 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our topic for today's episode is how we talk about politics, and joining us to talk about that is Arnold Kling, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and author of the Three Languages of Politics. Most of us, if you ask like, how do we talk about politics in general, our response is something like angrily. You know, there's vitriol and we all get mad about it and we yell at each other and whatnot. But you have, I guess a more interesting theory than that, which you call the three languages of politics. Can you tell us just what that is? Sure. And it may relate to this intuitive notion that we talk about it angrily. When I listened to your podcast from a couple months ago on politics and primitivism, it struck me that maybe in the light of that I should have called this the three war whoops of politics. The rebel yell, yeah. Yeah, this is a tribal way of talking about politics. And I want to make clear that these are, using the term languages, I don't think these aren't three theories. These aren't three ideologies. These are related to three ideologies. So first of all, I divide the world into three ideologies of progressivism, conservatism, and libertarianism. A lot of people just want to do two. I'm going to want to give libertarians a third one. And the languages very briefly are axes of sort of what is good and what is evil. So what is most good on the progressive side is to be on the side of the oppressors. So there's this oppressor, sorry, on the side of the oppressed. Good. Yeah, what is good for progressives is to be on the side of the oppressed. So there's a strong oppressor-oppressed axis. Oppressors are bad. People who progressives hate, they accuse of being on the side of the oppressors. That includes libertarians and conservatives. People that they admire are people who they believe are on the side of the oppressed. So they like to occupy Wall Street because they think of it as being on the side of the oppressed. Then we have conservatives whose axis is civilization and barbarism. So they view the worst evil is going back toward barbarism. And part of the reason they're conservative is they think that we've accumulated institutions and cultural norms that have taken us away from barbarism. And any threat to those institutions and cultural norms threatens to take us back in the direction of barbarism. And so people who they regard as being on the side of going back to barbarism are their worst enemy and the people they admire are the people who've been the defenders of civilization. And for libertarians, the axis is freedom versus coercion. So the evil are people who use government coercion and the good are people who fight government coercion. And again, I want to emphasize that these aren't the essence of their ideology. But they are, I think, the way that they organize the world in terms of we, they really good, really bad. So when they're really in their primitivist mode of thinking about politics, they fall back on these things. So it's as a language, if you use that language, it's a way of signaling to the people who agree with you. This is how we line up on this issue, folks. It's clearly oppressors versus oppressed or it's clearly civilization versus barbarians or it's clearly freedom versus coercion. And it's also a way of castigating the opposition. Maybe you could give us an example, like take a particular one policy issue or one thing that we talk about when we talk about politics and maybe show how each of the three languages might approach it. Sure. Pick an issue. Terrorism. Okay. So that one's one of the more difficult ones for both the progressives and the libertarians, I think, because it's such an obvious, it obviously seems to fall into civilization versus barbarism and the terrorists are barbarians and we in civilization have to fight back. But let's take something like the Boston Marathon bombing, which, so it was easiest for conservatives to put it in their civilization versus barbarism story and you could see others having trouble. So the libertarians for when there were complaints right after the incident was resolved about the tanks in the street. We had tanks in our streets in Boston. People under house arrest, basically, yeah. So they wanted to put it in the freedom versus coercion axis and on the left there was this marvelous piece where a guy wrote, you know, I really hope it was a white male who did it. So if he wanted to be done by an oppressor, someone who's legitimately in the oppressor class, a white male as opposed to somebody who might be regarded as coming from the oppressed class such as a Muslim. Are these like exclusive ways of looking at things such that everything, if you're say a conservative, then everything is a matter of civilization versus barbarism. You don't really think so much like you don't value freedom and coercion or oppressor oppressed as much or is it more just an emphasis of how we talk? Well, again, yeah, go back to the language story. So I don't think, I mean, I think the ideologies are complicated and they allow for people to think along all these axes and all about other things as well. I mean, there's certainly that that's not the only thing. But sort of when a crunch comes and you need to reaffirm that your ideology is right and to reaffirm that the other guy is wrong, I think these are the languages that people fall back on an amazing amount of time. And I think one of the reasons I like your theory so much is because we see it, you can see how a word is used in a different way that evokes a different type of oppressor, oppressor type of regime. Immigration is one where you kind of look at immigrants as either being lawbreakers. But or we talk about how we want to ban the word illegal, right? We don't want to say the word illegal anymore. We want to use the word unregistered or undocumented because that sort of removes it from the civilization, barbarism, lawbreaker type of motif. Yeah, no, immigration is a classic issue where people tend to look at it through the three languages. So the most important thing to a conservative is that they've broken the law, the illegal immigrants. And the most important thing to progressives is that these people are poor and come from poor countries. I mean, if the illegal immigrants consisted entirely of sort of rich capitalists, it would be interesting to see how the progressives would come out. They might very well look at it. And for