It is thrive-survive. The left thinks in terms of what it will take to thrive, and the right thinks in terms of what it will take to survive.
What he is trying to do is explain why the two tribes believe what they do. My goal with the three-axis model is to explain why they communicate as they do. My objective differs a bit from Scott’s although they are close. I think that the tribes have nuanced reasons for believing what they believe, but when they are beating tribal drums, the signals fall along my three axes.
Anyway, here is a sentence from his post:
I despair of any theory that will tell me why school choice is a rightist rather than a leftist issue
Pointer from a commenter on Bryan Caplan’s post.
Suppose that both sides now believe that the left controls the public schools. Then I think it becomes easy to explain the partisan pattern. To put this another way, if most teachers and school boards were proponents of right-wing views, I think that a reversal on school choice would be highly probable.
In terms of Scott’s single-axis model, the fact that the left controls public schools may cause the left to deduce that public schools are the best hope for providing students with the tools that they need to thrive, and that taking students out of public schools only subjects them to inferior models. Conversely, the right may believe that public schools are ruining the character of young people, and the only way for society to survive is to make alternatives available to as many students as possible.
For explaining school choice, you need look no further than tribalism. As soon as you believe that the public schools are brainwashing children for one tribe or the other, that will strongly influence whether you want your children in them or not.
Excuse me, I said “your children”. I should have said, “everyone’s children”.
That last paragraph fails the gut-check test.
The left’s communication about the problem with school choice is all about survival: if students can leave bad schools and take their funding with them, those bad schools will get worse, and the students who are stuck in them won’t “survive”.
The right’s communication about the need for school choice is all about thriving: students are more likely to thrive if they can choose their school.
So, from a “what do they talk about/focus on” perspective, in this case the right is all about thriving and the left about survival.
What’s more, I’d go farther and say that in general the left’s redistributionism is all about survival – “here’s what we have, how can we distribute it so the fewest people starve?” – and the right’s economics are all about thriving – “how can we organize so that we have more stuff?”
I wouldn’t want to generalize the point, only to say that the mapping of left/right to thrive/survive isn’t resonating for me.
Having read the referred article, I can now amend my comment above.
The article suggests that leftism involves a presumption that society and the individual will thrive regardless of decisions made. Thus, for example, it’s okay to tax the shit out of lucky producers and hand out the money to the needy/our cronies/whoever, because society will thrive regardless.
Rightism is based on a presumption that the whole system is hanging by a thread. It’s okay to let people go without, because if we tax the producers the whole system will collapse, and we’ll all go without.
School choice then maps just fine. The left feels, essentially, that optimizing education is unnecessary: society and the kids will thrive regardless. The right thinks that optimizing education is essential: without it, the kids will fall into poverty.
However, the article kind of falls apart on environmentalism/religion. Global Warming is a visceral issue for the left. It’s also a “the whole thing is hanging by a thread” issue, which the theory holds is right-ist. The article has to spin that by arguing that it’s not really about that, it’s really about status. In a world that will always thrive, you look for ways to gain status rather than accumulate wealth – and “caring” is a way to gain status. Fine – but what about that “hanging by a thread” aspect?
Religion is a visceral issue for the right. The problem is, the article has to spin religion the other way, that it’s a “whole thing is hanging by a thread” issue, and not a way to gain status. But, we all know that religion is closely tied to status in the real world: try being a pillar of the community and a known atheist.
I’m still not buying it.
Regarding environmentalism: there are, indeed, an awful lot of people on the left who are just sure that this whole modern civilization thing is going to come crashing down someday due to resource depletion, pollution, etc.
But then again most of these people aren’t stocking up on canned goods and ammunition. Many of them make a fetish of travelling internationally and eating foreign cuisine, carbon footprints be damned (apparently), so maybe this is just more status-signaling.
