*The Myth of Left and Right*: Hyrum Lewis Responds

Both of the Lewis brothers have kindly written detailed followups to last week’s interview on their prize-winning iconoclastic book, The Myth of Left and Right. Here’s Hyrum.

---

Dear Bryan,

See my responses to your questions below. Perhaps Verlan will find those adequate, but if he has anything to add I’d love to hear it. Thanks again for your intellectual humility and good faith in giving us the chance to air our views, even though we are not in complete agreement. I address some of our disagreements here and look forward to your responses to my responses.

All the best,

Hyrum

1. What are the three best bodies of evidence in your favor?

Thanks for the softball, Bryan :-)

Yes, so most people believe in what we call the “essentialist theory of ideology,” which says that politics is about one big thing (e.g., progress vs. preservation) and therefore the political spectrum is useful to measure that one big thing. We, by contrast argue that politics is about many disparate, unrelated things and that the political spectrum is therefore misleading. We’ve found that these three lines of evidence (each backed by numerous studies) best militate in favor of our position:

1. Historical: Even a cursory look at history shows that what is considered left and right is always changing. Pro-market used to be considered “liberal” (e.g., Jefferson and Jackson) and then later was considered “conservative” (e.g., Taft and Reagan). Militarism used to be considered “liberal” (Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman—remember all those “right-wing” isolationists who didn’t want to get involved in WWII?) and then later it was considered “conservative” (Reagan and W. Bush). If some positions were essentially “conservative” then we would see conservatives embracing those positions across time and space. We don’t, indicating that there are no essentially conservative (or liberal) positions.

2. Laboratory: Scholars have shown that they can get ideologues to switch positions simply by priming them with social cues. So if experimenters tell self-described “conservatives” that Donald Trump supports the minimum wage, those conservatives also support the minimum wage; if they tell self-described “conservatives” that Trump opposes the minimum wage, those conservatives also oppose the minimum wage (and the more conservative someone is, the more likely they are to follow the social cues). If support for the minimum wage grew out of an essential conservative philosophy or disposition, conservatives would draw their positions from that essence. They don’t. They draw it from their social group.

3. Survey: When we survey Americans about their individual political positions, we find no correlation between issues considered liberal (such as belief in abortion rights and belief in redistribution of wealth) except among those most socialized into believing in the political spectrum. If abortion rights and redistribution went together naturally because they both shared a left-wing essence, we would expect to see people holding those views in a package, regardless of their exposure to the left-right paradigm.

6.a. Aren’t you holding essentialists to too high of a bar? 

I don’t think so because we are holding them to the bar of falsification, which is what separates rationality from dogmatism and science from religion. All scholarly theories must be, in principle, falsifiable and yet the essentialist position has been, in our view, soundly falsified.

So, let’s go back to your claim that leftists are essentially anti-market:

What if the next president of the United States (with the help of a congress from his own party) was the most anti-market president in a generation—radically increasing spending, signing new economic regulations, running up debt, and significantly decreasing America’s “economic freedom” score—and yet the left hated him and the right loved him. Would this falsify your view that the left is essentially anti-market? If “anti-market” defined the left, then wouldn’t your theory predict that the left would love this extremely anti-market president?

If so, then the presidency of George W. Bush has already falsified your claim.

Now, the common retort to this is, “Well, there are many other issues in politics besides just markets and the left hated Bush because of his stances on the Iraq war, abortion, gay marriage, and other social and foreign policy issues.” To which we say: “Exactly!” There are many, many other issues in politics besides markets (e.g., immigration, abortion, diplomacy, war, affirmative action, gay marriage, capital punishment, gun control, drug control, etc.), so why use a unidimensional spectrum that presumes there is only one (pro vs. anti-market)? We don’t use a unidimensional spectrum in any other complex realm of life for good reason (there is no single “business spectrum,” “medical spectrum,” “recreation spectrum,” etc.), so why do we use one in politics? We shouldn’t.