libertarians, it's government coercion that's going to be kicking these people out of the country. So we shouldn't have the borders to begin with in one extreme libertarian view. Yeah, it seems like you almost came up with a theory to explain why pundits become bigger idiots over time. And that's one thing I read your book and say pundits are not actually in the place in that they're not playing the game of convincing the other side as much. It seems like that's actually how I ended up writing, coming up with the theory and writing the book is that I just the first thing I the thing that I noticed that kind of made me go in that direction is that so much of what's written either in blogs or in newspaper columns. If you think about it, it's just not going to convince anybody on the other side. It's not trying to change. It really wouldn't change the mind of someone who disagreed. It isn't designed to change the mind of the people who are on your side. And what I said, you know, what it's really trying to do, and this is really sad, is that it's being done to try to keep the people on your side from changing their mind. It's trying to make it less likely that people on your side will change your mind. That's the most that it's trying to accomplish. So I said, well, given that, you know, if I were a conservative trying to reinforce conservative views, how would I write? And then I came up with the civilization barbarism thing and same with the others. Is it so I mean, you use words like it's designed to do these things or they're setting out to keep conservatives thinking one way as opposed to setting out to convince progressives or libertarians. Is it do you think it's that conscious or do you think that it's also that, you know, if I'm if I'm a conservative, so I'm naturally prone to see things in this barbarism versus civilization way, then when I go to construct an argument, the argument that sounds the most convincing to me, so therefore it might be the most convincing, I think, to other people is going to be a civilization barbarism argument. I think it's probably more the latter that that people people that that these are the types of things that they find convincing. And so they're I think in some ways they're surprised that they don't convince other people, you know, so when someone when when the weekly standard headlines, it's post Boston marathon headline civilization and barbarism, I think they're surprised that that anyone would would think about it differently. So but I think that that comes a little bit from people talking among themselves. So if you had a room full of libertarians sooner or later, they'll start, you know, getting animated. Oh, those people all they wanted is power. All they want to do is strengthen the government and use power to, you know, to to take away people's freedom. You get a bunch of conservatives together and eventually they'll say, oh, they're just a bunch of barbarians. You know, they just want to destroy our civilized values. So so a little bit of group reinforce. I think a lot of it is ultimately selection bias. So people who are inclined to try to understand someone else's point of view and talking a way that would persuade them are probably selected away from in the political columnist world, maybe even in the blogosphere. You know, it's it's otherwise I think it's it's it's a lot easier for me to explain, you know, a Rush Limbaugh or a Paul Krugman by saying, well, that's what the market seems to want. People want reinforcement for their own point of view. They don't want their own point of view challenged. And they're really not that interested in people who can talk to other people to people on different persuasions and change their minds. Does this mean then that if we want if we want to be more effective in communicating our ideas, it would help us to learn these other languages? I'm thinking about so early on in the Free Thoughts broadcast, we had Matt Zelensky on to talk. And he's from the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog and that they tend to speak to progressives kind of. It's I mean, that's their mission. But there's the sense that they're talking, trying to talk progress in libertarianism. And one of the things that they do is emphasize and he emphasized the oppressive force. It's an oppressor oppressed access. It's the poor are being oppressed by the powerful controlling, you know, government and the powerful who are in league with government. And so we're talking this particular language. Yeah, I would say a nice try. But I think it's I'm kind of careful at the end of the book saying I don't think this is going to magically enable you to persuade other people. I think I first of all, people are just very suspicious. So they say, yeah, but you're saying that by now you're a libertarian. So you're really on the side of the oppressor. And you're just you just I see through that you got you got that wrong. It feels inauthentic in the same way as when like the political parties try to speak to millennials by adopting or when your parents come down and tell you that they like your bank. I've heard those crazy new rock bands are listening to it. Just really speaking my language dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think it's hard to make that sound authentic. And I think it's not really the way progressives use the word oppressor. Repress it. And they don't there. I don't think they have any kind of natural inclination to think of government as an oppressor on economic issues. I think they're willing to think of it in terms of like privacy invasion. But that's that's an issue where libertarians and progressives are aligned to begin with. So the feedback loop, though, is what what strikes me is interesting. We could talk about this as a method of sort of dog whistling or using the language of people that you're hanging around. You bring up libertarians, you know, when libertarians hang out together, the word statist often comes out in a way that it doesn't it doesn't come out around other people. So it could be just way of talking about it. But there's also some sort of feedback loop. I think between the quality and nature of your beliefs and why you believe them in terms of the fundamentals and then engaging in this type of rhetoric that maybe makes your changes your beliefs itself in terms of how who you think you're opposing, what the other side looks like to you in terms of homogenizing them into a group that's just against