I could not help but think “three-axes model” when I read Strangled by Identity, by Rishabh Bhandari and Thomas Hopson. American politics features three concepts of identity, but Americans are rarely clear-eyed about how these differ and disagree. Ethnic identitarians … Continue reading
A commenter writes, There’s one thing I’m still not clear about from the book. You distinguish talk from thought but … many readers do not make this distinction… Three antagonistic framings of issues that the three tribes use in a … Continue reading
Jonah Goldberg writes, At least for a moment, antagonists on either side of polarizing issues could see beyond the epistemic horizon of their most comfortable talking points. Black Lives Matter activists thanked the police for their protection and sacrifice. Conservative … Continue reading
I do not think that the 3-axes model performs as well as usual at interpreting the post-Brexit feelings. But here is a try. Let us treat the vote as an anti-immigrant backlash. That might not be correct, by the way. … Continue reading
A reader asks, how does conservative opposition to Communism (in the second half of the 20th century) fit on the civilization-barbarianism axis? I’m not sure that the Soviet Union or communist China are really thought of as “barbarians”. It seems … Continue reading
Larry Summers writes, It has seemed to me that a vast double standard regarding what constitutes prejudice exists on American college campuses. There is hypersensitivity to prejudice against most minority groups but what might be called hyper-insensitivity to anti-Semitism. The … Continue reading
Scott Alexander has an essay post on tribalism. Read the whole thing. An excerpt: in order to talk about tribes coherently, we need to talk about rallying flags. And that involves admitting that a lot of rallying flags are based … Continue reading
The front page of today’s WaPo has me thinking about this. First, there is the story of the massacre of Christians on Easter in Pakistan.Along the libertarian freedom-vs.-coercion axis, the preferred explanation is blowback. That is intervention by western governments … Continue reading
Catherine Rampell writes, Why not just target the output, rather than some random subset of inputs? We could tax obesity if we wanted to. Or if we want to seem less punitive, we could award tax credits to obese people … Continue reading
The crisis du jour is once again aligning people along the three-axis model. The freedom-coercion axis says that borders should be open. The oppressor-oppressed axis says that people fleeing Syria are oppressed, and anyone who would keep them out is … Continue reading