March 29, 2009

Was it Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patton?

"Was it Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patton who said 'if you label me, you disregard me?'" Wayne's World viewers realize it sounds better in Cantonese.

Some comments, several posts down, blossomed into a discussion of how many axes are required to classify polities. Nanobrewer expressed some interest in continuing, and political Zoology has always been of great interest to me.

tg offers a good baseline with The Republican Liberty Caucus's RLC LiberGraph. My favorite two-axis graph is from Pew and I have cited it frequently in the context of asking my big-L libertarian friends how they expect to govern with a 9% electorate.

My gripe with the RLC's is its defining "personal liberty" as a scalar quantity. I tried to explain that I prefer a strict enforcement of just laws, and I turned to Bastiat (understandable and avoidable) to define them. I score myself high on the personal liberty scale. I'd go along with the whole libertarian agenda of legal drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, and helmetless motorcycle riding; things that do not harm me, you may do.

Two places I tend to stray off the libertarian reservation are my acceptance of strict -- almost authoritarian -- enforcement of laws that do hurt me. I cited Mayor Giuliani as an example. Let's make insider trading legal but let's put graffiti taggers in stocks in the public square It seems more than semantic to ask whether this knocks down my personal liberty score or represents a different axis.

My second libertarian heterodoxy and gripe with both the RLC and Pew scales are their domestic-only metrics. I cited Deepak Lal's Liberal International Economic Orders and my willingness to support an international military presence to defend the infrastructure of free world trade. That would get me kicked out of a Reason soiree before they ran out of cocktail wieners.

So I vote for Pew's, and I add a parameter for "crime tolerance." Many libertarian-types are willing to put up with a lot of crime to preserve expression and insulation from police.

I then add an international military axis from isolationist (Rep. Ron Paul) to adventurist (President Bush).

I propose four axes:

  • Social Liberalism

  • Economic Liberalism

  • Authoritarianism

  • Military Adventurism

But then again, I'm just your typical, Authoritarian, Social Liberal, Economic Liberal, Adventurist...

Posted by John Kranz at March 29, 2009 4:17 PM

Here's where I'll have to part with JK. Too many additions will result in an eye chart; nice for a story, a blog post, or perhaps an academic paper, useless for nudging our paradigm towards much needed change, IMO.

First: I think rating military adventurism as a deciding, ideological factor is potentially ruinous. One of the great successes of our American experiment has to keep the military under civilian, political control. Use of the military should always stem from deeper beliefs,
like protecting economic rights (e.g., free trade) or extending our ideas of personal liberty beyond our borders.

I've been thinking about this over the last couple of days and really do think one more axis is needed, and am nearly as sure that no more than one should be included. I find the Pew report, well-considered, properly analyzed (as always) and a bit troubling. Perhaps this was the populist wave McCain tried to ride?

All for now; I hate to dis&run but I need to winnow my 3-axis thoughts down to a manageable size, get some personal things in proper order prior to leaving town for business, and be sure JK isn't alone on this topic.

Posted by: nanobrewer at March 29, 2009 8:20 PM

Safe travels, nb. Email me your 3-axis (jk [the cat] three sources [doth protest too much] com)and we'll reopen this.

Posted by: jk at March 30, 2009 12:59 PM

I am with nanobrewer on military adventurism. It seems to be to narrow a lens with which to gauge worldviews. Where would you put the President who puts diplomatic pressure on a country in order to bring about free-trade reforms? What about the President who agrees to sell nuclear material and technology to key allies? Where on the spectrum falls the President who will use military force to protect economic interest but will not do the same for the sake of human rights and liberties?

A better spectrum for analyzing foreign affairs is the realist-idealist range. On one side you have those folks who approach the rest of the world with a cold dose of realpolitick, interested only in securing America's power. On the other side you have those idealists who believe that American foriegn policy should be rooted in American values; democracy, free trade, and liberty are ends in and of themselves, not just means to further American influence or power.

It is not hard to classify most people on this spectrum- Whereas I believe that supporting the Saudi regime is amoral, hypocritical, and unbefitting America, JK has stated that he believes this course of action to be a necessary evil. That puts me closer to the idealist side of the line than him.

But on the other hand, JK has stated before that the creation of a stable democracy in Iraq is reason enough to commit thousand of U.S. troops to the nation, even though the Iraqi democracy that emerges might not have American interests in mind. That puts him closer to the idealist side of things than most of America.

Posted by: T. Greer at March 31, 2009 12:42 PM | What do you think? [3]