Today I would like to share the link to an important blog post by George Lakoff on Donald Trump, simply entitled, “Why Trump?”  As my faithful readers may remember, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote the groundbreaking book, Metaphors We Live By, in 1980 which inspired my research into metaphors. After decades of brilliant research in linguistics and cognition, Lakoff turned his attention to the language of politics. He wrote another landmark book called Don’t Think of an Elephant in 2004 (rev. in 2014) in which he described the differences in the thinking of liberal and conservative politicians. In his recent blog post, he builds on his previous work to explain the rise of Donald Trump. The key tenet of his Elephant book is that most people think about government in conceptual metaphors. To quote a section of his recent blog post this week,

“…we tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms: We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security. The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).”

Lakoff extends his theory to explain the views of the conservatives.

“The strict father logic extends further. The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate. The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, Our Country above other countries. The hierarchy extends to: Men above women, Whites above Nonwhites, Christians above nonChristians, Straights above Gays.”

I can’t summarize the rest of the blog post to do it justice. You will have to read the rest of the article to see Lakoff’s brilliant analysis of Donald Trump. It is a bit long but well worth the effort. It is the most insightful analysis of conservative politics you will ever read. You can access the blog post here.

If you are interested, I have a list of books by Lakoff and Johnson, together and separately, in my Bibliography page on this blog. Lakoff, of course, has links to his other books and blog posts on his website. Please check them out if you have time.  Comments are welcome!

Next time: More on Trump