Responding to me, he writes,
Arnold Kling notes that Progressives generally see the world as divided between oppressors and the oppressed. (I would add a third group, the Guardians or the political class). Some social groups are oppressors, others their victims, the oppressed. The job of the Guardians is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” or more generally, help the oppressed in their endless struggle against their oppressors. In this view of the world, speech may just be a weapon used in several ways by the oppressors to subjugate the oppressed. It directly attacks the dignity of the oppressed. Oppressors cast doubt on the harms to the dignity of the oppressed. The speech of the oppressor justifies a society marked by oppression. He demands recognition of a universal self that excludes the lived experiences of the oppressed. In this world with these harms, censorship is not really an abuse of power. It is an obligation of the Guardians, a necessary task for the good ruler. It is this view of politics – oppressed versus oppressor – that transforms identity into censorship.
I think that the only response to this is to reject identity politics. The only version of equality that I can support is equality under the law. Any other attempt to manufacture equality is seems likely to undermine equality under the law. I am not saying that equality under the law can be achieved in some perfect, ideal sense. But let’s stick with that as the goal. Treat people as individuals, not as members of oppressor or oppressed classes.
Perfect.
Run for President already.
Two comments on Sample’s piece.
(1) People who believe they have a right to free speech on social media do not have a strong survival instinct. 93% of employers check a job candidate’s social media profile mostly for derogatory information. It is unclear the extent to which a profile conforming to the hiring manager’s political preferences is used as either an advantage or a screen. And anything on social media is already in the government’s hands and will be able to be used against you by any prosecutor or even by the IRS in targeting audits. Tyler Cowen recently advised against sharing
continued…sorry…slip of the keystroke
Tyler Cowen recently warned against sharing your DNA geneaology results with online services ostensibly because it can be used against you and your family and there is very little reward to tradeoff for that risk. The same goes for social media and answering pollster’s phone calls. The information that you share can and may be used against you. And when The Guardians decide that you are a threat or at least it would be politically advantageous to target you, bad things will happen. In nominally free countries like the UK and Canada and around the world, cops are kicking down doors in the dead of night to arrest speech code violators. And this will happen more and more in the US in the coming years.
(2) Libertarianism has always been fractured and splintered but the relatively recent movement in the allegedly libertarian DC think tanks towards an extreme right progressive orthodoxy renders the label “libertarian” nonsensical. Just as the once meaningful label “liberal” was appropriated by the hard left, so too now has the hard-right anti-democratic progressive wing appropriated the label “libertarian.” I increasingly think of Mercatus, Cato, and Niskanen as nests for neo-Salazarists who want to dictate their little doctrine of moral niceties from supranationalist seats of power and strip away all local and individual autonomy. They have utopia in mind and are not going to let any processes get in the way. Sad.
Arnold,
If radical individualism was enough to stop these people, don’t you think it would have worked by now? Libertarians and others have been preaching “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” for a long time, but it doesn’t seem to stick. Even MLK basically rejected individualism and equality before the law as anything but a temporary tactic for advancement of his people (he was as much a moderate hating SJW as any other which is why he was so unpopular at the time of his death, we retroactively claimed he believed whatever we wanted about him).
I can’t think of any instances of this actually working. Even a place that does it alright like Singapore has a unified dominant ethnic majority that basically outlaws rebel-rousing.
Hasn’t individualism been tried in the market and failed the market test?
A more accurate model might be “offsetting power blocks”. If the Group X and Group Y are both gunning for their own groups interest openly, perhaps they can negotiate along power politics lines as people always have. Some degree of “identity neutral zone” and legal procedurals may indeed be a useful negotiated Schelling point. But that can only hold if each group understands that “get out of line and the whole thing collapses in a way you might not like”.
I think to an extent this is already the case, and the Guardians have decided to secede from Group X and form their own group, Group Z, which allies with Group Y to loot Group X. Sure, they’ve got some ideology to justify it, but at the end of the day they are looting Group X, throwing Group Y a few bones, and living high on the hog off their share of the spoils. I think this power dynamic, not ideology, is the main factor.
So what should Group X do? What they shouldn’t do is fruitlessly act as a bunch of individuals against the combined might of Group Y and Group Z, who mercilessly exploit them while they beg to adopt some new individualist ideology when ideology is only ever the excuse for power, not the driver of power.
If they really want to achieve some individualistic equilibrium they have to convince Groups Y and Z that not agreeing to that will result in a worse outcome for them. This threat must come from strength and be credible. That’s the most important factor. Otherwise, they are just weaklings who can be exploited and they can’t fight back so who cares what they want.
