Notes Toward A New Political Taxonomy
It has become clear to me over the years that one of the causes of persistent confusion in our political arguments is the interchangeable use of taxonomic terms that, while they may have a natural affinity, are not actually synonyms.
Three terms that tend to get used interchangeably are:
Left
Liberal
Progressive
Their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are treated similarly:
Right
Conservative
Reactionary
The shades of difference among the meanings of the words within the triads, however, are not minor. One can very well be extremely right-wing without being a reactionary in any meaningful sense – think of Ayn Rand. One can be extremely left-wing without being a liberal in any meaningful sense – think of Lenin.
I propose, therefore, to accentuate the differences between the words commonly lumped together, to clear up all ambiguities by assigning technical meanings to commonly-used terms, and thereby define a three-dimensional space within which political writers and thinkers could more clearly be pegged.
Herewith my new definitions:
1. Liberal vs. Conservative
The core of the difference between a liberal and a conservative outlook relates to one’s basic assumptions about human capacities. A liberal is someone who is generally impressed with the capacities of an individual, and who therefore wants individuals to be free to develop those capacities. Liberal distrust of authority and belief in the importance of open minds and freedom of inquiry stem from this basic assumption: that individuals can be trusted to know what’s best for themselves, and that the best environment is one that nurtures that capacity in individuals.
A conservative by temperament takes the opposite side in this dispute. Most human beings are naturally afraid of freedom, eager to hand over decisionmaking power to some authority. They frequently do not – cannot – know what is best for them. Most ideas are beyond their natural cognitive capacities, and anyhow people are not so much moved by ideas as by sentiments. Not only are human beings fundamentally selfish, they are frequently perverse. Deference to authority combined with an intense concern for the nature of that authority and its legitimate grounds grows naturally in conservative soil.
Put simply: a liberal outlook trusts individuals and questions authority; a conservative outlook distrusts individuals and defers to authority.
2. Left vs. Right
Issues of the individual versus authority are not fundamental to the left-right axis. Rather, this axis is defined by attitudes towards success.
A left-wing perspective is animated by failure and the consequences thereof. Whether we’re talking about Rawlsian liberals or Christian socialists or orthodox Marxist-Leninists, the ultimate object of concern is the miserable of the earth. Their perspective, their needs, are the beginning and the end of political morality.
A right-wing perspective is opposite to this. How to design a system that adequately rewards success is the essence of the right-wing political project. What constitutes “success” may vary among different kinds of right-wingers – are we talking about having the most impressive genetic endowment? accumulating the most wealth? devising the most impressive technical innovations? it can even be a matter of aesthetics – how do we reward the achievement of euphony and harmony? But these are all kindred spirits in that all are asking how to reward success, so that we get more of it, rather than how to mitigate the consequences of failure (or, in the case of more radical leftists, abolish it altogether).
Put simply: a right-wing perspective is animated by an affinity for the winners and their interests, while a left-wing perspective is animated by an affinity for the losers and their interests.
3. Progressive vs. Reactionary
The progressive-reactionary axis revolves around attitudes toward time and history.
The progressive is future-oriented. Things will – or could – be better in the future than they are now. But more than this, history has a direction that can be discerned, and that one must be cognizant of in constructing one’s politics. You don’t have to be a dialectical materialist to be a progressive; the motor of history could be something entirely other than the class struggle – indeed, history doesn’t have to be conceived as a machine with a motor at all for it to have a direction. Whiggish history is progressive; so is history as understood by social darwinists; neither has much in common with Marxist history apart from that fact.
The reactionary, by contrast, is past-oriented. Things will – likely – be worse in the future than they are now, just as they were better in the past. Apparent progress masks the loss of things that were more valuable than the novelties acquired. Moreover, in the deepest sense, the real truth is that there is nothing new under the sun. What may appear novel has really been seen many, many times before. The reactionary resists change simply because it is change, and is therefore unlikely to be good; he is the one standing athwart history yelling “stop!”
Now, as should be obvious, there’s a reason why we use the triads interchangeably: because they are mutually reinforcing. But by accentuating the differences among the terms, I’m hoping to define a space that would make it easier to situate any given individual, and understand why ostensible allies might wind up disagreeing – and ostensible opponents agreeing – when the defining questions of a given moment get scrambled.
You might ask: how is my scheme different from the political compass? First and foremost, the political compass is far too idealistic. Do people really range between those who think the economy shouldn’t be regulated and those who think the economy should be centrally managed, with a spectrum in between? I think those kinds of intellectual commitments come later. I think my scheme – do you side with winners or with losers? – is much closer to the heart. Second, and relatedly, the political compass is far too narrowly bound to our current political disputes. It therefore makes it very difficult to see affinities across time and space to situations where the issue landscape was very different, even if a very similar array of different temperaments contended. Finally, I think the orientation toward history is a very important dimension for people’s political allegiances – indeed, sometimes the dominant one. If Christopher Lasch or Alasdair MacIntyre weren’t reactionaries, they wouldn’t be anything at all.
To start placing people in my defined space, let’s take a fellow like Andrew Sullivan. I’d call him basically a liberal, right-wing progressive. He calls himself a conservative, but I don’t see a lot of evidence that he’s deferential to authority nor that he’s skeptical of individuals’ capacities. And that’s consistent across his career; these things were true when he was cheering on Margaret Thatcher and they are true today when he’s cheering on Barack Obama. But he’s also basically right-wing; he is generally more animated by the need to reward success than by the need to ameliorate the consequences of failure. His “move to the left” over time represents a change in emphasis on his part and a response to a change in the political landscape – where once he considered himself a member of a right-wing coalition of liberals and conservatives against the left, he now sees himself as a member of a liberal coalition of left- and right-wingers against conservative reactionaries. (Oh, I’m sorry – he’s of no party or clique. Never mind.)
Your typical libertarian – Julian Sanchez, Will Wilkinson, etc. – is also a liberal, right-wing progressive, the exceptions being the few but hardy traditionalist libertarians – like Ron Paul himself – who are liberal, right-wing reactionaries. A guy like Daniel Larison, who gets on well with traditionalist libertarians, is no liberal, but he’s also not so right wing, in both cases, I think, because he is first and foremost a Christian.
