Book review: The Three Languages of Politics
The book posits that, like tribal differences, three political factions in America, progressives, conservatives, and libertarians, have developed their own political language, structuring arguments from different perspectives. He calls it the three axes, as in geometry, and since our languages span different dimensions, we have a difficult time understanding each others' viewpoints. Progressives, he says, speaks along the victim-oppressor axis, conservatives along the civilization-barbarism axis, and libertarians along the voluntary-coercion axis.
For example, if you show a video of someone punching another in the face, people from these differing political factions may describe the same scene in three different ways, even if the ultimate conclusion is the same.
The progressive may be more apt than the others to say something like, "That person getting punched is a victim of violence!"
The conservative may be more apt than the others to say something like, "The person punching is wreaking havoc!"
The libertarian may be more apt than the others to say something like, "The person getting punched is being aggressed against!"
Also like tribes, these axial languages were developed, if unintentionally, to be understood within the tribe, not necessarily outside it. Additionally, these languages are often used to, at least subconsciously if not overtly, identify other members of the tribe to see whether they should be accepting or denouncing of the other person. When a person is fully subsumed by their language and all multilingual capabilities are lost, Kling calls closure. When closure is achieved, a person is at peak cynicism, politically, where one assumes the worst of everyone outside their tribe along their own axis. Everyone not a progressive is an oppressor, everyone not a conservative is barbaric, and everyone not a libertarian is an aggressor.
This seems to bear out in real life more often than not, with intense simplicity such that I wonder why I've never thought of it this way before. The left has spent the last decade really focusing on labeling classes and assigning victimhood or oppressiveness to those groups, whether or not the individuals have actually oppressed others. If you've paid one iota of attention, you know which racial, gender and religious groups are on which end of their axis. Conservatives have often talked about and compared which groups of people are civilized and which groups of people are barbaric. Likewise, it's easy to think of which groups around the world they have advocated fighting or allying with. Libertarians' discussions along our axis are even easier to see. The entire foundational principle of the philosophy is the Non-Aggression Principle, that no one may initiate aggression against another.
Kling stresses in the book that these are just the way these groups tend to talk, and not necessarily how they think. He also stresses that speaking their language will not necessarily convert them to your side or vice versa. Within the book, he goes through several examples, never committing to praising one axis over another. Ultimately, he says the purpose of the book is to be able to see another's' viewpoints in their language to better understand others, as to reduce political fighting across the aisles.
While I think the fundamental three-axis argument is brilliant, I will throw his caution into the wind and argue some of those points.
If he is correct in theorizing that this is generally how these factions talk, and I think he is, how could the language not influence the epistemology of their political thought, or more likely, the other way around? I think this language is a reflection of their honest beliefs. For example, if someone tends to use forceful language, it would tend to indicate the person's personality is stronger and their confidence in their convictions higher than someone who uses more passive language, even if it doesn't reflect the probability that the person is right or wrong. To think otherwise would be to assume that everyone is being dishonest in their language, speaking in terms that don't truly reflect their intent. I think that is an unreasonable position.
If we look at libertarians, this is painfully obvious. Pretty much all of the great libertarian thinkers, Walter Block, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul...you name it...fundamentally consider the Non-Aggression Principle either formally or indirectly when they consider a policy position. Deontological libertarians for sure rabidly adhere to this ideological axis, but even consequentialist libertarians often think and act along these terms as well. It is no accident that the Libertarian Party, for membership, requires signing a statement that reads: I hereby certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.
It may be less obvious with progressives and conservatives since they do not appear to have such a written commitment to foundational political principles. But their respective line of thinking often rears its head. Progressives, when seeing a conflict, will often jump straight into determining a victim and oppressor, with these days more and more determined by socioeconomic, racial, gender, or other similar identities over any actual action. When discussing topics such as income inequality, the conversation often steers to how rich people oppress poor people as a matter of argument, not just language. It's so obvious these days that those not aligned to the left mock their worldview as the Oppression Olympics, a race to see who can set themselves up as the most victimized individual. Perhaps they consider those that are not victims to be oppressors with no middle ground, especially judging by their rallying cry "White silence is violence." Conservatives also seem to think along their stated axis. It's no coincidence that they, almost without variation, tend to heap praise on organizations that aim to establish order in the face of chaos, such as the police, military, and religion. When discussing topics with them, law and order seem to be front and center, often with actual arguments, not just rhetoric, going to how it's the law and the law must be upheld, or argued in terms of how "criminals", even nonviolent ones, are degenerate and must be put away for the sake of civility.