Interesting point. I’m reminded that slave traders raided areas without strong governments capable of protecting their people.
Forming ‘offsetting group power blocks’ just leads to a perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes. Individualism (there’s nothing radical about Kling’s position, it’s pretty mild I’d say) is the only social convention capable of averting that conflict in the long run, and as an ideal it’s been wildly successful compared to the alternative, which has generally tended to yield perpetual inter-ethnic and inter-national strife.
“social convention capable of averting that conflict in the long run”
And how would it be enforced? What happens when one side learns it can violate that social convention with impunity. Racking up advantages for itself without any effective pushback? The convention will break down.
“wildly successful compared to the alternative”
Where has it been successful? Most multi-ethnic empires have been wracked by division and tension. The only “successful” ones I know of have a single ethnic that forms a dominant super majority (the way the Han rule Singapore).
I don’t see any successful examples of this working. If it did then endorsing it would be easy (its certainly aesthetically pleasant).
Sure Singapore has a very group but that is one small island state and they depend upon the hub of Asian trade. And aren’t Chinese ethnic differences significant in that country. (Although they have long term struggle since 1800 and really only now do they come across as successful.)
1) In terms of the US, we have always had a ‘new’ ethnic group to blame problems on. No Irish allowed? German-Am communities had issues 1914 – 1940. I told my Hi-Am neighbors that next generation they will in the US long enough to complain about the next group Immigrants invading the US. (Phillipino?)
2) For all the problems of the EU, let us remember the good things. The value of increased is huge (think of any state self-sufficient in all products) and now of the Western powers of Europe has started another European war in 74 years. When has that happened?
3) When explaining the Cold War victory with my teenage son, I ‘argued’ that the Domino theory only worked once in the Cold War era and that was Japan Inc. So the other Asian nation saw Japan was successful with capitalism and followed suit (including China) and have been successful. It was a military victory but economic one why the West won.
4) Again, one interesting aspect of the modern US, is minority groups are succeeding in this nation. Asian-Americans are doing extremely well and both Af-Am & Hi-Am are better than ever in our history. I do wish SJW take this into account.
Even more telling, is that black immigrants from some African and the Caribbean countries are doing better as a group than are whites as a group. Why does institutional racism / white supremacy / white privilege impact American-born blacks but not immigrant blacks?
Well, there haven’t really been many large multi-ethnic (including a high functioning and low functioning ethnic groups together) countries that are well functioning that I can think of. The closest modern example one can get is a city state.
If you want a larger country Malaysia right across the water from Singapore has 32 million people. It’s Malay majority represses its (successful) Chinese minority in a way that would make SJWs blush.
In Singapore three ethnic groups vote overwhelmingly for their own political parties. Because the Chinese are a supermajority and don’t divide their vote to a significant degree, their party, the PAP, has remained in power this whole time.
I’m not quite sure what the rest of your points mean in this context.
Sample’s mentioning ‘Guardians’ reminded me of Jane Jacobs’s Systems of Survival with it’s ‘Guardian’ and ‘Commerce’ syndromes. Anyone see a mapping from the three languages to the two syndromes? On first glance it appears that her commerce syndrome maps to libertarians very directly, while about the best I can do with the others is to see conservatives and progressives as two different instantiations of the guardian syndrome where progressive guardians see themselves as the protectors of the poor and middle-classes against the ultra rich while conservatives see themselves as the protectors of the civilized against the barbarians.
On a tangential point, where do left/right populists fit in the Kling political taxonomy? I’m thinking that the oppressor/oppressed slot works best. Instead of the progressive “other” / white male conflict, though, populists see themselves as the oppressed and the oppressor as any or all of the following: elites, corporations, Jews, globalists, the 1%
This is where I struggle with Kling’s Three Languages too, that is, where do you slot in Trump et al.
The model I use in my head is to think of Kling’s Three Languages as belonging to a group I call Golden Rulers. All three consist of elites that believe strongly in the Golden Rule (treat others as you wish to be treated) and Positive Sum systems but each identifies an issue so destructive that you need to break the Golden Rule in order to serve the Greater Good. Progressives think oppression/exploitation is such a significant problem that you can/must violate freedom of speech and/or economic freedom in order to minimize the harm. Conservatives think “degenerate” behavior in indivuals is such a serious problem and contagious (in a bad apple kind of way) that laws are needed to curb such behavior as drug use, gambling, and sexual promiscuity. Libertarians think Coercion is such a problem that they want to create term limits for politicians or mandate a gold standard so that politicians/technocrats can’t deflate away accumulated wealth.
