If we go back to the very basics, there seems to be a difference in personality between the typical left/right voter.
Largely, the left tend to have higher openness (open to new ideas, likes to discover new cultures, meet new people, etc.), high agreeableness (likes cooperation, group harmony, dislikes competition) and high neuroticism (worries a lot, sees potential issues everywhere).
Conversely, the right tend to be higher in conscientiousness (like efficiency, does a thorough job), lower in openness (dislikes change and is suspicious of new ideas) and lower in agreeableness (likes competition, does not care that much about group harmony).
Seems to me to be fairly good descriptions of the typical left/right voter. :)
The centralization/decentralization aspect of politics muddies the waters a bit for me, but maybe that is part of the cooperation/competition picture...
Basically, agreed, but because there is something deeper tying these things together...
"the left tend to have higher openness" -- because they must create in order to move forward from what exists to what does not yet exist
"the right tend to be higher in conscientiousness" -- because they preserve existing orders
"The centralization/decentralization aspect of politics muddies the waters a bit for me..." -- please see my note on Trojan horses below
--------------
About 250 years of of Right-Left battles in modern republics has resulted in pure FUBAR....
I applaud Caplan's seeking fundamentals here for L and R. However, like Marx, for Caplan the world looks essentially economic, and so political fundamentals look like markets. But individual power, in all its various ways, in an ostensible democratic republic is more fundamental than economy. We are not simply "traders" in our relations, and it is critical to get a handle on that. Before delving into traders vs non-traders, let me suggest an even simpler view (and one which I think better reflects actual L-R origins 235 years ago):
1. Rightism is, arguably, based on the most fundamental principal there is: Human agency (power). So they promote the maximization of individual agency, i.e. "freedom".
-- A result from the natural inequality of humans is inequality of outcomes, and they are largely ok with that "natural" outcome. They are ordinarily the establishment, as groups of humans naturally move toward inequality over time.
2. Leftists, in turn, react to what they see are the excesses of Rightist freedom, and seek a moderation of outcomes, i.e. "fairness".
-- Whenever the pendulum of "freedom" has shifted too far, they become the majority of the population, and act on this judgment. They are thus ordinarily the rebels to the establishment.
Note that both centralizing communism and fascism are totalitarian perversions that each love to scream they represent "the people", but are simply anti-democratic, Trojan-horse concentrations of power. Do not confuse any of their methods with Left and Right.
One can also say that the right and left have different definitions of "fairness." Leftists typically regard equal wealth for everyone as fair, while rightists often regard proportionality (greater wealth going to those who are smarter, more creative, and harder working) as fair. Leftists run into problems when they want to force the wealthy to give up the wealth that they have worked hard to earn. Rightists run into trouble with their proportionality argument when their wealth was inherited.
"Rightists run into trouble with their proportionality argument when their wealth was inherited."
Agreed. But I'd say not only there...
"Leftists run into problems when they want to force the wealthy to give up the wealth that they have worked hard to earn."
'Earn' is a very tricky word in defining rights in an economy. The moment one starts to unpacks what is 'earned' and what is not, a Pandora's box is opened. To take just a single prevalent and potent example in the modern age: When a replicating machine *especially, one that the 'earner' did not personally invent and build* allows the earner to multiple infinitely some widget, in what sense does the 'earner' actually *earn* the proceeds multiplied millions and billions of times, that he/she may not even be able to personally conduct 99+% of *merely the transactions* performed, never mind the widgets themselves? If if we can't say he/she didn't truly 'earn' it, then where should the wealth created -- or at least a large part of it -- really belong? How do we figure that out? I'm saying one can't simply default it *all* to the widget inventor, as has been the mindless answer ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
And no inventor is truly a self-creation, he/she is the product of thousands of years of civilization, from language, learning, environment, etc. on down. These are a couple of the major problems with modern wealth concentration, beyond the inheritance issue, that has been studiously ignored for centuries by the powerful and their cooperators. I can tell you right now that once AI really gets a grip on us, this hidden issue of unbalanced knowledge control will, finally, absolutely explode in politics.