you. Yeah, I do think that one of the ultimate end stages is to not just think of these axes as sort of things in the abstract and there are evil people along the opposite axis. But you actually get to the point where you're convinced that anyone who is in the group who disagrees with you actually ultimately is part of that evil axis. So again, read any Paul Krugman column and see him describe in which he usually does, conservatives or libertarians. And it's clear that they're just oppressors. And that's about all about as far as his thought process goes. And I was sort of disappointed to read, is it Jason Brennan's book where he says, well, basically we have conservatives who want to have a nanny state. And that's not how conservatives would describe themselves. It's not a very generous way of talking about it. A police state, I think he said conservatives. Well, the liberals want the nanny state. Conservatives want the police state. OK, right, OK. So, yeah, that's not a good way to open up a dialogue with somebody who disagrees with you. And it's also not a good way to educate the people who agree with you about what those ideologies really are about. Yeah, there's a general rule I use in a lot of different situations, which am I using any words to describe someone that they would not use to describe themselves? Right. The one I use all the time is brainwashed is a really good example. And you say, well, you're just brainwashed. No one ever says, I'm brainwashed. And it's a good indication of whether or not you're, I guess, not speaking the right language or not categorizing their beliefs with enough respect, really. Yeah. Well, Brian Kaplan developed this phrase, an ideological touring test. Imagine that you were placed in a room, let's say, with a bunch of progressives. Could you articulate progressivism in a way that they would say, oh, yeah, that is. And I think that, going back to your question about Metzlinski and the poor and the poor being oppressed by government, I just I don't think you could talk that way in a room about one room of progressives and sound like a progressive. I think people would instantly tune in something. I heard something a little weird there. I think we've got a trader in our mix missed. Yeah. If you say minimum wage law is oppressing the poor, they're probably going to say, oh, he's a witch. He's a witch, get him, get him out of here. Yeah, you can say there are studies that show that the minimum wage reduces employment among low-skilled workers, and you can be OK. But yeah, you start using the language of oppressive on that one, and they're not going to. Well, or I mean, it seems anything that would shift whatever group you're talking to into the suspect class is going to be, because when you're arguing that government hurts the poor, especially these programs that are often designed to help the poor, then what you're really saying is, you progressives who are supporting this, if it's true that the poor are being oppressed, are now a member of the oppressor class, in the same way that conservatives talking about civilization versus barbarism, whatever their particular policy preferences are, those are never barbaric, even though as a libertarian standing outside of it, looking at policies that are preferred by American conservatives, many of them look awfully barbaric to me. Yeah, if you're against waterboarding, you could say, well, waterboarding's a pretty barbaric thing. But that's not the way to gain entree into the start to convince conservatives. Your rubric also reminds me of one of the other virtues of it is that there are a lot of sort of pop-sci political books out there, but many of them read as sort of attempts to explain why you're right through some sort of language that you're caught in neuroscience. George Lakehoff is a neuroscientist who became a Democrat strategist and he wrote a book called Don't Think of an Elephant, and he had this whole theory that the reasons that conservatives were winning, he considered the last 30 years of conservatives being winning, was because they were using words like death tax rather than a state tax that put a spell on your brain and basically that he had to come up with an explanation for how anyone could believe this and his explanation was basically witchcraft. I've got into your brain and they've done witchcraft on it. Yeah, Lakehoff's a very interesting character and I really wanna distinguish my project from his. Again, I'm not trying to explain why people believe they do or to summarize ideologies. I'm trying to summarize rhetoric in some sense. I'm trying to summarize, or I think the War Whoop story really is right. If we view politics as primitivism as sort of whipping your tribe up into a frenzy, I think that is what I see these languages as doing. But Lakehoff, the first book that came to my attention, I think it was his first foray into the whole political stuff was. Don't think of an elephant? No, no, it was before that, it was moral politics. The daddy and the mommy. Yeah, so that conservatives are this strict father morality and liberals have a nurturant parent morality. And so it was very interesting. I think he probably is onto something that rhetoric of a nurturant parent that people can succeed if they're given all the resources they need is rhetoric that appeals to a progressive. And I think the strict parent, people need to be punished if they step out of line. That has a conservative thing, appeals to conservatives. Where I think he flew off the rails is that he then proceeded to do, look at studies of parenting and say that nurturant parents is a better model. Okay, fine, maybe that's true. I'm not gonna argue with it. But then to say, well, therefore conservatives are clearly wrong. As if the analogy between a family and government is 100% perfect. And so any way that you run a family that's better is clearly the better way to run government. It's like, whoa, how did you make that leap? He came to a class of mine in law school one time because my professor was friends with him and he gave his stick. And again, it has some validity to it up to a point and then it sort of crosses a line into now I'm explaining why they're crazy and we're sane. And then you start to look at it and say this, now you're just part of the problem. You're not explaining anything, you're part of the problem. And he stood up there and he said, the problem with Democrats is that we're too rational. And I was, my head was spinning. Not because