Trump and Brexiters belong to Zero Summers. They see everything in terms of winners and losers in a zero sum game. Its only through the lens of Zero-Sum games that I can makes sense of a Republican party under Trump simultaneously supporting trade wars (mercantilism), and blue collar labor workers (traditionally left-wing/Marxist). Everything policy under Trump is truly “America First” in a narrow Zero Sum interpretation while all three Golden Ruler groups/languages understand that each policy is negative sum in the long term.
This is where I struggle with Kling’s Three Languages too, that is, where do you slot in Trump et al.
That’s easy — Trump is a conservative. Mercantilism has been a conservative position in the past. Repeal of Corn Law tariffs was opposed by conservatives. Smoot and Hawley were both Republicans. Everything old is new again. In Kling’s system, Trumpian conservatives support tariffs because (like the wall) they are supposed to protect us against foreign barbarians. Free-trade (along with easy immigration and a general openness) is naturally a classical liberal position, not a conservative one.
Hmmmm… that is the first explanation that uses Kling’s definition of conservative as pro-civilization/anti-barbarian that I can almost believe. I tend think of conservatives as supporting proper/appropriate behavior of individuals and that is an unforgiving lens to view Trump through 🙂
I think your Mexicans==barbarians therefore Trump==KlingianConservative formulation is creative/witty but I remain unconvinced. Protectionist is not the same as conservative in my mind.
I think a surprising number of what is described here as the Guardian glass actually believe they themselves are among the oppressed. They will of course concede their white or male privilege, but still manage to think, despite being at the 90th income percentile, that they are oppressed by the ‘super rich’ or that because they’re not religious they constantly have the boot of the religious right on their neck. Even while living very comfortable lives many manage to partake of the persecution complex themselves. For some, it’s that disposition rather than a savior complex that draws them to the movement.
I think that the only response to this is to reject identity politics.
Of course, when has identity politics not existed in our past? Successful political campaigns have to ‘sell’ their campaign narrative to voters and often that means appealing emotionally to voters which often appeals to their identity. And certain identities change over time.
1) So Reagan 1980 campaign against ‘welfare queens’ which was a form of successful attack identity politics at the time. It was a great appeal to WWC in 1980 who moved enough Republican for Reagan victory.
2) And identity politics can be used in a positive fashion. Didn’t Reagan use identity politics of the Moral Majority to ensure his 1980 Primary and election success? The message of ‘Good Religious Christian’ would vote for the Republican. And Barack Obama Positive Diversity was successful in 2008.
(Note history way underestimates how inevitable Reagan victory in 1980. Not only did Reagan have to get over being a very conservative Republican in 1980, he had the issue of being a bad actor most of his Hollywood career. And the Moral Majority support did a bunch to ensure Reagan took the 1980 Primary over Bush and protected the first divorced President could beat the very religious Jimmy Carter in 1980. Although the straw that broke the country back was Iran Hostage Crisis.)
You could say that identity politics is bad when it is dividing Americans into different identity groups and pitting them against each other. In theory you could run a unifying campaign of shared national identity, which a lot of politicians try to do. But I think the more common usage of the term is for the divisive kind of identity politic – which is fine by me, we need a term that refers to that exclusively.
What do you call a woman with three Social Security cards, 30 wigs, a Cadillac, a Lincoln and a Chevy? Chicago newspapers called her the welfare queen. Sometimes she called herself a heart surgeon. Sometimes she called herself a psychic.
She got rich off insurance fraud, welfare fraud, and kidnapping. She stole children.
Identity politics doesn’t come into it until you start making excuses for free-riding by changing the subject. Now her crimes are incidental and her “identity” is all that matters. She had dozens of identities. Her actions are what a healthy society pays attention to.
At Oberlin you raise your status by lying about a clerk in a grocery store. You change the subject from shoplifting to identity politics, irrelevant as it is. But the problem of free-riding is a human universal. Stealing is destructive in any society.
John Sample’s “Guardians” is what I think of as “Philosopher Kings” as described by Plato in The Republic (ancient greek philosophy).
“The Rupublic” is fundamentally anti-democratic and a response to the truly horrific conviction and execution of Plato’s mentor Socrates. To Plato, Athenian democracy was equivalent to mob rules and considering that Socrates was found guilty of “corrupting the minds of the youth” I tend to agree.