Meanwhile, 'force' is always in the the of the beholder. Leftists believe, likewise, they are 'forced' -- in their case, to accept the (ordinarily) greater (natural) powers of a portion of the population. If someone is, the first place, born smart and strong (that is, leaving aside for the moment unnatural, e.g. legally inherited, differences), is there really no limit to the 'force' that they can apply to the weaker? If the answer is no, then what is that limit and why? Is there really a single answer, or is there potentially as many answers as there are people? This is at the root of the conflict.
If one accepts the moral principle of moral equality, of one-person one-vote, then baseline Right and reaction Left will always exist.
All very good points. The concept of 'earn' and related concept of 'deserved' are indeed complex notions. And it is true that creations of every inventor depend on the work of countless others. Also true is that we are all forced to accept differences in inborn, natural powers, which feels unfair to leftists. (Although some leftists deny the existence of inborn differences, attributing different outcomes to differences in social environments, which can be changed to level the playing field--see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201103/life-poker.) All of these issues revolve around morality, which is itself a complex subject that I have spent my life trying to understand. Thank you so much for your cogent points.
As a professional personality psychologist, I can confirm those Big 5 differences between right and left. As with all science, one can dig deeper, asking questions about the origins of those personality differences. I have a theory that successful societies require both a stabilizing element that preserves functional traditions and an exploratory element that looks for new, better ways of doing things. Of course it is often hard to tell if a tradition that has worked well in the past will continue to be functional, and, similarly, it is hard to tell if an innovation will truly be an improvement. People will lean toward tradition or innovation, not because they can rationally calculate actual outcomes, but because of the feelings and intuitions that constitute their personalities.
But how many of those traits are learned or at least reinforced? To be slightly snarky, do neurotic people align with the left, or does embracing the left tribe encourage neuroticism?
My opinion? Personality (or temperament, the prototype of personality) always comes first. So, people who are prone to negative emotions (particularly outrage about what they see as economic unfairness) are drawn to liberalism. However, there is almost certainly a reinforcing of these neurotic tendencies by other neurotic liberals. Furthermore, there seems to be a new trend in younger folks toward making their psychological problems a valued aspect of their identity. I am guessing (because I haven't seen the data) that this is more common among young liberals. My take on this is that this serves two functions: 1. it is a badge by which likeminded liberals recognize each other and bond with each other; and 2. as Freud said, neurotics get secondary gain from their neurosis (e.g., getting excused from obligations, getting positive attention from sympathetic others, more time to take tests, etc.)
One thing not exactly-contra this, but interesting, is that I think I've seen data recently suggesting democrats are less likely to date a republican than vice versa, so where does the left's antipathy to right fit in here?
I don't think this correct because it collapses in on itself when you consider that there have been right wing movements that are anti market, yet also anti left wing. How can that be? Your ur example of Nazis being a prime one, considering that they were against a global Marxism but in favor of nationalist socialism that very much preached and expected all Germans to repress their individual interests in the name of the collective German good. MAGA is pro tariffs etc.
Hyrum and Verlan Lewis make a surprisingly robust case that there is no single issue or underlying ideology to right v left and that in every country and throughout history their respective basket of issues has changed so much that there's no common thread, and they give enough counterexamples to be convincing (they also explicitly take on Sowell's theory and are persuasive than he is, IMO). Their conclusion is that there is no common thread or definition whatsoever and that it is entirely just tribal identification no more meaningful than what sports team you root for, and premised on mostly arbitrary things like family and friend tribe, single salient issues that happened to be held at the time the tribe was selected, etc.
I don't go all the way to their conclusion though I find their evidence compelling. For myself, I break it down quite simply. In every society and regardless of the particular issues of the day or what ideology is espoused, the right represents the interests of the powerful men in that society and how they would arrange things to best suit them. And the left represents the interests of everyone else...women, non powerful men, children, and non-humans. There are non powerful men on the right bc they are hoping to become powerful one day and take the lead of those who already are. And there are women on the right mostly bc they are the wives (or aspiring wives), daughters, or mothers of powerful males (or boys they expect to become so one day).
Most people I tell this theory to bristle at and reject it (on both sides), but can't come up with any good counterexamples.
Thanks for describing the Lewis bros book more completely. I also find their arguments, and evidence, compelling.
If I had to divide humanity into two groups, I would focus on the urge to meddle with other people. I prefer MYOB types, who will not offer (demand) guidance unless asked, and all the other varieties of busy-bodies, do-gooders, and control freaks--for any motivation.
