The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.
This isn't a new idea-- which is good, given that new ideas are usually wrong. Edward Banfield talked about this in the context of the debates over the American party system in the mid-1950s. Richard Bensel's book on Gilded Age parties-- I think it is called "The Political Economy of American Industrialism"-- makes a similar point. But it is good to have an entire book that focusses exclusively on this issue, and I will definitely read it now. In theory, recognizing that "left" and "right" refer to coalitions and policy positions that are constantly shifting should lead people to be more tolerant. But it won't, in my opinion, because people are naturally tribal, and enjoy feeling hatred for others.
'Bad tribalism is what happens when the issues are seen to be really important, and a lot is at stake.' (As close as I can get to a quote). Question for the Lewis's: Don*t political party insiders always think politics is really important (it is most of their life), and that a lot is at stake (to them it is)? Won't that create a huge incentive to reduce the issues to one dimension in order to encourage tribalism? Isn't tribalism in the parties best interests?
My personal suspicioun is that what makes someone right wing or left wing isnt ideolagy at all: its a genetic and evolutionary personality, with different priorities, intuitions, and preferences
In as blunt terms as possible: conservatives are evolutionarly farmers, progressives are huntergatherers.
The prefered policies of each side makes no coherent sense, because they are both fighting for social desirability bias, and appealing to each heritages instincts
Farmers on keeping strangers out, adhering to a masculine authority, maxamise own fertility. Typically see hard work as the most important thing, and then to be conformist and normal.
The envirement is there to be exploited and turned into farmland, or human goods.
Hunter gatherers operate on an assumption of the commons, where everyone usually has enough to live prosperous lives, and any poverty has to be explained. Which creates a huge emphasis on economic disparities. They are also hugely on the lookout for anyone trying to snatch a bigger pie and dominate everyone.
Envirement has enough for everyone and is only deficient if you over exploit it
Libertarians are essentially evolutionarly weirdos, altough i think we are right
I don't have 90 minutes to watch this so I'll sum up.
The Republican base is:
1) Middle class
2) Married vs single/divorced
3) Many kids vs few/none
4) Usually too high income for welfare, but not high income enough that money doesn't matter
5) Generally employed in free market versus government and government adjacent
6) Generally has high income versus education level
6a) GOP vote share maxes out around the associates degree level of education once you control for other factors like race
7) White vs Brown
The more your not like that, the more Democratic you are. Note that you can not be like that because you are both underclass or wealthy (not middle class).
Most of the policies fall out from that.
Does a policy benefit middle class people with big families? Right supports it.
Of course you might feel a policy "doesn't really" benefit some group, but at least in a first order sense it should benefit them.
Also, every party is a coalition of interests, and sometimes one has to "take one for the team" in order to keep the coalition together and get what they want.
Realignments tend to happen when a coalition falls below the level of electoral viability necessary to win elections. But it can take time (sometimes you have long periods of one party rule).
In terms of differences, just look at red states vs blue states. We would all agree red states are way better, and that's how people vote with their feet. The same is true internally (people move out of cities and to the suburbs). This was especially obvious during COVID but is also true on simple things like taxes and regulation.
Your definition of left and right reminds me of the question of what a species is. One def that captures most instances is: a male and a female are in the same species if they can mate and have offspring. But then there are apparently birds that you can track the species going west on the globe and when you get back to where you started you’re at a new species. (Can imagine you start with blue and red birds locally. You tack the blue group going west, it gradually shifts its hue to purple, and by the time you get back to the start you’re at red.)
Going back in time you could imagine the same thing happening with left and right, or at least the parties currently identifying one way might end up on the opposite later.
So perhaps the party stances only cohere locally. Of course your def of left right is static.
Not a myth. Social status rules. And, where status does not exist (financial wealth is only a weak proxy), tribal status is only equal parts headcount and vigilance. The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” can be refactored to “the friend of my enemy is my enemy” .. this most basic cognitiion is essential to both hunting AND warring parties. Freedom of speech bothers few outside a duopoly yet today, anti-free speech abounds in the US. Right and left (sometimes cheaply seen as tribal cs ideology) is a myth.” Or rather, perhaps It’s a only a lazy, narrative construct. Either way, it’s not fixed thus, it’s easily debunked.
Hypothesis: most people don't actually treat politics the way Sean Hannity does, but the minority who do produce a hugely disproportionate amount of political commentary, so they seem like a majority.
Professor Caplan, why do you believe Hitler would have self-identified as being on the right? Sure he hated the communists, but he also hated liberal capitalists, and most traditional conservatives. I remember reading somewhere that in the Gestapo files they actually used the word "reactionary" to identify dissident clergy! Many fascists explicitly describe themselves as advocating a "third position" between capitalism and communism. Hitler probably thought of himself as a centrist!