Matt Yglesias is a liberal and a progressive, through and through, but he’s not much of a left-winger – which is one reason he gets so much grief in comments from the left. Ross Douthat is deeply conservative, but he’s not particularly right-wing – which is one reason his book got so much grief from Rush Limbaugh and his minions. And his collaborator, Reihan Salam, is somewhat less conservative, but mainly is wildly progressive, while Douthat is mildly reactionary.
Sometimes people’s idols aren’t who the idolizers think. I’d venture to say most libertarians have some admiration for Ayn Rand, and think she’s one of them – a liberal, right-wing progressive. Ayn Rand was a cartoonishly extreme right-winger in the sense that I am using the term – her ideology isn’t much more than the worship of the “bitch god,” success. She was also progressive, like most libertarians – much more interested in the future than the past. But it’s not at all clear to me that she, unlike many of her admirers, was actually a liberal in the sense of trusting the individual and distrusting authority. It’s a very limited group of individuals in her intellectual world who can actually be entrusted with freedom. That’s a conservative vision, whether she’d have admitted it or not.
Andrew Sullivan, the liberal right-wing progressive, idolizes George Orwell. But Orwell was such an odd duck because he was a liberal, left-wing reactionary. He was passionate about the individual and deeply distrustful of authority, but the animating political question for him was what was to be done about the wretched condition of the working class – he was, all his life, a socialist. And he was also a reactionary – “he loved the past, hated the present, and dreaded the future” is I believe the apt description. His hatred of Communism had at as much to do with his reactionary sentiments as with his liberal ones – which is how he could be embraced by conservative right-wingers with whom he would have agreed about nothing else.
Anyway, one could go on forever like this, and, if you like the schema, I encourage you to do so.
Excellent! This is very good.
We are driving out a taxonomy for american christians at Protein Wisdom…
here’s a first draft
Social Justice Christians— extreme left
Mainstream Christians— pious middle
Tea Party Christians— extreme right
Is there a correspondence mapping between christian taxonomy and political taxonomy?
— matoko_chan · Apr 26, 04:16 PM · #
If you want to categorize people perfectly, you have to realize that there are as many political dimensions as there are permutations of people in the world.
If you want to account for 85% of the variation, the left-right spectrum is good enough.
— Chris · Apr 26, 04:43 PM · #
I like most of this, but I think one part is badly wrong: the left/right bit. For my part, I am not particularly concerned with failure, but with ensuring, insofar as possible, that everyone has the chance to succeed. Success v. failure is about outcomes; those of us who are concerned with liberty and opportunity just don’t fall neatly into this classification at all.
Note also that recasting your general classification, on this point, to deal with opportunity doesn’t work very well. I am, I suppose, more concerned with people who lack the opportunity to live a decent life, if they work hard and play by the rules, than with using government policy to ensure that people who have these opportunities will be rewarded. Partly, I suppose, that’s because I think the market will do a fine job of rewarding them, but partly also that’s because, when someone lacks the opportunity to live a decent life if s/he is willing to work hard and play by the rules, then that is (according to me) unfair, so of course I focus on it.
Plus, not everyone who thinks that the future could be better — which seems like a pretty unexceptionable thing to think — thinks that history has a direction. I, for instance, don’t, though on your ‘progressive/reactionary’ scale I’m otherwise solidly progressive. I assume that things can be better in the future, but that it is up to us to determine whether they will be or not, and thus to determine whether, in our lifetime, change will constitute progress, and the arc of history will bend towards justice.
— hilzoy · Apr 26, 05:00 PM · #
Point #1 (Liberal vs. Conservative) needs some work, methinks. Too philosophically abstract to be so definitive? I find it to be the weakest argument. Point #2 (Left vs. Right) will probably be the most contentious.
There’s also another important axis, as makato_chan touched on, above: religious vs. secular. Many of the “odd ducks” listed are, perhaps, a little less odd when taking this into account.
— Folderol and Ephemera · Apr 26, 05:04 PM · #
“Your typical libertarian – Julian Sanchez, Will Wilkinson, etc…”
Surely these two aren’t typical libertarians.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Apr 26, 05:07 PM · #
I very much enjoyed this no matter its faults, especially its attempt to classify Orwell who is a hell of a duck.
— Hector Rodriguez · Apr 26, 05:32 PM · #
I like it, but of course I have my complaints.
1) I support freedom not because I am particularly optimistic about the abilities of the individual to chart her own path, but because I am extraordinarily pessimistic about the abilities of the state to improve on her condition through additional regulation over what we have now. I suppose it’s all relative, but does my pessimism about the effectiveness of central authority make me a liberal in your schema?
2) My other gripe is that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are already widely used. (The other four are more up for grabs). Like the libertarians who demand that we use liberal to mean “classically liberal” (i.e., quasi-libertarian), it leads to confusion. Can we call them “Millman-liberal” or “Liberal-M” or something?
— J Mann · Apr 26, 05:50 PM · #
What about someone who distrusts individuals and questions authority?
What’s a cynic to do?
— S.G.E.W. · Apr 26, 06:18 PM · #
hai hilzoy, welcome back.
You know Noah…perhaps political, social and religious taxonomies are all just variants of differing artificial constructs….that overly far deeper cognitive structures…..like say….IQ and g?
;)
— matoko_chan · Apr 26, 06:23 PM · #
Your test for conservative v liberal would put the tea partiers on the liberal side. Does that sound right to you?
My acid test for left versus right would ask whether the greatest threat to liberty comes from {walmart, clear channel, News Corp} or {The Fed, IRS, FCC, DEA etc}. I wonder if the answers would correspond to your acid test (optimize for successful or losers)?
— Kevin Lawrence · Apr 26, 06:26 PM · #
matoko_chan: i never left the comments sections. ;)
Kevin: I don’t know that your acid test is quite right. Personally, I hate ranking threats to freedom, at least within broad equivalence classes, but I think that Bush’s claim that he could detain citizens indefinitely, without charges or trial, purely on his say-so, is right up there near the top of my threats to freedom.
One interesting question to ask people would be: which do you regard as a greater threat to your freedom: (a) the President claiming the right to detain people on his say-so (and acting on this claim), or (b) a 2% increase in the (marginal) highest bracket capital gains tax?
Only slightly kidding.
— hilzoy · Apr 26, 06:37 PM · #
Minor correction: “right up there near the top of my threats to freedom.” That should have been: my list of threats to freedom.
Also, I was thinking only of the contemporary US, not, say, Turkmenistan or North Korea.