Caplan's definition of rightist does not define them as pro-market, only as anti-leftist, so your observed contradictions isn't one.
That said, as another commenter pointed out, if you define the right only in terms of opposing the left, you fail to explain what offends the right about the left and how the right can even recognize the left to know whom to oppose.
The market part is recent. It doesn't relate to difference on culture, morality, religion.
The difference may be that conservatives trust less in theory and in experts, and prefer tradition and what's worked in the past.
Me and Mark Ramseyer wrote an unpublished paper where we found the one question which best distinguished right from left was on global warming--- which came down, I think, to trust in experts.
"Voter Ideology: Regression Measurement of Position on the Left-Right Spectrum,'' (with J. Mark Ramseyer). For scholars who need a measure of political preferences, a person's position on the ideological spectrum provides a good start. Typically, scholars identify that position through factor analysis on survey questions. In effect, they assume that the calculated synthetic variable marks the person's location on the liberal-conservative spectrum. They then use that ideology variable either as the focus of a study on ideology, or as a control variable in other regressions. The leading attitudinal surveys--- the GSS, the CCES, and the ANES--- include a variable giving a respondent's self-identified ideology. Factor analysis assigns this variable no special prominence. To treat this self-identification appropriately, we urge scholars to instead measure ideology using the fitted value from a regression of self- identified ideology on other survey responses. In contrast to factor analysis, the regression approach assigns proper priority to self- identification; it lets us test whether voters identify their own ideology through identity-group variables; it avoids the bias introduced in choosing the issue variables to include in the factor analysis; and it identifies the issues that the average voter thinks best define "liberal'' and "conservative.'' http://www.rasmusen.org/papers/spectrum-ramseyer-rasmusen.pdf.
A quibble: Why are Nazi's considered right-wing? The German Nazi party stood for National Socialist German Workers' Party. Workers' party? That's left wing. Socialist? That's left wing. Nationalist? That could be either left or right wing.
Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory shows where the difference lies, at least today. The Left focusses on two (sometimes three) of the foundations; the Right holds them all important. This is explored in =The Righteous Mind=, which presents the result of real studies. (See also C.S.Lewis, =The Abolition of Man=, which anticipates Haidt's results.)
I've never liked this definition, Bryan, because it requires rightists to identify leftists, but doesn't explain how this happens. The definition of a rightist should include the functional landmarks of the leftist. And so that the more precise definition will tell us what it is about the leftist that makes him obnoxious to the rightist.
Furthermore your definition implies that rightists have no inherent qualities, since the quality is contingent upon the existence of the leftist.
So I offer this improved version of your definition: a rightist dislikes critique of social systems, especially religious, economic, and gender-role systems. And perhaps more finds repugnant exactly that style of critique that undermines received premises. If someone's lifestyle or explicit opinions imply such a fundamental critique, they are disliked.
This more functional definition I think can handle both 19th century French demarcation, as well as 1988 Soviet Russia, and USA 2025.
My only complaint about this definition is that it's fuzzy about who's views count as axiomatic. I guess I'll leave that sociology for another day...
Or see the book by the Lewis brothers, The Myth of the Left and Right. They argue that the "core issues" and even fundamental values are just conglomerations of tribal affinities.
Hmmm. I think of leftists as collectivist and rightists as individualistic (“don’t tread on me”).
Collectivists are group-oriented and place the primacy of the group ahead of the individuals who make up the group. Collectivists seem to be the caring ones. They care about “the poor”, “the marginalized”, “the working class”, “the [name the group]”. This is why identity is so central to leftist politics - because collectivism by definition is about groups. Collectivists paint individuals as selfish and even a threat to the well-being of the group. No one likes selfishness. So it’s easy for collectivists to coerce individuals to surrender to the group and to subject to violence those individuals who resist or are perceived as resisting.
The U.S. Constitution resting on Enlightenment values, recognizes how easy it is for “the group” to smother the individual, and as such, spends a lot of time on mechanisms (separation of powers; Bill of Rights; etc) to protect the individual.
Your definition of rightists as being anti-leftist makes sense in the context of leftists being collectivists, which threaten individuals with the power of the group.
