In the comments, Joseph links to this post by Den Beste arguing for a series of axes to place folks on political positioning.
Den Beste's post, like almost all his posts, was well argued, and thoughtful. I'm not certain it is the most useful model.
What we know about axes in politics.
- If the axes chop heads...it's bad.
- American votes in the Senate are far better modeled as a single-axis than as anything else. There is the left-team, and the right-team...and various players are variously committed to leftness or rightness. If one says what the vote-split was on a political measure (57 yea, 43 nay ... more republicans voted yes...then one can get 90+% predictive value on who voted for and who voted against).
- Cultural differences between folks in all countries everywhere are very well modeled as a 2-axis system. Rich/poor (Forager/Farmer) and West/East (individual/group). We're all westerners here, so that boils down to a Forager-Farmer distinction (Hanson's words) or a Trader / Guardian distinction (Jane Jacobs).
- Most people treat politics as a team sport...and support their team independent of positions. Supporting Romneycare and opposing Obamacare. Opposing Bush in Iraq, but supporting Obama's identical policies in Iraq. etc.
- individualized/central choices
- stability/change
- suffice/perfect
- tolerate/conform
- equality/freedom
I know folks who care deeply about equality...or at least about extra protection for the poor...and honestly don't give a damn about the rest of the axes.
Most libertarians I know care massively about the autocratic axis...and don't care at all about the rest of them.
And conservatives don't seem to be well represented on this set of axes.
I will restate my line:
- Conservatives are folks whose top political goal is to preserve the existing good. Changing things to make things better is likely to cause more problems than it solves...and so it's better to keep what good we have now...or even sometimes go back to what good we had last week / year / decade. "We live in the best country in the best time in the history of the world...what are you trying to break now?"
- Progressives are folks whose top political goal is to make things better, especially for the poor and weak. The core issue is that the existing system creates losers...and those losers are losers substantially because of the system they're in. "The system itself creates winners & losers...it is our ethical responsibility to mitigate that...and the only way to do that is to tinker with the system."
- Libertarians are folks whose top political goal is more freedom for each individual. The government is an (but not the only) oppressive institution that spends 98+% of it's resources screwing people...nearly always in favor of government insiders...and always doing 10x more harm than good. The goal is to minimize the government footprint on our lives...and replace the government with alternate institutions subject to the checks and balances that come from having to please the customer. "GTFO of my life".
- The elitists are folks whose effective top political goal is to collect more power for the center. Public Choice economics says that upwards of 99% of everyone involved in politics necessarily falls into this category, regardless what their other nominal goals are. The most effective method of collecting more power for themselves is to increase the power available to the government, and decrease the power available to the public. Power is zero-sum. Libertarians mortal enemies are elitists.
I have next to no sympathy for anyone anywhere near the elitist position...and don't do well describing it from the inside, while I have lots of sympathy for all 3 of the other positions. The issue...as per the 2nd aretaevian meta-rule...is value > truth ....NOT where are you on the axes, but what's important. Many progressives would like stability (My 85 year old granmother, for instance), but protecting the poor (and the even weaker animals, or trees) is higher priority. Many conservatives would like to help the weak, but they fear that doing so would break the goodness we have now. And many libertarians like either or both of the other two goals...but think that preventing government intrusion into our lives is a higher priority.
Formalists are hyper-conservatives who think elitism can result in conservation of existing value, or restoration of historical value.
Neocons are conservatives who think that the US position in the world order ca. 1960 is essential to conserving our way of life.
Greens are progressives who have expanded their protection of the weak outside the boundaries of homo sapiens.
Left libertarians anarchists (ME!) are libertarian who think protecting the weak is important and who think the government's primary purpose is to enforce inequality.
Corporations are all elitist, because it's much easier to bribe the government to change the rules, and thereby make money than to deliver value in a competitive market and make money.
Posts
15 comments:
Conservatives are folks whose top political goal is to preserve the existing good...or even sometimes go back to what good we had last week / year / decade.
So what about the libertarian who thinks that yesterday's model of the relationship between citizen and government was closer to libertarianism than today's is? Can't he also be a conservative under this definition, until such time as we get back to that place and he insists we keep going?
Although Moldbug quotes Carlyle on the importance of Great Men, I think it's missing the point to describe Formalists as hyper-conservatives who think elitism can result in conservation of existing value.
The goal is to align incentives, so that those making the decisions are the ones who gain or lose by those decisions.
A Formalist government would be more like the owner of a mall, whose goal is to maximize the value of that mall, even though he doesn't own or run the individual shops. Setting the right ground rules and running the public areas well increases the rent he can charge.
Which is a better way to run a mall? Having a mall-owner, who charges rent; having a co-op, where the shop-owners vote; or having individual shops, with no shared mall at all?
Elmo,
1. Welcome to the blog.
2. I think the core question is goal...not method. Most libertarians currently think that the conservative team is a lower threat to liberty than the progressive team, and so join that team as provisional supporters, even though they're not actually conservatives, insofar as the team political game plays, it's good. Others (me) don't agree...but still count ourselves as fellow travelers with the libertarians, even if we disagree on method, our goal is similr.