Scott anticipates some of the obvious rebuttals, and also gives what I believe is the correct response, so I wont recite them, but simply disagree on how much variance is explained by thrive-survive instincts. I am still convinced, perhaps even more so, that the principle component is self interest. Very few people have a set of preferences that they believe would lead to a net loss in status/wealth/power for them personally.
His strongest point is #2, but how stable is it? I lack the historical knowledge to judge, but I am guessing that, for instance, Asian political groups don’t map well onto Western ones. Also, one could possibly view Israeli Jews vs. American Jews as a natural experiment to test hypo #2. If so, I am guessing it would reject it. Not only are there genetic similarities between the two groups, but often, the same individuals are thrive-ists w.r.t America, and survivalist w.r.t Israel, which is perfectly explained by self interest.
As far as the intersection with the three languages, the barb/civ and liberty axes feel orthogonal to me, while the oppressor/oppressed axis falls squarely in the thrive-ist camp.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/10/how-much-of-politics-can-be-lined-up-along-one-dimension.html
I think, to make this work, you have to define “self interest” on a just-so basis. When you look at high-income taxpayers vote for left-leaning candidates, and advocate leftist policies, you have to assert that their gain in downside insurance protection (“I know there’s a safety net if I need it”) and/or gain in status (“I’m such a wonderful person, and all my friends look up to me for it”) more than offset the higher taxes they pay. And, when low-income people support right-wing candidates, you have to assert that the potential loss in transfer payments is more than offset by the perceived increase in employment prospects. But, we can’t quantify any of it.
Well, I think the definition is easy, and concrete, but the measurement, is hard. But either way, is the survive/thrive motivation any less just-so?
Your intuition is basically correct.
The Democrats *were* the party of school choice, in the late 19th century. The heart of the issue was whether taxpayer money could be used to support Catholic schools. Catholics were a key D voter group; Rs wanted public schools used to assimilate new immigrants to traditional American protestant values.
Now, in a post Vatican II world, the deepest differences between catholicism and protestantism have now been washed away. The biggest opponents to allowing public school money being used for sectarian religious purposes are now secular Democrats.
It seems the real axis is simply, “Dominate or Resist Domination”.
Or, with more detail, “Your political coalition should Dominate the others, or Resist Domination by them, as regards irreconcilable priors and preferences, and as circumstances relating to the balance of power may require.”
Everything else is rationalization – usually using transcendental justifying narratives or metaphysical mythologies – symbols for communication, and status signalling.
That is, it is pretense. “Dominate, while pretending you are not really Dominating, but instead working toward some holy goal.” Or “Resist Domination, while pretending you are doing something more and greater than merely Resisting Domination, and instead pleading for the exercise of one’s inviolable and inalienable rights.”
If it seems most of the time the right is just trying to ‘survive’ (that is, ‘Resist Domination’), then that probably reflects who really holds the strong cards at present in our society, especially when it comes to having power and influence over the state, with its tremendous power to exert coercive domination through compulsory mandates.
And this certainly includes all the other institutions that specialize in the influence of public opinion – which is no less a source of the power to dominate in a society like ours. The left, at present, tends to dominate all those institutions too, and precisely because they are motivated to enter these fields and use them to, “Enlighten, and Morally Uplift” their various target audiences.
School choice is an issue for ‘the right”, for exactly the reason you mention. To resist domination and involuntary indoctrination by ‘the left’, which owns the institution.
In fact, it is obvious to any unbiased observer that it is utterly impossible to make any logically consistent and coherent reconciliation of various positions associated with ‘the right’ or ‘the left’.
But the Dominate-Resist Domination axis explains it all perfectly well, and it seems to have some common-sense roots in fundamental patterns of human social behavior.
Don’t think so. The right’s support for a strong military, strong police force, and strong morals laws (drugs, prostitution, gambling, “deviant” sex) is all high on the “dominate” axis, while the left’s general opposition to the same things are low on that axis.
