Noah Millman offers a three dimensional taxonomy political leaning aptly summarized by William Brafford
- liberal vs. conservative (attitudes toward the individual and authority)
- left vs. right (attitudes toward social/economic winners and losers)
- progressive vs. reactionary (attitude toward past and future)
Noah asks where we fit in. On a line by line analysis I would have to call myself a conservative left-leaning progressive, but that doesn’t seem quite right. I tend to have more in common with Will Wilkinson ( liberal right-leaning progressives) than either Ross Douthat (conservative left-leaning reactionary) or Matt Yglesias (liberal moderate-leaning progressive).
To me the problem seems to be in the term liberal/conservative which conflates elitism vs. populism with authoritarianism vs. liberalism. I would probably more accurately call myself an elitist liberal than a conservative, but my elitism probably outweighs my liberalism and thus according to the Millman taxonomy dumps me in the conservative camp.
To be more specific I am highly skeptical about the ability of individuals to understand their choice set. I generally think politics doesn’t work because the general public is always interjecting their mostly foolish ideas. I also think that the dominance of major corporations, think tanks, universities and to a lesser extent religious institutions are a good thing for society.
At the same time, however, I am highly skeptical of attempts to prescribe behavior for individuals. I don’t think that the social problem is tractable and I don’t think that socialism qua socialism will ever be able to compete with a market economy. It is because this that I think I side more with the Cato boys who are right-wing and elitist than say Yglesias who is moderate-leaning but populist.
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Thursday ~ April 29th, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Dain
What a refreshingly candid post. Not necessarily refreshing for you, but for anybody.
I’ve struggled with the tension between individual autonomy vs. elite knowledge myself. I feel like I come down on the side of individual autonomy almost by default. If (political) elites could improve the welfare of individuals I’d throw “freedom” out the window and jump on a kind of unreconstructed B.F. Skinner bandwagon. I think the cognitive bias camp of elites in particular are the most promising for a theory of positive oligarchy (hah), but they are only a fraction of the elites in question. They can never realistically comprise the entirety of the administrative state, much of which has either public choice reasons for being self interested (and not pristine utilitarians as they ought to be), or while well intentioned, without the exit-induced feedback necessary to better understand how they are failing those they serve. The substance of this feedback is unknown to an expert, unless the expert in question is omnipotent of course.