From a review entitled "Manic Progressives" by Tobin Harshaw in the New York Times Book Review:
'According to Lakoff, conservatives believe that “fundamental” freedoms to be cherished include “freedom from coercion by the state or by the liberal elite”; “the freedom to use any kind of vehicle anywhere”; “the freedom to hunt — regardless of whether I am hunting an endangered species.” After they get back from riding snowmobiles over northern spotted owls, these troglodytes apparently have bigger game in mind: “What they want to conserve is, in most cases, the situation prior to the expansion of traditional American ideas of freedom: before the great expansion of voting rights . . . before Social Security and Medicare.”
O.K., we can stipulate that conservatives share a distrust of government and would love to slash programs that have improved the nation over the years (as well as, perhaps, some that haven’t). But does anybody not wearing a tinfoil hat believe that Republicans really want to take the vote away from women, blacks and non-landowners? Or that President Bush’s poorly managed Medicare prescription-drug expansion was a clever ruse to destroy the program?
...{The author's} failure to paint his opponents as anything but the most risible of cartoons stems from a larger incapacity... a refusal to believe that the other side might be making its case in good faith. Caricaturing your opponent’s stances is an easy way to win an argument, I guess, but it’s not going to sway many readers — or win many elections.'