— hilzoy · Apr 26, 06:43 PM · #
For a while I’ve been referring to myself as a left-wing reactionary, and I’m pleased to see that your breakdown uses those terms in exactly the way that I do. More exactly, I’m a conservative left-wing reactionary.
@Kevin, your acid test assumes to much. What if political liberty is not a major priority to you?
— JS Bangs · Apr 26, 07:21 PM · #
Then help me refine my acid test… I have in mind govt agencies that regulate corporations versus corporations. Your (Hilzoy’s) example is about govt vs individual – that is, Noah’s respect for authority axis.
I still think I am on to something.
(Granted, if liberty is not important my test is worthless)
— Kevin Lawrence · Apr 26, 07:41 PM · #
The group that I have found comes closest to being an articulation of my political ideals has been called, at certain times in France, the ultra-gauche. I should add the important caveat that I would not fulfill any orthodox Marxist’s idea of a Marxist, as I have always divided descriptive Marxism from prescriptive Marxism, and while I am to a point a descriptive Marxist, I am no kind of prescriptive Marxist. More importantly, I am deeply opposed to teleology and ambivalent towards the idea of human progress.
Essentially I believe that our political concerns should involve maintaining radical non-normative civil liberties and discursive space, while providing for the amelioration of human suffering through the use of government action. I don’t think that human beings are basically good, nor do I believe that scientism, cramped materialism and an increased technocracy will lead us towards a better future. I am opposed to the neoliberal project and I don’t recognize any greater injury in having what you have taken from you in comparison to never having at all. I don’t believe in inheritance, I do believe in romanticism. The essential political responsibility is in the direction of human liberty, recognizing that human liberty cannot be defined merely negatively but must be ensured through the practical ability to do things. (A right to be fed is meaningless without the ability to be fed.)
What I’m saying, in other words, is that I am possessed of the contemporary disease that makes one think that he is a unique and beautiful snowflake, and that anyone else would find his political commitments interesting at all, when in fact they are interesting to no one but him. But hey, it’s the Internet.
Surely these two aren’t typical libertarians.
On the contrary, to varying degrees I think they represent the essential turn in contemporary libertarianism. I wouldn’t presume to speak for either of them individually but I think the larger movement is towards a fusion of neoliberal goals, libertarian rhetoric and Marxist spirit.
— Freddie · Apr 26, 07:44 PM · #
This is very interesting. For me it suggests that the main political parties in the US right now are both basically conservative, in that they distrust the individual, and reactionary, in that they look to (different) eras of the past as superior to the present. The only real difference is that the Democrats are moderately left-wing and the Republicans are quite a lot further to the right.
This explains why the people whose ideas I admire most, who are generally liberal and at least somewhat progressive, never seem to get any traction.
— SimonK · Apr 26, 08:38 PM · #
hilzoy: good to hear from you! You make two points: first, that you care about opportunity, not outcomes; second, that you think things may be better in the future, but not that history has a direction; yet you consider yourself left-wing and progressive.
On the first, I think you misunderstand me. The dichotomy I’m setting up is of what motivates you. Are you more concerned with making sure the losers don’t suffer too much, or are you more concerned that the winners are adequately rewarded? An awful lot of real political disputes boil down to that. Of course, left-wingers tend to think the losers didn’t lose fairly, and right-wingers tend to think winners deserve everything they have. But it’s much easier to tell who the winners and losers are than to determine what is really deserved, isn’t it?
On the second: well, the progressive/reactionary axis just might not be terribly important to you. It isn’t to everybody. Maybe you’re one of those happy people who don’t live either in the past or the future, but in the here and now.
J Mann: both very good points. You can often come to “liberal” conclusions from “conservative” premises. A good example would be C.S. Lewis on slavery. Asked whether many people don’t deserve to be slaves, he said something like: of course; but nobody deserves to be master.
But still, there should be some decent rules of thumb. If you instinctively side with the accused, you’re a liberal. If you instinctively side with the police, you’re a conservative. Obviously, there are complications to this; a conservative under an authority he or she views as illegitimate (e.g., an occupation government) is unlikely to instinctively side with that authority. And “authority” and “government” are not the same thing – you can have a conservative temperament, and hence be very skeptical of individuals who step outside of the bounds of community or church control, while still being skeptical of a distant governmental authority. But those complications notwithstanding, I still think it’s a decent rule of thumb.
My bottom line is: liberals have more faith in the individual’s capacities. If you have a conservative view of human nature, and for that reason are skeptical of unchecked government power, I don’t think that makes you a liberal on this axis. You can have liberals who support an active government and liberals who support a more restrained government, and that division has everything to do with how they think government power shapes the environment for individuals – whether government can help shape an environment in which individuals can better realize their capacities, or whether it’s more important for government to get out of the way. Similarly, there are conservatives who favor a more active government – paternalistic, punitive, or both – and conservatives who favor a more restrained government. Does that make sense?
Kevin: I’d call the Tea Party folks right-wing reactionaries. I don’t think they are particularly conservative or liberal – their protestations to the contrary, I don’t see them either as principled believers in the capacities of the individual, nor believers in the importance of deference to established authority. I just think they’re annoyed at what they see as the government taking money from “deserving winners” and giving it to “undeserving losers” (which is why I call them right-wing) and in thrall to a vision of the way things used to be when we didn’t have all these problems (which is why I call them reactionaries).
Freddie: ok, you’re like Orwell: a liberal left-wing reactionary. Makes sense: I could see you going to Spain to fight for a far-left faction with even less organizational capacity than the freaking anarchists, like the POUM, the way Orwell did.
— Noah Millman · Apr 26, 08:53 PM · #
Regarding your liberal/conservative axis:
I myself think the individual tends to be perverse, and I also have a strong distrust of authority for exactly that reason. (I tend to look like a “Libera” in pop-political parlance, then, because I think that the individual should be freed—but not because I think the individual is noble but because I think a whole lot of free individuals will cancel ach others’ perversity’s out, while just a few authority figures are more likely to be able to completely screw things up for the rest of us. Ahem. It may be that I think the individual should be freed because I think this tends to disempower the individual. Oh, man, I shouldn’t have used my real name should I have?)
It seems like the liberal/conservative axis you delineated may need to be split. There’s trust/distrust of authority, and there’s ennoblement/disparagement of the individual. These appear to me to be independent attitudes.
— Kris Rhodes · Apr 26, 09:32 PM · #
(Sorry for the poor editing…)
— Kris Rhodes · Apr 26, 09:34 PM · #
I think I qualify as a liberal, left-wing, progressive, although I’d have to think a bit to work out my exact score on each. I do like this schema.
