “news”. But I digress…

…and clearly the topic of abuse of the language by political partisans is one of my hot buttons too. I find it tempting to wield Lakoff as a weapon, so maybe he’s too inflammatory for anybody to touch.

The end result of decades of corrupting the language for political purposes has made words into landmines. We’ve overshot 1984 and we’re more than halfway there.

That’s precisely “why this is on Community”.

The very idea that our philosophical and ideological differences might be merely a residue of psychological, anthroplogical, or even biological origin (artifacts, as you call them) is anathema to those who prefer to see the world in black and white, good and evil, and inherited dogma straight from Mt Sinai, 18th century Philadelphia, or mid twentieth century hack science-fiction writers

And the idea that the manipulation of language to control thought by deliberately confusing strict and restrictive definition for objective clarity is a favorite theme of mine, which I never fail to bring up.

Orwell, the great English Socialist, wrote in “1984″ how fascism seeks to simplify and constrict language so that no spontaneity and nuance is possible, and that in this way any deviation from the Party Line becomes not only ungrammatical, but literally unthinkable, even inconceivable. Doubleplusungood. How can you even talk about economic or social class when the word “class” itself is not in the dictionary? It has no definition, therefore, it does not exist. It’s hard to reason with that kind of logic.

I’m sorry, sometimes I just can’t help myself.

Lakoff’s idea of two opposing family models seems integral to his worldview. It’s shown up in other works of his that I’ve read, and to me, instinctively makes sense, which is an interesting, almost self-referential, reaction. It’s supported anecdotally by the longstanding tendency to view liberal beliefs as “feminine” or “mothering”, and conserview beliefs to be “masculine” and about the “strong father” figure.

At root we’re simply talking about primate social structures, which fractally scale up and down an organization unit with an alpha male at its head bossing secondary monkeys. A feature of primate social orders that was discovered relatively late in the game is the presence of a parallel female power structure, with its own alpha female, partially independent of the alpha male. I think our two opposing world views are distant artifacts of those two hierarchies.

I’m not asserting that our political worldviews are those old primate orders, but rather that their adherants are differently predisposed to find different political philosophies congenial. If you take comfort in the presence of the Strong Leader/Father/alpha male who will protect you and wisely order your life, you’ll gravitate toward conservatism. If you thrive on mommy’s encouragement and love, you might well gravitate toward liberalism and pay it forward.

I should warn you that I’ve tried to raise Lakoff around here before, and provoked a ferocious reaction from the usual suspect. I mean “suspects”. The reaction was obviously the result of a direct hit that gored that ox half to death. Good luck using Lakoff to address “what passes for political discourse on this forum”. The ideas that you and I find insightful and illuminating, “they” find terribly threatening.