Jan. 8th, 2019 09:29 pm
Horizontal and vertical politics
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kleptoquark[epistemic status: this popped into my head and seems to be a useful lens]
There's a popular (originally Bedouin) quote: "I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger."
And there's an Emo Philips joke, which is too long to quote here.
You can think of someone's group allegiances as being vaguely hierarchical, with coarse-grained divisions (nationality or religion) at the top and fine-grained details (rationalist drama of the week) at the bottom. Of course, a lot of groups don't sort neatly into a hierarchy: does religion come before or after nationality? Depends who you ask.
Lots of political conflicts are horizontal, between groups at the same tier of this hierarchy: state vs. state, religion vs. religion, rationalist catgirl polycule vs. rationalist catgirl polycule. In a horizontal conflict, you're asked whose side you're on, with the sides helpfully laid out in advance.
In a vertical conflict, on the other hand, different tiers are pitted against each other. A lot of the time, this involves people with the same set of group identities fighting over the ordering of the hierarchy. I vaguely recall being asked, as a child in Hebrew School, to consider whether I was a Jewish American or an American Jew. They aren't synonyms: a Jewish American is an American who happens to be Jewish; an American Jew is a Jew who happens to be American.
Not to imply that higher (more coarse-grained) levels are always considered more important; other vertical conflicts center on exactly that question. Most Americans would agree that the US is part of a larger "Western" grouping of countries, but many would reject any narrative pitting "Western civilization" against other supra-national groups. Members of separatist movements (in e.g. Quebec or Catalonia) identify more strongly with their region than with the country it is (currently) part of, and any separatist conflict is inherently vertical: politicians in Madrid who opposes Catalan independence describe themselves as Spanish, not Castilian. While pro-independence Catalonians may not consider themselves Spanish, Eurosceptics in France or Germany do consider themselves European; they just insist that European identity take a backseat to French or German identity. (There are several different Eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament, which is an interesting concept. The closest analog in American politics that I can think of is "states' rights" parties, but those have usually been firmly on a particular side of a strong regional (and racial) divide. Here's a very vertical-politics quote from Wikipedia: "The States' Rights Democratic Party (usually called the Dixiecrats)...")
There isn't a nice clean prototype for vertical conflicts the way there is for horizontal ones, which makes them a bit harder to describe. I think it's still useful to notice when vertical politics are at play, especially because the rhetoric used in vertical conflicts tends to obscure things.
Vertical politics often shows up when there are horizontal conflicts on multiple tiers. When a country is at war, there will often be internal factions who are more hawkish or dovish, sometimes corresponding to preexisting political or demographic divisions. The hawks are likely to emphasize that "we" are at war, call for unity, and denounce the doves as traitors and cowards. (Treachery and cowardice are usually thought of as individual acts: a traitor defects to the other side, a coward selfishly puts their own needs before the needs of the group. The language of treachery and cowardice keeps the focus on the international conflict.) The doves will probably emphasize existing divisions, accusing the more hawkish party, region, (etc.) within their country of starting a war for their own benefit and at the doves' expense.
This gets interesting when the domestic divides also exist on an international scale. The Bolsheviks capitalized on the unpopularity of World War I, urging workers of all nations to unite against the warmongering bourgeois imperialists of all nations, while the French Section of the Workers' International (note the hierarchical language) faced internal conflict between French patriotism and Socialist solidarity. Most other leftist parties in France decided that they were socialist Frenchmen, not French socialists.
The most interesting thing about vertical politics, other than how ubiquitous it is, is how rarely it's discussed directly. Most political discourse focuses on two armies, a battlefield, and the question of which army will win. It's often more interesting to ask, "Which battlefield will win?"
There's a popular (originally Bedouin) quote: "I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger."
And there's an Emo Philips joke, which is too long to quote here.
You can think of someone's group allegiances as being vaguely hierarchical, with coarse-grained divisions (nationality or religion) at the top and fine-grained details (rationalist drama of the week) at the bottom. Of course, a lot of groups don't sort neatly into a hierarchy: does religion come before or after nationality? Depends who you ask.
Lots of political conflicts are horizontal, between groups at the same tier of this hierarchy: state vs. state, religion vs. religion, rationalist catgirl polycule vs. rationalist catgirl polycule. In a horizontal conflict, you're asked whose side you're on, with the sides helpfully laid out in advance.
In a vertical conflict, on the other hand, different tiers are pitted against each other. A lot of the time, this involves people with the same set of group identities fighting over the ordering of the hierarchy. I vaguely recall being asked, as a child in Hebrew School, to consider whether I was a Jewish American or an American Jew. They aren't synonyms: a Jewish American is an American who happens to be Jewish; an American Jew is a Jew who happens to be American.
