While I found Kling’s idea quite interesting, I should say that in my own mind all three of these values (as well as others) are important. I am a consequentialist libertarian. I start with liberty as the basic building block of good consequences. But one of the features of liberty is that it allows a sophisticated civilization to grow that is of great value. And I also believe that liberty greatly helps to prevent oppression and to help the oppressed of the world. So I care about all of these values, but, as a libertarian, liberty is the basic building block.
I am starting to think that The Three Languages of Politics is the book that everybody understands but nobody gets. The aspect that nobody gets might be termed the difference between cheerleading and analysis.
If you are playing the role of a basketball analyst, you evaluate strategy. You might say, “The Cougars should use a zone. If they get too far behind, they should use a full-court press.”
If you are playing the role of a basketball cheerleader, you recite chants that exalt your team and disparage the opposing team. If you say, “Adam, Adam, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, Bobby can” you are not really talking about strategy for using Adam and Bobby.
The three-axis model is about how we do political cheerleading, not how we do political analysis. Of course, everyone is against oppression, barbarism, and coercion. But when we do political cheerleading, we prefer one axis over the others. And we disparage the other political teams by accusing them of being on the opposite side of our preferred axis.
I would think of this a little differently. I know baseball, so I will go there. Baseball analysts, conventionally, would talk a lot about productive outs, even though the data show that productive outs is bad strategy, because that is what their identity is tied up with. Sabermetric analysts, on the other hand, for decades would ridicule the importance placed on catcher defense because they couldn’t figure out a good way to measure it (they concluded, therefore, that it was worthless). Then some analysts figured it out – and the most shrill of those analysts would find excuses to ignore it. Many of them still do this regarding the concept of chemistry in sports. And they do this because their identity is tied up with that way of thinking about things.
Analysts are always cheerleading. Mike Rappaport thought he was performing analysis as he was cheerleading.
> The three-axis model is about how we do political cheerleading, not how we do political analysis.
Really? I think you’re selling the 3AM short, here. Couldn’t it be how we tell ourselves we are doing political analysis while we are actually, regrettably doing political cheerleading? That is, the language is presumably genuine and heartfelt, not cynically judged saccharine though many such examples present themselves.
> Of course, everyone is against oppression, barbarism, and coercion. But when we do political cheerleading, we prefer one axis over the others. And we disparage the other political teams by accusing them of being on the opposite side of our preferred axis.
This much is broadly true. And Arnold is right that libertarian bloggers exist who do not get it.