6.b. At any given time, leftist and rightist thinkers disagree, so there’s got to be some room for indeterminacy, right?

Yes, all categories have indeterminacy at the margins. For instance, we could show that there is indeterminacy in the category “chair”—which we might define as “a human-made device for human sitting”—by pointing to marginal examples, such as dollhouse chairs or stumps around a campfire. But the left-right categories are not indeterminate at the margins, they are incoherent at their core. To show why, let’s go back once again to your “anti-market” essence:

Adolf Hitler was not a marginal figure to the right; he’s considered the quintessential right winger—the purest, most perfect embodiment of the right-wing essence taken to its logical conclusion. And yet he was a proud socialist who believed in government nationalization of private industry and vast redistributions of wealth. Hitler was, by any measure extremely anti-market. So, according to the “anti-market” essence, Hitler should be on the “far left” (his anti-market views were even more extreme than the most radical Democrats today). The same is true of Tojo, Mussolini, and many other quintessential “far right” figures of the past century.

Donald Trump is not a marginal figure to the right; he’s considered the quintessential American right winger—a “far right” ideologue who captured the Republican Party and drove it to its extreme right wing—and yet Trump is far more anti-market than was Bill Clinton. So why does the left despise Trump and praise Clinton? When Trump and Bush moved the Republican Party in a more anti-market direction, we were told that they had both moved the party “to the right.” It seems to me that if your “anti-market” essentialist claim were correct, the consensus would be that Bush and Trump had moved the party “to the left.”

Of course, the falsifying evidence doesn’t stop there. Here’s more:

• The War on Terror: if the left is essentially “anti-market,” why did the left (more than the right) tend to oppose the War on Terror and national security state more generally even though its expenditures and government controls reduced economic freedom? The essentialist theory has no answer, the social theory does.

• Immigration: if the left is essentially “anti-market,” why does the left currently want more of a “market” in laborers from foreign countries? The essentialist theory has no answer, the social theory does.

• Drugs, Gambling, and Prostitution: if the left is essentially “anti-market,” why is the left currently more in favor of free markets when it comes to drugs, prostitution, and gambling? The right says “drugs kill people so we have to regulate the sale of drugs”; the left says, “guns kill people so we have to regulate the sale of guns”—why the inconsistency? The essentialist theory has no answer, the social theory does.

• Tech companies: if the left is essentially “anti-market,” why was Trump’s proposal to control the “liberal” private-sector tech companies considered “right wing”? The essentialist theory has no answer, the social theory does.

• Mitt Romney: if the left is essentially “anti-market,” why is Mitt Romney considered to be more moderate (and therefore further to “the left” on the political spectrum) than Donald Trump even though he is far more pro-market? The essentialist theory has no answer, the social theory does.

It seems pretty clear to me that both sides are anti-market depending on the context and what certain market actors are doing relative to the tribes. All of the above is, in my view, more than sufficient to falsify the claim that the left is defined by an “anti-market” disposition.

11. You seem willing to accept sub-level essentialism, like “support for economic freedom” or “hawkish foreign policy.”  But don’t all of your arguments about the logical independence (or “granularity”) of issues apply here, too?

Yes, but the difference is that some categories are accurate and useful and others are inaccurate and harmful. It was correct for doctors in the mid 19th century to accept sub-level essentialism when it came to categories such as “fever” or “vomiting” or “hemorrhage,” but not the high-level essentialism of the four humors theory. It’s only when they gave up the high-level essentialism (with all of the bleeding and purging it entailed) that doctors finally began to save more lives than they took. We need to give up the high-level essentialism of the political spectrum in the same way and for many of the same reasons.

The sports analogy can further provide an answer to your question: treating the sub-level category of “speed” as essential is useful for evaluating individual basketball players, but not for explaining the bundle of players we cheer for. Pretending that all Los Angeles Laker players share the essence of “speed” and deluding ourselves that we cheer for the Lakers because we cheer for speedy players would not be useful. Nor would it be true: we can falsify the “speed” essence by pointing to slow (non-marginal) Lakers such as Shaquille O’Neal, Kurt Rambis, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, just as we can falsify the “left = anti-market” essence by pointing to anti-market (non-marginal) rightists such as Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, W. Bush, and Trump.

