Kling talked about the question of police conduct in dealing with African Americans, which spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, and how each “tribe” thinks about the problem.
“The progressive framing of the issue emphasizes racism, among police and in society as a whole. Progressives put white police, or white society at large, in the role of oppressors, with African Americans in the role of the oppressed,” he wrote.
“The conservative framing of the issue emphasizes the need for order. Conservatives put criminal suspects and unruly demonstrators in the role of barbarian threats and put police in the role of defenders of civilization.”
“The Libertarian framing of the issue emphasizes the need for citizens to be free of police harassment.”
My sense is that the various tribes are behaving true to form these days.
I think your orientation may also affect how you see the sequencing of solutions. As someone who leans conservative, I feel that if we address the underlying violent crime rates the perceived policing issues will improve. I get the sense liberals feel the opposite.
I once lived in a place that had a seepage problem, the remedy for which was a sump pump.
The sump pump kept the water level low and the basement nice and dry even after big storms. But there were trade-off costs. Electricity, of course, but also noise at irregular times, and lots of noise for extended periods after bad storms.
It would be absurd to say that once the sump pump addressed the standing water level issue, perceived noise problems would improve. Noise problems are the price of preventing much worse problems.
Yes, In the current situation, every one is playing their usual roles. But it was interesting earlier when roles were reversed and it was conservatives protesting shut downs. The progressive tribe sounded pretty TLP conservative when they rushed to denounce the barbarian shutdown protesters (see for example: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a32493736/armed-lockdown-protesters-michigan-legislature/ ) and the shutdown protesters sounded pretty libertarian in their denunciations of tyranny. And the libertarians used progressive language to tut, tut, about the public health risk of the earlier demonstrations.
My impression is that a similar dynamic was at work during the TEA party demonstrations as well, and more recently in the 2nd Amendment Sanctuary City movement.
Perhaps the three languages are less about identity than role played at the moment: complainant, accused, and moral grand standing opportunist. The three languages perhaps are used situationally, but because the standard news narrative is a Manichaean oppressor-oppressed script, progressives more often use the language of complaint, conservatives the language of defensive justification, and libertarians the language of backseat moralizer.
Even then, Liberals stuck pretty close to the TLP model. They weren’t “denouncing the barbarian shutdown protesters”. They were denouncing the oppressors trying to deliberately inflict COVID on the oppressed population.
Do an internet search for “Chauvin barbaric” or “police barbaric” or “Israel barbaric” and you will find plenty of progressive results. Same goes for the death penalty.
The question is, what distinguishes mere violence from barbarism, rhetorically? The answer is justification, which has ideological roots, not linguistic roots.
Progressives use the word barbaric plenty when referring to violence – especially state-performed violence – against members of their favored groups. Conservatives consider these to be justified and legitimated uses of the state’s monopoly on violence, hence not barbaric. Meanwhile progressives forgive a lot of looters and violent occupiers and rioters, because their actions are justified by circumstances of oppression, whereas conservatives call it barbarism because they deem it unjustified.
I think in the last 10 years we’ve seen a gradual but steady breakdown in the actual ‘Language’ part of the TLP thesis, as the positions of relative power have shifted. It’s not just a “Populists vs Elites” or “TradProles vs TrumpMAGAs vs BoBos” or whatever.
The language of power is context-based shifts in rhetoric according to one’s relative positions and whatever serves the fundamental goal of determining “Who shall outrank Whom?” in a particular situation or regarding a particular issue.
When it’s Trump or various right-wing marchers, progressives are again keen to use “law and order” or “no one is above the law” type language in their talking points (and not merely to talk across part lines). When it’s “occupation” groups or looters, then that rhetoric goes out of the window. Conservatives and libertarians can also be observed to be moving around their language use a lot.
Part of the breakdown in the TLP thesis is not really the fault on the part of the analyst, which was fine at the time, but because progressivism has conquered the commanding heights of practically all elite institutions and is also breaking down in terms of the attempt to maintain a coherent intellectual framework with nods to social justice and traditional American left-liberal sentiments (e.g., universalism, meritocracy, provisionalism in terms of deviation from procedural equality and exceptions which must be characterized as fundamentally temporary in nature.)
This intellectual breakdown accompanied by an increasingly intimidating, vicious, and obnoxious soft reign of terror is causing the thesis to weaken in terms of relevance to our, ah, dynamic political situation.
This gets to an observation I’ve often noticed, but rarely see articulated: progressives are philosophically conservative when it comes to maintaining their politically preferred protective barriers.
If you read discussion regarding social spending and public welfare, progressive dialogue borrows quite heavily from conservative motifs: ‘the bedrock of civilization’, ‘the roots of our community’, etc.
In my personal sphere I’ve had liberal friends literally use the word barbaric to refer to the USA’s lack of sufficient protective barriers compared european counterparts.
Maybe this means that the civilization/barbarian axis isn’t unique to conservatives, but instead that each ideology imposes its own unique moral hierarchy to define what’s essential to life as we know it.
