Don’t think of an elephant
Many times I’ve found myself wondering how “conservative” and “liberal” positions on issues are actually decided, because neither have ever seemed like coherent collections of ideas to me. This excerpt from Berkeley linguist George Lakoff’s book “Don’t Think of an Elephant” describes a framework for understanding liberalism and conservativism, a “family model” that rings very true to me. I found it a fascinating read. Here are a couple of links to it:
PDF excerpt (with nice formatting - recommended)
same excerpt, in html (with very little formatting)