I think Democrats are inherently rational, but it goes out to my comment about, if you wouldn't call yourself it, then you're probably playing some different game. You'd be like, well, as a Republican, I'm irrational. Yeah, that's why I'm Republican. Yeah, exactly. And everyone thinks that their beliefs are too complex to say in bumper sticker logic, that's what you say. They have bumper sticker logic. We have very complex and deep-seated reasons for believing what we wanna do. And that's exactly one thing he told me. He said, conservatives can put their logic on a bumper sticker, whereas I need a bumper sticker so it's huge as it explains how complex my beliefs actually are. So again, it's still just that. Yeah, I think everyone believes that. And there's, and one of my favorite pieces of literature that I cite in the book is, and I'm forgetting the term the guy used for it, but basically we believe that we have, we understand our opponents better than they understand themselves. That's just a very powerful belief. He wasn't even talking about it initially in terms of politics. But anyone that you happen to be on the other side, we believe that we understand them not only really well, but better than they understand themselves. We understand their true motives. And if you're at that point, it's almost hopeless for you to be able to engage or accept any possibility that their ideas are correct or anything. You're really, that's really far gone. I'm curious about the civilization barbarism as the conservative and the freedom coercion as the libertarian distinction because I'm thinking of a lot of conservative rhetoric of especially since Obama came into office and then the rise of the Tea Party but then the way they talk about, conservatives talk about say, Obamacare, there's a huge amount of freedom language going on. They want to coerce you into having the government's choice in healthcare. They want to take away your freedom to do this. The Tea Party is very much steeped in the language of freedom and liberty first. Is that a change in conservatism? Is it a different kind of conservatism or are they using those terms say differently than the way that libertarians do? I think there's some overlap, but probably not much. There's also a lot of rhetoric on Obama that sort of makes him out as being on the side of barbarianism. You've seen that. The Kenyan thing to some extent. The Kenyan thing you could say is almost part of that. Yeah, and the recent issue of being, the Crimean situation. I kind of look at it and say, well, it's a lot closer to Russia than it is to us. I don't know what I would do about it if I were president, but the idea that if he were more of a defender of civilization that this would not have happened is very much part of the conservative rhetoric. And some of them were raving, right-wing talk show hosts will actually say, well, this is what Obama's trying to do. He's trying to undermine America. And I think there's been a lot of conservative rhetoric that we need to take back our country. That is, I think, a dog whistle along the civilization barbarism axis. And that would be the talking constantly about the Constitution. The Constitution represents kind of a high-water mark. The Constitution, as the founders saw it, represents the high-water mark of civilization and Obama is trying to undermine that. And so that's a deviation from... And it's interesting, so libertarians and conservatives can align on the Constitution, but the libertarians, what is important to them is their reading of it and its use as a way to constrain government power. And I think it's for conservatives, it is more of a symbol of civilization, of the tradition. And I think Aaron's question about using the term freedom is interesting too, because you even heard this in Obamacare debates and you still hear it to some extent today. Well, what is freedom if you might have a catastrophic health care problem and then you won't be free to pay for that on your own ability, which again, maybe them just trying to co-opt, the supporters of Obamacare trying to co-opt freedom rhetoric and say, come on board, freedom lovers and us saying, I don't think that word means what you think it means. Well, that was the argument when the study came out that showed that Obamacare would increase unemployment, that people would leave the labor market, that this was the freedom to not work is being enhanced by this. Yes, yeah. Your comments about Obama too, and making him on the side of barbarism, I think one of the fascinating things that you've seen with Obama has been the pathologizing of Obama. And this happens a lot, as you said, we think we understand our opponents better than they understand themselves. So you have to come up with some deep-seated mental reason such as Dinesh D'Souza's post-colonial explanation of how to try and explain why Obama is a milquetoast liberal politician who advocates the same physicians they've been advocating for 20 years. We need to give him a psychosis because he doesn't have reasons he has pathologies. Yeah, well, and but as you were saying earlier, that's kind of the favorite thing of academic psychologists is to say, well, conservatives basically were born with a fear of spiders and ultimately that turns you into conservative. I'm wondering if this makes, because you've said you kind of refrain from drawing conclusions about how we ought like, so we ought to change our language in a certain way or here's ways we can now try to talk to each other, but I'm wondering if does this represent something that's making our political lives worse because it's not so much, if this is true, then it's not just that we disagree with each other and that we can disagree with each other over really important things, but that on top of that, we can't even talk to each other about it in a meaningful way. It's not, I would phrase it, I'd say that the problem is that we layer onto it so much of, and I'll go back to your primitivism, so much tribal. Us versus them. Yeah, and that we make the disagreement, we make the disagreement's more emotional and more intense and put in much higher stakes on them than we need to, so if I were to prescribe anything to people, it'd be like the ideal thing is if everybody in the world read this book and took it to heart, they would take a step backward every time they hear these sorts of dog whistles, especially when the dog whistle comes from their own side and say, aha, this is just a dog whistle