— Greg Sanders · Apr 26, 09:48 PM · #
my overall take on your dimensions: I like them, but your repurposing of the ‘liberal/conservative” labels seem unfortunate and likely to result in confusion. I like the labels that the political compass uses for it’s “authority” axis better.
put me down for liberal, left-wing progressive too but I care more about equality of opportunity than equality of outcome. I have no problem with people getting insanely rich as long as it is not at some else’s expense.
— Kevin Lawrence · Apr 26, 09:54 PM · #
This serves to clarify the point John Quiggin made a couple of weaks ago about there basically being two kinds of libertarians. I agreed with the point, although not particularly his breakdown of why the propertarian type of libertarian isn’t really libertarian.
Your point above about the possibility of reaching liberal conclusions with conservative reasoning captures the real difference. All libertarians are basically right-wing progressives, and operate within a framework of liberal conclusions.
But some libertarians – like Will Wilkinson and Julian Sanchez – arrived there from a genuinely liberal perspective: people are basically pretty capable and can look after themselves, and if we let them actually do that we might see a good deal of improvement in the overall human condition.
But the other kind of libertarian – say Bryan Caplan, since he’s the scapegoat of the month – starts from a basically conservative premise – people don’t really understand what’s good for them personally, let alone what’s good for other people, and putting them in government doesn’t really change that, so the scope of government should be reduced as far as possible. That would make these people basically conservative, right-wing progressives, which is a combination you don’t touch on above.
— SimonK · Apr 26, 09:56 PM · #
Noah –
This was fantastic!
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these same issues over the years, and your taxonomy includes some features that I never quite “got.” (By yours, I’d be a liberal-moderate-progressive (in the Yglesias / Kevin Drum mold). Perhaps one of the reasons I like this blog so much, although it is ostensibly “conservative,” is that most of the authors are either “liberal” or “progressive” in their outlook, rather than the conservative—right-wing—reactionary triad that is more characteristic of the right blogosphere.
— Scrooge McDuck · Apr 26, 10:35 PM · #
Really excellent post, Noah. In particular, your description of Matt Yglesias as being like Julian Sanchez but somewhat more left-wing helped me articulate precisely what my disagreement with him is. Thanks for a really insightful post.
SimonK: I think Bryan is probably also somewhat reactionary—after all, what he got in trouble for is commenting how much freer the 1880s were than today.
— Jadagul · Apr 26, 10:37 PM · #
freddie,
i think the prescriptive/descriptive terminology you’re looking for is marxist vs marxian
— gabriel · Apr 26, 10:37 PM · #
I don’t like liberal vs. conservative.
I think of it as individualist vs. socialist, or collectivist.
And it relates purely to the individual in relation to the state.
Also just because a person favors capitalism when it applies to the free market, doesn’t mean that we are also OK with the kind of crony-capitalist, corporatist, kleptocracy that emerged at the tail-end of the Bush era.
This critique of business/government cronyism, as a corruption of real freemarket capitalism, has a long history going back all the way to Adam Smith.
— Keid A · Apr 26, 11:02 PM · #
Noah, my first reaction to the “liberal/conservative” part of the axis was much like J Mann’s and S.G.E.W.‘s. I think human beings are fundamentally selfish and even perverse, but so much the more reason to make sure no small group of individuals accumulates too much power! I almost want to say the axis is incoherent, because it seems to assume that someone other than individuals wields authority.
A more constructive point: you could break the axis down into individualist/authoritarian and tragic/utopian axes (the second pair of terms comes from Thomas Sowell). Your original post does a nice job of explaining why there are utopian individualists and tragic authoritarians, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are tragic individualists like me and utopian authoritarians (Plato and Lenin, perhaps).
The other axes come apart in other ways. For example, when Will Wilkinson talks about the injustice of prohibiting people in poor countries from moving to rich countries where they can get higher-paying jobs, in what sense is he not being moved by concern for alleviating human misery? He certainly thinks one of the best ways to help the poor is to remove barriers to free enterprise and let people’s natural capacity for success shine, but in spite of the nice things Wilkinson sometimes says about Rand, Wilkinson’s concern for success isn’t Ayn Rand’s sociopathic success worship.
Similarly, Andrew Sullivan’s progressiveness is tempered by a fair amount of respect for precedent. Propose abolishing marriage altogether, and he’ll quickly tell you about the value of doing whatever’s worked so far. I suspect this axis isn’t terribly useful for understanding the current political climate: there’s a shortage nowadays of both hardcore reactionaries and hardcore revolutionaries. “Revolutionary,” actually, might be a better foil to “reactionary” than “progressive.”
But Orwell provides an even sharper challenge to this axis. He may have dreaded the future, but he also hoped that a real revolution could bring about an anarcho-socialist utopia. The mix of hope and fear for the future is probably best described as “apocalyptic”—essentially, the viewpoint is “if we don’t make a radical change for the better, things will take a radical turn for the worse.”
— Chris Hallquist · Apr 26, 11:05 PM · #
Oh, and where the hell does Nozick go? It would be amiss not to recognize him as an extreme opponent of the sort of wealth redistribution Rawls advocated, which makes him sound right-wing, but he never said we should try to actively reward the successful, just that we should let people have what they rightfully accumulate. I guess you could say Nozick was an extreme individualist who merely seemed right-wing, but that doesn’t quite seem to capture his perspective.
— Chris Hallquist · Apr 26, 11:44 PM · #
Chris: Even on immigration, Will is still trying to uncap the top of the bell curve, not cap the bottom. Imagine his response to the common argument, “But if we let the best and brightest from Mexico come here, the people who are still stuck in Mexico are even worse off.” As for Nozick, I think you have him nailed exactly as a strong individualist who only looks right-wing.
That said, I think the points about splitting the liberal/authoritarian axis are good ones.
— Jadagul · Apr 27, 12:56 AM · #
BTW speaking of kleptocracy, I thought this satirical article was one of the funniest things I have seen recently. h/t Barry Ritholz
— Keid A · Apr 27, 12:58 AM · #
I would say that the key distinction between liberalism and conservatism is that conservatism defers to “legitimate” authority. The concern with legitimacy is fundamentally a conservative concern, while discussions of legitimacy disturb the liberal worldview. Once we recognize that, I think, a lot of the conceptual problems are diminished.
