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TOMPAINE.com - Left Out By Right Rhetoric 
 
 
Left Out By Right Rhetoric 
 
 
Sharon Basco is executive producer of TomPaine.com. 
 
Hillary Clinton wasn’t the first, and she won’t be the last, to 
envision a "vast right-wing conspiracy." Like most dragons, this one 
is based in truth: right-wing conservatives have become extremely 
adept at expressing and communicating their message. This success is 
charted and discussed in a book entitled Moral Ethics by George 
Lakoff, who is a professor in the department of linguistics at the 
University of California, Berkeley. TomPaine.com’s Sharon Basco 
spoke with him about his theories. 
Check back on Friday for part two of this interview. 
 
 
There are two different models of the family, and two 
different models of politics. 
 
 
TomPaine.com: When your book Moral Politics was first published in 
1996, its subtitle was "What Conservatives Know that Liberals 
Don’t." In its latest edition, the subtitle is "How Liberals and 
Conservatives Think." Whether you’re focused on what they know, or 
how they think, your thesis is that both parties operate from a 
model of the family. 
George Lakoff: Yes, all Americans have the basic metaphor of the 
nation as family, where we have Founding Fathers, and we send our 
sons and daughters to war, and so on. 
And politics is connected with the family via this metaphor, and 
connected very, very deeply. There are two different ideal models of 
the family that I'll call a Strict Father Family and a Nurturing 
Parent Family.... And this metaphor maps those models of the family 
onto our national moral and political life. And what you get are two 
very, very different models of the family, and with them two very, 
very different models of politics. 
Here’s how those differences play out. If you have the Strict Father 
models of the family then you’re assuming that the world is a 
difficult place and always will be, that children are born bad and 
have to be made good, that the job of the father is to be a moral 
authority, to protect the family, to support the family.... 
The strict father wants his kids to become disciplined, pursue the 
self-interest, and become self-reliant and be good people because 
they are disciplined.... Now this comes into politics in many ways. 
First, it says that social programs are evil. Why? Because... social 
programs are seen as something that gives people things they don’t 
earn, therefore making them morally weak. Namely it hurts the people 
it’s supposed to help. That’s the conservative argument in politics. 
 
In foreign policy you see this in terms of the idea of the moral 
authority of the father. So the father in a strict father family 
doesn’t give up his moral authority. He’s supposed to be in charge, 
period. And no back-talk. And this administration says, "Of course, 
we know! No back-talk! ... We know what’s right, we have the 
authority and the power. And we’re not going to debate it. We’re 
just going to tell you what’s right and if you don’t like it we’ll 
punish you!" This is the Bush administration’s view not only of 
foreign policy, but a lot of domestic policy as well. 
On the progressive parents’ side, the idea of a nurturing family is 
very, very different. There it is assumed that the world should 
become a nurturing place, should become a safe place, a healthy 
place. And that children are born good and should be kept that way 
and developed. That the idea of a parent is to nurture children, and 
to raise children to be nurturers as well.... 
This implies many things.... First a nurturant parent has to be 
fair, promote fairness. You’re not empathetic toward someone if 
you’re not fair with them.... Protection is an important value. 
Think of the things that nurturing parents want to protect their 
children from, not just crime and drugs but also cars without seat 
belts, tobacco, chemicals in the environment, unscrupulous 
businesses, namely all the things that liberals would like the 
government to protect citizens from. 
You have as well the idea of fulfillment in life. If you’re a 
nurturant person and you care about others, then you need to be 
fulfilled in life and happy in your life, and you want others to 
be.... 
In addition to that there are other things that follow. For example, 
open two-way communication. You don’t really understand what others 
need and what your children need if you don’t communicate openly and 
honestly with them. So open, honest two-way communication is 
crucial. Whereas in the strict father model it’s, you know, the 
father says, the child does, period, no back-talking. 
And you see that in liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes toward 
government openness. 
Another extremely important part is community development. In a 
nurturant family you know you need the help of the community: "It 
takes a village," as Hillary Clinton said, "to raise a child." And 
you need to have community development if you’re going to have 
overall nurturing.... 
A progressive view of international relations says that you live in 
a world community. You should be a responsible, empathetic citizen 
in that world community.... We should be cooperative, venture into 
treaties, work with other nations, and so on. And this is a very, 
very different view than what you get from folks who just say we 
should use our power to serve our self-interest. 
TP.com: You write that "liberalism has a view of discourse that puts 
it at a disadvantage." This brings to mind the often-heard notion 
that conservative talk shows, whether radio or TV, are effective in 
part because they put their arguments in black and white and in 
staccato, single-syllable terms. 
Lakoff: [I]t's very important to know that if you take someone 
else's words or ideas and negate them, even if you are against the 
ideas... you support the ideas by negating them. 
Now, this is how Fox News works. They will say, "We are fair and 
balanced. We will have a liberal and a conservative." But we have a 
conservative host! What the host does is, the host frames the 
questions, so that the liberal, even if he denies them, still 
supports the frame. For example, "Are you against the president's 
proposal for tax relief? What? You are against tax relief?" 
 
