Conservatives need to be told what to do, and have concise and precise rules about everything, that everyone MUST follow.
Liberals are more comfortable with the "nurturing parent" model. They think for themselves and do not take kindly to being told what to do without a good justification.
This is one of many sources for this view...
http://interventionmag.com/cms/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=832
Redwood: How does the conservative set of values differ from the liberal set of values?
Lakoff: It's not simple, but here's how it goes. We all have a metaphor that we use in everyday thought, in which the nation is a family. We speak of the Founding Fathers, for example, and of sending our sons and daughters to war. That metaphor, linking the nation to a family and understanding it that way, maps two very different conceptions of ideal family life onto political life: a Strict Father family and a Nurturant Parent family. The result is two utterly different moral systems for how the country should be run.
In a Strict Father family, there's a background assumption that the world is a dangerous and difficult place; that there is competition; that there always will be winners and losers, and that this is a good thing; and that children are born bad and have to be made good. 'Bad' meaning that they will just do what feels good rather than what's right. The assumption is that the only way this situation can be dealt with is through a Strict Father who protects the family in the dangerous world, supports it in the difficult world, wins the competitions, and teaches his kids right from wrong.
Redwood: How does the Strict Father teach these lessons?
Lakoff: There's only one way to do that, which is punishment when they do wrong -- painful punishment. The idea is that this will cause them to get internal discipline, so that they will discipline themselves to do right, not wrong, and that this internal discipline will serve in a secondary way to allow them to pursue their self-interest and become self-reliant. That is, to make their way in a difficult world.
What this does is to bring morality and prosperity together in the Strict Father family. It also defines two kinds of children: the good children who are the disciplined ones, who will be able to support themselves and be independent as well as moral, and the bad children who aren't disciplined, cannot follow moral precepts, and are not disciplined enough to support themselves. The idea is that after these children have become old enough that they go out into the world, they either can take care of themselves or they are subject to the discipline of the world. That is, they get 'tough love.'
This family model then maps onto politics in a very important way. It says, for example, that all social programs are immoral because they make people dependent. They give people things that they haven't earned and therefore make them dependent. It says that in foreign policy, the president is the moral authority and doesn't have to ask any neighbor countries or allies what to do, or to ask for advice. He knows what's right and wrong and will do what's right. And other people should just follow suit. It says many more things about political policy, which are in my book, Moral Politics.
Redwood: What about the liberal model?
Lakoff: The liberal model of the family, the progressive model, is what I call the Nurturant Parent model, in which there are two parents equally responsible, whose job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturing of others. They assume children are born good and can be made better. Nurturance means two things: empathy (meaning you connect with your child and figure out what your child needs and what all those cries are when babies cry at night) and responsibility. You can't take care of anybody else if you're not responsible to yourself. That means self-responsibility as well as teaching responsibility for others.
From these two values, empathy and responsibility, a whole complex of values follows. If you empathize with your child, then you'll want to protect your child. In progressive politics, this turns into consumer protection, environmental protection and so on. If you empathize with your child, you want your child to be treated fairly. This comes out in politics as a desire for equality and fairness in social life. In the family, if you empathize with your child, you'll want your child to be fulfilled in life. So fulfillment becomes a progressive value. There's no fulfillment without opportunity, and no opportunity without prosperity, so opportunity and prosperity become progressive values.
Then, any child is raised in a community -- as Hillary Clinton says, it takes a village -- and you don't function in the community without serving that community, so public service becomes a progressive value. And in any community, you have to cooperate, and there's no cooperation without trust and no trust without honesty. So cooperation, trust, and honesty become progressive values, as does open communication, which is required in any community. So what you find is that there is a progressive understanding of how to responsibly raise children, for both parents, and that this maps onto politics.
Now there's a misrepresentation of this by the right. In the Strict Father model, there's mommy as opposed to daddy. And mommy is not strong enough to protect the family, not able to support the family, and not disciplined enough to teach the kids right from wrong. So there's the phrase, "Wait 'til daddy comes home," which is from such families. They then caricature the Nurturant Parent model as if it were a 'weak mommy' model, which it isn't, because any nurturant parent is going to raise his or her child to be responsible. You have to be strong to be a nurturant parent. Parenting isn't for weaklings.
The true irony here is that those raised in the nurturing environment are usually more independent, both in thought and action, more self motivated. Those raised in the Strict Father environment, whose essential compulsion is to foster independence and condemn dependence, usually end up creating the dependent model whose main need in life is to be told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it...and follow orders blindly.
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