ASSOCIATED PRESS
It’s no secret that Americans are divided politically. What’s especially curious, though, is the fact that people tend to talk past one another and rarely if ever achieve a real meeting of the minds on political controversies. Empirical researchers are studying this–Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is one very important contribution–and as a way of organizing our thinking on rhetorical and political division I think Arnold Kling’s short book The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides is especially insightful. It has recently been republished and made available for $0 in multiple formats, including as an MP3 audiobook, by the Cato Institute, and it has a lot to teach us, I think, about all the ways people are reacting to the “migrant caravan” of asylum-seekers at the US border. I hope that by adopting Kling’s framing we can add light to a discussion where there is right now mostly just heat.
Kling asks us whether we are really trying to understand and influence one another or whether we are just seeking status within our own political groups. He considers three groups in American politics: liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Liberals frame issues in terms of the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Conservatives frame issues in terms of the struggle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians, meanwhile, frame issues in terms of the struggle between liberty and power (or coercion).
These different framings lead us to different ways of thinking about policy issues. Importantly, Kling notes that there isn’t a “right” or a “wrong” framing that applies to literally every issue, and he argues that the Civil Rights Era is most usefully understood through the liberal “oppressors versus oppressed” framing. It’s entirely possible that the most appropriate framing differs from issue to issue.
But we would do well to…