The possibility which seems increasingly credible to me is this: modern leftism isn't strictly a political ideology. It's a kind of class outlook, a worldview calibrated to erode virtue and to maximize opportunities for bureaucratic expansion... in order to gain as many resources and as much status as possible for the elite class.
This explains why no poor or working class people believe in the tenets of 'social justice.' And, because they're not known or included, the ideologues of social justice don't care about THEM (not really). They're merely an abstraction - a way to gain class power and to validate their own identities and sense of social authority.
As with most profound things I believe I absorbed this lesson from reading Thomas Sowell (who writes plenty about 'the elect').
The terms “left” and “right” as applied to political ideologies are vague and ambiguous. Both terms have changed meaning with time and place. Neither represents any consistent political ideology. The terms “collectivist” and “individualist” are clearer and more precise. The political left tends to be associated with collectivism, while the right tends to be associated with individualism. However, neither side is consistently one or the other.
I note that on the Caplan criterion (and not only the Caplan criterion) for leftists certainly encompasses Nazis, fascists, MAGA (and especially groyperism), and the systems of many (other?) caudillos and other non-Communist authoritarians.
They also qualify as rightists (under a slightly modified Caplan criterion) because they hate *other* leftists.
After all, they are selling pretty close substitutes: Nazis versus Communists, Republicans versus Democrats. There is between them the rivalry that usually attaches to the sellers of substitutes, and then some.
I am not proposing that the right is a subset of the left. There are rightists who are not leftists; if I thought for a while I might be able to name some still alive and working. But the late Dick Cheney comes most immediately to mind. But a part of the right, currently a large part, is a subset of the left.
It is an old strategy in New York City, where the Republican Party is moribund, for a less-than-usually-leftist Democrat observing the heavy Democratic competition for mayor, to run on the Republican line. He is then a Republican in name only: Giuliani (who later became a real MAGA) and Blumenthal (who later lapsed back into Democracy).
Donald Trump took this strategy national. Naturally, as a defense against the obviously correct accusation that he is a Republican in name only, his movement's most frequent and expectorant animadversion for regular Republicans is "Republican in name only."
Right and Left are creations of journalism in conjunction with an unwritten agreement with the leadership of both political parties. This supposed dichotomy gives both parties credence and energizes their bases. The terms are meaningless as far as governance goes.
Definitely simplistic. Most people are Centrist most of the time, although they barely give it much thought. It's only when a government starts moving too far away from the centre they they start paying attention. Their reaction is then to move increasingly left or right of centre depending on how much they agree or disagree with the government's actions, which becomes destabilising. We would all be much better off if we could create an inherently stable Centrist government. It would be interesting if Bryan were to add a Centrist category to his theory.
I will offer an even simpler categorization. The right is about preserving institutions and is distrustful of change. The left believes institutions are inadequate/broken and that better ones can and should be designed.
This implies that the conservatives will differ in what they are preserving based upon their era and history. At one time, that included the rights of Kings, or preserving communism, or obeying the Pope. In the US, it includes preserving the Constitution and our 250 year traditions of institutions liberal democracy/economics.
The left seeks to create change in the belief that things can be improved.
My take on the issue is that we need both, though not always in equal proportions. As a believer in the value of human progress, I recognize that we need to identify and preserve the things that got us so far, as we discover ways to improve further and to offset our problems. The extreme elements in both parties scare me.
I think that there is some truth to that simplistic theory, although I am unaware of any data to support it. There are plenty of other theories about what makes people lean right or left. Personality differences (see Narcoleptic Panda's comment) constitute one such theory. Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman hypothesize that right-left differences are a function of a preference for focusing on producing resources versus distributing resources, both of which are necessary for viable social groups. I think Baumeister-Bush are on to something, although I have found shortcomings with their theory and believe that the Theory of Dual Morality accounts for their perspective while overcoming the shortcomings, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202503/focus-on-resource-acquisition-vs-distribution-divides-us . Briefly, the Theory of Dual Morality posits that perceptions of scarcity and danger encourage people toward rightist thinking, while perceptions of abundance and safety encourage people toward leftist thinking. For more details, see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202106/moral-political-polarity-and-its-origin
If we go back to the very basics, there seems to be a difference in personality between the typical left/right voter.