Isegoria,
I think this is a focus difference. What goal are Formalists trying to achieve. By my read of the formalists... they're mostly seeking reactionary goals...the restoration of the good of yesteryear. They just have revolutionary/elitist methods.
Is the goal not the essential question in politics? I argue that it is...but you're suggesting that it's not the right way to think about the Formalists?
Am I wrong? Or focused on inessentials?
Then you may simply have a difference of definitions.
I might call myself a "conservative" insofar as I think the American founders got the relationship between free people and their government more right than any other governors have, and certainly more right than the current status quo, but would never argue that they got everything right or that they had an expansive enough definition of free people.
I want to preserve the existing good and to return to an earlier form of government, but have no qualms about getting rid of the existing bad or continuing to reform government once we get there (though I favor small, careful steps over radical revolutionary change wherever possible--another competing definition of conservatism). That doesn't fit the definition of conservatism you're using, but isn't an uncommon definition among libertarian-leaning folks who call themselves conservative.
Elmo,
1. In my response to you, I may have been unclear, or may have meant the wrong thing. Let me try this again. My original meaning was clear to me...my response to you not so much.
Revision:
There are axes along which people care about things.
One axis is libertarianism: How much do we care about freedom?
One axis is conservativism: How much do we care about preserving the existing structure?
One axis is progressivism: How much do we care about protecting the weak?
A conservative-libertarian may be someone who has moderately strong concerns on the first two axes, and low doses of the 3rd (for strangers, especially).
There's 3 distinct axes...and different folks have different strengths of opinion as to what matters.
Personally, I sit strongly on he libertarian axis...with mild positive awareness in both other directions...and an awareness that for liberty, I'd drop both of the other values.
Where do you sit in an arbitrary conflict between freedom and preservation? Does it vary?
And I may be conflating this point with your previous post about not understanding how people can identify simultaneously as libertarian and conservative--"they're using different definitions of conservatism" is my suggested answer to that question.
With regard to your axes, I care primarily about freedom; my interest in preservation is frankly coincidental. I happen to think that a lot of traditional American values are either substantially closer to the ideal of personal liberty or otherwise enable movement in the direction of liberty. If I came from a culture whose past was less free in all ways, I'd have no qualms about scrapping the past in its entirety and leaving it to hobby reenactors (with various reservations about the speed with which it's scrapped, yadda-yadda).
I care about protecting the weak, but it's mostly in a laws-of-robotics kind of hierarchy with freedom: "we should try to protect the weak, except where such actions would conflict with preserving individual liberty". ;)
Which, in practice, amounts to people spending their own resources protecting the weak and haranguing others to voluntarily do the same.
The proximate goal of the Formalists is to align incentives, so that power and responsibility go hand in hand — which should lead to good governance, which would lead to less crime, less economically wasteful activity, more prosperity, etc.
It's reactionary in the classic sense of being a reaction to Democracy, which is now considered a Good unto itself.
Elmo,
My conservativism line is mostly: Don't they know that freed markets and freed minds (wealth and liberty) are the greatest tradition-corroding agents ever built? I guess I didn't say it real well.
I dunno, man. Do you have any idea how expensive Renaissance reenacting is? ;)
Isegoria,
Up front I'll grant the possibility of my being wrong... please correct me if I am.
Good governance is itself an instrumental value to some final / intrinsic value. What is that end for the formalists? My read of Moldbug is pretty clear (and loud): He's arguing that we should preserve the good we had before (peace, low strife)...the quintessentially conservative / reactionary goal.
And certainly almost everyone arguing in support of Moldbug is in the conservative-reactionary goal space.
Elmo,
you win.
I would say that there's a huge rift between Moldbug the man and Moldbug the character he plays on the Web. Unlike many of his conservative fans, Moldbug is a Bay Area liberal by nature, playing with interesting ideas — and one very interesting train of thought is that Modernity made a few wrong turns, and those stuffy old Reactionaries of yesteryear may know a thing or two, even if they seem to be spouting nonsense about the Divine Right of Kings.
Anyway, I think he would say that we had a much more libertarian society under the supposedly authoritarian rule of monarchs than we have while "ruling ourselves" under democracy.
And he would openly relish that irony.
So, yes, he values the "conservative" goals of law & order and prosperity, and he points to a time in the past when we worked more effectively toward those goals, but his goals are largely indistinguishable from your own stated goals, which you see as not at all conservative.
Isegoria,
Thanks. I'm still awful confused by Moldbug. But this has been true for a good 3 years...and if he's effectively split-personality, then so much the better for my confusion not being just because I'm dense.
Moldbug is often deliberately obtuse. Of course you'd have to ask him, but I think this is partly "Are the new viewers gone yet?" and partly because challenging writing is so rare in modern times.
In any case, it causes the new viewers to go away and makes for interesting puzzles for the reader.
Post a Comment