When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined
how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of
cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has
become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to
hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the
underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of
basic morality. Even more so than when Lakoff wrote, liberals and
conservatives simply have very different, deeply held beliefs about what
is right and wrong.
Lakoff reveals radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions
of morality on both the left and right. Moral worldviews, like most deep
ways of understanding the world, are unconscious - part of our
"hard-wired" brain circuitry. When confronted with facts that don't fit
our moral worldview, our brains work automatically and unconsciously to
ignore or reject these facts, and it takes extraordinary openness and
awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast
number of facts we are presented with each day.
For this new edition, Lakoff has added a new preface and afterword,
extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the
book's original publication, from the Affordable Care Act to the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the recent financial crisis, and the effects of
global warming. One might have hoped such massive changes would bring
people together, but the reverse has actually happened; the divide
between liberals and conservatives has become stronger and more
virulent.
To have any hope of bringing mutual respect to the current social and
political divide, we need to clearly understand the problem and make it
part of our contemporary public discourse. Moral Politics offers a
much-needed wake-up call to both the left and the right.
