You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.

For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is - it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself.

Barack Obama understands what Ronald Reagan learned, which is that people vote not on the basis of issues and policy details, but on the basis of something deeper, namely, what are your values? Are you authentic? Do you say what you believe? Do you communicate with us? And do we identify with you? You don't know what particular issues are going to come up in the future, so you have to depend on someone's values, and whether they are telling you the truth, and whether you can trust them in office. Obama's been running a campaign on that basis.

What Barack Obama calls bipartisanship is not moving to the right, but finding where people who consider themselves conservatives share these fundamental American values. When he talks about union, that's the kind of thing he means. That requires common responsibility. Individual responsibility is one of the hallmarks of conservative thought. In conservative religion, you yourself are responsible for whether you get into heaven. Or with fiscal conservatives, you are the market. It's your individual discipline and market discipline.

If you're a progressive, you can find lots of people who call themselves conservatives, but who agree with you on lots of things. There are people who call themselves conservatives, but who love the land as much as any environmentalist. Progressives share a number of common values with people who call themselves conservatives. Barack Obama has understood that very well. What he calls bipartisanship is not adopting conservative views, but finding where people who consider themselves conservatives share with him and other progressives these fundamental American values.