Tag: The Three Languages

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. 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. How, then, do we understand what is happening along the border, and how do we understand the political rhetoric and division regarding the migrant caravan? For conservatives, the struggle between barbarism and civilization is also obvious. The rights-emphasizing libertarian can point to the exercise of force along the border as illegitimate interference with voluntary interaction between migrants and those who wish to hire them, rent to them, care for them, or otherwise associate with them. Instead of jumping right to the assumptions of stupidity and ill will, Kling suggests that we first seek to really understand one another's ways of framing the issue, and not just superficially.