— Ariston · Apr 27, 01:07 AM · #
“a liberal outlook trusts individuals and questions authority; a conservative outlook distrusts individuals and defers to authority.”
What about post-modernists (or nihilists if you prefer) who believe in neither?
— Joseph · Apr 27, 02:19 AM · #
I will add to the chorus of folks who think this is brilliant, save perhaps the first metric. You state the metric as thus:
“a liberal outlook trusts individuals and questions authority; a conservative outlook distrusts individuals and defers to authority.”
This skews things a bit. It seems to me that one can be an individualist without placing much trust in individuals themselves. Ayn Rand is the perfect example here. As you state, she did not really trust in the power of the great majority of mankind at all. She placed her trust in a dogmatic and authoritarian belief system. But this system was completely centered on the individual. Rand saw life through the eyes of the atomized individual and could imagine nothing else.
Contrast this with some of the Chinese Daoist philosophers. These men were extremely skeptical of authority, but overall their philosophy was grounded in a communitarian worldview.
So how to classify people like this? I suggest, as have others before, that you break up ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ into more specific groupings. As I see it, the replacement metrics could be:
Under these two groupings, the two earlier examples make more sense. Rand is an Individualist Cynic, while the Daoists were Holistic Cynics.
— T. Greer · Apr 27, 03:33 AM · #
Y’know. There are a lot of good insights here, but I don’t think that any taxonomy will catch on if it has more than three dimensions. We live in a three dimensional world, and cannot really visualize—or integrate—4-, 5-, or n- dimensional explanations.
I’m actually pretty happy with Noah’s proposed taxonomy, right as he put it. It is vastly more useful and informative (and explanatory) than the simple left-right spectrum we are used to thinking in terms of, and is simple enough to remain memorable, sharable, and useful.
— Scrooge McDuck · Apr 27, 04:24 AM · #
THis is a very interesting post, but I think the people who say the left emphisis “opportunity” over winners and losers are more correct. I think what you are calling leftism is based in fairness. It based in the marxist idea that the dudes on top are controlling the game. It’s based in abolitionist thought. It’s based in Jesus’ demand that we level the hierarchy. So I would describe (grossely) your left/right axis as creating a fair system vrs. preserving a rigged system. The right side is not about rewarding success, it’s about protecting privilidge. I think this best fits the politics of the past zillion years. Kings lose power, slavery is abolished, civil rights are won, democracies develop, industries are regulated, etc….This is directly about making the system fairer. You can see people lableing themselves conservative fighting aginst these advancments every time.
About Orwell. He hated the future becasue he was very worried it would be authoritarian. In the times and places he was living, that was a reasonable fear.
— cw · Apr 27, 04:48 AM · #
Jadagul—Wouldn’t Will deny that allowing freer immigration makes people who stay in Mexico worse off? I’ve always understood him as the sort of pragmatic free market booster who is convinced that free trade makes the large majority of us better off in the long run.
— Chris Hallquist · Apr 27, 04:51 AM · #
Joseph,
Consistent postmodernists are a small subset of professing postmodernists. The deconstructive or genealogical procedure is almost always made either to stop short of certain left-liberal pillars or to reassemble them after they’ve been symbolically dismantled. Postmodernists who’ve deconstructed the modern subject, for example, tend to find some other way to be libertarian about selves and authority.
— Matt Feeney · Apr 27, 05:17 AM · #
Very good.
I would add some distinctions:
Realist v. Moralist: The distinction here is between when you start your moral reasoning: before or after you know the facts. Freddie and Charles Murray, for example, would be realists. Most everybody else would be in the moralist camp.
Loyalist v. Alienated: I don’t think people have much conscious control over this. It’s part of your personality, whether you feel loyalty to whatever groups you are part of or feel alienated from and superior to their groups. This has all sorts of correlations. People who like college football tend to be loyalists. People who like most of the Stuff White People Like tend to be alienated. For whites, it’s a good predictor of partisanship.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 27, 07:54 AM · #
I know you seriously don’t want to talk about this one, Noah…..religiousity vs rationalism.
Isn’t it interesting how all religions seem to conform to a kindof gaussian distribution with a large moderate pious mainsteam middle and extremist tails that are ..say…..relatively dogmatically open or dogmatically closed?
— matoko_chan · Apr 27, 11:53 AM · #
Perhaps….. that is just the Standard Model for human cognition?
A large cohort of moderates within 2std of the mean, and a dogmatic tail and a rational tail?
hmmm…what does that remind me of…oh! the bellcurve of IQ?
And perhaps another axis correlates with social capital and social networking…..
there is a biological basis for all behavior, you know.
And perhaps not an axis in 2-space or 3-space….but an n-dimensional topography with hills and valleys?
— matoko_chan · Apr 27, 12:43 PM · #
I find that the liberal / conservative distinction provided above reveals their common source in the Hobbesian fountain. The paradox of grounding authority upon the decision of individual reason and not some transcendant, divine or Godforsaken, principle. Humans vacillate between fear and hope.
Without said coercive authority, there can be no culture or hope for learning, or new discoveries, NPR radio, South Park, you-name-it, etc…
— JC Brown · Apr 27, 12:45 PM · #
Can Steve Sailer put two sentences together without mentioning race?
Do we need another scale that ranges from race-obcessed to has-something-going-on-in-their-life?
— Snarkie McSnarksnark · Apr 27, 05:16 PM · #
“Kevin: I’d call the Tea Party folks right-wing reactionaries. I don’t think they are particularly conservative or liberal – their protestations to the contrary, I don’t see them either as principled believers in the capacities of the individual, nor believers in the importance of deference to established authority. I just think they’re annoyed at what they see as the government taking money from “deserving winners” and giving it to “undeserving losers” (which is why I call them right-wing) and in thrall to a vision of the way things used to be when we didn’t have all these problems (which is why I call them reactionaries).”
Well, no, that doesn’t describe the Tea Parties at all. They’re not annoyed because the money is going from “winners” to “losers”, because that’s not what’s actually happening — the money is going from one set of “winners” to another set, from people in ordinary trades and professions to people with political connections. It’s crony capitalism they’re protesting; they differ from the usual bemoaners of “evil corporations” because they blame the sellers of political influence much more than the buyers. They thus pose a real problem with your taxonomy, because none of your three axes are at all relevant to their issue.
