On the day before my twentieth birthday, in 1980, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin.
My childhood friend and I were on a month long trip through Europe. On the day we arrived in West Berlin from Copenhagen, the sun shone on us for the first time in a week. Pedestrians hustled along the sidewalks; stores overflowed with artfully displayed merchandise; flower vendors sold pink carnations on the street corners. Even thirty five years after WWII, West Berlin was busy rebuilding. A pre-war church, its steeple broken off at a jagged diagonal by some long ago Allied bomb, was surrounded by new skyscrapers of gleaming glass and steel.
West Berlin was not a border city. It was an island right in the middle of communist East Germany. The infamous Berlin Wall didn’t separate Berlin—it encircled West Berlin. This concrete barrier, maybe a dozen feet high, was topped with barbed wire. East German soldiers manned the watchtowers, peering through binoculars. It was very creepy. They had orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to cross the dead zone and escape into West Germany. White crosses were painted on the west side of the Wall, memorializing those who had died trying. I remember feeling slightly sick to my stomach.
Non-German tourists were allowed to cross into East Berlin on a one-day visa through the border crossing at Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie was an unimposing little wooden shed staffed by a rotation of American, British and French military police. We were required to exchange some Deutsch Marks for East German currency, and then we walked on through.
There was no one and nothing on the other side of the Wall. A couple hundred yards ahead of us were grey, crumbling shells of buildings. All was quiet. I don’t know how far we walked—maybe a quarter mile?—before we came to city streets on the other side of those vacant buildings. A few people were out and about, heads bent down, no eye contact. I remember there was no color. No pink carnations. No merchandise, artfully displayed or otherwise. No honking car horns, no construction cranes, no gleaming skyscrapers, no trees, no birds. Somber. Still. “Dead.”
We had to spend our East German currency, but there was nothing to spend it on. Finally we found what was probably a tea room. It was cavernous, and there were a significant number of patrons, but it was not a chatty crowd. We tried to order something, but we really didn’t have any choice of menu items. We got what they wanted—or had available—to serve us. This struck us as hilarious, and our giggles were out of place in the grim atmosphere. We paid our bill and left our remaining, useless currency on the table.
That night, back in West Berlin, we went to an underground maze of brick-and-timbered pubs, where happy crowds of young people danced in a haze of cigarette smoke while American music blared.
The people who lived East Berlin and West Berlin were of the same race, history, and creeds with the same natural resources and the same damage from the war. And yet, less than twenty years after they were divided, their lives had become vastly different. Everything was identical about these people except their system of government.
These memories flooded back recently when I read Arnold Kling’s thought-provoking little book, The Three Languages of Politics. His premise is that progressives, conservatives and libertarians are tribal coalitions. Each tribe looks at the world through a different lens and speaks a different political language.
Progressives communicate in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed. Conservatives think in terms of civilization versus barbarism. Libertarians view the world through a lens of liberty versus coercion. Certainly there are matters of degree and areas of overlap, but Kling’s theory illuminates the reason we struggle to effectively discuss, much less solve, complex issues.
For example, tens of thousands of people from Central America are traveling north through Mexico hoping to cross the border into the United States. Progressives might focus on the smugglers who oppress the migrants with outrageous fees and dangerous transport. Conservatives might consider the chaos at the border, the instability, and the breakdown of nuclear families. Libertarians might wonder why the U.S. government limits and complicates guest worker visas thus impinging on the freedom of people to come and go.
Or consider the recent shooting deaths of eight people at three massage parlors in Atlanta. Immediately the national discussion ballooned beyond these eight murders to numerous tangential topics, whether or not they pertained to this particular crime. Women—and Asian women in particular—are oppressed into sex work. Massage parlors are temptations that erode the virtue of a civilized society. Prostitution should be legal so that women are at liberty to make their own career choices.
Reflecting on Kling’s book, I wondered why I tend to at least initially frame issues along the liberty-coercion axis. Why do I so value individual liberty, and bristle at government overreach? Why do I favor allowing people to do their own thing, as long as it doesn’t interfere with someone else’s rights? Why do I believe government exists, only with the consent of the governed, to protect rights, not to manage humanity?
Perhaps if I had traveled to Johannesburg on the day before my twentieth birthday—where I could have observed the oppression of the Black race under the hand of the white Afrikaners—I would now tend to look at issues in terms of the oppressed and the oppressors. Or maybe if I had visited New York City in the summer of 1980—when crime was raging, drugs had eviscerated neighborhoods, and the stabilizing institution of the nuclear family was shattered—I would view the world along the civilization-barbarism axis.
But I saw the difference between liberty and coercion. I went to Berlin.
