My reading life has provided me with a web of networks with authors I never have met except on the pages of their books. Lacking any other acceptable descriptor, I refer to these writers as “my friends.”
My “friend” George Lakoff asks penetrating questions in his work, The Political Mind: “Why do certain people, most of them self-identified as conservatives, find certain acts of love — premarital, extramarital or homosexual — more sinful than war or torture? Why should a conservative living in the Midwest find it personally threatening when gays get married in San Francisco or Massachusetts? Why do many progressives object to the death penalty on moral grounds, while not being opposed to abortion on the same grounds?”
Why indeed? Conservatives seem to have a single mind, a mindset, a mode of thought that informs their approach to every social issue. Lakoff, in another work, one that inspired my doctoral dissertation, argues we live by a series of metaphors that constitute our reality.
Conservatives react negatively to every social issue because they live by one dominant metaphor: The Strict Father.
Conservative modes of thought are sweeping across the nation, creating a kind of soft authoritarianism. Evangelicals are comfortable with the idea of minority rule. No conservative I know is bothered by the fact that 72% of Americans accept same-sex marriage. They are not deterred that more than 65% of Americans believe there should be some access to abortion. They are not the least bit intimidated by a secular and progressive Christian majority that embraces diversity.
I understand the mindset that contests what liberals label the contestability of truth. There’s no surprise, then, that our fiercely divided nation has invented alternate truths, fake news and conspiracy theories.
“I suggest conservatives live by a single, dominant metaphor.”
Based on and expanding my thought from The Creative Power of Metaphor, I suggest conservatives live by a single, dominant metaphor. In 1990, I thought that metaphor was “Life is war.” Conservatives seemed to conceptualize every aspect of life as a war. That made fellow Christians enemies. That led to battles over every social issue.
Now, I believe I discovered only one of the secondary or tertiary metaphors of the conservative movement. Borrowing again from Lakoff, the primal metaphor is the Strict Father motif.
Definition of the Strict Father metaphor
Lakoff defines the strict father as the moral leader of the family, and he is to be obeyed. The family needs a strict father because there is evil in the world from which he must protect them — and Mommy can’t do it. The family needs a strict father because there is competition in the world, and he has to win those competitions to support the family — and Mommy can’t do it. You need a strict father because kids are born bad, in the sense that they just do what they want to do, and don’t know right from wrong. They need to be punished strictly and painfully when they do wrong, so they will have an incentive to do right in order to avoid punishment — and Mommy can’t do it.
Mapped onto politics, the Strict Father model explains why conservatism is concerned with authority, with obedience, with discipline and with punishment. It makes sense in a patriarchal family where male strength dominates unquestionably. Authority, obedience, discipline and punishment are all there in the family, organized in a package.
Gay rights
Many conservatives reluctantly have conceded that same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, “settled law.” Conservatives, however, are still unsettled. The Strict Father metaphor helps explain this opposition. As Lakoff surmises, “Suppose that strict father marriage, with its version of masculinity, is a major narrative you live by. Then a threat to its legitimacy is a threat to your very being. Marriage isn’t the real issue; the real issue is identity.”
“The Strict Father family can’t make room for gay men raising children as a family.”
If your very identity is defined with respect to a Strict Father family, where male-over-female authority rules, then the legitimacy of same-sex marriage can threaten your identity. The Strict Father family can’t make room for gay men raising children as a family. For them, this is attempting to drive a round peg into a square hole.
Abortion
Why do conservatives, not content with overturning Roe v. Wade, keep pushing to criminalize abortion? In the Strict Father family, a decision to have an abortion can’t be left with the woman. It is an insult to the strict father. I contend this is the reason some states support husband notification. The pregnant teenager has disobeyed her father and should be punished.
Friends willing to transport a woman across state lines for an abortion are now facing legislation that makes them subject to arrest. Friends can’t be allowed to interfere with the rights of the strict father. All the defining features of the Strict Father metaphor are at play in the abortion issue.
Food assistance programs like SNAP
Why would an affluent member of Congress be concerned about the amount of food assistance received by a poor person? The irony of affluent members of Congress debating food assistance for poor people without consulting a single poor person is thick. Yet from a conservative perspective, individual responsibility means being willing to deal with the consequences of your own decisions. In the metaphorical world of the strict father, the poor are lazy and refuse to work.
When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson claims SNAP is “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program,” he conveniently ignores the fact that 41 million Americans receive SNAP benefits and that the alleged fraud in the program doesn’t exceed 2% of the budget. As for the emotional argument that SNAP is “bloated,” the reality is that SNAP comprises a very small portion of the federal budget and it is not a key driver of our federal debt. In 2022, spending for SNAP made up only 2.4% of total federal spending.
Trapped in the metaphorical world of the Strict Father, conservatives lose all perspective as they threaten to go to war over 2.4% of the national budget.
“Trapped in the metaphorical world of the Strict Father, conservatives lose all perspective as they threaten to go to war over 2.4% of the national budget.”
In a Strict Father family, hierarchies of power and wealth are justified on “merit.” If a person is “given” food benefits, the desire to compete, to win, to provide would disappear. People would lose the incentive to be disciplined, and morality would decrease, prosperity would suffer.