The problem is our system of elections. If we had something like ranked choice voting or single transferrable vote or etc then we could have granularity of positions. I would like to see US House elections done without districts on a statewide basis with single transferrable vote. In the smallest state it makes no difference. In the largest, its a huge difference.
In CA, you need less than 2% of the statewide vote to get elected to the house. You would get libertarians and greens and communists and etc elected. You would get anti-market, anti-abortion Democrats. You would get pro-market, pro-abortion Republicans. People would have to make ranked choice position votes. And geographic decisions. Would a socal Democrat prefer a socal Republican over a nocal Dem? Maybe, sometimes.
With a complicated situation it is easier to assert chaos than find a pattern. Words do not have essential or necessary meanings. The left-right spectrum is not very useful. A political compass can be useful. Left: personal liberty; Right: property liberty; North: libertarian; South: authoritarian. https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-political-compass-and-why-libertarianism
I think bryan caplan is a tiny bit right on the left being anti market. But i think the real description of left vs right is rather
“The left are anti economic differences, and finds changes and inequality there painful and outrageous”
(Which leads to being anti profit as that generally creates economic differences, and since the market is built around profit, they often turn anti market)
“The right is anti social differences, and often find social changes and disconformity outrageous and painful.”
(This leads to right wing people often being against immigration, or sexual and gender related changes in society)
What we then purport to be the left or right wing ideology is often local politicians or intellectualls trying to satisfy the social desirability bias and tastes of these two different groups.
And since both sides dislikes change and difference but in different ways, and goverment can be very good at stopping change and new things, in practical politics both sides have very similar policies. But vastly different rhetoric.
Why would you expect a two party system to make sense? There are lots of things for people to care about and even if people actually generally were ideological (they mostly aren't; they are going to have a few proclivities that guide a lot of their positions but then a lot of positions are just going to be decided on an ad hoc basis), you'd still end up with a coalition that isn't going to be bound together by any coherent principle. The democrats aren't the party of antisemitism and jewish people because antisemites and jewish people are beholden to some myth that their interest are aligned or they believe in the same things. Same thing in the past when democrats were the party of jim crow and african americans. They were part of the same party because they were part of the same coalition and who ends up in what coalition is more or less an emergent process and not the result of some semi-coherent rule.
The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.
-Ayn Rand, 1964
This isn't a new idea-- which is good, given that new ideas are usually wrong. Edward Banfield talked about this in the context of the debates over the American party system in the mid-1950s. Richard Bensel's book on Gilded Age parties-- I think it is called "The Political Economy of American Industrialism"-- makes a similar point. But it is good to have an entire book that focusses exclusively on this issue, and I will definitely read it now. In theory, recognizing that "left" and "right" refer to coalitions and policy positions that are constantly shifting should lead people to be more tolerant. But it won't, in my opinion, because people are naturally tribal, and enjoy feeling hatred for others.
'Bad tribalism is what happens when the issues are seen to be really important, and a lot is at stake.' (As close as I can get to a quote). Question for the Lewis's: Don*t political party insiders always think politics is really important (it is most of their life), and that a lot is at stake (to them it is)? Won't that create a huge incentive to reduce the issues to one dimension in order to encourage tribalism? Isn't tribalism in the parties best interests?
My personal suspicioun is that what makes someone right wing or left wing isnt ideolagy at all: its a genetic and evolutionary personality, with different priorities, intuitions, and preferences
In as blunt terms as possible: conservatives are evolutionarly farmers, progressives are huntergatherers.
The prefered policies of each side makes no coherent sense, because they are both fighting for social desirability bias, and appealing to each heritages instincts
Farmers on keeping strangers out, adhering to a masculine authority, maxamise own fertility. Typically see hard work as the most important thing, and then to be conformist and normal.
The envirement is there to be exploited and turned into farmland, or human goods.
Hunter gatherers operate on an assumption of the commons, where everyone usually has enough to live prosperous lives, and any poverty has to be explained. Which creates a huge emphasis on economic disparities. They are also hugely on the lookout for anyone trying to snatch a bigger pie and dominate everyone.
Envirement has enough for everyone and is only deficient if you over exploit it
Libertarians are essentially evolutionarly weirdos, altough i think we are right
I don't have 90 minutes to watch this so I'll sum up.
The Republican base is:
1) Middle class
2) Married vs single/divorced
3) Many kids vs few/none
4) Usually too high income for welfare, but not high income enough that money doesn't matter
5) Generally employed in free market versus government and government adjacent
6) Generally has high income versus education level
6a) GOP vote share maxes out around the associates degree level of education once you control for other factors like race
7) White vs Brown
The more your not like that, the more Democratic you are. Note that you can not be like that because you are both underclass or wealthy (not middle class).
Most of the policies fall out from that.