Largely, the left tend to have higher openness (open to new ideas, likes to discover new cultures, meet new people, etc.), high agreeableness (likes cooperation, group harmony, dislikes competition) and high neuroticism (worries a lot, sees potential issues everywhere).
Conversely, the right tend to be higher in conscientiousness (like efficiency, does a thorough job), lower in openness (dislikes change and is suspicious of new ideas) and lower in agreeableness (likes competition, does not care that much about group harmony).
Seems to me to be fairly good descriptions of the typical left/right voter. :)
The centralization/decentralization aspect of politics muddies the waters a bit for me, but maybe that is part of the cooperation/competition picture...
Basically, agreed, but because there is something deeper tying these things together...
"the left tend to have higher openness" -- because they must create in order to move forward from what exists to what does not yet exist
"the right tend to be higher in conscientiousness" -- because they preserve existing orders
"The centralization/decentralization aspect of politics muddies the waters a bit for me..." -- please see my note on Trojan horses below
--------------
About 250 years of of Right-Left battles in modern republics has resulted in pure FUBAR....
I applaud Caplan's seeking fundamentals here for L and R. However, like Marx, for Caplan the world looks essentially economic, and so political fundamentals look like markets. But individual power, in all its various ways, in an ostensible democratic republic is more fundamental than economy. We are not simply "traders" in our relations, and it is critical to get a handle on that. Before delving into traders vs non-traders, let me suggest an even simpler view (and one which I think better reflects actual L-R origins 235 years ago):
1. Rightism is, arguably, based on the most fundamental principal there is: Human agency (power). So they promote the maximization of individual agency, i.e. "freedom".
-- A result from the natural inequality of humans is inequality of outcomes, and they are largely ok with that "natural" outcome. They are ordinarily the establishment, as groups of humans naturally move toward inequality over time.
2. Leftists, in turn, react to what they see are the excesses of Rightist freedom, and seek a moderation of outcomes, i.e. "fairness".
-- Whenever the pendulum of "freedom" has shifted too far, they become the majority of the population, and act on this judgment. They are thus ordinarily the rebels to the establishment.
Note that both centralizing communism and fascism are totalitarian perversions that each love to scream they represent "the people", but are simply anti-democratic, Trojan-horse concentrations of power. Do not confuse any of their methods with Left and Right.
One can also say that the right and left have different definitions of "fairness." Leftists typically regard equal wealth for everyone as fair, while rightists often regard proportionality (greater wealth going to those who are smarter, more creative, and harder working) as fair. Leftists run into problems when they want to force the wealthy to give up the wealth that they have worked hard to earn. Rightists run into trouble with their proportionality argument when their wealth was inherited.
"Rightists run into trouble with their proportionality argument when their wealth was inherited."
Agreed. But I'd say not only there...
"Leftists run into problems when they want to force the wealthy to give up the wealth that they have worked hard to earn."
'Earn' is a very tricky word in defining rights in an economy. The moment one starts to unpacks what is 'earned' and what is not, a Pandora's box is opened. To take just a single prevalent and potent example in the modern age: When a replicating machine *especially, one that the 'earner' did not personally invent and build* allows the earner to multiple infinitely some widget, in what sense does the 'earner' actually *earn* the proceeds multiplied millions and billions of times, that he/she may not even be able to personally conduct 99+% of *merely the transactions* performed, never mind the widgets themselves? If if we can't say he/she didn't truly 'earn' it, then where should the wealth created -- or at least a large part of it -- really belong? How do we figure that out? I'm saying one can't simply default it *all* to the widget inventor, as has been the mindless answer ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
And no inventor is truly a self-creation, he/she is the product of thousands of years of civilization, from language, learning, environment, etc. on down. These are a couple of the major problems with modern wealth concentration, beyond the inheritance issue, that has been studiously ignored for centuries by the powerful and their cooperators. I can tell you right now that once AI really gets a grip on us, this hidden issue of unbalanced knowledge control will, finally, absolutely explode in politics.
Meanwhile, 'force' is always in the the of the beholder. Leftists believe, likewise, they are 'forced' -- in their case, to accept the (ordinarily) greater (natural) powers of a portion of the population. If someone is, the first place, born smart and strong (that is, leaving aside for the moment unnatural, e.g. legally inherited, differences), is there really no limit to the 'force' that they can apply to the weaker? If the answer is no, then what is that limit and why? Is there really a single answer, or is there potentially as many answers as there are people? This is at the root of the conflict.