Right.
As the situation evolves, TLP is breaking down the same way that Haidt’s Moral Foundations thesis broke down.
One can look at both works as if they have two main goals.
One is to be a work contributing to a social analysis, that is, a scholarly and rigorous collection of observations and attempts to discover and elucidate patterns of human attitudes and behaviors which are powerful in terms of their ability to explain many other observations and forecast likely reactions to events.
But the other goal is more “social project” To Save Postwar Liberalism, that is, to create a kind of focal point narrative of the origin and nature of modern American political differences, which like-minded people can rally around in attempts to defend the relative peace and tolerance of the classical liberal order, and the health and sanity of our public intellectual life. That would be the product of the equivalent of a metaphorical “negotiated cease-fire”, as an alternative to total, interminable, and increasing, destructive culture war.
See, there’s no need to be angry or upset or terrified of a political opponent, because really it’s all a matter of difficulty communicating across different personality types. You can be charitable towards your opponents because they are really honest, sincere, and innocent people of good faith like yourself, and not some evil ogres. It’s really a big misunderstanding from using words differently and talking past each other, of succumbing to manipulative ‘tribal’ instincts whipped up by nasty agitators, of placing slightly different emphasis on one member of a set of values we all share and care about.
Indeed, we would appreciate the comic pettiness and absurdity of such passions being aroused by such small differences – the first step towards transcending and defusing them on our way to social harmony and comity – if only we could detach and remove ourselves from the situation, “you say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to, let’s call the whole thing off!”
If one had some objections or quibbles with the social analysis, one might still be tempted to keep one’s mouth shut and even contribute to the effort for the sake of the worthy goal, if one thought it had any chance.
Of course, as some heterodox right-wing thinkers had been pointing out for a long time, it never had any chance, but the argument is subtle and hardly obvious, so, until recently, one could be forgiven for hoping otherwise.
But it’s now completely clear that the prospects for anything like this social project are totally dead because it has become impossible to safely appeal to any other higher and shared values or loyalties, or rise to a higher level of generality, which is an indispensable element for making any case.
In retrospect the whole strategy and reluctance to use a few targeted legal measures to reinforce the openness of the open society was a big mistake.
A 4th language, that of Populism, based on an axis of direct democracy/authoritarians, is focused in the current situation, on how the shortcomings of the USA political system ensures long festering problems are not resolved unlike in a direct democracy system as in populist Switzerland, where direct democracy forces resolution of problems and fuller representation of segments of the population means no one (or very few) are left sitting on the sidelines, and all have the opportunity to participate in self-governance. None of the Floyd demonstrations in Switzerland turned violent.
Do Progressives even fit in the TLP model? Progressivism runs on a pure identity model, i.e. “You’re either with us or against us.” There doesn’t seem to be an underlying philosophy or even an axis, but rather it’s a binary set. Members of the tribe are Saints, non-members are Demons.
Note, I’m talking about Progressivism, not Liberalism.
https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2020/06/must-meetings-f-ing-stupid-politics/
“Liberals want to take police money, police funds and divert it to community services, which sounds like a very good thing, good idea,” Maher said. “But they’re calling it ‘Defund the police,’ which sounds bad!
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That would be Bill Maher making the same point.
They don’t actually want to take police money. They just want the actual police to become their thought police.
I’m not sure he understands what the dispute is about. If you say, “We want to to cut the police force in half,” some people are going to find that troubling. Saying, “no, wait, that’s only half of it; we’re also going to hire a bunch more social workers.” That does nothing to allay the fears of the skeptic, because the skeptic (correctly, in my opinion) doesn’t accept the premise that “community services” or “social services” are substitutes for police. Despite widespread assumptions to the contrary, there is very little that police do that can be replaced by ‘social services.’ Even if we tried to send social workers to deal with unstable metnally ill people in the street, I am certain that the moment a social worker gets stabbed or shot by a ‘client,’ the social workers will revolt and demand that the system be changed so they aren’t putting their lives in danger, and we’ll gradually slide back to a police-type of service.
In short, whether there is too much policing and whether there is too little social service are two questions that are independent of one another. One is not a substitute for the other, so saying you’re going to replace one with the other is irrelevant. It’s like saying, “we’re going to cut your healthcare benefits… but wait, there’s more, we’re going to use the money to build more national parks.”
Bill Mahler is missing the point, there is no real concern for black lives in BLM, with the possible exception of the ignorant white kids who have never been to an inner city. The leading cause of death for black men in their twenties and thirties is homicide. If you do not believe that violence is a concern in the African American community, consider these two questions.
From what neighborhoods originate the majority of 911 calls?
Where do the majority of African American professionals live?
As someone who is deeply concerned about the inner cities, who has lived in inner cities, and has experienced violence in them, I see nothing from BLM that would indicate that they are interested in addressing the problems of inner cities or violence against African Americans. Yet no one in the media questions their narrative and I have seen no criticism of the movement except on indepedent blogs.
