Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

TLP on BLM

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Matthew Gagnon writes,

Kling talked about the question of police conduct in dealing with African Americans, which spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, and how each “tribe” thinks about the problem.

“The progressive framing of the issue emphasizes racism, among police and in society as a whole. Progressives put white police, or white society at large, in the role of oppressors, with African Americans in the role of the oppressed,” he wrote.

“The conservative framing of the issue emphasizes the need for order. Conservatives put criminal suspects and unruly demonstrators in the role of barbarian threats and put police in the role of defenders of civilization.”

“The Libertarian framing of the issue emphasizes the need for citizens to be free of police harassment.”

My sense is that the various tribes are behaving true to form these days.

The virus and political alignment

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Joseph C. Sternberg writes,

The oddity is that the left in most of the world has been so intensely critical of Sweden’s experiment. If this model works, it would hold out some hope that the coronavirus could be managed without putting millions of members of the left’s own blue-collar base out of work. Yet the prevailing attitude is less “let them try” and more “excommunicate the heretics.”

I prefer to use the three-axes model. For those of you new to this blog, the model says:

Conservatives like to frame issues in terms of civilization-barbarism, accusing their opponents of being on the side of barbarism.

Progressives like to frame issues in terms of oppressors-oppressed, accusing their opponents of being on the side of the oppressors.

Libertarians like to frame issues in terms of liberty-coercion, accusing their opponents of being on the side of (state) coercion.

For conservatives, the easiest way to frame this in civilization-barbarism terms is to cast China in the role of barbarians. President Trump has taken that approach.

Progressives instinctively reacted against this. Early in the crisis, the progressive framing, as articulated by WHO and some American progressives, was to charge that racism was behind the fears of the virus. They saw themselves as heroically fighting against anti-Chinese prejudice.

Since then, the progressive framing has become less clear to me. I have seen, but forgotten to bookmark, a few articles claiming that the virus crisis is harder on minorities because their death rates are higher and harder on women because they bear the burden of caring for children home from school. Those articles would represent oppressor-oppressed framing, but to be honest, I don’t see them as representative of what most progressives are saying at the moment.

For now, I see progressives as focused on claiming President Trump has badly mis-handled the crisis. It seems to me that they place a higher priority on that than on establishing an oppressor-oppressed narrative. Such a narrative may emerge later, perhaps in the report of the investigative commission that many progressives are calling for.

Libertarians are being driven bonkers. Myself included. I don’t have to repeat what I already have said. I see as villains all of those who seem to me to automatically praise activist government regardless of whether it helps while ignoring the possibility that the private sector can adapt effectively.

Of course, libertarians are backfooted by the undeniable fact that there are externalities here. If I behave recklessly, I can endanger others by infecting them or using scarce hospital resources.

Should it be legal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet or for a restaurant to have a smoking section? Many people would say “no.” Libertarians would be inclined to say “yes.” There is some of the same division over whether or not you should be allowed to eat in a restaurant these days. And libertarians are not winning the argument.

FEE tests the three-axes model

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[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
The Foundation for Economic Education has published a report on its “youth education and audience research” project. Part of that project tested the three-axes model. FEE developed didactic stories, such as a city taking property from a small-business owner to give it to a hotel chain. They then tuned the narrative of the stories to either emphasize oppressor/oppressed, civilization/barbarism, or liberty/coercion. Tuning helped to increase engagement in the targeted audience.

The 3-Axes Model is a genuinely useful way to understand major differences in the way that Progressives, Conservatives, and Libertarians fundamentally understand and process the world. When presenting messaging to these groups, using the language and themes that each group prefers is a good way to present your message without activating their ideological defenses.

Yuval Levin and TLP watch

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Yuval Levin writes,

The left wants to be sure we do not take injustices in our society for granted—that we see the ways in which the strong oppress the weak, that we take them seriously, that we never walk by them and pretend they don’t exist. . .

The right, on the other hand, wants to be sure we do not take social order for granted—that we see the ways in which our civilization protects us, enriches us, and elevates us, that we never imagine that this is all easy or natural, and never forget that, if we fail to sustain this achievement, we will all suffer for it.

He does explicitly cite The Three Languages of Politics.

The topic of the essay is education policy, and I recommend the entire essay–it is probably the best essay I have read this year. I could have selected many passages to quote.

My inadequate attempt at a summary:

1. For the past 30 years, conservatives have focused on ways to strenthen incentives for K-12 schools to improve test scores.

2. Meanwhile, the left has taken over the culture of education. Conservatives need to fight to reverse this trend.

I think that these are valid points. But the song that runs through my head comes from Carole King. “It’s too late baby, now it’s too late.”

