The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides Paperback – May 9, 2017 by Arnold Kling (Cato Institute)

The gist of the book is: political discourse tends to run along three axes, which are incommensurable. Liberals tend to judge along an oppressor-oppressed axis, Conservatives along a barbarian-civilization axis, Libertarians along a coercion-freedom axis. The purpose of the book is not to deconstruct and criticize what he sees as the dominant heuristics of each group, but to use them to help readers get into their ideological opposition's shoes.

The strong point of this book is in trying to put the reader into his or her ideological opponents' shoes. He brings up the ideological turing test (created by Bryan Caplan) which asks: if you were put in a room with your ideological others, could you pass as one of them? Psychology finds that, on average, liberals think they can make better conservatives than conservatives, and vice versa. Neither is right.

Now on to the parts of the book I disagreed with. Kling compares the diverging languages to an 'audible' in football: a purposeful confusion of signs to make sure the opposition doesn't know what is going on. This seems farfetched to me. Diverging language among groups that are so large, tends to be an unintentional process that indicates that there are few contacts between groups. Polite society has politics as one of its taboos, and people tend to view media outlets that they agree with in the first place; this means that the network of people actually using political language in conversation is very fractured, just what you would expect from people with little real contact (and strong enforcement within each social group).

His portrayal of the explanations for the financial crisis seemed a little problematic. The movie "Inside Job," which seems to be a very Progressive explanation of the financial crisis, is told with a strong appeal to the barbarian-civilization axis. The director chronicles the 'depravity' of bankers, interviewing former prostitutes and others who can attest to the barbarousness of bankers. The barbarian-civilization heuristic seems to be somewhat common in Progressive discussions: witness discussions about gay marriage or creationism in schools. Their ideological opponents aren't oppressors (though in the former there is some of that), but barbarians who refuse to embrace civilization--a civilization that embraces science, and sees traditional hierarchies as barbaric (as well as oppressive).

These differences in interpretation notwithstanding, this is an excellent and quick read. It is a rare duck that tries to improve political discourse rather than score points for the author's team. There have been critics who argue that this book doesn't advance the academic literature on the cultural theory of preference formation, and so on, but these critics miss the point. As James Buchanan (the economist, not the president) was fond of saying, it takes repeated iterations to force alien concepts on reluctant minds. There are few concepts more alien than respecting your political opponents, and this is an excellent iteration of it.