I studied Lakoff’s linguistic work back in undergrad, and he seems to be an intelligent, scientific person. Lately I’ve seen a few articles crop up in which he discusses his political opinions. These didn’t interest me too much until I hit this, a discussion about how our ideas of what families should be like can be extrapolated to explain our political views. Really interesting stuff.
The notion makes a lot of sense to me, and in some ways I feel like I already knew that, that I have even used the family model in conversation to explain my political views. It seems natural to do so.
I would be interested to know if Lakoff is correct about children with strict-family backgrounds growing up dysfunctional.