“If you took two people on the opposite side of this argument, put them in a room, let them calm down, and then had them ditch the catch phrases and just say the longer, entirely reasonable version to each other, do you think it might start a more productive conversation?”
No. I think the masses are virtual signaling and live a mob mentality in any movement. I’ve spent my entire life attempting to engage with people on all sides in a reasonable non-confrontation manner, often in private to try to avoid reputational effects, and I can tell you it gets about five exchanges in before all the slogans and sacred cows are used up and once that happens, you just get called a name and they exit as fast as possible. Self examination of beliefs is generally not something people have any interest in.
(True Story) This is why a young Filipino woman can confront me openly and yell at me for not wearing a mask in Whole Foods yet the very next day I see her at a large block graduation party doing lines of cocaine sharing straws with no mask, no social distancing, etc. But hey I’m sure in her head that was OK because “evil white male oppressor. Proven even more so if he dares called out my hypocrisy”.
There is no rational conversation with those people because they aren’t rational. As the saying goes, you can’t have a discourse with Bolsheviks because ultimately they won’t engage in good faith even if you can get that far. You just keep your head down and hope the extreme elements in the other camps react in kind.
Gagnon encourages us, in reference to your book: “Rather than using the language of your own tribe, speak to them in the language of theirs and you might find that they are more willing to listen to you.”
But this is often extraordinarily difficult precisely because the ‘political languages’ are ‘designed’ to induce the speaker toward a particular conclusion; they’re highly Orwellian. It’s not like interacting with someone from a different culture and learning to put things in terms they’ll understand. The whole purpose of political language is to restructure how people think in order to lead them to certain beliefs. Note that I don’t think there’s some consciously Orwellian conspiracy to do this. I think it just happens automatically in a Darwinian (or perhaps rather Lamarckian) process. An ideology will tend to filter out phrases or framings that are uncertain or open to the other side’s interpretation in favor of loaded terminology and grammar that presupposes the ideology’s conclusions, and an ideology that does this more successfully will suffer less attrition and survive better than one that doesn’t.
I would say we should just aspire to use more ‘clinical,’ neutral language in discussing public policy and avoid loaded or emotionally charged wording. Obviously, some people will insist that even that language is unacceptable, but I really don’t think there’s much point in trying to ape the speaking/writing style of the activists one is trying to convince. They’re not idiots, they know when you’re disagreeing with them, even if you use their own terms to do so. Plenty of the people who’ve lost their jobs in the last week or so for wrongthink expressed their fatal opinions using the terminology of their tribe, it didn’t help them. People can generally figure out pretty quickly when they’re talking to an outsider (if anything they’re very likely to mistake an insider for an outsider).
Thank you, Mark Z, I think you are quite right.
Gagnon’s mealy-mouthed TLP analysis is simply obsolete, too.
Whatever it may have meant a year or six months ago, today the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is not any kind of argument. It is now the American Left’s version of the Moslem “shahada” which the Faithful utter frequently and the convert recites before witnesses to join the faith, becoming liable thereby to capital punishment for any heresy or apostasy. For many centuries it has been customary for Moslems to rampage through neighborhoods of non-Moslems summoning all those they encounter to recite the shahada. Those who know it not or refuse to recite it are abused or killed as enemies of the Faithful; those who declaim it are spared— or murdered if suspected of hypocrisy, on the grounds, quite proper by Islamic law, that insincerity is heresy or apostasy.
The American Left has removed ordinary meaning from the words “black lives matter” and made them purely a formula of allegiance to their cause, one which they constantly shriek and which anyone may be summoned to recite at any time. Anyone who refuses or mocks that demand is denounced as a “racist” (the American Left’s word for heretic) and instantly condemned to punishment by the mob. Silence is not an acceptable response either. The Left relies upon its new formula “silence is violence” (seen now on countless “protest” signs) to convict any fence-sitters of heresy.[1]
Since the “Black Lives Matter” formula has been placed beyond discussion by the progressives, who enforce their taboo by immediate physical violence as well as public denunciation, deprivation of livelihood, etc., a TLP-based approach to debating the obsolete ordinary-meaning of the phrase is pointless and dangerous.
Anyone who shouts (or “tweets” or fills their window with) “Black Lives Matter” is an enemy of society, a fool, or a (possibly quite wise and prudent) hypocrite. In no case today is a BLM-reciter interested in a nice little discussion of socio-economics, leading toward greater mutual enlightenment and perhaps somewhat revised personal opinions on the public-policy questions of our time.
[1] For non-American readers: the American Left has re-defined the word “violence” to include “any communication which displeases a Leftist.” The original reason for this trick was to justify the condign punishment of remarks undesired by Leftists, because under American “First Amendment” law, words cannot be forbidden or (generally) punished, but “violence” can be. Re-define unwanted words as “violence,” et-voila, they can be forbidden and punished!
The Left wants to cancel anyone who disagrees. And if you can’t see how far they’ve come in their Cultural Revolution, then you’re going to be unpreprared for how bad things will get in the next decade.