If one accepts the moral principle of moral equality, of one-person one-vote, then baseline Right and reaction Left will always exist.
All very good points. The concept of 'earn' and related concept of 'deserved' are indeed complex notions. And it is true that creations of every inventor depend on the work of countless others. Also true is that we are all forced to accept differences in inborn, natural powers, which feels unfair to leftists. (Although some leftists deny the existence of inborn differences, attributing different outcomes to differences in social environments, which can be changed to level the playing field--see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201103/life-poker.) All of these issues revolve around morality, which is itself a complex subject that I have spent my life trying to understand. Thank you so much for your cogent points.
As a professional personality psychologist, I can confirm those Big 5 differences between right and left. As with all science, one can dig deeper, asking questions about the origins of those personality differences. I have a theory that successful societies require both a stabilizing element that preserves functional traditions and an exploratory element that looks for new, better ways of doing things. Of course it is often hard to tell if a tradition that has worked well in the past will continue to be functional, and, similarly, it is hard to tell if an innovation will truly be an improvement. People will lean toward tradition or innovation, not because they can rationally calculate actual outcomes, but because of the feelings and intuitions that constitute their personalities.
But how many of those traits are learned or at least reinforced? To be slightly snarky, do neurotic people align with the left, or does embracing the left tribe encourage neuroticism?
My opinion? Personality (or temperament, the prototype of personality) always comes first. So, people who are prone to negative emotions (particularly outrage about what they see as economic unfairness) are drawn to liberalism. However, there is almost certainly a reinforcing of these neurotic tendencies by other neurotic liberals. Furthermore, there seems to be a new trend in younger folks toward making their psychological problems a valued aspect of their identity. I am guessing (because I haven't seen the data) that this is more common among young liberals. My take on this is that this serves two functions: 1. it is a badge by which likeminded liberals recognize each other and bond with each other; and 2. as Freud said, neurotics get secondary gain from their neurosis (e.g., getting excused from obligations, getting positive attention from sympathetic others, more time to take tests, etc.)
One thing not exactly-contra this, but interesting, is that I think I've seen data recently suggesting democrats are less likely to date a republican than vice versa, so where does the left's antipathy to right fit in here?
I don't think this correct because it collapses in on itself when you consider that there have been right wing movements that are anti market, yet also anti left wing. How can that be? Your ur example of Nazis being a prime one, considering that they were against a global Marxism but in favor of nationalist socialism that very much preached and expected all Germans to repress their individual interests in the name of the collective German good. MAGA is pro tariffs etc.
Hyrum and Verlan Lewis make a surprisingly robust case that there is no single issue or underlying ideology to right v left and that in every country and throughout history their respective basket of issues has changed so much that there's no common thread, and they give enough counterexamples to be convincing (they also explicitly take on Sowell's theory and are persuasive than he is, IMO). Their conclusion is that there is no common thread or definition whatsoever and that it is entirely just tribal identification no more meaningful than what sports team you root for, and premised on mostly arbitrary things like family and friend tribe, single salient issues that happened to be held at the time the tribe was selected, etc.
I don't go all the way to their conclusion though I find their evidence compelling. For myself, I break it down quite simply. In every society and regardless of the particular issues of the day or what ideology is espoused, the right represents the interests of the powerful men in that society and how they would arrange things to best suit them. And the left represents the interests of everyone else...women, non powerful men, children, and non-humans. There are non powerful men on the right bc they are hoping to become powerful one day and take the lead of those who already are. And there are women on the right mostly bc they are the wives (or aspiring wives), daughters, or mothers of powerful males (or boys they expect to become so one day).
Most people I tell this theory to bristle at and reject it (on both sides), but can't come up with any good counterexamples.
Thanks for describing the Lewis bros book more completely. I also find their arguments, and evidence, compelling.
If I had to divide humanity into two groups, I would focus on the urge to meddle with other people. I prefer MYOB types, who will not offer (demand) guidance unless asked, and all the other varieties of busy-bodies, do-gooders, and control freaks--for any motivation.
