Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think is a 1996 book by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. It argues that conservatives and liberals hold two different conceptual models of morality. Conservatives have a strict father model in which people are made good through self-discipline and hard work, everyone is taken care of by taking care of themselves. Liberals have a nurturant parent model in which everyone is taken care of by helping each other.

The first edition of the book was published with the subtitle What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't.

Moral Politics has two different purposes. Lakoff uses the techniques of cognitive linguistics to attempt to better understand the mental frameworks that lie behind contemporary American politics, describing which mental concepts make up a "liberal", and which a "conservative". (What Lakoff means by these two terms is considered below.) And, in the last few chapters, he argues that "liberal" morals and politics are superior to "conservative" morals and politics.

The book is intended as an objective study of the conceptual metaphors underlying conservative and liberal politics although the closing section is devoted to the author's personal views. Lakoff makes it clear however, that there is no such thing as an Objective study of politics, as politics is based in subjective morality.

Lakoff wrote Moral Politics soon after the Republican Party's "Contract With America" takeover of Congress under the Clinton presidency, and his usage of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" is strongly influenced by how those labels were used in the 1994 elections, the former having much to do with the Democratic party and the latter with the Republican party; indeed, chapter 9, "Moral Categories in Politics", presents Hillary Clinton as a prototypical "liberal" and Newt Gingrich as a prototypical "conservative". (Lakoff actually puts this somewhat differently, suggesting that Clinton is the prototypical nemesis of conservatives, while Gingrich is the prototypical nemesis of liberals.)

The major observations/assumptions and questions on which the book is founded include these:

Lakoff tries to resolve these difficulties through a model in which liberals and conservatives are shown to have different and contradictory worldviews. These worldviews are thought to conflict in a number of ways relevant to the understanding of politics. Nonetheless, Lakoff claims that all of these differences center around the two sides' respective understandings of a single concept - the ideal nuclear family.

The family is central to Lakoff because he views the family as the most familiar model for Americans to understand the country; that is, Americans often metaphorically understand their country as a family, with the government corresponding to the parent(s) of the family and the individual citizens corresponding to the children. Thus, one's understanding of how a family is best organized will have direct implications for how the country should be governed.