Trump and the Alt-Right are Smart, So We Need to Be Smarter

George Lakoff is one of the voices anyone interested in democracy should be listening to these days. “Students who become Democratic operatives tend to study political studies and statistics and demographics in college. Students who lean Republican study marketing. And that’s his point. It’s a very different way of thinking.

Conservatives believe in a what Lakoff calls the “strict father family,” while progressives believe in a “nurturant parent family.” In the strict father family, father knows best… The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality….

The nurturant parent family, on the other hand, believes that children are born good and can be made better. Both parents are responsible for raising children, and their role is to nurture their children and raise them to nurture others. Empathy and responsibility toward your child also extend to empathy and responsibility toward those who are less powerful, or suffering from pollution or disease, or are marginalized in some way.

While Lakoff is an unabashed Berkeley progressive, he said Democrats are decades behind in understanding how to frame issues in a way that can reach swing voters.”

The full text of the article about Lakoff is here.