To understand what metaphor has to do with conservative politics, we must begin with that part of our metaphor system that is used to conceptualize morality - a system of roughly two dozen metaphors. The reason at bottom is that liberals do not understand the form of metaphorical thought that unifies and makes sense of the full range of conservative values. Liberals tend not to understand the logic of conservatism they don’t understand what form of morality makes conservative positions moral or what conservative family values have to do with the rest of conservative politics. They don’t understand why conservatives attack violence in the media while promoting the right to own machine guns. They don’t understand why budget-cutting conservatives should spare no public expense to build prison after prison to house even non-violent offenders, or why they are willing to spend extra money to take children away from their mothers and put them in orphanages - in the name of family values. Liberals don’t understand how anti-abortion “right-to-life” activists can favor the death penalty and oppose reducing infant morality through prenatal care programs.

Conservatives regularly chide liberals for not understanding them, and they are right. But unless one knows that the system exists, one may miss it altogether and be mystified by its effects.įor me, one of the most poignant effects of the ignorance of metaphorical thought is the mystification of liberals concerning the recent electoral successes of conservatives. Because so much of our social and political reasoning makes use of this system of metaphorical concepts, any adequate appreciation of even the most mundane social and political thought requires an understanding of this system. Such concepts are often reflected in everyday language, but their most dramatic effect comes in ordinary reasoning. A large proportion of our most commonplace thoughts make use of an extensive, but unconscious, system of metaphorical concepts, that is, concepts from a typically concrete realm of thought that are used to comprehend another, completely different domain. We may not always know it, but we think in metaphor. Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dustīy George Lakoff © copyright George Lakoff 1995 It would be interesting to conduct the same analysis of Buddhist metaphors and how they affect political thinking and action.

This essay by George Lakoff is on the unconscious metaphors that shape political viewpoints.

George lakoff metaphors