Not to imply that higher (more coarse-grained) levels are always considered more important; other vertical conflicts center on exactly that question. Most Americans would agree that the US is part of a larger "Western" grouping of countries, but many would reject any narrative pitting "Western civilization" against other supra-national groups. Members of separatist movements (in e.g. Quebec or Catalonia) identify more strongly with their region than with the country it is (currently) part of, and any separatist conflict is inherently vertical: politicians in Madrid who opposes Catalan independence describe themselves as Spanish, not Castilian. While pro-independence Catalonians may not consider themselves Spanish, Eurosceptics in France or Germany do consider themselves European; they just insist that European identity take a backseat to French or German identity. (There are several different Eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament, which is an interesting concept. The closest analog in American politics that I can think of is "states' rights" parties, but those have usually been firmly on a particular side of a strong regional (and racial) divide. Here's a very vertical-politics quote from Wikipedia: "The States' Rights Democratic Party (usually called the Dixiecrats)...")
There isn't a nice clean prototype for vertical conflicts the way there is for horizontal ones, which makes them a bit harder to describe. I think it's still useful to notice when vertical politics are at play, especially because the rhetoric used in vertical conflicts tends to obscure things.
Vertical politics often shows up when there are horizontal conflicts on multiple tiers. When a country is at war, there will often be internal factions who are more hawkish or dovish, sometimes corresponding to preexisting political or demographic divisions. The hawks are likely to emphasize that "we" are at war, call for unity, and denounce the doves as traitors and cowards. (Treachery and cowardice are usually thought of as individual acts: a traitor defects to the other side, a coward selfishly puts their own needs before the needs of the group. The language of treachery and cowardice keeps the focus on the international conflict.) The doves will probably emphasize existing divisions, accusing the more hawkish party, region, (etc.) within their country of starting a war for their own benefit and at the doves' expense.
This gets interesting when the domestic divides also exist on an international scale. The Bolsheviks capitalized on the unpopularity of World War I, urging workers of all nations to unite against the warmongering bourgeois imperialists of all nations, while the French Section of the Workers' International (note the hierarchical language) faced internal conflict between French patriotism and Socialist solidarity. Most other leftist parties in France decided that they were socialist Frenchmen, not French socialists.
The most interesting thing about vertical politics, other than how ubiquitous it is, is how rarely it's discussed directly. Most political discourse focuses on two armies, a battlefield, and the question of which army will win. It's often more interesting to ask, "Which battlefield will win?"
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no subject
I think Marxists get some credit for discussing this sort of thing explicitly a lot.
This post probably sounds like it's leading up to some woke redpill about how you should *really* identify with your blood type instead of your astrological sign, but I promise I don't have anything like that in mind.
Sorry about the stealth pun and the cutesy punchline.
no subject
(* Hooking up with 5Stars and basically no one else to do it -- an ideologically incoherent bloc if there ever was one!)
Of course, like any attempt to render EU politics into human language, probably an oversimplification.
no subject
I think this kind of conflict is very common. For example, in modern America you get leftists talking about "people of color" and rightists talking about "non-Asian minorities", both trying to draw lines that will get a majority on "their" side. In the 80s we had second wave feminists talking about "women's experience" and womanists trying to challenge this idea because it erases the black experience. Much of the neoliberal deregulation ideology seems aimed at causing us to think differently about how to group {the government, individual voters, individual corporations}: pro-regulators think about "us" (the voters and our government) against the corporations, deregulators think about "us" (the voters and the corporations) against the government. Again, these are a question of which identity you foreground, but the choices don't come from a vertical hierarchy.
I have my own insight-porn post I've been thinking about making, but maybe I can just write it right here as a DW comment instead. Claim: this kind of conceptual conflict is exactly the mechanism by which ideology has a practical effect on the world; and it's also why politics is the mind-killer and political discourse is so bad.
That is, if we consider that simplified model of World War I again, how does an individual person decide whether to consider himself a Russian and enlist, or a Proletarian and revolt? A bit of it is considerations of whether the Workers really are strong enough and can win, or whether Russia is likely to lose the war anyway, and so on. But a lot of it is a big coordination game, depending on what other people will chose. If you are the only one deserting the army, you'll get put before a firing squad; if you are the only one not deserting you'll get hanged as a counter-revolutionary.
Political speech can't alter the physical conditions of the world, so it can't really make the German army more able to win the war. But it can help with finding Schelling points in a coordination game.
I think a lot of political writing is really unsatisfying because you get the feeling that the writer don't care about what is true and false, but rather they try to spell out talking points which then every "good" member of your coalition is supposed to adopt. (E.g., when Damore gets fired you will not see Feministing publish a literature review of sex differences.) In the World War 1 example, this makes sense: you don't want individual Russian workers independently consider their identities; you want the only concept being discussed to be proletarians vs capitalists, so that people cannot think in terms of nations, or at least can't talk about them and create common knowledge. That way, you can influence which equilibrium the game will end up in.