Kling explicitly states that even despite having heavy libertarian tendencies himself, doesn't consider any one axis to be superior to another.
At the risk of achieving closure, I fully disagree.
If it's just the way someone speaks, then okay; no harm, no foul. But if I'm right and people actually think this way, thinking along an arbitrary axis can easily lead to wildly contradictory thoughts and ideas. I am confident that the libertarian axis provides the only logical and reasonable methodology, of the three, to determine just and optimal outcomes.
The progressives' and conservatives' axes, are inherently ambiguous to define. How do you define who is a victim and who is an oppressor? What is the metric by which one judges to determine this? At first glance, it may be obvious who is which, when you think of straightforward examples like murder or theft. But look at who the progressives have been defining lately as oppressors. They had no hesitation with ripping Nick Sandmann apart because he was a white kid that had a Trump hat on, but literally didn't do anything but stand there and smile at someone. They had no hesitation trying to destroy Jordan Peterson, whose "crime" was to refuse to use certain pronouns. At every turn during the #MeToo uproar, all men were excoriated, even Louis CK, whose major misdeed appeared to be to ask women if they would watch him masturbate. Well, until Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault. Suddenly "believe all women" quickly turned into something else. Then look at who they have been defining as victims. Jussie Smollett had praise heaped on him before the facts came out on his bizarre situation before it was found out that he staged everything and made a false police report. Even after it turned out he completely fabricated the entire incident, some on the left still defended him as a martyr. Report after report on college campuses, progressives that run the colleges found men to perpetrate rape even if the "victim" herself said it was all a misunderstanding. Looking at their positions on issues through history brings no further clarity to their classifications. They used to be against gay rights but now they are for; they used to be against drug legalization, now they're for some but not for others; they used to be tough on crime (though this may be more of a Democrat thing and not necessarily a progressive thing), now they want police to be abolished. All of these point to an inherent ambiguity on figuring out who, exactly, is an oppressor and who is a victim. This leads to wildly different and often times self-contradictory conclusions. This is because the victim-oppressor axis has no inherent criteria of judgment and results in judging based on the whims of one's biases.
The conservatives' axis makes even less sense to me, even if I don't disagree that they utilize it. Most people do have some kind of intrinsic guide to who is a victim and who is an oppressor. Trying to figure out what is civilized and what is barbaric is quite a bit more arbitrary. How does one define this? It seems that civilization is often defined as order and tradition while barbarism is defined by disorder and libertinism. On this axis, anything can be justified and anything can be condemned, changing by whatever traditions and institutions give them grounding. Animal sacrifice could probably be considered civilized if there were deep traditions in its practice. Ironically, at least in America, despite my thinking that this is more arbitrary, seems to produce somewhat more static results but will change over longer periods of time, possibly because tradition and societal norms change slowly over time. As Michael Malice says, "Conservatives are progressives driving the speed limit." Still, despite being more static, they don't seem to be any closer to achieving more coherent arguments. Many are still against gay rights; they see the Middle East as people filled with barbaric people, even though we initiated and funded wars in the region; they look at sex workers as bad people, to be put behind bars despite being unable to articulate anyone's rights being specifically violated. Each of these has varied somewhat over time. Young conservatives are increasingly ambivalent toward homosexuality compared to their elders, as is has moved more mainstream into the public eye and more established as normal civilized behavior. Neoconservatives have been vanishing from the ranks of the conservatives, as we see Trump's relatively antiwar rhetoric during his campaign be more accepted. Many conservatives are likely still against sex work, but I predict that over the next generation, younger conservatives will begin to relax on their stance against that as well, at least policy-wise. Again, this is because the civilization-barbarism axis is inherently arbitrary, based on the norms and traditions, whether those norms and traditions are just or not.
