Editing Family as a model for the state (section)

==Politics and the family==
In her book, ''Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France'', Elisabeth Fraser analyses [[Eugène Delacroix]]'s famous “Massacres of Chios” (1824), which helped galvanise [[philo-Hellenism]] in France. Delacroix's symbol for the oppressed Greek nation was a family employed as a conceptual and visual structuring device. A reviewer encapsulated Fraser's argument:

<blockquote>Equating patriarchal family metaphor with government paternalism and imperialist protectionism, the chapter argues that such familial intimations, heightened by acute emotionalism and hints of a Western culture soiled by Eastern penetration, corresponded to and reflected a paternalistic government urge to protect the victimized Greeks, a thinly veiled justification for French colonial intervention in the Mediterranean.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.kunstform.historicum.net/2005/02/4653.html|title=Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer}}{{Dead link|date=April 2024 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref></blockquote>

More recently, [[George Lakoff]] has claimed that the [[left-right politics|left/right distinction]] in politics comes from a difference between ideals of the family in the mind of the person in question; for [[right-wing]] people, the ideal is a patriarchical and moralistic family; for [[left-wing]] people, the ideal is an unconditionally loving family. As a result, Lakoff argues, both sides find each other's views not only immoral, but incomprehensible, since they appear to violate each side's deeply held beliefs about personal morality in the sphere of the family.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=515 |title=Methaphor and Myth, 12/21/2001 – the Texas Observer |website=www.texasobserver.org |access-date=17 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020416055642/http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=515 |archive-date=16 April 2002 |url-status=dead}}</ref>

Such a model is not a recent addition to modern discourse; J. Vernon Jenson discussed “British Voices on the Eve of the American Revolution: Trapped by the Family Metaphor” in the ''Quarterly Journal of Speech'' 63 (1977), pp.&nbsp;43–50.

The idea of the [[commonwealth]] as a family is close to [[cliché]]; it permeates political discourse at every level:

<blockquote>There is an historic American National Family metaphor .. That American National Family frame is like any real extended family-fractious but in the end functional. There are people in it who aren't just like you, but they are still family and we still have to try to solve our problems together, despite our differences.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://metaphorproject.org/our-one-big-family-frame/|title=Our 'One Big Family' Frame|website=metaphorproject.org}}</ref></blockquote>