The left takes the social justice mission of education as given. The cultural values that Levin views as important are treated as relics of a racist patriarchy that must be purged from schools.

I would say that conservatives face an uphill battle, with an emphasis on the word battle. Even the ordinarily mild-mannered and moderate Levin concludes,

this adds up to a controversial understanding of the purpose of primary and secondary education, and one that will tend to fan the flames of our culture wars. Whether we like it or not, the next phase of conservative education-policy thinking will need to be willing to do that

The analogy with religion

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Molly Bridgid McGrath writes,

Sacrificial Politics is a system of roles bestowed upon people by those around them, and these roles carry rights, prerogatives, obligations, expectations, and social statuses. For example, with diversity talk we do not just recognize that some people are “different” in the desired way; we do not just include them; and we don’t treat everyone in the room equally. We confer a status on select people as “diverse” and as having the power to bestow “diversity” on the groups they join. Other people get the status of not “diverse.”

You might think of this system of social constructions as a game with four positions and rules for what each position is supposed to do. (i) The Sacred, who are members of an oppressed category, are supposed to represent their category by believing and advocating certain things. (ii) The Pious are the members of the privileged category (e.g., white, male, straight, or cis) who recognize, honor, protect, and avenge the Sacred. (iii) The Profane are the members of the privileged category who are not pious (“profane” just means “outside the temple”). (iv) The Blasphemers commit acts of desecration against the Sacred (sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose) and are marked henceforth as perpetrators of injustice.

It is a long essay on the theme of the religious character of the oppressor-oppressed axis.

Amy Wax follows up with another long essay on how this religion may undermine our legal tradition.

The cult of progressivism dictates that these groups, and any individuals within them, are always victimized by evil attitudes and actions — discrimination, bigotry, racism, sexism — on the part of members of favored groups (mainly white males), or to unfair and unjust societal structures. Regardless of facts, logic, or evidence, any disadvantage or detriments they suffer must be attributed to these causes. To the extent these conditions are legally actionable — and the job of progressivism is to ensure that they are — they must be rectified. Those are the central tenets of the legal department of the cult, which must be indulged without exception. Any aspect or result in the law that is inconsistent with these tenets is designated and banished as evil.

Understanding the dire effects of this brand of progressive wokeness rests on recognizing that the proper operation of our legal system depends on objective, impartial, and intelligible limits on the reach of our laws and the instruments of legal redress, and on respecting longstanding discursive, analytical, and adversarial methods for determining those limits.

To me, these read like very unflattering portrayals of the social justice movement. It is hard to believe that they would pass an ideological Turing test. Yet they strike me as valid.

The UK political extinction event

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William Galston writes
(Link fixed),

Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned as the second coming not of Margaret Thatcher but of Benjamin Disraeli. His pledge of “one-nation Conservatism” means his government will lavish funds on long-neglected parts of central and northern England and on the National Health Service, which he terms a “beautiful idea that represents the best of our country.” In the short term, that means larger deficits; in the longer term, higher taxes. Proponents of limited government—a dwindling band—will be licking their wounds for years.

Note the last sentence in particular. Recently, when I have talked about The Three Languages of Politics, I have just talked about the Progressive oppressor-oppressed axis and the Conservative civilization-barbarism axis. I don’t mention libertarians.

I joke about 2016 being an “extinction event” that wiped out libertarians. Also fiscal conservatives and sane Democrats (like Galston). Libertarianism survives as a scapegoat–it turns out that we have been running the world all along, although we didn’t realize it. We caused the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, etc.

FYI: an event to watch

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Jonathan Rauch, Yuval Levin, and I will be speaking at the AEI Thursday morning, December 12. The topic is “healing our political culture.”

Usually I am pretty modest about these things, but in this case I am going to guarantee that this event will be worth your attention. Make a note to watch it, or at least to check out the archive video.

For some background, you can read recent essays by me and by Jonathan. But the discussion will build from there.

More from the Cato Unbound symposium

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I write,

Unfortunately, we are seeing on campus a form of reductionist progressivism that actually does take the oppressor-oppressed axis as the sole basis for framing issues. The campus justice activists are not only subject to the psychology that inclines us away from Persuasion Mode and toward Demonization Mode. Their very ideology justifies Demonization of dead (and living) white males while treating the values of free speech and open inquiry as tools of oppression.

Jonathan Rauch writes,

Pace Kling, I don’t think “centralized curation of content” and content restrictions are most of what will happen as digital media grapple with antisocial behavior, though we’ll certainly see some of those (and have, and should). More important, and more successful, will be human-machine partnerships and platform redesigns which identify toxic behavior and content and help users avoid them.

There is more at both links. But again, I don’t think that bad actors and factually incorrect posts are the core problem. The core problem is the way otherwise good people behave on social media.