George Lakoff’s two co-authored books and multiple essays assert that metaphor is not the rhetorical flourish of an individual author or speaker, but a conceptual system that structures how we understand the world.

Lakoff’s new book Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t, seems to alienate the political left beginning with its very title. Its stark red, white, black, and gold cover makes it look like a book for Nazis. It is a book for liberals that looks and reads like a book for conservatives. Moral Politics is a long, cold, clear, and ultimately convincing demonstration of a misunderstanding between the mainstream political left and right which has led to a surge of vitality within the Republican party in recent elections. It is clear to all of us that liberals and conservatives make no sense to each other, but it is clear to Lakoff that conservatives understand themselves far better than liberals.

To liberals, many such discrepancies seem obvious, as Lakoff demonstrates in his introduction, when he writes:

Lakoff demonstrates that liberals and conservatives both understand the nation as a family, with the government as parent, and citizens as children. Conservatives desire a nation with a strict father government, and liberals desire a nurturing parent government. The second, perhaps more crucial difference between liberals and conservatives is that only conservatives understand the importance of the family to their own world view and to American politics (and to this end have even adopted phrases like "family values.")

In my opinion, Lakoff fails to make liberals look as good as he wants them to look, and even as good as they are. He attempts to show the superiority of the liberal world-view by citing scientific studies that show, in an actual family, that a nurturing parent has more chance of raising a well-adjusted child than a strict parent does. However, elsewhere in the book, Lakoff points out, firstly, that there is a difference between how you raise your children and how you vote, and secondly that a government is not literally a parent and so studies about actual childrearing may not apply. Finally, he says that the conservative world-view is flawed because it presupposes an absolute reality, and reality is not absolute. This argument, in my opinion, threatens to undermine itself by reducing itself to a subjective opinion. I would rather that Lakoff have proposed that liberal politics are morally superior to conservative politics because conservative politics, in the past two decades, have lead to drastically slashed social spending, a military that continues to grow even in the wake of the cold war, and such atrocities as The War in the Persian Gulf, which Lakoff himself described as "a violent crime." In short, conservative politics lead to human suffering. Perhaps the biggest problem with this book are the political events that have happened since I first began to write this review: the demolition of welfare and the resumed bombing of Iraq. These conservative steps taken by a supposedly liberal administration have made Lakoff’s insights increasingly irrelevant to me. I guess that makes me what Lakoff would call a "cynical liberal."

This book may not be of use to most voters. I recommend it to Marxist political writers who want a way to make political speeches coherent. This book, by itself, may not help what Lakoff sees as a crisis in liberal politics. But, by reading it, perhaps you can.

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