The Nation as a Family
As a rule, humans understand abstract or complex ideas in terms of more concrete or accessible concepts. Usually this process involves the use of a metaphor. For example, Americans—like many other cultures—understand a complex, hard-to-conceptualize social group, our nation, in terms of something closer to home, our family. Models of idealized family structure lie metaphorically at the heart of our politics. The very notion of the founding fathers uses a metaphor that construes the nation as a family, with familial roles, such as parents and children. We think metaphorically without realizing it—the Nation as a Family, with citizens as family members, is such a natural metaphor that we don't even notice it is there.
But it is there. And it drives how we think about political and social issues.
In American culture there are two opposed and idealized models of the family, the Nurturant Parent model and the Strict Father model. The metaphor of the Nation as a Family maps the values and relationships from those family models onto our politics, creating "liberal" and "conservative" political positions that we understand through our models of family structure.
The progressive worldview represents, metaphorically, the Nurturant Parent family model, and the conservative worldview represents the Strict Father model. The two models come with distinct moral systems that are founded on different assumptions about the world, interpret shared values such as responsibility or fairness differently, and center around different moral priorities.
In other words, our beliefs about what a family should be exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of society we should build. For instance, those with a strong Strict Father model are likely to support a more punitive welfare or foreign policy than someone with a strong Nurturant Parent model, who are likely to favor more cooperative approaches. Those with a strong Nurturant Parent model are more likely to favor social policies that ensure the well-being of people such as health care and education, whereas someone with a strong Strict Father model would object to social programs in favor of promoting self-reliance.