Thomas Sowell’s “utopian/tragic” axis, however, is very much relevant, both to the Tea Parties and to US politics generally. One can’t describe the Democratic Party today as “liberal”, “left-wing” or “progressive” as you define the terms with a straight face — but utopian? Yes, absolutely. Contrariwise, the Tea Parties aren’t “conservative”, “right-wing” or “reactionary” to any degree above the American norm; rather, they cry out warnings of Nemesis, the appointed punisher of the hubris that tries to build Utopias.
— Michael Brazier · Apr 27, 06:50 PM · #
Sailer’s idee fixe notwithstanding, an axis running along strength of in-group attachment seems to me both primitive and of high explanatory value for political affiliation. I think it’s distinct from and not reducible to any of the three axes Noah suggests, taken either individually or conjointly.
The best case for leaving it out, I guess, would be folding it into the progressive/reactionary axis — generally those looking forward to the future are looking forward to, at least in part, greater cosmopolitanism, more ethnic/racial diversity, etc; while those who are past-oriented are likewise inclined to count stronger local loyalties as one of those things now lost that made the past better. I’d expect a lot of correlation, at least. But then why not fold the progressive/reactionary axis — which deals with more abstract judgments and beliefs, and is thus less likely to be primitive — onto the in-group loyalty axis?
— CPM · Apr 27, 07:23 PM · #
Hilzoy captures my own critique perfectly.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Apr 27, 07:54 PM · #
But then why not fold the progressive/reactionary axis — which deals with more abstract judgments and beliefs, and is thus less likely to be primitive — onto the in-group loyalty axis?
CPM why not fold it onto the religiousity/rationality axis?
— matoko_chan · Apr 27, 08:22 PM · #
I understand that you REALLYREALLY don’t want to talk about religiousity Noah.
But when one of the two major political parties is nearly purely religious (self identified christian)….isn’t it important?
— matoko_chan · Apr 27, 08:38 PM · #
This already exists and seems to me to do the trick:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
— john · Apr 27, 09:54 PM · #
Read the whole thing, john.
— Freddie · Apr 27, 10:10 PM · #
I like tragic/utopian axis that Chris H brought up, although I would substitute “pragmatist” for “tragic”. Larison, for example, is a pragmatist who rails against the utopian foreign policy of the neoconservatives.
— sacman701 · Apr 27, 10:15 PM · #
Matoko,
For the (I’d have thought) fairly straightforward reason that religious in-groupings aren’t the only ones out there, aren’t the only ones that matter, and don’t always map so neatly on other relevant in-groupings.
— CPM · Apr 27, 10:16 PM · #
That’s a really good taxonomy of political ideologies, I think. As you’ve said, it probably comes a lot closer to the actual ways people conceptualize — and get worked up about — politics.
But how about one more dimension? How about pragmatist vs. idealist (maybe it’s already been said, I haven’t read all the comments). Generally, as I look around the blogosphere and what not, I get the feeling there’s something of a division between people who are completely happy to work within the existing political framework (and take all the mix results and compromises that come with it) and those who are less willing to see their ideas get mucked by the political process. People’s relative affinities for civil disobedience, protesting and the like probably track pretty close to this metric.
Just a thought.
— Justin · Apr 27, 10:27 PM · #
Noah: I’m not content on this outcomes vs. opportunities discussion. It seems you’ve dismissed it, and I’m not clear why. You wrote: “The dichotomy I’m setting up is of what motivates you. Are you more concerned with making sure the losers don’t suffer too much, or are you more concerned that the winners are adequately rewarded? …Of course, left-wingers tend to think the losers didn’t lose fairly, and right-wingers tend to think winners deserve everything they have.”
This seems to ignore the fundamental question. Perhaps you are ignoring it because there is no fundamental opposite – either opportunity matters or it doesn’t. Maybe that’s not as robust an axis to measure, but it seems that you frame it right at the end of your statement “left-wingers think losers lost unfairly…” etc. But are you sure of this? Do left-wingers think this, or do they, as hilzoy suggests, ultimately not care what the outcome is, if the launching platform can be perfectly leveled?
My suspicion is that we are talking about the divide between egalitarianism and exceptionalism. If all opportunities are perfectly equal, left-wingers (according to hilzoy) should be content. If they are not, it must be because they have an expectation that, all things being equal, the outcomes would be equal. Conversely, right-wingers could be said to believe that all things being equal, some will naturally be exceptional and rise above the rest. The motivation we seem to be seeing is a resistance to doing anything that obstructs the rise of exceptional people/nations/etc, compared to the continued paring away at sources of inequality in the ultimate goal to create an environment that produces equality.
BTW, I’m new here – found the subject fascinating, and am perfectly comfortable being told I’m wrong. Just wanted to chime in for clarification of an idea I thought was being glossed over.
QT
— QueenTiye · Apr 27, 10:35 PM · #
CPM, i am not talking about specific religious in-groups…….i am talking about religiosity.
religiosity n defn.
the quality of being religious….ie to harbor supernatural belief.
don’t you think religiosity (not religion, but tendency to inform ones world view with the supernatural) vs rationality is a valid axis?
doesn’t the fact that the GOP is nearly wholly some variant of christian point to a positive correlation of religiosity and conservatism?
— matoko_chan · Apr 28, 12:08 AM · #
Nice try but….apparently the HCR bill was conservative???
Conservatives aren’t in love with authority as much as they defer to the “tried and tested” versus the untried and untested. Culture is how dead people vote. Conservatives believe in subsidiary. Liberals believe the “smartest” people can plan it all.
— Tony · Apr 28, 12:51 AM · #
I have been talking about a 3 dimensional way to define political beliefs for awhile. The axes I use are:
Conservative – Radical
Liberal – Authoritarian
Big Government – Small Government (socialism vs. its opposite, whatever the proper term is!)
The problem with the author’s definition is that conservative and liberal are not opposites nor are they mutually exclusive. Right vs. Left simply have no definition beyond which side of Congress each party sits on.
— Mark · Apr 28, 02:50 AM · #
Oh come on Noah….is it a problem for you that conservatism and religiosity appear to have an r-squared approaching 1??
Aren’t you concerned that the GOP is nearly 100% self-described christian?
Is that representatitve of “real” america?
Admit it….the GOP has devolved to a white conservative christian grievance movement.
You should be ashamed.