Caplan dissected and debated the Lewis team. There are a series of posts and podcasts about it. This is a good start: https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-myth-of-left-and-right
Why are people so naive when they come to look at the American Left?
Caplan's definition of rightist does not define them as pro-market, only as anti-leftist, so your observed contradictions isn't one.
That said, as another commenter pointed out, if you define the right only in terms of opposing the left, you fail to explain what offends the right about the left and how the right can even recognize the left to know whom to oppose.
The market part is recent. It doesn't relate to difference on culture, morality, religion.
The difference may be that conservatives trust less in theory and in experts, and prefer tradition and what's worked in the past.
Me and Mark Ramseyer wrote an unpublished paper where we found the one question which best distinguished right from left was on global warming--- which came down, I think, to trust in experts.
"Voter Ideology: Regression Measurement of Position on the Left-Right Spectrum,'' (with J. Mark Ramseyer). For scholars who need a measure of political preferences, a person's position on the ideological spectrum provides a good start. Typically, scholars identify that position through factor analysis on survey questions. In effect, they assume that the calculated synthetic variable marks the person's location on the liberal-conservative spectrum. They then use that ideology variable either as the focus of a study on ideology, or as a control variable in other regressions. The leading attitudinal surveys--- the GSS, the CCES, and the ANES--- include a variable giving a respondent's self-identified ideology. Factor analysis assigns this variable no special prominence. To treat this self-identification appropriately, we urge scholars to instead measure ideology using the fitted value from a regression of self- identified ideology on other survey responses. In contrast to factor analysis, the regression approach assigns proper priority to self- identification; it lets us test whether voters identify their own ideology through identity-group variables; it avoids the bias introduced in choosing the issue variables to include in the factor analysis; and it identifies the issues that the average voter thinks best define "liberal'' and "conservative.'' http://www.rasmusen.org/papers/spectrum-ramseyer-rasmusen.pdf.
A quibble: Why are Nazi's considered right-wing? The German Nazi party stood for National Socialist German Workers' Party. Workers' party? That's left wing. Socialist? That's left wing. Nationalist? That could be either left or right wing.
Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory shows where the difference lies, at least today. The Left focusses on two (sometimes three) of the foundations; the Right holds them all important. This is explored in =The Righteous Mind=, which presents the result of real studies. (See also C.S.Lewis, =The Abolition of Man=, which anticipates Haidt's results.)
I've never liked this definition, Bryan, because it requires rightists to identify leftists, but doesn't explain how this happens. The definition of a rightist should include the functional landmarks of the leftist. And so that the more precise definition will tell us what it is about the leftist that makes him obnoxious to the rightist.
Furthermore your definition implies that rightists have no inherent qualities, since the quality is contingent upon the existence of the leftist.
So I offer this improved version of your definition: a rightist dislikes critique of social systems, especially religious, economic, and gender-role systems. And perhaps more finds repugnant exactly that style of critique that undermines received premises. If someone's lifestyle or explicit opinions imply such a fundamental critique, they are disliked.
This more functional definition I think can handle both 19th century French demarcation, as well as 1988 Soviet Russia, and USA 2025.
My only complaint about this definition is that it's fuzzy about who's views count as axiomatic. I guess I'll leave that sociology for another day...
Or see the book by the Lewis brothers, The Myth of the Left and Right. They argue that the "core issues" and even fundamental values are just conglomerations of tribal affinities.
Hmmm. I think of leftists as collectivist and rightists as individualistic (“don’t tread on me”).
Collectivists are group-oriented and place the primacy of the group ahead of the individuals who make up the group. Collectivists seem to be the caring ones. They care about “the poor”, “the marginalized”, “the working class”, “the [name the group]”. This is why identity is so central to leftist politics - because collectivism by definition is about groups. Collectivists paint individuals as selfish and even a threat to the well-being of the group. No one likes selfishness. So it’s easy for collectivists to coerce individuals to surrender to the group and to subject to violence those individuals who resist or are perceived as resisting.
The U.S. Constitution resting on Enlightenment values, recognizes how easy it is for “the group” to smother the individual, and as such, spends a lot of time on mechanisms (separation of powers; Bill of Rights; etc) to protect the individual.
Your definition of rightists as being anti-leftist makes sense in the context of leftists being collectivists, which threaten individuals with the power of the group.
