My political lens makes me think you’re crazy — and vice versa

By David McElroy · June 5, 2013

Does this ever happens to you? Some issue pops up in the news or there’s some new action in society — by government or a company or a private organization — and you instantly know what you think about it. An action is completely wrong. It’s clear-cut. Nobody with principles could see it differently.

But then you talk to somebody else who’s obviously intelligent and informed, but he sees it completely different from how you see it. Then you talk to someone else and discover that this person has an entirely different point of view from either you or the other guy.

“Those idiots!” you mutter darkly to yourself. “It’s so obvious. How can they be so blind?!”

This happens in politics all the time. I hear people saying that their opponents are dishonest, stupid, crazy or evil. The opponents tend to be equally sure that you’re dishonest, stupid, crazy or evil. How can we come to such different conclusions?

I think the people who disagree with me about politics or social policy tend to be simply wrong, not evil or stupid or crazy. My thought has been that if you can understand their assumptions and their ways of looking at the world, their conclusions will at least make sense, even if you still think they’re completely wrong. You can understand that people of good will and sound brains can disagree.

Economist Arnold Kling has just published a short ebook examining this issue and proposing a model that makes sense to me. It’s called “The Three Languages of Politics.” It’s $1.99 and only available at Amazon. (If you use Amazon’s Prime service, you can read it free.)

Kling proposes that three dominant groups in American politics today look at the world along three different axes. He divides the the U.S. political scene into progressives, conservatives and libertarians. (Kling is generally libertarian today, but he’s been part of the other two camps at different points in his political evolution.)

Here’s how Kling believes the three groups tend to interpret the world:

— Progressives see the world largely through a lens of oppression. They see it as a battle between oppressor groups and oppressed groups. In their view, “good people” line up with oppressed groups. Progressives also tend to see the world in terms of competing groups more than in terms of individuals.

— Conservatives tend to see the world through the lens of civilization vs. barbarism. For them, it’s a battle between civilized and reasonable people on the one hand and those who want to destroy everything that’s good on the other hand. This is why they tend to see the “war on terror” as an existential crisis to protect western civilization and they’re less concerned with the history of how we got here.

— Libertarians see the world through the lens of freedom vs. coercion. If you’ve read much that I’ve written here, you’ll recognize that as my lens. We see the world as a battle between those who are trying to live their own lives freely against those who are trying to control others.

If you understand these differing lenses, it can make sense how we see issues in different ways. Kling and economist Russ Roberts have a great discussion of the book on this week’s episode of EconTalk. I strongly recommend listening to Kling’s insights, even though I don’t agree with all of his points.

You can see the clash of these differing points of view all the time, and it’s even messier because people can sometimes see certain issues partly through lenses other than their normal ones. Here’s a recent example.

In the days following the bombing of the Boston Marathon, many of us in the libertarian camp were outraged at what we saw as serious intrusions into individual rights. Police shut down the city and were going door to door in force, searching for suspects — with no warrants or specific reasons to search certain places. To us, it was clearly a widespread violation of the Fourth Amendment.

For plenty of other people — mostly from a conservative viewpoint, but not exclusively — the police actions were clearly necessary to protect civilization. They didn’t see the matter as we did. To them, this was simply a matter of protecting the public safety from barbarians who didn’t care about rules or about civilized people. (This attitude is why it’s so easy for conservatives to defend torture when it comes to suspected terrorists. They tend to see “those people” as barbarians who don’t deserve the same rights we have.)

A former friend who lives in the Boston area actually cut me off — defriended me on Facebook with no explanation — because I wrote about the issue from a Fourth Amendment perspective and asked what legal basis there was to randomly search people’s houses. It was apparently so upsetting to him that someone would take a view that he saw as dangerous to his family that it was worth cutting off a friend because of it. This is an example of what happens when people see the world in different ways and have trouble accepting someone else’s point of view.

Kling doesn’t believe that understanding these differing perspectives will help us to all agree. He doesn’t even think it will help us to change other people’s minds. But it’s important to think about so we can understand other people — and maybe come to the realization that other intelligent and rational people can simply see the world in different ways.

As with so many things, I see it as another example of why we shouldn’t be forced to live under a “one size fits all” set of rules and that we should be able to choose our own rules and establish our own cities or enclaves.

Of course, given the lens through which I see the world, isn’t that predictable?

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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