On the other hand, the left’s support for high taxation, a strong regulatory state, nationalization of this and that, and legal restrictions on undesirable speech, are high on the “dominate” axis…
You should distinguish between the core set of preferences, interests, and priors which define the nexus-of-commonality that forms the basis of a particular coalition, from the coalition’s attitudes towards rival, competitive coalitions and the institutions they can influence and through which they can attempt to dominate each other.
The narratives that the political coalitions use to communicate a purported common-source of their preferences is, in my view, mostly compatible with Kling’s three-axis formulation.
The narratives that the coalitions use to justify their right to control the other, or to escape that control, are simply Dominate-Resist.
So, for example, a moral preference for a special legal status for heterosexual monogamy may be a core common interest that described the attitude of most people in the ‘right’ coalition.
On the one hand, they want to dominate the ‘left’ and force them to abide, and on the other hand, they want to prevent the ‘left’ from dominating them, by, for instance, mandating equal legal status to the point of compelling private businesses to serve nonconforming partnerships, even if it violates their conscience.
The general outline of the preferences have not changed, but in the past, the ‘right’ had the upper hand on this issue, whereas today, the ‘left’ has the upper hand. You may have noticed a not-very-subtle shift in the nature of argumentation and the principles to which they appealed because of the shift in the balance of power.
The institutions they, alternately, sing the highest praises to, and then, decry the corrupt abuses of (and from which they seek liberation), shifted accordingly, and conveniently.
Well, the need to dominate the other team explains the correlation between orthogonal issues, but how does one choose a team to begin with?
That’s the big question, isn’t it?
The answer seems to be, like most things, some combination of Nature and Nurture.
On the Nature side of things, there is a lot of strong evidence that people have some inborn personality traits, predispositions, and preferences, and tendencies to express certain attitudes and behaviors when confronted with a particular social environment.
On the Nurture side, there is the way one is socialized, acculturated, educated (even ‘indoctrinated’), and other things that one is, “brought up to believe.”
But there is also the instinct to align to whatever one’s friends believe, and with what high-status people claim to believe, so that one can maintain friends and achieve higher status merely by claiming adherence to certain beliefs that are high-status in one’s society.
Part of high-status are those source of information which are highly respected and considered authoritative references for the best available guess about ‘The Truth’, reference to which permits one to successfully and persuasively argue ad verecundiam
There is also the important possibility of independent rationality and logical inquiry and assessment of arguments and evidence, but, if one is brutally honest, one should admit that the vast majority of people do not come to the vast majority of their beliefs in this manner.
Obviously, there isn’t much anyone can do about biology in the very short term (though we might ask some questions about demographic trends and differential fertility rates).
If your side dominates the early and higher education systems, the authoritative sources of information, the media, and at least seems to be the side most of the rich, famous, celebrity, cool, smart, and otherwise successful or high-status people are on, then you will appear to be the strong horse, and you will have very little trouble recruiting people to your cause.
Parents, and different degrees of isolation from mainstream society, can play an enormous role in countering this influence and implanting lasting resistance to these social pressures, but even so, as soon as parental influence is out of the picture and a full-court-press is initiated on every other factor, it’s not uncommon to see rapid and dramatic swings in a young adult’s outlook.
We call that experience ‘college’.
In one of those essays, Scott points to some research suggesting that when it comes to forming coalitions or tribes, ideas trump race. Both conservatives and liberals expressed greater reservations about their children marrying someone of a different political orientation than a different race. I find that interesting, in terms of what it suggests about human evolutionary history. How would Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene interpretation explain that, assuming it’s correct? Does it suggest that competition within tribes (and I mean actual hunter-gatherers here) was just as important as competition between tribes, which would maybe serve to weaken kinship loyalties, or does it simply mean that being on the winning team is that damn important, so screw cousin Jerry if he doesn’t want to get on board with our team?
What would Jonathan Haidt say, too?
Then again, this is just based on survey data, so social desirability bias maybe distorting the results completely.