from my own side, but let's see it analytically, let's imagine what this would look like from other people's point of view, let's see if I can look at the facts, and I mean, I'm not promising, I would all of a sudden change my libertarian views, I'm not inclined to, but at least I think it would be a step forward if people recognize that, oh, I'm responding to a dog whistle here, wait a minute, let me try to take a broader view. You say that these don't define the underlying ideology, but what I'm wondering is so, yes, so progressivism, the ideology is not one of just oppressor-oppressed, that there's whole aspects to it that then define one of these things. Then believe in human progress, that's part of progressivism. And conservatism has all these things, but libertarianism really reduced to its core just is a focus on freedom versus coercion. I mean, especially if you take the kind of really, the more extreme views, like so a strict non-aggression principle libertarian is gonna say, well, all there is to my ideology in fact is freedom versus coercion. So I can't really talk about anything else when it comes to politics, because that's all there is to it. That might be true of somebody who's sort of comes at it from what I call the philosophical point of view, but there's also people come at it from the pragmatic point of view. In fact, one of my favorite thinkers, Jeffrey Friedman, says that libertarians tend to, like when one fails, they fall back on the other. So when they're saying philosophically, the non-aggression principle, and then something comes up that maybe that principle just doesn't completely preside, and then they fall back, well, but on a practical level, when you allow more freedom, people, you get more economic growth and people are better off. And conversely, the people who are libertarian more for the well, you get more economic growth, people are better off. When they come across an issue where maybe that doesn't work, they fall back. Yeah, but philosophically, people ought to be free. So in any case, I think those are those two pillars that sort of un-easily support libertarianism. There's the empirical case for free markets producing better results, and then there's the philosophical, that no one should be able to force somebody to do something against their will, and people kind of go back and forth with those two. Well, I do think it's true that when it comes to the moral languages of politics, we don't spend as much time talking about the efficacy of markets as we do talking about the problems of freedom versus coercion and why a life well lived is without coercion or with as little coercion as you possibly can. And I think, honestly, I think libertarians make more progress with non-libertarians when they make the utilitarian case for libertarianism rather than the absolutist, natural rights case. Yeah, and speaking for myself, that I've considered myself a libertarian for quite a long time, but until I came in here and started hanging out with a lot of libertarians, I was pretty much entirely just consequentialist and didn't have a big anti-authoritarian streak in me. I'm not very anti-authoritarian. I've become more anti-authoritarian as I hang around people speaking the same language of anti-authoritarianism. There's the, well, we shouldn't really make people do this because it produces bad outcomes, and then there's the don't tell me what to do type of attitude, which I think it brings out, libertarians bring that out in each other. It's interesting, I think my background, my personality was very anti-authoritarian all my life and I came to my libertarian policy beliefs rather late, so different directions, different directions. So the question here is also, so what do we do? That doesn't seem like there's very much of an audience for sort of plain spoken, non-dog whistling type of pundits out there. It seems like the world is spreading apart and there's not a place for people who want to have a nice discussion about the issues. No, I think we should become depressed. No, I don't, that seems to be my conclusion in every time I'm in a public setting, my conclusion. Let's all get depressed. Have you done, have you looked at this historically? Like looked at the arguments from say 100 years ago to see if these same sorts of things are there or if it's getting worse or? I was very careful in the book to say this is contemporary, I didn't want to rule out that it was true historically, but I didn't want to make any claims like that that would immediately get me shot down by somebody who understood the history of political philosophy better than I do. It'd be interesting to take something, I hadn't, I didn't read, I read Yvonne's book on Burke versus Pain. Oh, the great debate? Yeah, and it'd be interesting, I should have said, as I read it, I should have looked for passages that lined up this way, but I didn't do that. I'd have to go back and see. Well, I think some of this could definitely be tied in. I mean, we can talk about how you talk about it, how we talk about it, but also the more fundamental issues of why do we believe what we believe and some of the stuff like John Hite's work on the fundamentals of political psychology that there's, is this fair, is this unfair, is this disgusting, is this not? Those are what really undergirds our sense of that this is wrong or not and then we get involved with groups and start using words to rally each other around ideas, around the white hats versus the black hats. Yeah, I think I have mixed feelings about that. I certainly like a lot of what Hite has done. I'm not, I particularly didn't feel like the disgust, the extent to which people feel disgust works the way he thinks it does. I did, because I look at the progressive's attitude to things like obesity or genetically modified organisms. And I say, if that's not a disgust issue, what is it? I guess, yeah, certainly with genetically modified organisms, it's really, the utilitarian case is almost all against them. The scientific case is almost all against them. So, yeah, to me, thinking that I know my opponents better than they know themselves, they think that that's a disgust issue. The attempts to explain conservatism in these kinds of psychological terms, like this isn't Hite, but people who I think feel like they're carrying his banner say that conservatism has to do with, is fundamentally about endogamy, that you don't want to see marriage outside your tribe. And so, that leads to your