Cheerful Brazil news for you (if you haven’t seen it).

Arnold Kling has his new book out about the three axes of political ‘language’ (or ‘pigeon-holing’). Progressives try to force everything onto an “Oppressor-Oppressed” axis, and any inter-racial incident involving a young black male identifies that black male as “oppressed” and the rest of the story writes itself (and sometimes needs a little artistic license nudge for flair and panache) in a way in which it is easy to determine which side one is supposed to be on.

Kling says Conservatives do the same for their “Civilization-Barbarism” axis. You could alternatively call this axis Rule-of-law-vs-Anarchy, or Order-Chaos.

But trying to combine the two axes, as I think is more apt in this context, you could have The System (Cops, Law-abiding middle class) vs The Streets (Crooks, and the thug-tolerant / glorifying underclass). The Man vs The Homies.

A lot of people on the right support Zimmerman because they identify with The System, Law and Order, the Cops, and an ordinary lower-middle class man trying to keep his community safe from petty criminal thugs. But on the left, there are two groups – those of a higher class which support Martin because they ideologically see his class as oppressed, and those that support Martin because they see themselves as belonging to that oppressed class, the folks “kept down” by The Man.

Victim-Ideology has a double constituency – those who see themselves as victims, and those who, while not victims themselves, hold themselves out as being champions of the oppressed. Basic Law-and-Order Conservatism only has one audience – themselves.