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America’s Three Moral World Views

Feb 3, 2022

The concept of left/right in politics is debilitating in it’s lack of dimensions, but it’s useful to structure discourse. I thought I’d broaden things out to offer a less debilitating, and hopefully more accurate break down of American political world views. Things are still more complicated than this, but it’s based on the idea that there are actually 3 main world views in American politics, not just two. No one fits neatly in to just one world view, and no one is consistent on which they apply to all issues — most of us use one or another almost completely unconsciously, based on social context, and will apply different ones to different issues.

The main things I wanted to show with this are where the identitarian politics and “centrism” really fits, because left/right doesn’t cover it. Identitarian politics, how I loath thee. It is the politics of identity, of “othering” — whether it’s about the aggrieved minority (Democrats), or the aggrieved majority (“white” Republicans), it doesn’t matter — it’s all the aggrieved in-group vs the out-group oppressors, asserted by a static unchallengeable authority, and it’s always dangerous — yes, even when Democrats do it.

Terms like “liberal” and “centrist” have been so debased, that it’s hard to even discuss them. We live in a liberal culture, with a liberal democracy, and a liberal economy. We are almost all of us liberal, despite the way right-wing media uses that word as a slur against their favorite straw-man opponents. Whenever CPAC conservatives talk of “liberty” they are dipping in to liberal moral frames. “Centrists” are simply arrogant — they believe they sit in the void in the middle of this chart, but they are really just promoting a specific kind of economic classical liberalism mixed with a moderate amount of social support (progressive morality). Centrists have failed to noticed how much they’ve drifted to an extremist kind of liberalism (neoliberalism) away from support in any legitimate sense. Support is all just lip service from centrists, and that’s put progressives in sharp contrast. But we can work on that. Progressives have made their own mistakes, courting identitarian politics too aggressively, because they don’t have any natural aversion like liberals do, to leveraging authority.

Conservatives can’t stand centrists, because they don’t represent conservative values of self-discipline and their specific kind of authority. Conservatives are all about authority, not liberty, not that they seem to be any kind of self aware about it. When they are talking about liberty, it’s a specific kind of liberty, the kind where they get to set up their own little strict father fiefdoms. Ask a conservative (who’s not also a libertarian) if you should obey a police officer. See if you get an answer about liberty.

There is a funny alliance between “centrists” and identitarians, but we can see this starting to fray as the identitarians get ever more hard-line and inflexible about every little perceived slight, and lean harder and harder on conservative model authority (I’m right because my cause is righteous, and my authority to define terms shall not be challenged!). Identitarian politics is as illiberal as you can get.

These inflexible identitarians are going to cost progressives and centrists a lot in the next election (2022), count on it. Look at the chart, it’s a completely ridiculous alliance. When “centrists” blame progressives for those losses, they’re partially right, but only because of the identitarian component — and we can do something about it, if we understand our values, and stop the madness (or we can cancel Whoopi for the crime of having said something unpopular, but probably true…).

The key to understanding the blended positions is that they aren’t blended at all. The folks in those in between spaces hold multiple separate world views. There is no rational compatibility between liberalism and conservatism, or progressive and liberalism. That’s why the libertarians seem so bizarre, and centrists so wishy-washy. American libertarians are seen as something of an anomaly — but if you understand moral reasoning in the human brain, it’s easier to understand. Economic liberalism on the economy, so they can do strict father conservatism in their businesses and at home. That’s the exact opposite of progressive. It’s the same for identitarians and centrists. These multi-world-view in-betweens are more defined by what they oppose than what they support. Each of these in between groups will simply apply one of their world views to a different issues, or in a different social contexts. They aren’t blending anything. It’s more like balancing competing concerns. I almost labeled the “nobody” space “Zen.”

It’s the liberal in me who has a problem with identity politics. The progressive in me wants to address their grievances. This is not easy to balance, but imagine how much easier it would be to balance if we could talk about it directly without getting cancelled. There are multiple incompatible world views at play. None of the 3 main world views are wrong in their morals, even if they are doing some reprehensible things in the pursuit of puritanical versions of each. They are each righteous inside their own frameworks. Even conservatism has a place — but it’s dangerous on its own — all 3 are. They must be balanced.

BTW, rationalist thinks they are in the “nobody” place, but the truth is, they are mostly one of these groups, doubling down on a particular moral world view, and calling it more rational than the other rationalists. A real rationalist would be eager to learn how moral cognition works, and start to map this out, but they have mostly just doubled down on their own kind of identity based in-group mockery, and it has to stop. We need to figure out how to balance these things, so we can occupy that central space in a real way.

I call one who would occupy that place, the radical moderate. More on that to come.