views on immigration, it leads to your views on sex and so on. And that, that's right. It seems like a dog whistle itself. Yeah, that struck me, it's too much of a stretch. I don't quite get how that explains like conservative views on foreign policy or for free markets or just throwing that all into the endogamy story seems like way too much. That's one of the things I like about your way of looking at things as opposed to, say, Hite's, which for those who aren't familiar with this, Hite's a psychologist and he gives people questionnaires on moral questions and has them talk about, whether they think this is morally right or wrong and uses those to tease out their views on what he calls the moral foundations, which are things like disgust and purity or authority. Freedom and courage and harm, fairness. And his thesis then is that different political groups kind of feel more of an affinity towards certain foundations than others. So conservatives are pulled more by things that represent authority issues than they are by fairness issues. And also disgust for them too. So, and- But I agree with Arnold. But I think one of the issues with this is exactly the one that you got at with disgust. And when I reviewed the book for the Cato Journal, I made a similar sort of argument that he says, so he puts these questions out there to prevent to provoke fairness or not. And then says, progressives score high on fairness, which is then why they support these given policies because these are policies that are about fairness. And as a non-progressive, I look at them and say, no, I support fairness, but I believe that these are not fair. I'm looking at the policy differently as opposed to the moral foundation. I think what makes sense in opposition to that about your theory is that the underlying policy preferences, because this is one of the problems with the liberal rights theories, it doesn't seem to fit with policy preferences changing within these groups over time. Yours allows for this so they could, you know, conservatives can oppose the individual mandate on all of these grounds when it's a Democrat doing it, but when it's a Republican doing it in Massachusetts, they can support it totally. And your theory says doesn't, that doesn't cause a problem for your theory. And in part, that's because Romney's rhetoric was, this is going to keep the people from abusing the emergency rooms. And that's, ah, that's barbaric, people using the emergency rooms and not paying for it. Ah, this is good, whereas Obama was using different rhetoric for it. Yeah, no, I think that's a good point. And let me cite another thing that Geoffrey Friedman suggests that you not try to reduce anyone's point of view, that you don't take a reductionist attitude, say you believe this because, just say, all right, take their beliefs on face value, just whatever, you know, just use that as an operating principle. Take the beliefs at face value. And so I wanted to be careful of the book and say, well, you know, I'm not trying to explain why a progressive believes what they want to do. I'm just saying, once you form your beliefs, however you believe them, when you're trying to whip up your own side, you're going to end up falling back on this kind of rhetoric. And I think that that brings in with sort of good thinking habits of taking what they say on their face and not trying to dig down into them. And I tell people all the time that, you know, you have to believe that you need to understand that the other side has good arguments. They don't just have idiocy, they have good arguments and you won't be able to combat them if you don't think that those are good arguments. All these things that go into good thinking, and you can feel, sometimes you can feel yourself get pulled into the dog whistle camp and the bad thinking comes in and you say, okay, I need to stop that. Well, actually, and now I remember the term I was looking for for that thing, which is the law of asymmetric insight, the belief that you understand other people better than they understand themselves. And that's what I'm trying to kind of avoid slipping into and it's very easy to slip into that one. And also, just as a side, I think that some of this political psychology ends up doing that, ironically. These psychologists are supposed to understand these things but they are actually probably guilty of asymmetric insight in sort of thinking that they understand the conservative mindset better than them, that they don't need to take conservative points of view at face value. So then I know that you have resisted the kind of normative conclusions from your book instead of just describing the way things are. I'm not giving recommendations on then how to change the way we talk in order to be more effective or, but are you, in a sense, saying the solution, one thing we should do is not try to adopt and necessarily try to adopt the other side's rhetorical style when talking to them or try to adopt all three, but instead to try to step outside of this, that it's a negative normative sense. Yeah, and certainly restrain your own rhetoric. So, the most extreme use of the rhetoric, let's say for a libertarian, would be to say that all they want is power. Just say, okay, no, wait, I'm gonna step back and take what they say at face value. I'm concerned that if we followed through on that policy that we would be ending up with more government power and more coercion, but I'm gonna take at face value that that's not the fundamental purpose of it. And then in terms of your own rhetoric, just there's no need to sort of whip your side into a frenzy over these issues. So if the NSA spying thing comes out, you don't have to sort of jump up and down and scream, ah, that's coercion, that's gonna get rid of freedom. You can say, well, what can we do about that? I guess these people are very concerned about terrorism. That's probably a legitimate concern, but what is it about this that might be different? And for example, in that particular example, David Brin has a very different take on that, which is that the technology's here, your ability to stop anyone from using that technology, it's unlikely what we need is more symmetry in the ability to use it. So we should have as much of a window into government as government has in us, and that's a very difficult point of view to accept. It's difficult for the super people who- Privacy- Yeah, privacy advocates or people who fear government to say we're gonna give government