Perhaps I'm biased here, but the libertarians' axis is the only one that appears to have any kind of concrete principle, including a built-in metric to determine the ethics of a situation. And this is why libertarians tend to be the most principled with positions that don't change much and yet, seem to be very much ahead of the curve. When it does change, it's typically still within the confines of its ethical structure, but our understanding of human nature or science has evolved. Libertarians have always been for gay rights because they don't aggress against others when they consensually have same-sex relationships. Libertarians have always been against the drug war because drug users don't infringe upon other people's rights when they do drugs. Libertarians have always been against the abuse of power by the police because they initiate force upon otherwise peaceful people. Libertarians have been on the correct side of each of those issues for decades, while progressives have started catching up to some of them, and conservatives finally starting to move in this direction. I'm not saying the libertarian axis is perfect. Abortion is a hot button topic among libertarians because it can be argued along the axis from multiple perspectives. A pro-life libertarian may say a fetus is a living person that deserves its right to be protected; conducting an abortion is initiating violence against a baby. A pro-choice libertarian may say a woman owns her own body so forbidding abortions is initiating force upon someone's will to do with their own body as they please. An evictionist libertarian (if you're not already familiar with libertarianism, you may not have heard of this before) may say, nobody may kill a baby since that initiates aggression upon it, but a woman cannot be forced to provide for it, so you may only evict the baby from the woman's body, but not kill it. And then there's every argument in between (and possibly beyond) those positions. However, this is not a failure of the axis. In each one of those arguments, they are strictly argued within the narrow framework of the axis. This is a failure of humans not being able to reach a consensus of the start of life, protection of rights, and the weight of rights. This is what makes in-house libertarian arguments so much more interesting to me than others.
Interestingly, it seems to me that inherently, the libertarian and progressive axes seem to have quite some overlap to the point of being nearly identical. Victims could be seen as the coerced, and oppressors be seen as the coercer. The one extremely important distinction is that the progressive axis lacks the metric of who is a victim and who is an oppressor, which is fulfilled by the libertarian axis. The libertarian axis is essentially the progressive axis with a built-in ethical system to figure out who is the victim and who is the oppressor. Equally as interesting is that although conservatives' axis has nearly nothing to do with the libertarian axis to the point of being completely noncoplanar, the policies of conservatives and libertarians currently are closer together than the more closely linked axes of the libertarians and progressives (I am intentionally not saying Democrat and Republican, here). It's likely that this is only because America has strong roots in classical liberalism, a subset of the libertarian umbrella. Since classical liberalism is the tradition in this country, conservatives observe this, but not always because of its inherent voluntary-coercion fundamentals, but that classical liberalism is viewed as a tradition representative of civilized society.
Kling provides his own examples of situations where each axis shines over the others. I see where he's coming from, but I ultimately disagree with him. Even though the first edition was originally published recently, in 2017, his examples did not age well.
