SYNOPSIS
What book are we doing?
The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics, by George Lakoff
Why are we doing it?
It’s the election, stupid.
How can we use it?
To understand the very different ways conservative and liberals see morality.
To remind us that the people we’re trying to influence don’t necessarily think or feel the way we do.
To better meet people where they are.
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
— Stephen Covey
You may have heard there was a U.S. presidential election recently. You may also have heard both in the long lead-up and in the aftermath, a range of people, pundits, and late-night talk-show hosts, expressing exasperated disbelief that anyone – let alone enough Americans to form a majority – would vote against their own interests. George Lakoff reminds us that, in a rational-actors model, voters evaluate criteria objectively to make a rational choice that benefits them the most. But an estimated 98 percent of people’s thought is not conscious. Voters are people; they are not rational actors.
Lakoff presents a framework that, while not a panacea for the complexities of politics and elections, serves as a useful tool and a shortcut to understanding some seemingly inexplicable behaviour. He suggests, through the metaphor of family, two idealized and conflicting versions of the nation: the strict-father model (representing pure conservative politics) and the nurturant-parent model (representing pure liberal politics). The strict-father model recognizes Dad as authority figure – the moral leader of the family to be obeyed (lest you face well-deserved punishment) – while the nurturant-parent model has a parent or parents with equal responsibility, tasked with nurturing the children.
These metaphors bring to life the core difference in the two political perspectives’ definitions of morality. Conservative morality is obedience, while liberal morality is empathy. According to Lakoff, these morality frames are core to winning over voters. “There is a moral here for progressives: The more they can activate empathy in the public, the more support will be available to them and the worse conservatives will do. Correspondingly, the more conservatives can generate fear in the public, the more support they will generate, and the more that will inhibit support for progressives.”
Republicans followed Lakoff’s playbook. Trump is exceptional at generating fear and at selling himself as the authority figure the Family needs to keep them safe and prosperous.
The Democrats, however, seem to have lost their way. While Lakoff suggests, “Empathy is at the center of the progressive moral worldview,” Harris demonstrated a lack of understanding of most Americans. The party moved from avoiding and distancing themselves from their past comments and positions to name-calling (“weird” is not the language of empathy) to generating their own version of fear (“Trump’s a fundamental threat to democracy”) to trying to convince conservatively oriented women to secretly vote against their husbands. Through the lens of the strict-father model, this tactic simply doesn’t work.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see how most Americans, including those inclined to a liberal perspective, were left asking, “Don’t you see me? Don’t you know what my life is like in a world of financial pressure, a loss of hope for the future, and perpetual stress? Are you really talking about joy right now?” It’s an unfortunate irony that a party historically rooted in empathy showed so little of it.
The Political Mind reminds us that not everyone shares our worldview and that, if you expect to change people’s behaviour, meet them where they are – not where you think they should be.