that power and somehow the fact that we have transparency into them is gonna be good enough to counteract that, and then the people in government, transparency, what you're gonna watch us, the police are gonna be filmed while they're doing their job, that's- Yeah, in our episode that we did with Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, he had a line, Nick had a line that said we should avoid the soda tax and we should avoid the Buchenwald type of arguments that the soda tax is the same as a concentration camp or this is the beginning of the end of human civilization, which we're prone to and I always say it would be amazing if we could actually discuss these issues on the margins as opposed to the extremes, which is something that I bring up in my primitivism of politics stuff, which is very similar to what you say, extremifying your opponent, homogenizing them and not actually addressing the fact that there's close calls between you two on the margins. I do that in gun policy all the time. I'd rather debate on the margins than on the, you wanna rocket launcher versus you wanna disarm every person on the planet, let's have a fight in the middle of that and that's not even a good debate. Yeah, yeah. You said you haven't really looked at this historically so we can't talk about trend lines of this is getting worse or it's getting better than it used to be, but I'm still curious if you have any opinions about whether the way government currently is, whether the size, the scope of its powers, the kind of policies we have, the kind of policies that we argue for make this problem potentially worse than it might otherwise be. Yeah, no, my instinct is it's worse than it was. I can even remember the 60s when politics was quite polarized and I think in some ways it's worse. There was definitely more of a violent fringe back in the 60s and that was concerning, but I think what is worse is that people feel more threatened by the notion that they might have to change their minds. So in the 60s, an awful lot of people changed their minds about the Vietnam War and they were able to deal with that. And in the 70s a lot of people changed their minds about the usefulness of wage and price controls. They tried it and pretty much everyone now agrees that that experiment didn't work. And it was- D-regulation too, also in the late 70s. Yeah, the deregulation of transportation involved changing minds. Now I think people, I think on, and this is true on all sides, but I certainly notice it on the progressive side maybe because I wanna believe that their own self-image that they're the reality-based, intelligent, well-educated group. I get the sense that and this is accusing them of psychological, but of having a harder time changing their mind. So I think that the trend is, I think to use these languages more and more and that is either coincident with or causing a resistance to changing one's mind. I mean, I would, I guess I wish I could come up with more issues in which I felt libertarians and conservatives needed to change their minds. D- The drug war for conservatives would be potentially one. D- And that's one that some of them have. Yeah, I think, well maybe immigration would be the classic one, that getting conservatives. So there's an interesting one where I have a feeling that the differences between the elite and the mass are kind of the more important than any of the kind of the ideological ones. But I can certainly think of things where I think there's room for progressives to change their mind, like the effectiveness of fiscal policy, big deficits on improving the economy. I mean, they're really dug in on that. I think that those of us who don't agree that deficits really help the economy grow and reduce unemployment that we're just out to screw the unemployed or that we have no sense of science at all and yet, you know, I think an objective reading of the data would say, boy, that's really a questionable call, whether that makes a difference. It seems like, you know, we ran a huge deficit and unemployment went up. We had the sequester and these things that the progressives say, oh, that's gonna cause, you know, it's austerity. It's gonna cause a recession and economy did okay. So I think that it's part of a general trend for people to dig in and your question is sort of why are people digging in more? One possibility is that structural, that the government has become bigger, more important, that's a very comforting idea from a libertarian point of view. Hey, they wouldn't have these fights if government weren't so big. I'm more inclined to take a soft cultural view that people, for whatever reason, have taken on their political beliefs as a stronger part of their identity. So, and my evidence for that would be something like on Facebook, the amount of political stuff, even from, you know, friends from just, that I've friended because they're my high school friends. So it's not like, you know, I mean, it'd be one thing if all my friends were people from the Washington area who I knew from my political and economic, you know, these are people that just happened to have gone to high school with and they're like posting, you know, their political rhetoric or people that I worked with when I had my business and, you know, we had no political discussions at all, but, you know, whether Facebook posts are all political. So I think people are, it's a bigger part of their identity. And again, I go back to the 60s and 70s, you know, people identified, you know, there was the jocks versus the long hair, jocks versus greasers, and there were these, you know, all these cultural divides and so on, all these ways of people identified themselves, but it wasn't all politics. And I think that the salience of politics and people's identity has gone up and that is creating this kind of extreme polarization or coinciding with it. I think that's one of the real dangers of that is that the difference between, you know, the various clicks, you know, if you're part of a click in high school or you identify very strongly as like a Boston sports fan versus New York sports fans or whatever these other kinds of... Which Aaron does, by the way. He's your Patriots. Yeah. But is that those are relatively harmless lines to draw upon, you know? So I can totally hate the New York Jets and think that there's something just like morally deficient with their fans. Which he does treat them at A-Rosk. Otherwise they wouldn't be Jets fans, but I don't see