— matoko_chan · Apr 28, 03:37 AM · #
matoko_chan – I am a religious person, and I don’t find myself to be conservative, nor do I find the articulated positions of my faith to be so. According to Noah’s taxonomy, most outlooks my faith puts forward sit squarely in the balance of each axis. I’m not clear at all why the “Christian right” should be accepted as the one and only determinant of “religiosity.”
— QueenTiye · Apr 28, 04:37 AM · #
Do I trust the individual? It depends on which one.
— Innocent Smith · Apr 28, 04:48 AM · #
Now for my short but precise answer to your post.
Politics proper only concerns itself with a single thing: The role of government.
The Nolan chart is the simplest/most precise way to show this. It is a two dimensional chart, that thus has four corners.
The two dimensions are: Economic, Social.
Economic means the role of government in economic policy in taxes, spending on social programs, education, health care, etc. regulation.
Social means role of government in drugs, homosexuality, abortion, the draft, etc.
Those who favor social freedom but not economic are left/liberal
Those who favor economic freedom but not social are right/conservative
Those who favor all freedom, libertarian
Those who favor none, populist/authoritarian
For my part, I feel it’s just an accident of history that will eventually correct itself that left/right are mixed on freedom and thus are internally hypocritical on many fronts. Through most of the history of parties one party was pro-freedom and the other pro-state.
Classical Liberalism, now called libertarianism, was of course pro freedom down the line, while other movements were usually pro-state, religion, etc. down the line.
Liberals/Royalists Whigs/Tories, Democratic-Republics/Federalists, etc.
Those on the left who emphasize either economic or social as more important will naturally tend to stray on the other. Those, like Naomi Wolfe, who favor the social aspect (and thus pro-freedom), begin to come more and more strongly to the libertarian side on economic issues.
Those on the right, like George Bush, who favor the social side, naturally become more pro-government economically. He was, of course, a “compassionate conservative” and very religious but I highly doubt he could name a single free market economist. In any case, he greatly expanded the federal role in education, expanded medicare, destroyed the budget. The tax code became vastly more complex than it was under Clinton.
Anyway, we’ll eventually end up with a libertarian party and a populist party again, it’s what makes the most sense if we only allow two parties.
And now for my longer and more interesting post:
Progressive vs. Reactionary is an interesting one, because it does not necessarily relate directly to political philosophy. It does, however, relate very closely to another axis that is already well established, which has obsessed me for a while and which I continue to apply to new things. One of the two most broad and in human culture.
Rationalism vs. Romanticism.
Let’s start with a shorthand of this:
Rationalism – Age of Reason/Enlightenment, Mid 1600’s-1789,
Admired Greece and Roman Republics for the perceived reason and desire for knowledge, rather than superstition, that guided those societies. Coined the term “Dark Ages” as a Pejorative, and Middle Ages as what they saw was a break in true civilization during those times, until the Renaissance. Empirical(Locke), believed that laws of the Universe (Newton). Ultimately optimistic man was perfectible, and so was government if it respected the natural laws that were discovered, such as rights(Locke) economics(Smith) Contract Theory(Locke) Reason-Based Morality(Kant). Almost always saw their time as the most reasonable yet, and that things were getting better, and possible wouldn’t as long as knowledge was accumulated and applied. Strong emphasis on the objectivity and universality of all of the above ideas/laws. U.S. founded.
Art was heavily Greece/Rome based, formal and applied laws such as mathematics in Architecture and painting (golden ratio), realistic, formal rhyme and stress in poetry structures. Formal music styles of Bach and Mozart in the middle of this time.
Age of Romanticism, little after 1789 – WWI/II, now?
Reaction against what they saw as the extreme rationalism, scientifically, reason they saw, and perceived dehumanizing effect of industrial revolution and modernism. Emphasized the subjective appeal of art – Impressionism painted subjective impression of a scene, emotions such as horror (Gothic novels), folk music rather than authorities, Wagner, others used large, powerful orchestras to paint a scene and create emotional effect. Painted and wrote/poemed about nature heavily (uncommon before), viewed it as sublime and viewed humanity as a source of corruption.
An example of a Romantic Character is a Byronic hero, a gifted, misunderstood loner, following his inspiration and outside of contemporary society.
Architecture was revival of Gothic Cathedrals and others from the middle ages, folk mythology, magic, etc. Overall I would say, extremely nostalgic of the past, cynical about their present and future, and about humanity in general.
Romantic Nationalism came along with central governments strong enough that formerly loose language/culture groups unified as a single nation, and began to emphasize the particulars of their race/culture/identity. It began as a revolt against Kings because it put the nation above the rulers. Much of it ended in WWI, but the Nazis made a darker version to justify imperialism. It mostly ended after WWII.
(Interestingly, I’d say that Nazis/Italian Fascists were undeniably Romantic, while Communism was undeniably Rationalist. Fascism focused on national identity, the past, etc, while Communism was based on universality, and follows Hegel in belief that humanity is always getting better (Marx saw worldwide communism as ultimately inevitable (Note: I am a moderate libertarian))
I’d say Romanticism is more associated with religion, or maybe more accurately, spirituality, merely because it eschews reason and focuses on individual experience, such as with god, and is less likely to immediately label things as superstitious, backward, etc, because it is not perfectly empirical.
Transcendentalism is a great example of this.
Romanticism remains extremely influential in art. Think Tolkien or the Fantasy Genre. Or Led Zeppelin. Or Byronic Heros like Batman.
Sorry if this was long – but this subject really really interests me.
— Jivatmanx · Apr 28, 06:01 AM · #
Queen Tiye
ima religious person too. So?
religiosity vs rationality, ie supernatural belief vs rational belief, is a valid axis that Noah is loathe to discuss for some reason.
I’d say Romanticism is more associated with religion, or maybe more accurately, spirituality, merely because it eschews reason and focuses on individual experience, such as with god, and is less likely to immediately label things as superstitious, backward, etc, because it is not perfectly empirical.
Romanticism is not the same as religiosity. Say romanticism vs empiricism or..idealism vs pragmatism if that is what you mean.
You are right, this is an interesting discussion…I just wonder why some obvious aspects of homo sapiens sapiens’ political orientation seem to be taboo in this thread.
— matoko_chan · Apr 28, 12:28 PM · #
I’m not clear at all why the “Christian right” should be accepted as the one and only determinant of “religiosity.”
Queen Tiye, you have it backwards.
I am hypothesizing that religiosity is the primary determinant of the christian right.