Note that “individual responsibility” is a hallmark of this view of religion — it is up to you and you alone as to whether you get into heaven.
Conservatives are not as heartless as portrayed. They really believe cutting welfare benefits would build discipline, improve lives and make America great again.
God as Strict Father
Why are evangelical Christians so conservative? They view God as a strict father. God has “wrath,” anger and a desire for punishing the wicked. This is why conservatives interpret the destruction of everything from Sodom to New Orleans as acts of God.
When God is a strict father, the hierarchy is clear. Obey God or you go to hell. The only chance to avoid hell: Be born again. Obey all God’s commands — literally and actually — as informed by your minister’s reading of the Bible and you are one of God’s holy ones. All the elements are in play here: authority, obedience, discipline, punishment. A strict God is a strict father.
This is one reason there was so much “hell” raised in American churches at the idea that God might also be Mother. People reacted negatively to versions of the Lord’s Prayer that began, “Our Mother, who art in heaven.”
I understand the reluctance to embrace an idea that undermines the foundation of the Strict Father metaphor. If God is the universal strict father, if the Bible is the strict father playbook, if men are the rulers in the strict God’s strict world, then there can be no room for dissent.
President Ronald Reagan, left, shakes hands with Moral Majority head Jerry Falwell, right, after he spoke to the National Religious Broadcasters on Jan. 30, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Reagan told the group that America was in the midst of a almighty spiritual revival and he supported a ban on abortions, tougher laws against child pornography, and was for voluntary prayer. (AP Photo/Ira Schwarz)
Ronald Reagan’s metaphor
There is, however, an example from the conservative world that demonstrates the power of a metaphor to create a lasting meaning in the minds of conservatives.
Ronald Reagan, for instance, invented the metaphor of the “Welfare Queen” and expanded it to the defining principle of conservatives for decades. Whether or not the Welfare Queen was a total fabrication or a real woman is not relevant. The power of the metaphor is that the Welfare Queen came to stand for all African Americans on welfare.
She is a lazy, uppity, sexually immoral Black woman who is a cheater living off the taxpayers, driving a Cadillac paid for by taxpayers, having children just to get money for them. As a salient exemplar, the probability judgment that a welfare recipient would be like that went up, even though the majority of welfare recipients are white and few own vehicles of any kind.
Josh Levin chronicles the life story of the original “Welfare Queen,” Linda Taylor. In reality, she was a consummate con artist. She conned the government, individuals and anyone naïve enough to believe her. If she had been a man, she would have starred in the female version of Catch Me If You Can.
For Ronald Reagan, she was a vivid metaphorical opportunity. Reagan invented a single metaphor and used it to characterize all welfare recipients that way. Conservatives accepted Reagan’s metaphor.
His metaphor, of course, undergirds the Strict Father construct. The conservative logic grew that welfare recipients are immoral, lack discipline, are lazy and refuse to work for a living. Reagan’s framing of all welfare recipients in this light stuck and remains “gospel” for conservatives today.
“Reagan’s framing of all welfare recipients in this light stuck and remains ‘gospel’ for conservatives today.”
Reagan’s description of the Welfare Queen driving a Cadillac enabled him to reach Southern poor whites. The Cadillac symbolized something valuable and upper-class that was not earned but uppity. He also deftly employed the racist and sexist tropes that whites were above non-whites and men above women. In Reagan’s view, to be against welfare was to be against good white taxpayers supporting lazy uppity Blacks.
The rhetorical trope for this was metonymy, the substitution of the name of an attribute for that of the thing meant. Activating the idea of welfare also activated the idea of African Americans via association.
In Reagan’s created frame, the welfare recipient is a lazy uppity Black person. The only logical, moral action for good taxpaying whites to take is to eliminate welfare. After all, in this frame, Blacks are unworthy and they should only get what they deserve — nothing. This is how metonymy works.
Reagan’s prodigious powers of persuasion convinced poor, white, worthy welfare recipients to vote against their own self-interest. They supported Reagan’s stand against welfare because they already lived out of a more powerful set of metaphors: the Strict Father and the Moral Order. They knew Reagan didn’t include them in the Welfare Queen trope. They were on welfare, but they didn’t drive Cadillacs. They weren’t uppity, and they were not Welfare Queens.
This single example helps explain how today Speaker Johnson can ignore facts and reality to insist on cutting SNAP benefits. The “Welfare Queen” haunts the dreams of all hardline, Strict Father legislators.
As a teenager, I loved Roger Miller’s insane lyrics. My favorite: “You Can’t Roller Skate in A Buffalo Herd.” Among the impossibilities Miller sings of:
You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd.
You can’t take a shower in a parakeet cage.
Well, you can’t go swimming in a baseball glove.
You can’t change film with a kid on your back.
You can’t drive around with a tiger in your car.
But you can be happy if you’ve a mind to.
All you gotta do is put your mind to it.
Knuckle down, buckle down,
Do it, do it, do it
As Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein tried to teach us, it takes effort and courage to want to see reality and accept the truth, and to live the truth. Conservatives haven’t realized you can’t be a literalist in a metaphorical world.
Rodney Kennedy
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.
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