those people as enemies, but the difference is when we start getting our cultural identity from politics is that there are policies attached to those and those policies end up seeing us forcing other people to live in a line. You're libertarian. I agree. But I think it encourages us to see each other as when we identify politically as opposed to along these other lines, it encourages us to see each other more as enemies than we might have otherwise. Which I think is then a deeply harmful. I think the fewer people you see as your outright enemies probably the better your life is gonna go. Yeah, I definitely, this circles back to sort of the politics as primitivism issue. Yeah, I think I'd much rather see people's primitive urges go into sports stadiums than in politics, but maybe that's just my libertarian inclination. I mean, my inclination is to think that if you had a continuum of primitivism and maybe civilization. Or just something, yeah, right. Peacefulness. That the most civilized way to live is live and let live. If your idea of a good day is to curl up with a good book inside and my idea of good day is to take a hike in the woods. We each do our own thing. And that just seems like the most civilized way to live. And the most primitive is for us to beat each other up. And then somewhere in between, we can take votes and do things like that. And I guess I think that the taking a vote is closer to the, or maybe that's kind of your insight, is that taking a vote is closer to the beating each other up than it is to the live and let live. Depends on what you're voting about, yeah. Yeah, I liked your comment though about, and I think about this as I'm working on the book on this, that you don't wanna make sure that you're just justifying your libertarian view of the world in terms of this rubric you set up, which is a point well taken. But when you bring in the social aspects and comparing how much of your identity might be tied up with politics, that's a very good point because this also could be tied to the diversification of culture across the board, the long tail effect of there being not three networks anymore, not three bands anymore, and there were more than three bands, but there were just more and more things that you can do. And that means that there are more things that you could assign a group mentality to. So, Trader Joe's versus this, they start to have political ramifications. Whole Foods has a political undertone to it. Trader Joe's does that if you shop at a different type of grocery store, maybe it doesn't and even bands and even those. But that could have worked out the other way, right? It could have worked out that people's political heat turned down as they became more and more engaged in these other things. And with these wider opportunities. And one of the things that I remember Tyler Cowan writing a blog post about is that, if there are a lot of areas to compete in, then there are a lot of different status games to play. And I may be the best connoisseur of a certain type of music. And I may have a tight in group of people who take my recommendations on that music. And that's a great, you know, that, you know, in terms of, you know, my view of sort of a civilized versus primitive view, that would give, you know, give us a more civilized life or less likely to run into conflicts with each other is that people, is there enough status games so that everybody can feel their high status at something. But if you put all the load everything into politics, that seems like wow, you're bound to make a lot of people unhappy. Hey, let me push back just a bit on this, that kind of social science aspect of all of this a bit. And just say what, we're having this conversation very much in the Beltway right now. And I know you said like, you see more political posts from your Facebook friends, but that could be because that's become like the thing one does on Facebook. Or, you know, when you post on Facebook, you get these little, you know, it tells you how many people responded and political things may get just more responses than, you know, here's an article about bird watching or whatever. And so it incentivizes stuff like that. But is it possible that we living here in the Washington, D.C. area, are to at least some extent over-reading how much people identify culturally with political groups and maybe outside the rest of America. Yeah, they, I mean, they can identify as Democrats or Republicans, but they're not thinking about it that much and they're not identifying. Yeah, so they're not like reading the newspaper, looking at the web, and when they see something that's threatening to their side, getting all like, oh, I gotta do something about that. I gotta write my blog post to share with them. Or they're just not reading the newspaper and reading the political pundits as much as we are. They live a normal life. Yeah, well, certainly that's true. I mean, you can just see in terms of the, you know, the percentage of non-voters and how that goes, you know, Obama just complained about this, how that goes up during off-year elections. So, yeah, I think that's true, but I think it's still kind of scary to the extent, to me, the extent to which at least among highly educated people that there's a lot of identity. I mean, I just see it in friends. I mean, I don't know if you get this experience, but I get this experience up because I have, you know, just about all my friends are on the left and so he was sitting around a dinner table and, you know, eventually the conversation comes back to how miserable the conservatives, the fact that, you know, that conservatives make them feel, how angry they get. And it's like, you know, you just wanna crawl under the chair. I wanna thank you, Arnold, for coming on Free Thoughts today. And I wanted to close by just asking if our listeners have found this really interesting. Of course they should buy the book, the Three Languages of Politics. It's only about 50 pages, so it's definitely worth it. But then is there somewhere they can say, find you online to get more of your thoughts? Well, I have a web blog that's called Ask Blog, but I think if you Google Arnold Kling Blog, sooner or later you'll get there. I used to blog elsewhere, but sooner or later you'll find this Ask Blog and if you see a blog with current posts, only by me, then you know you've found it. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod, that's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.