The solution to mob-rules-democracy is not incorruptible and super knowledgeable Philosopher Kings but fundamental rights and the rule of law. “Corrupting the minds of the youth” can never be a crime in a system with freedom of expression and laws that enshrine the principles of innocent-until-proven guilty and guilt-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt.
Does identity politics add anything new to the debate?
“The job of the Guardians is to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’ or more generally, help the oppressed in their endless struggle against their oppressors.”
Who gets to decide:
1. Who the oppressed are
2. Who the oppressors are
3. How the oppressed are to be comforted
4. How the oppressors are to be afflicted
5. The point at which the comforted oppressed are no longer oppressed
6. The point at which afflicted oppressors become oppressed
7. The point at which the Guardians become oppressors
The Party!
“I’m from the Guardian class and I’m here to help you.” Sure you are. Every oppressed secretly dreams of being an oppressor. Every oppressor tries to pass himself off as a guardian. Say, what’s the name of that UK newspaper again?
The trouble with rule of law is making it happen in the first place. Somebody has to enforce the law. Enforcement requires force. Force requires a power advantage. I think the only that makes it really work is conscience. The powerful choose to moderate their oppression because they are made to feel guilty. Civility and civic feeling derive from guilt. But not everyone has a conscience.
Power blocs can either be in a perpetual shooting war or a perpetual ceasefire depending on how they approach conflict. If you are much stronger on defense than on offense, but adequate on counterattack, you can engineer a healthy sort of stalemate where everyone gets along despite the ugly facts of human nature.
Civilization is a stalemate between rival factions. The right sort of stalemate: a perpetual ceasefire.
I have adopted a new convention in which I reserve the word “equality” for equality under law, equality in rights, or equal opportunity. For the Social Justice notion of equivalent human characteristics or outcomes I use uniformity, or sameness, or levelling.
Unfortunately, the idea that one has to choose between equality under law and statistical uniformity or aggregate sameness of outcomes for all possible identity groups is incomatible with progressive ideology which holds as a fundamental tenet that such group uniformity of potential is a fact and such outcomeswould obtain naturally and sponteously in the absence of oppression. The immediate implication of this principle – as any progressive will tell you right away – is that one simply cannot “reject identity politics” without tolerating, acquiescing to, or, really, being complicit in that oppression, marking one as an evil enemy of truth, justice, and righteousness.
From that worldview the inescapable logic is that the only alternative to identity politics is bigotry.
As for Samples’ use of “The Guardians”, progressive ideology does not genuinely recognize such a distinct political class but simply insists that it is the obligatory moral mission of all good, right-thinking people and, especially the state through its agents, with whatever means they have available, to fight against oppression and social injustice (and those who would impose it, in particular), and to work to bring about a more perfect and righteous social context. Imagine the Puritan theocracy in New England pursuing their own social goals consistent with their religious ideology. They wouldn’t recognize a class of “guardians” but would understand the achievement of those particular goals as being the duty of all good Christians, some of whom would of course be in the government and possessed of its special authorities and powers, and thus have a resultingly greater responsibility to see to acccomplishment of the mission.
“[P]rogressive ideology… holds… that… group uniformity of potential is a fact and such outcomes would obtain naturally and spontaneously in the absence of oppression.”
This would seem to fundamentally contradict the progressive belief that cultures are different and those differences are good and are even to be celebrated. For example, let’s say that people from culture A value art and creativity more than scientific reasoning, while those from culture B value science over art. Progressives hold that both of these cultures are equally valid. Fine. But then they should not be outraged when culture A produces more artists than culture B and culture B more scientists than culture A.
Equality under the law only deals with how the state must treat individuals. What about individual morality? What about having a personal moral ethos that demands treating other people as equal individuals?
It seems to me that a large part of the social justice movement, whether or not it is tied to aggregate sameness of outcomes (it need not be) is about promoting that personal moral ethos. Not be being “color blind” per se, but by seeking mutual recognition of social nuances that create unequal status, and seeking changes in social norms that rectify those imbalances.
“What about having a personal moral ethos that demands treating other people as equal individuals?”
Please define what that means.
Obviously people are very different along many important dimensions, and it’s perfectly reasonable to treat them differently in consideration of many of those differences.
Social Justice activists certainly aren’t in favor of treating individuals the same if they have engaged in behaviors that badly transgress progressive morality. After all, that’s what deplatforming and calls for purging, termination, etc. are all about. Old Liberals might have gone along with the idea that even nazis get to march and speak. Modern progressives don’t believe that at all.
Yes, but I see PC-ism on all sides.