— matoko_chan · Apr 28, 12:47 PM · #
Free surface area, baby. Free. Surface. Area.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 28, 04:38 PM · #
Noah,
I think you might consider adding a fourth axis, elitist vs. populist.
For example, by this reading I would have to call myself a conservative but more naturally an elitist liberal.
That is I tend not to think that people know what’s best for them but I also tend not to think think “the good” should be prescribed. Rather people should look to experts in various domains, business, religion, academia, and follow their guides.
This is different, however, from naturally siding with the police. I think.
— Karl Smith · Apr 28, 04:50 PM · #
I think you might consider adding a fourth axis, elitist vs. populist.
brilliant!
this is a very old axis, perhaps the oldest.
Pythagoras vs. Kylon
— matoko_chan · Apr 28, 05:05 PM · #
Noah.
The GOP/Tea Party base is nearly homgeneously selfdescribed christian.
I think that really argues for a religiosity/rationality axis in your political taxonomy.
Pardon, but I just really feel the need to rub your nose in that like George Bush rubbed my nose in his stem cell lies when I was still young and naive to believe presidents didn’t lie about science for political gain.
— matoko_chan · Apr 28, 09:24 PM · #
I have noticed lately that most conservatives are inherently moral absolutists, while most liberals are moral relativists. I think this is an important aspect of the liberal/conservative divide.
Conservatives have an ideal that everyone should strive for whether or not anyone is able to live up to their standards. Conversely for the moral relativist it becomes ones actions that really matter and hypocrisy is ultimate sin.
— Eorr · Apr 29, 06:15 AM · #
moral absolutistism is highly correlated with religiosity and inflexible dogmatism.
— matoko_chan · Apr 29, 12:29 PM · #
This is very interesting. I had some quibbles with some of your definitions (I’m a philosopher; quibbling is our profession!) but others have covered most of them, so I’ll just make a note about terminology and then comment on MacIntyre.
First, I like `traditionalist’ more than `reactionary’. Burke was a traditionalist, of course, but he also supported American independence, and thus it seems odd to call him a reactionary. Also, I think `reactionary’ is used much more often as a slur hurled at one’s opponents than as a point of self-identification.
Next, MacIntyre is clearly a conservative and leftist (although his conservatism isn’t thoroughgoing, as the independent practical reasoners of <em>Dependent rational animals</em> are individuals-who-live-in-local-communities). But he’s not clearly a traditionalist or reactionary (or, for that matter, a progressive). He doesn’t want a simple return to pre-modern, medieval, or ancient Athenian ways of living; he wants to revive these old traditions (and is thus in that sense a traditionalist), but in ways that reflect and incorporate a few important insights of modern ways of life (especially participatory democracy, egalitarianism of various sorts, and toleration for the diversity of conceptions of the good). In terms of the end of <em>After virtue</em>, he doesn’t want a <em>return</em> to Benedict; he wants a <em>new</em> Benedict, someone who can do for our society what Benedict did for his. In terms of the end of <em>Whose justice? Which rationality?</em> he doesn’t think that Aquinas had the complete and perfected conception of the good human life; he just thinks that Thomism is the intellectual tradition best able to make progress towards that complete and perfected conception.
It’s important to remember that MacIntyre was, for much of his life, a committed Marxist of one sort or another, and aspects of Marxist and Hegelian thought — including conceptions of history and progress — still appear in his work. Unlike most other members of the broad Marxist tradition, though, who would generally be classified as straight-up progressives, MacIntyre is pessimistic about the possibilities for progress for our society as a whole. He’s somewhat (but only somewhat!) more optimistic about the possibilities for progress for small, local communities.
— Dan Hicks · Apr 29, 12:58 PM · #
Why do we always need to construct artificial binaries in order to understand the world? Why can’t we support a system that both rewards “success” and mitigates against failure? Why does history have to fit into a narrative wherein things get better or get worse? Why isn’t there a fourth axis for how comfortable we feel with oversimplified, Disney versions of reality? I know where I’d score on that one.
This reminds me of Dark Ages four-humors medicine turned modern day pop-psychology: choleric, sanguine, melancholic, and phlegmatic. My mom got really into it when I was in Middle School and she used to love describing family members. My Dad was choleric with a melancholic “wing”, my sister was sanguine with a phlegmatic “wing”, I was melancholic with a phlegmatic “wing” as though all of human personality fits together in a four-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Now, not only am I melancholic with a phlegmatic wing, but I’m also -10, 1, -3.
— Christopher Carr · Apr 29, 05:05 PM · #
I’d classify myself as a moderate leftist and a radical progressive, but I would echo some of the other comments that the liberal-conservative axis is too vaguely defined. That is, I think any American reading that description would describe themselves as liberal, despite having radically different ideas of what the description means.
— Chris Oliver · Apr 29, 05:17 PM · #
I think any American reading that description would describe themselves as liberal
unless you add the God factor.
a religiosity index will likely almost completely determine the modern empirical definition of a conservative.
— matoko_chan · Apr 29, 06:51 PM · #
No, actually, according to psychological research, right-wing individuals are far more likely to engage in “situational ethics” than non-right-wing individuals.
— Chet · Apr 29, 10:54 PM · #
I suspect quantitative social scientists would have statistical methodologies for identifying key variables. Factor Analysis and the like (I am no expert in this kind of thing). Why not approach the problem quantitatively?
— Keid A · Apr 30, 01:43 AM · #
The commentary here traffics in way too many gross generalizations. Do you guys read Nicholas Kristof by any chance?
Read: http://www.theinductive.com/blog/2010/3/6/political-ideology-and-morality-correlation-does-not-imply-c.html
— Christopher Carr · Apr 30, 02:34 AM · #
moral absolutistism is highly correlated with religiosity and inflexible dogmatism.
If you count atheism as religiosity, as I do, that’s a true statement. Nobody is as absolutist and inflexible about morality as an internet atheist.
— The Reticulator · Apr 30, 09:44 AM · #
atheism cannot correlate with religiosity….religiosity is the embrace of the supernatural and non-empirical dogma.
and ima medhlevi sufi.
— matoko_chan · Apr 30, 12:37 PM · #
Do you also count “bald” as a hair color, you baffoon?
— Chet · May 2, 02:32 AM · #
Do you also count “bald” as a hair color, you baffoon?
I think of bald in terms of hair.
That’s an excellent analogy, btw. OK if I use it next time I explain why I count atheism as religiosity?
— The Reticulator · May 7, 01:06 PM · #