The possibility which seems increasingly credible to me is this: modern leftism isn't strictly a political ideology. It's a kind of class outlook, a worldview calibrated to erode virtue and to maximize opportunities for bureaucratic expansion... in order to gain as many resources and as much status as possible for the elite class.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-progressive-agenda-as-pure-class
This explains why no poor or working class people believe in the tenets of 'social justice.' And, because they're not known or included, the ideologues of social justice don't care about THEM (not really). They're merely an abstraction - a way to gain class power and to validate their own identities and sense of social authority.
As with most profound things I believe I absorbed this lesson from reading Thomas Sowell (who writes plenty about 'the elect').
The terms “left” and “right” as applied to political ideologies are vague and ambiguous. Both terms have changed meaning with time and place. Neither represents any consistent political ideology. The terms “collectivist” and “individualist” are clearer and more precise. The political left tends to be associated with collectivism, while the right tends to be associated with individualism. However, neither side is consistently one or the other.
I note that on the Caplan criterion (and not only the Caplan criterion) for leftists certainly encompasses Nazis, fascists, MAGA (and especially groyperism), and the systems of many (other?) caudillos and other non-Communist authoritarians.
They also qualify as rightists (under a slightly modified Caplan criterion) because they hate *other* leftists.
After all, they are selling pretty close substitutes: Nazis versus Communists, Republicans versus Democrats. There is between them the rivalry that usually attaches to the sellers of substitutes, and then some.
I am not proposing that the right is a subset of the left. There are rightists who are not leftists; if I thought for a while I might be able to name some still alive and working. But the late Dick Cheney comes most immediately to mind. But a part of the right, currently a large part, is a subset of the left.
It is an old strategy in New York City, where the Republican Party is moribund, for a less-than-usually-leftist Democrat observing the heavy Democratic competition for mayor, to run on the Republican line. He is then a Republican in name only: Giuliani (who later became a real MAGA) and Blumenthal (who later lapsed back into Democracy).
Donald Trump took this strategy national. Naturally, as a defense against the obviously correct accusation that he is a Republican in name only, his movement's most frequent and expectorant animadversion for regular Republicans is "Republican in name only."
Right and Left are creations of journalism in conjunction with an unwritten agreement with the leadership of both political parties. This supposed dichotomy gives both parties credence and energizes their bases. The terms are meaningless as far as governance goes.
Definitely simplistic. Most people are Centrist most of the time, although they barely give it much thought. It's only when a government starts moving too far away from the centre they they start paying attention. Their reaction is then to move increasingly left or right of centre depending on how much they agree or disagree with the government's actions, which becomes destabilising. We would all be much better off if we could create an inherently stable Centrist government. It would be interesting if Bryan were to add a Centrist category to his theory.
I will offer an even simpler categorization. The right is about preserving institutions and is distrustful of change. The left believes institutions are inadequate/broken and that better ones can and should be designed.
This implies that the conservatives will differ in what they are preserving based upon their era and history. At one time, that included the rights of Kings, or preserving communism, or obeying the Pope. In the US, it includes preserving the Constitution and our 250 year traditions of institutions liberal democracy/economics.
The left seeks to create change in the belief that things can be improved.
My take on the issue is that we need both, though not always in equal proportions. As a believer in the value of human progress, I recognize that we need to identify and preserve the things that got us so far, as we discover ways to improve further and to offset our problems. The extreme elements in both parties scare me.
I think that there is some truth to that simplistic theory, although I am unaware of any data to support it. There are plenty of other theories about what makes people lean right or left. Personality differences (see Narcoleptic Panda's comment) constitute one such theory. Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman hypothesize that right-left differences are a function of a preference for focusing on producing resources versus distributing resources, both of which are necessary for viable social groups. I think Baumeister-Bush are on to something, although I have found shortcomings with their theory and believe that the Theory of Dual Morality accounts for their perspective while overcoming the shortcomings, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202503/focus-on-resource-acquisition-vs-distribution-divides-us . Briefly, the Theory of Dual Morality posits that perceptions of scarcity and danger encourage people toward rightist thinking, while perceptions of abundance and safety encourage people toward leftist thinking. For more details, see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202106/moral-political-polarity-and-its-origin