It just depends on who controls the forum.
There is a lot of censorship by framing and omission.
Libertarian blogs do not spend much time advocating polygamy, or the the right to be a push-cart or truck-vendor, or the need to end property zoning immediately.
But the minimum wage and rent control are evergreen issues! Solar power is for sissies, but the nation’s fuel-ethanol program is lost in the woodwork.
Privatize West Point and Walter Reed Medical Center?
Whenever I see people say something along the lines of, ‘ well we should *all* reject identity politics’ I think they must be blind to reality. The only people who listen are the ones who are already open and good people, treating others fairly and with as little bias as can be expected, while at the same time the ones who need to hear your message are completely closed to it, usually because they lack the metal capacity, sometimes for worse reasons.
As things are the only way to completely remove identity politics is to remove racial/ethnic diversity from the society. Since that is impossible you will either win or you will be subjugated by those who do win. The shift from white, christian america to diverse, non-christian america will get much uglier before something changes.
The “Guardians” are, indeed, a key group missing from Arnold’s 3 languages. The Morally Superior members of the oppressor, privileged class who choose to support the oppressed, and even suffer some oppression.
Educated people are usually striving to be, and be seen as, morally superior. Heroes to the poor – Guardians, NOT oppressors.
Guardians, NOT barbarians. Guardians, NOT agents of coercion.
But such moral hypocrites are lying to themselves:
speech may just be a weapon used in several ways by the oppressors to subjugate the oppressed.
Speech does NOT subjugate, actions do. Pouring a milkshake on Farage (in the UK) or on a MAGA hat wearer in the US — that is an action, not speech. Shoplifting at Oberlin is an action, and stopping the shoplifting is another action.
Defaming the local bakers is illegal speech. And I do think there are defamation and slanderous words that should be illegal if spoken. Those defaming are trying to oppress, and they are supporting the barbarous over the civilized. Often, and in the Oberlin case, supporting direct theft by a racial minority, whose identity might put him in the oppressed class.
But the college going thief is less oppressed than the non-elite bakery workers, and arguably less than the owner of the bakery, who is the victim of the theft.
Identity politics is the real world fails so often because it justifies the oppressed becoming the barbarous new oppressors.
“National Identity” – we are All Americans (or British, or French, or Slovak) is the single best group identity that can work. But the dominant group must treat other groups as “equal under the law”. The US was more like that 20 – 50 years ago, and is getting less like that now.
Great comments here, one of the best discussions.
Speech can be threatening in certain contexts.
There’s a good chance that many black people or gays have experienced some sort of violence in the past, such as getting beat up by bullies in high school. Imagine say, being a black person who had (say) an uncle who got beat up by rednecks in rural Alabama the 1970s. You’ve had the story passed down to you through your family. So one day you’re on a road trip and you stop in a small town in Alabama to pick up some supplies. And the guy behind the register makes a comment like “You best be on your way, some folks around here don’t like n—-rs.”
You could take that as a warning – or an implied threat. This guy is reminding you of the ways violence has been used against people like you in the past, without overtly saying “leave or we’re going to beat you up”.
I’m not necessarily saying you have to shut down speech, but it’s useful to think about these kinds of nuances, if only to understand the perspective of someone who might say that speech makes them feel “unsafe”. Maybe they mean that more literally that we are assuming. As in they’ve been victims of violence in the past, they’re outside their comfort zone (probably true for blacks on major college campuses), and hearing racist speech literally makes them afraid that a bunch of white frat boys are going to jump them one night on a dark street or something.
It’s occurred to me lately that many black people might actually be a little afraid of white people. Which sounds crazy because we’ve all been raised with the idea that it’s black people who are scary and dangerous, but does make some sense considering that blacks actually do get targeted by hate crimes, especially when they venture out of majority black neighborhoods. They probably all have stories about family members who made the mistake of walking around black in the wrong place. Incidents like Trayvon Martin reinforce these perceptions – being black in a mostly white upper class neighborhood is a dangerous situation etc.
There is sort of a halfway point between “equality under the law” (only), and “equality of economic outcome”. Something which I think certain aspects of the social justice movement are right in reaching towards, and that is what I would call “social equality”.
“Social equality” means having a society in which the social norms are such that people treat one another as equals, regardless of race, gender, class, etc. That’s something that the social justice movement strives for, but it need not be attached to economic outcomes. It should be valued for it’s own sake, even if it doesn’t ultimately resolve all economic disparities, and you can work towards social equality without tying it’s success to the resolution of those disparities.