Author: Lee M.

I took the red-eye home last night from the meeting I was attending in SF and so took most of today off from work to catch up on sleep and stuff around the house.

I also started reading a fascinating book called 8 Ways to Run the Country by Brian Patrick Mitchell. Mitchell, the Washington Bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily is seeking to complexify the Left-Right dichotomy in a way that makes sense of various ideological groups in American politics.

Like some other political taxonomies such as the Nolan Chart, Mitchell posits a two-axis grid to plot various ideological groupings. But unlike the Nolan Chart with its rather simplistic axes of “personal freedom” and “economic freedom” (criteria which bias it towards libertarianism in a fairly obvious way), Mitchell plots along the axes of arche and kratos. Arche is social authority and kratos is political power. Thus various political positions can be identified according to the attitude they have to these two concepts.

Thus you get the classic left-right spectrum of attitudues toward authority – the various -archies such as hierachy, the patriarchy, etc. and a top-bottom axis of attitudes toward political power, with akratists (those opposed to all political power) at the top. So, in Mitchell’s terminology, an anarchist, properly speaking, is someone who wants to abolish all social hierarchy, but wouldn’t necessarily oppose political power. Meanwhile, an akratist is primarily concerned with the use of force or coercion and may for that reason oppose government while being ok with social authority.

Intriguingly, Mitchell says that this two-axis categorization is possible only in the west because it’s the west which separated social authority from political power in the first place. Christendom vested authority in the church and power in the state (obviously the reality is a bit more complex than that). This distinction makes possible political positions with varying attitudes toward these two social phenomeneon.

With the grid in place Mitchell sees four major traditions of American political thought vying for dominance throughout our history. In the lower left are Progressive Democrats who oppose social hierarchy and want to use the power of the state as a means to bring about greater equality. In the upper right are Libertarian Individualists who oppose social authority (bourgeois morality, etc.) and government power. In the top right are Republican Constitutionalists who want to check state power in order to allow the institutions which embody social authority, such as church, family, and community, to flourish, and in the bottom right you have Plutocratic Nationalists who are comfortable using centralized state power to shore up the national community and seek a harmony among business, government, and social institutions.

Adding to this already interesting mix, Mitchell refines these four quadrants, so you end up with a circle of eight positions plotted according to their views on arche and kratos with anarchists on the far left and akratists at the top:

Communitarian (bottom-center): a pro-government pragmatist and technocrat “whose focus is always on the good of the community”

Paleolibertarian (top-center): Anti-government but more comfortable with social authority than left-leaning cultural libertarians.

Theoconservative (right-center): Primary concern is for the social instutitions that shore up family and faith; not overly fond of government, but willing to use state power to shore up these institutions.

Radical (left-center): Chief concern is to overturn oppression and social hierarchy; like the Theocon on the opposite side of the circle, is suspicious about government, but willing to pragmatically use state power to serve the interests of the oppressed.

Individualist (top-left): Takes a negative attitude toward government power and social authority; primary concern is personal, individual freedom.

Neoconservative (bottom-right): Characterized by “belief in a strong central government to defend the established order, with all necessary cooperation between the social and political powers–church and state, business and government.”

Paleoconservative (top-right): Suspicious of government precisely because he believes that the modern state is corroding traditional forms of life and culture. Wants a decentralized polity that allows local communities to set their own standards.

Progressive (bottom-left): Wants to use government power to aid social progress; anti-traditionalist and “confident that the human condition can be infinitely improved if we just keep trying.” More focused on democracy than individual rights and liberties.

This is a really fruitful way to make sense of political ideologies that goes beyond Left and Right and even some of the more complex typologies. For one thing, it helps me makes sense of my own political views a little bit. I definitely tend toward akratism in Mitchell’s terms in that I’m highly ambivalent about the use of force and coercion and consequently can sympathize at least somewhat with Radicals, Libertarians, Paleolibertarians, Paleocons and Theocons. I’m far less enamored of the centralizers in the bottom half of Mitchell’s compass: the big-government progressives, the communitarians (at least in their nationalizing variety), and the neocons.

Subsequent chapters, which I’ve just started to get into, define each position in more detail, largely with quotes from representative figures. The book is brief and clearly written and yet adds a great deal of nuance to the ways most of us think about Americal politics.