Read the whole essay. He views the Left as animated by egalitarianism. This is close to my thesis that progressives use the language of oppressor-oppressed. Some excerpts:

The Left shares the suspicion of government power at the heart of classical liberalism, but only up to a point. Individuals need rights to protect them from overweening government intrusion, true, but government power in the proper hands can do good, and indeed the proper hands must wield the power of government in order to do the good of pursuing equality.

I have written that progressives believe that what their goals require is sufficient moral authority. Getting government to do good things is just a matter of summoning enough moral authority.

Few on the Left are willing to grant that their critics are likewise reasonable — in other words, that the Left has anything to gain from taking its critics seriously. That leaves the Left in search of an explanation for why it hasn’t won over its critics. The Left has three main explanations. The first is ignorance, in the sense that its critics lack sufficient knowledge of how society could be improved and why what the Left seeks would constitute improvement. For this category, there may be hope in the form of remedial education. The second is stupidity; its critics are simply unable to understand superior wisdom when they face it. There is little hope for them, alas. The third is venality — that its critics know better but seek to defend their position of personal privilege anyway. The only way to deal with these critics is to defeat them politically.

Lindberg notices, as I do, that this is not the New Left of the 1970s, with its revolutionary rhetoric and anti-establishment ideology.

The Left’s ambition is to obtain majority political support — no more, no less. The Revolution has been canceled. “The system is the solution.” The Democratic Party is the sole legitimate representative of the aspirations of Left 3.0.

Lindberg also notices the hard-line stance of today’s left. This may be the key quote of the essay:

The notion of an invincibly center-right electorate was anathema to the emerging Left 3.0. A key moment in its reconciliation with the Democratic Party was the latter’s abandonment of policies designed with a center-right electorate in mind. For the foreseeable future, the party would lay claim to the center not on the basis of adopting positions to appease moderates and independents, but on the basis of winning more than 50 percent of the vote on election day for candidates congenial to Left 3.0 and garnering majority public support for positions congenial to Left 3.0.

I see this hard-line stance evident in the progressive’s resistance to any suggestion for reducing government spending. You cannot suggest cuts in the short run, because that would mean austerity. You cannot suggest trimming entitlement promises, because Social Security is sacred and control over health care spending is a job for technocrats.

As an aside, possibly related, I find Venezuelans’ grief at the passing of Hugo Chavez to be fascinating and frightening. If nothing else, it suggests that earning popular support does not vindicate a politician’s wisdom or benevolence.

Readers suggested that I check out these two posts:

1. James Pethokoukis on Arthur Brooks. Brooks writes,

the core problem with out-of-control entitlements is not that they are costly—it is that the impending insolvency of Social Security and Medicare imperils the social safety net for the neediest citizens. Education innovation and school choice are not needed to fight rapacious unions and bureaucrats—too often the most prominent focus of conservative education concerns—but because poor children and their parents deserve better schools.

Brooks appears to be suggesting that conservatives adopt the oppressor-oppressed language when talking about entitlements and about school choice. My guess is that this will not be successful. I do not think that most ordinary people respond so much to the rhetoric of the three axes. And I don’t think that political elites can be talked into changing sides with different rhetoric.

Most of the energy in political discussions goes toward closing the mind of people on your own side. This seems to work, because elites on all sides are pretty closed-minded.

Of course, if you ask me what might be successful for conservatives, I do not have an answer.

2. Scott Alexander writes,

My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment…. Leftism wins over time because technology advances over time which means societies become more secure and abundant over time.

Read the whole thing. I think there is a little bit there that is correct. That is, I think that conservativism tends to include a tendency to worry that we could go down the tubes. In terms of the civilization-barbarism axis, conservatives see many routes back to barbarism.

However, I do not think that either progressives or conservatives would recognize themselves in Alexander’s mirror. Progressives also can be pessimistic–about the distribution of income and the environment, for example. And conservatives are optimistic along some dimensions.

My goal with the three-axis model is not to explain away someone else’s beliefs. Instead, the goal is to describe political beliefs in a way that reflects how each side talks about issues, particularly as they reach a settled opinion.

A reader familiar with the three-axes model asks,

The oppressed would seem to be victims of violence, but wouldn’t that make criminals the oppressors? How do hunters, recreational shooters, and the NRA end up being the bad guys?

1. The progressive model requires a villain who belongs to some sort of privileged class. Criminals do not fit the bill.

2. Hunting and recreational shooting are not approved activities for city-dwellers. Rural folks need to start acting like normal people and taking Zumba classes, going to restaurants run by celebrity chefs, and spending more time on smart phones.

Check out this story. The phrase “something really depraved is rising in this country” sounds much more like the conservative “civilization vs. barbarism” axis than the libertarian “freedom vs. coercion” axis.

He writes,

These ideas are placed into public discourse via a sophisticated conservative communications machine: think tanks, messaging experts,Grover Norquist’s weekly meetings at Americans for Tax Reform and across the country, training institutes, booking agencies, talk radio, Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, chambers of commerce, bloggers and the rest. This network puts those words and their frames, both political and moral, into the brains of a huge number of our citizens.

In my forthcoming e-book, I point out that each political tribe puts forth a narrative that blames the existence of the other tribe on a conspiracy of this kind. Lakoff lists the standard villains from the progressive point of view. For conservatives, it is “Hollywood” and the “mainstream media” that are to blame for people’s false consciousness.

In fact, Lakoff is most famous for Moral Politics, in which he argues that the difference between conservatives and progressives is that conservatives use a “strict-father” morality to evaluate public policy and progressives use a “nurturant parent” model. Never does Lakoff recognize that equating government-citizen and parent-child is a mistake.

Libertarians think that the false consciousness of people comes from academics such as Lakoff. For decades, we have hoped to change the narrative within universities.

A while back, John Goodman wrote,

No one questions why we provide help to people who are sick or disabled. Or why we provide benefits to people who are temporarily out of work and looking for a job. But why subsidize people who want to play golf?

The short answer is that the elderly are treated as an oppressed class. They receive “senior discounts,” for example. (To be fair, in some cases this is price discrimination, intended to maximize revenue.)

From a conservative point of view, Social Security undermines the incentive to work, and not just for seniors. It is funded by the payroll tax. It also undermines the incentive to save, because people count on Social Security instead. Thus, Social Security goes against an important value for civilization–deferred gratification.

Are the elderly today truly an oppressed class? I think it would be hard to argue that case. However, the same might be said for many of the oppressed classes as defined by the progressive model. All unionized workers, including public-sector workers making more than the median income? All women?

One issue that I have not addressed in the oppressor-oppressed axis is how these classes come to be defined.