When it comes to sports, we have all recognized the obvious fact that we cheer for certain players not because of some essence they share, but because they are associated with our team (the Lakers), so why can’t we do the same in politics and recognize that we cheer for certain positions not because of some “essence” they share, but because they are associated with our team (the Left or Right).

12. Quote from p.79 on raw tribalism versus intellectualized tribalism.  True?

Perhaps you could be a bit more specific, but I think our main point is that the highly intellectual are more likely to be tribal when it comes to politics because the essentialist myth is upheld by ex post storytelling and intellectuals are far better at concocting such stories. Intellectualized tribalism is also more pernicious than raw tribalism because it is less self-aware. We all have, for instance, the raw tribalism of American nationalism, but because we are aware of this tribalism, we are far more likely to be rational about it and question our nation and its leaders. We haven’t deluded ourselves with the myth that everything our nation does somehow flows out of a righteous philosophy. That’s not the case when it comes to left-wing ideology where intellectualized tribalists have convinced themselves that everything left-wing is righteous because it all flows out of the righteous philosophy of “progress” or “social justice.”

13. “The essentialist paradigm is making everyone stupid and evil.”  Thinking again on a continuum, what’s the marginal effect?

One of the most common reactions to our rejection of the political spectrum, is the claim, “Well, it’s not perfect, but it’s useful.” People say this over and over, but never once to my knowledge has anyone provided any evidence for it. All of the scholarly evidence I’m aware of shows the exact opposite: those who think of politics in terms of a left-right spectrum are in a mental prison. They are far more dogmatic, hostile, closed-minded, and even unhappy. They can’t think as rationally or accurately as those who think outside the spectrum (Tetlock’s work on forecasting is pretty dispositive on this point). The spectrum is the opposite of useful.

It’s not just that there’s no scholarly evidence for the usefulness of the spectrum, I’m not even aware of any anecdotal evidence. In fact, I can’t even imagine any anecdotal evidence that would back it up. None of us, for instance, would ever expect to hear someone say, “My uncle used to be a cranky, wild-eyed nutcase, who was irrational, hostile, conspiratorial, and angry when it came to politics, but then he discovered the political spectrum, embraced a right-wing identity, and he’s been calm, thoughtful, and charitable ever since.” The political spectrum is neither correct nor useful. It doesn’t pass the epistemic or pragmatic tests that should justify all models, especially political ones.

So, to answer your question: the marginal effect of the essentialist theory that underlies the political spectrum is decidedly negative. All of the scholarly and anecdotal evidence I’m aware of show that it creates irrationality and unjustified hostility among those who use it.

And so while we’re on the subject, I would ask you, Bryan: why do you continue to use the political spectrum when it is so obviously detrimental to the cause of freedom that you and I believe in? By telling us that Bryan Caplan is essentially like Adolf Hitler because both of you are part of “the right,” aren’t you playing into the hands of statist authoritarians? Denigrating freedom by conceptually tying it to its opposite (fascism) seems rhetorically destructive to the cause of liberty. The market economy has been perhaps the greatest force for social justice in the history of the world, and yet “social justice warriors” reject markets because the political spectrum tells them that favoring markets is somehow “far right” and therefore “fascist.” Why tarnish freedom with this false guilt by association? Shouldn’t we just give up the fiction that there is one issue in politics, and instead say, “free markets are good,” “racism is bad,” “war is bad,” “immigration is good” and those are distinct issues? Why give people the false impression that you are a racist, anti-immigrant warmonger because you believe in free markets? The essentialist theory isn’t just bad for society and individuals, it’s particularly bad for freedom so I’m surprised that so great a champion of freedom as yourself is so determined to hold onto it.

Thanks for giving us this chance to respond to your questions.

Hyrum