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,

1. All of us are familiar with both models, and capable of viewing family through either of them.
   
2. Which model we use as a metaphor for reasoning about politics isn't necessarily the same one we use for our own family life.

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.