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argued, specifically, that disciplinarian households engender authoritarianism, which becomes
expressed in conservative political attitudes. We find this explanation too simplistic and
pejorative, and imagine that there may be many determinants of parental visions, which need not
overlap with any kind of authoritarianism. However, discovering exactly what those determinants
may be is beyond the scope of this particular study; our focus is on understanding how family
values, however acquired, influence political dispositions.
Secondly, it is not clear from Lakoff’s theory how macro-level changes in the
distributions of these visions would have occurred over time to contribute to the altered political
landscape evident in society today. As we see it, there are at least two possible explanations: first,
it is possible that this heuristic was not very much in use prior to the 1960s, perhaps because there
was simply not as much variance in beliefs about parenting and child psychology prior to the
Spock revolution (which began in the 1950s and has expanded ever since) and the fundamentalist
reaction by people like James Dobson (beginning in the 1970s). But while there may be anecdotal
support for this explanation, we simply do not have any data on attitudes toward parenting during
the time period necessary to provide compelling evidence of such a change. As such, this is a less
than satisfactory explanation for our purposes. A second explanation, which we prefer, may
simply be that significant variance in parenting styles has always existed; many parents were
reflexively applying the nurturance model long before it achieved popular notoriety through
Spock and other child psychologists. Therefore, people may have always applied the nation-as-
family heuristic to politics (thus partially explaining apparently nurturant visions of governmental
authority as expressed in abolitionism, the policies of the Progressive Movement and the New
Deal, among others). The growth of ideological constraint may have simply been a function of
new issues emerging on the political landscape, which needed homes and classifications. The
nation-as-family heuristic ultimately may have provided the means necessary for attitudes on
these issues to find homes within the particular parties that they did, but this process likely took
time, starting with elites and filtering down through the two-step flow of political communication.
Convention