His example of where the progressives' axis shines is the Civil Rights Movement. He contends that the best framework to view this was on a victim-oppressor axis, where minorities, primarily black people, were victims. While yes, this is a pretty good topic where it shines, the oppressor part is not quite as clear. Some progressives today will claim it's all whites, even though there were many whites that argued and fought for equal protection. Some will recognize that it's the Jim Crow laws. Kling mentions that conservatives like Goldwater and libertarians like Milton Friedman had worse takes. Sure, Goldwater's states' rights argument to keep Jim Crow on a local level is no good, but I disagree that Friedman had a worse take. Friedman, as noted in the book, suggested that freedom of association had a more important role to play and would help cultivate more peace instead of pent up animosity underneath. Judging the state of affairs today, he was probably more correct than Kling gave him credit for. Consider where the left is now, pushing for a return to Jim Crow style laws with policies that hurt a wide range of people, including minorities, to help (but not really) certain other minorities. With a victim-oppressor axis, there is no real guiding principle to guide the person toward solutions that result in fewer victims. Even some of the most evil atrocities in history like the Holocaust, the Holodomor, or the Cultural Revolution, can be justified using the victim-oppressor axis. Focusing on the Holocaust, in the Weimar Republic following World War I, people saw Jews doing much better than others during the massive economic downturn. They claimed that Jews were keeping the rest of the people down and therefore, they were oppressing everyone else. Sure, you can claim they were wrong in labeling Jews as the oppressors and you'd be right, but you can say the same about the Woke Left labeling all white people and males as oppressors these days, whether or not they actually oppressed anyone. This leads to people on "the wrong side" getting murdered and people on "the right side" saying they're not sad a "fascist" was murdered, even though the person has had no fascist tendencies. The libertarian voluntary-coercion axis, while you can also say people can falsely accuse Jews of utilizing coercion, the standard to bear is much higher and much more specific. We see the left today utilizing extremely broad definitions of oppression, but coercion must be shown as a person actually initiating force upon someone else. Even if they are able to falsely claim coercion, the retaliation end also has a much higher standard. In the libertarian axis, a balance must be made between the violation and the response. If one is proven to have stolen something from another, the person aggressed against cannot respond by shooting them in the back a few days later, as that would be an escalation, or in other words, initiation of new aggression. Likewise, even if Jews in the Weimar Republic unfairly took advantage of others, it is an absolutely unacceptable response to throw them in a gas oven. We have seen recently, particularly on college campuses when controversial figures are scheduled to speak, the violence stemming from assumed oppression shows the victim-oppression axis has little standard to speak of for the response.
For conservatives, he used the example of rising urban crime in the 1970s. This one aged even worse than the prior example, and as a libertarian, Kling should have known this was a bad example to use. Much of the Thin Blue Line parading that led to more and more police power that both Republicans and Democrats raced to give them late in the 20th century is what led to a culture of police violence. The drug war, along with militarized police, no-knock raids, and qualified immunity all led to many innocent people being killed. Since there is no real metric along the civilization-barbarism axis to determine a solid ethical course of action moving forward, the response by conservatives to this has led to bad outcomes, even if it solved some others in the process. By contrast, the libertarian axis is the only one that has a sustainable outlook, where criminals initiating aggression is bad, and at the same time, the police initiating aggression, even if doing so legally like a court-approved drug raid, is bad. To libertarians, tipping the scales in the ranks of police to protect bad behavior is a pretty obvious way to achieve worse police behavior, but not so much to conservatives.
He concludes with the third example of libertarians being the best on marijuana legalization, which libertarians have been on the correct side on for likely well longer than the Libertarian Party has been around, whereas the left has only really come around in the past decade or two. This is kind of a "duh" point, but he should have indicated that the libertarians are even better at it than just marijuana. The axis would make any libertarian conclude that not just marijuana, but rather all drugs, should be legal. As far as I know, progressives are only now starting to move toward mushroom legalization and only in a very limited scope. In a few years for psilocybin and probably decades for other harder drugs, it will be proven, yet again, that libertarians have been way ahead of the curve.
The three-axis model seems to go a long way to explaining why it seems like progressives and conservatives tend to play fast and loose with principles. It's because their thought, or at least their discourse, involves axes that are fundamentally ambiguous. Labeling all black people as victims makes it much more difficult to hold Obama's feet to the fire when he starts and escalates wars against numerous other countries. One very well shouldn't engage in victim-blaming, right? On the flip side, labeling US military as bastions of civilization makes it difficult to criticize even the politicians for engaging in wars they think of as barbaric, even when those very people were funded and taught by the United States military. Libertarians are the only political group of people that have been consistently anti-war. Certain progressives have been good on this front, but unfortunately, they seem to be in the distant minority.
While his fundamental axes model is a brilliant insight into political discourse and has altered the way I think about political differences, I think these omissions are extremely important distinctions. I think Kling either whiffed on it or he wanted to avoid antagonizing any particular group to attract more eyes to the book. I do think his primary goal to get people to start talking to each other and actually understand each other is a noble and important goal. Whether it was worth omitting the above to achieve this end, I'm not so sure.
