There are two major errors here that void this entire post
1. The statement and restatement that "they hold all the cards" - this is a common myth. They don't.
2. George Lakoff's view of nurture vs. discipline: this is nowhere near correct. Lakoff's view regarding conservatives vs. liberal is much more simple - a liberal can be counted on to give their all in a fight - a conservative is a bully, someone who picks fights and can't finish them - a weak, cowardly creature who continually gets into things that he or she can't finish and is only interested in the shallow, visceral face of the problem but can't go deep.
A personal point: raising children is an art form - not a science. Politics, on the other hand, is the maximum utilization of available resources. Its the way massive numbers of interests can combine, and the vocal, and frankly stupid - special interests get reigned in for the good of everyone - its the magna carta, the constitution, the battle of good vs. evil.
There are children living at home with their mother and father, children who still don't have jobs. Yesterday was a great example - to see the flood of immigrants just stop, and America continue on as normal. The gaps would have been filled by teenagers in a normal world. Their work would have been done by 17 year olds.
Instead, it simply wasn't done. A massive protest organized completely without union management - millions wide. The work simply stopped.
So, what would the government do? Be stern, and punish them for illegally entering the country - or be nurturing, and grant them citizenship.
Well, first thing: raising a kid, the question becomes much more difficult and much easier to solve if you go back to the fact that people have been successfully raising children for over 20,000 years.
But modern politics, complicated by media strategy, special interests, lobbies, corruption, greed, international pressure - now thats a different row to hoe. So back to the question - what do you do?
The answer is, you compromise: you give them a chance to qualify, as citizens - but you make them go back if they entered in less than two years. Give the people who are established the chance to make it, but clip the wings of the guys who come over to take the job, send the money away - and disappear.
So, the work stops. They get replaced. America goes on. Like a teenager throwing a tantrum, the best thing a parent can do is just smile - because you're holding more than the teenager thinks you've got, two aces in your sleeve - and they know it. You give them no traction. You let them complain, you say "yes, I would too."
And in the end, the love you give. Is equal to . the love. You take.
Chris is acurately expressing what Lakoff says in his books Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant.
I'm not sure where Lakoff has expressed the ideas you describe here. Can you provide a citation?
turner, what you're saying about Lakoff sounds vaguely familair - I've heard him say something like that too - but it's very far removed from the central thesis of Moral Politics, which is what Chris is referring to.
That said, I think Chris didn't get it quite right, either. It's an oversimplification that leads to misunderstanding. Lakoff says Americans have two common moral models of how families work, and all Americans know both models. He says that liberal politics come from reasoning about politics through metaphor to one of those models, while conservative politics come from reasoning about politics through metaphor to the other model. But he explicitly says that some people use one model for their family life, while viewing politics through metaphor to the other model.
So, two key points: According to Lakoff,
In fact, he says "Reagan Democrats" were mostly people who used the liberal moral model for politics and the conservative one for their family life, and Reagan knew how to take advantage of this by making the metaphor explicit and causing them to take what they knew about family into politics.
