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 constant intellectual war – the antagonism causing them to represent each issue entirely as one of civilization versus barbarism, or oppressor-victim, or coercion-liberty. This leaves little room for hope as it has nothing to say about what people think: perhaps it’s not simple partisanship but how they really think too.

In theory, I see a distinction between:

1) arriving at an opinion by yourself. Call this private reasoning.

2) justifying your opinion to others. Call this public justification.

I mean for three axes model to apply to (2). But in practice (1) and (2) are so closely related that it is easy to slip into applying the model to (1).

Let’s use an example. Take the travel ban from Muslim countries. Along the oppressor-oppressed axis, what stands out is the fact that many American non-Muslims are wary of Muslims, and to progressives this makes Muslims an oppressed class. For a progressive, this justifies opposing the ban. Along the civilization vs. barbarism axis, what stands out is the threat that Muslim extremism poses to our civilization. For a conservative, this justifies supporting the ban. Along the coercion-liberty axis, what stands out is that the ban coercively deprives innocent people of an important right. For a libertarian, this justifies opposing the ban.

However, I do not wish to say that any person adopts a single-axis reason for supporting or opposing the ban. In fact, a person who self-identifies as progressive and who takes a progressive position on many issues might, for some reason, support the ban. Our tribal axis plays a role in private reasoning, but it is not everything.

When I say “justifies,” I mean public justification, not private reasoning. In public (i.e., talking with others), a progressive is likely to:

a) make oppressor-oppressed arguments against the ban;
b) view favorably others who use such arguments;
c) accuse supporters of the ban of being oppressors

In fact, even if a progressive for some reason had decided to support the ban, that progressive still would be receptive to (a) – (c). With regard to (c), the hypothetical ban-supporting progressive probably would feel a need to say, “Yes, I know there are many Islamophobes out there who support the ban, but my reason for supporting the ban is not Islamophobia.”

It is easier to escape your preferred axis privately than in public. When you are among members of your own tribe, it is almost impossible to escape from your (tribe’s) preferred axis.

I hope that helps.

He sketches the main ideas of the book, and then he uses the three-axes model to discuss the blind spots of each tribe. For example,

Liberals first. In their eagerness to empathize with the victim, they can turn the victim into an object rather than an independent actor. Poor people are so oppressed in the liberal view, they don’t just have limited agency to choose and live life in meaningful ways. They have no agency. They are simply objects manipulated by powerful people around them.

Indeed. I would say that the oppressor-oppressed axis attaches too little agency to the individuals in the oppressed categories. Also, it attaches too much agency to the individuals put into the oppressor category. Progressives prefer to explain market outcomes as deliberate exploitation rather than the operation of supply and demand.

I would say that conservatives have a blind spot when abandoning tradition can enhance civilization rather than threaten it. Think of abandoning the tradition of Jim Crow in the South.

Concerning libertarians, Roberts writes,

We often romanticize the power of economic freedom. We struggle to imagine that some people are poorly served by markets, that some transactions involve exploitation of ignorance and that the self-regulation of markets can fail. In our zeal to de-romanticize government, we often ignore the good that government does especially in cases where freedom might perform badly. Our worst mistake is to defend the freedom of business to do what it will in situations where government has hampered or destroyed the feedback loops of profit and loss that make economic freedom successful.

I get what he is driving at with the last sentence–the problem sometimes called crony capitalism–but it comes across as more of a humble-brag than a blind spot.

What might I see is the libertarian blind spot? Perhaps it is the tendency to view coercion as a binary phenomenon. We speak as if you either are coerced by the government or you make a free choice. Perhaps it is more reasonable to think in terms of a continuum. There are many government policies that people do not experience as horribly coercive. Traffic regulations are one obvious example. There are market situations where people do not sense that they have free choice–remember the guy who got thrown off a plane by the airline? And what if a gay couple could not find any convenient baker willing to bake them a wedding cake?