What about the Radicals, Mr. Lakoff?

George Lakoff‘s new book, “Whose Freedom” makes the helpful argument that the model or metaphor of the family that exists in the cognitive unconscious mind shapes one‘s politics. According to Lakoff, there are two idealized family models that explain the highly polarized American political landscape: the strict father family model and the nurturant parent family model. The former preserves and promotes the values of discipline, self-reliance, and the individual pursuit of self-interest, which results in a conservative vision of what America should be. The latter sustains and grows the values of empathy, responsibility for others, and interdependency, which results in a progressive vision of what the Nation should be. Conservatives usually vote Republican and progressives usually vote Democratic. If Democrats want to win elections, then they must appeal to, activate, and use the language of the progressive family metaphor.

What Lakoff does not understand is that the deep, long-range solution to American Empire depends less on exploiting the differences between these two family frames than it does on becoming aware of what they have in common — namely, the deep-seated nuclear family frame. Both the strict father and the nurturant parent models are surface variations of the nuclear family ideal, and this fundamental frame is what underlies, organizes, and motivates Militant American Nationalism, or American Empire.

The nuclear family ideal teaches the value of putting itself first, and everyone and everything else second, or third, or fourth, or not at all, and this gets projected onto the Nation as a whole, and America sees itself as Number One, the best, most moral, hardest working, smartest country on the planet, with a political attitude and moral mission to battle and trump the rest of the world for our own security, well-being, and comfort. If one is unaware, as Lakoff appears to be, that the nuclear family frame divides the world into us and them, winners and losers, then one is unaware of the central metaphor of American domestic and foreign policy. Nuclear family values define, or frame, Americanism (which is the quintessential expression of the modern life-style).

Look at American society! One little family is rich, another little family is just making it, and a third little family can‘t afford decent health care, education, or clothing. This huge and growing inequality is socially acceptable, “normal”, because the boundary of the nuclear family is hard and harsh, and ultimately justifies the present world situation in which 400 or 500 dynastic families possess greater wealth than one-half of the human race. Both the strict father and the nurturant parent often take care of their own immediate family members, but they compete with, and disregard, other families, leading to a war of each against all.

Since Americans (with very few exceptions) are raised in nuclear families there is a great consensus for this gross inequality, at home and abroad. The economic mechanism for all of this is Capitalism in which each family pursues its own self-interest, and the self-interest of society and the world is thereby maximized, according to the extended political worldview of the nuclear family ideology. It all seems so natural, so commonsensical, and so true because this fundamental metaphor is unconscious, unquestioned, unthinkable. Fortunately, this family model does not necessarily determine what one‘s politics will be because there is an alternative family ideal that is even more deeply buried in the human identity.

For millions of years, until the historical emergence of the nuclear family around ten thousand years ago, the tribe was the basic unit of society, and the tribal family ideal is part of our cultural inheritance. Even though very few Americans grow up in a tribal family we acquire this ideal from actually existing indigenous communities, and/or from TV, movies, books, stories, etc. This family ideal teaches the value of putting community first, and links us, by a political extension of meaning, to a Communitarian society of equality, generosity, and inclusiveness.

Prehistory is full of tribal conflicts, but the Iroquois Confederacy, for example, expanded the meaning of the tribal family to the political principle of a Federation of Tribes - until European landfall. From the Military to the Quakers the call went out across the land to civilize the Indians, which meant, fundamentally, forcing them into nuclear families, and this was a historical turning point, fatal step, that has led to America's slow, steady decline, and this civilization built on a faulty foundation cannot endure.

Just about every member of American culture has, in his or her mind, versions of both models: the nuclear family frame and the tribal family frame, so real families are more complicated than ideal models. We don‘t have to create a whole new social order by fiat because we can tap what is already in the brain of Americans, and get people to apply it to politics. We can start with the tribal family model people already use to frame some of their experiences and extend its meaning. Down deep, and still in parts of our lives, we function best in small groups of between 15 and 25 people, so let‘s build a social movement on that foundation.

The battle between conservatives and progressives, Republicans and Democrats, is important in order to slow down the pace of world destruction, but the big battle is between Global Capitalism and Communitarianism, and it is being waged by Radicals who want a tribal constitution. The aim is not to go back to some static place in time, but to continue the line of development begun by our Ancestors, prior to our fragmentation into nuclear families, and extend it to a world government, or a hierarchical system of tribal councils, from the local to the world level, with an Ecological Council at the top.

Achieving a visionary society of second-order tribalism, or families-by-choice, will be a long and difficult process, if it happens at all, but focusing exclusively, as Lakoff does, on how progressives and Democrats can defeat conservatives and Republicans is one-sided, top-heavy, and ultimately futile because Capitalism, by any name or version, is nuclear family politics writ large, and both root and branch must be uprooted and overturned for the sake of the planet and every living creature on it. The Founding Fathers framed the U.S. Constitution through the big lens of little family capitalism.

In sum, we need a dual strategy for social change: short-term election victories, and long-term tribal rumblings/beginnings in which we think, talk, listen, and act in new ways outside the nuclear family box that reproduces itself as American society. Operating/working on these two socio-political levels, from the top down and from the bottom up, simultaneously and integrally, is the kind of higher rationality that is called for.