 
 
"We’re just going to tell you what’s right and if you don’t 
like it we’ll punish you!” 
 
 
Think about the framing of "tax relief." Relief says that taxation 
is an affliction, a burden that anybody who takes the affliction 
away is a hero and good, and anybody who is against it, wants people 
to suffer, right? You are against alleviating suffering? 
You see how this works, and it works throughout. The conservative 
think tanks have worked for 40 years now, developing not just 
language, but modes of thought that the language fit. And they have 
learned it very well, and the folks at Fox News have learned it very 
well. 
Liberals have no idea that language is not neutral, it is framed -- 
they walk into these things all the time. So, liberals have the idea 
that if you just tell people the facts, people will be rational, and 
reach the right conclusion. The facts will set you free. They won't! 
The facts unframed -- if not framed properly in the appropriate 
moral way, won't set you free! People won't reach the appropriate 
conclusions. It is very important that the facts be understood in 
some moral framework. The conservatives have understood that, and 
they frame everything they have in a moral framework.... 
But all liberals have a morality; it is a nurturing morality, and 
they haven't learned to talk in terms of that morality, and they 
haven't learned to frame their policies in terms of that 
morality.... 
TP.com: Is there something about the conservative framework that 
allows for what opponents will see as "dirty tricks" or deception? 
Lakoff: Yes there is, unfortunately. By the way, I don't want to say 
that all conservative communication is deceptive. I don't believe 
that for a minute. But let me begin by saying that I think there are 
many people who are honest conservatives, who have this moral 
worldview, and use it directly and speak from the heart -- and they 
believe that. But there is something in the worldview that leads to 
seeing deception as a reasonable thing to do. It has to do with the 
idea of evil being out there in the world. That is, if you are 
fighting evil, you can use evil to fight evil -- you can use fire to 
fight fire. The assumption is that, you know, if you are out there 
in a world against evil-doers, you may have to do some not very nice 
things. That is part of the conservative worldview. 
So they see liberals as doing something that they believe is simply 
wrong and immoral by their perspective. They can fight it anyway 
they can. Deceptive practices are all part of the game. 
TP.com: We usually think of language as neutral, but you write that 
"the who, what, when, where and why of news reporting does not 
capture the complex partisan differences in metaphorical conceptual 
structure that lie behind the political positions of conservatives 
and liberals." What is it that puts liberals at a disadvantage? 
Lakoff: It is not merely the language of news reporting. The 
conservatives understand that language is framed -- that it is not 
neutral, that it expresses ideas, that ideas are important, that 
ideas govern the way people act as well as the way they think. When 
they put out news releases or have interviews, they have learned to 
frame things very carefully. 
Now, the news business, and liberals have not yet learned this -- 
they have not learned how to do this -- because they believe that 
language is neutral; that it can express neutral ideas; that simply 
the facts will set you free.... 
 
 
 
Conservatives have discovered ... that everything has a point 
of view. 
 
 
So the assumption is that news is objective, there is objective 
truth (who, what, when, where, why), that there is no particular 
framing that slants things one way or another, that episodes are 
neutral; that when you report simply one event, not looking at its 
context, that that is neutral, and that they are there for being 
fair and balanced -- whereas they very well may not be. The whole 
idea of news reporting, as it is taught in journalism schools, is 
that you can report things -- just the facts -- and get them out 
there: who, what, when, where, why, period. 
What cognitive scientists have discovered is that this is never 
true. Conservatives have discovered it too. They discovered that 
everything has a point of view. That even the idea of episodic news, 
where you report the news without its context, that is a political 
decision on the part of the news room. That political decisions are 
made all the time, and they have gone out and started to make those 
decisions. They will put in their context on their stories. They 
will frame it in all sorts of ways by using appropriate language, 
and Fox News is completely slanted toward a conservative 
world-view.... 
Most people think that everything is neutral, and they don't notice 
the world-views they have, and how things are fitting in. So that 
the news business has not yet addressed the fact of framing, the 
fact of metaphorical thought, the fact that in this country you have 
two different conceptual systems for framing virtually every issue. 
They haven't tried to come to grips with it, and meanwhile, the 
conservatives have exploited it. 
 
 
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Published: May 08 2003 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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