Does a policy benefit middle class people with big families? Right supports it.
Of course you might feel a policy "doesn't really" benefit some group, but at least in a first order sense it should benefit them.
Also, every party is a coalition of interests, and sometimes one has to "take one for the team" in order to keep the coalition together and get what they want.
Realignments tend to happen when a coalition falls below the level of electoral viability necessary to win elections. But it can take time (sometimes you have long periods of one party rule).
In terms of differences, just look at red states vs blue states. We would all agree red states are way better, and that's how people vote with their feet. The same is true internally (people move out of cities and to the suburbs). This was especially obvious during COVID but is also true on simple things like taxes and regulation.
Your definition of left and right reminds me of the question of what a species is. One def that captures most instances is: a male and a female are in the same species if they can mate and have offspring. But then there are apparently birds that you can track the species going west on the globe and when you get back to where you started you’re at a new species. (Can imagine you start with blue and red birds locally. You tack the blue group going west, it gradually shifts its hue to purple, and by the time you get back to the start you’re at red.)
Going back in time you could imagine the same thing happening with left and right, or at least the parties currently identifying one way might end up on the opposite later.
So perhaps the party stances only cohere locally. Of course your def of left right is static.
Not a myth. Social status rules. And, where status does not exist (financial wealth is only a weak proxy), tribal status is only equal parts headcount and vigilance. The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” can be refactored to “the friend of my enemy is my enemy” .. this most basic cognitiion is essential to both hunting AND warring parties. Freedom of speech bothers few outside a duopoly yet today, anti-free speech abounds in the US. Right and left (sometimes cheaply seen as tribal cs ideology) is a myth.” Or rather, perhaps It’s a only a lazy, narrative construct. Either way, it’s not fixed thus, it’s easily debunked.
Hypothesis: most people don't actually treat politics the way Sean Hannity does, but the minority who do produce a hugely disproportionate amount of political commentary, so they seem like a majority.
Professor Caplan, why do you believe Hitler would have self-identified as being on the right? Sure he hated the communists, but he also hated liberal capitalists, and most traditional conservatives. I remember reading somewhere that in the Gestapo files they actually used the word "reactionary" to identify dissident clergy! Many fascists explicitly describe themselves as advocating a "third position" between capitalism and communism. Hitler probably thought of himself as a centrist!
Do countries with >2 party systems have less of the partisan tribalism the authors describe?
Every strand of left wing thought contains egalitarian principles
RE: The spectrum vs granularity
The problem is our system of elections. If we had something like ranked choice voting or single transferrable vote or etc then we could have granularity of positions. I would like to see US House elections done without districts on a statewide basis with single transferrable vote. In the smallest state it makes no difference. In the largest, its a huge difference.
In CA, you need less than 2% of the statewide vote to get elected to the house. You would get libertarians and greens and communists and etc elected. You would get anti-market, anti-abortion Democrats. You would get pro-market, pro-abortion Republicans. People would have to make ranked choice position votes. And geographic decisions. Would a socal Democrat prefer a socal Republican over a nocal Dem? Maybe, sometimes.
http://dispatchesfromheck.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-great-right-v-left-lie.html
With a complicated situation it is easier to assert chaos than find a pattern. Words do not have essential or necessary meanings. The left-right spectrum is not very useful. A political compass can be useful. Left: personal liberty; Right: property liberty; North: libertarian; South: authoritarian. https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-political-compass-and-why-libertarianism
I think bryan caplan is a tiny bit right on the left being anti market. But i think the real description of left vs right is rather
“The left are anti economic differences, and finds changes and inequality there painful and outrageous”
(Which leads to being anti profit as that generally creates economic differences, and since the market is built around profit, they often turn anti market)
“The right is anti social differences, and often find social changes and disconformity outrageous and painful.”
(This leads to right wing people often being against immigration, or sexual and gender related changes in society)
What we then purport to be the left or right wing ideology is often local politicians or intellectualls trying to satisfy the social desirability bias and tastes of these two different groups.
And since both sides dislikes change and difference but in different ways, and goverment can be very good at stopping change and new things, in practical politics both sides have very similar policies. But vastly different rhetoric.
Why would you expect a two party system to make sense? There are lots of things for people to care about and even if people actually generally were ideological (they mostly aren't; they are going to have a few proclivities that guide a lot of their positions but then a lot of positions are just going to be decided on an ad hoc basis), you'd still end up with a coalition that isn't going to be bound together by any coherent principle. The democrats aren't the party of antisemitism and jewish people because antisemites and jewish people are beholden to some myth that their interest are aligned or they believe in the same things. Same thing in the past when democrats were the party of jim crow and african americans. They were part of the same party because they were part of the same coalition and who ends up in what coalition is more or less an emergent process and not the result of some semi-coherent rule.