Hillary Clinton v. John Wayne

Provocative article on metaphors in American politics.

Here's a sample:

Regardless of the rhetoric about what Hillary is supposedly up to, she is likewise perceived as a threat to the patriarchal family. She is the archetypal Easterner; she speaks in complete sentences and is married to someone who speaks so well it makes him slick. If we translate the Easterner values from the 1950s westerns into today’s terms, we encounter individuals who try their best to find the better argument, people who give the notion of brotherly love something more than lip service, people who are unafraid of criticizing their own government, people who in fact believe that it is their civic duty to hold their leaders’ feet to the fire. In other words, I am describing the metaphorical nemesis of the rugged individualist in western cinema: liberals. And this is why so many men, and some women, bristle simply at the mention of Hillary’s name. They know essentially nothing about her, and yet they believe that she is a threat to everything they care about. Among herdsmen, and in patriarchal societies in general, men are owners of the flock or the herd and all that goes with it, women and children included. This stuff comes right out of the Bible. It’s what George Lakoff characterizes as “the strict father morality” in his book Moral Politics.


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