Busting the myth of Left and Right
Oliver Traldi
In a new book, two political scientists argue convincingly that there is no stable dividing line between the “Left” and the “Right.” Instead, politically active citizens join the Left and Right (knowingly or not) as though they’re joining clubs or becoming devoted fans of sports franchises, often with their teams determining their views rather than vice versa.
Everyone agrees that American politics is becoming more polarized and that there’s something dangerous about this. But the phrase “political polarization” names at least two distinct and, in some ways, competing ideas. The first idea is extremism. The Left is moving further left, and the Right is moving further right; the reasonable center cannot hold. The second idea is sorting. You talk to and read and live with the people on your “side.” Partisan sorting happens geographically, at the level of red states and blue states but even more at the level of enclaves of urban Democrats (Austin) and stretches of rural Republicans (Texas). Partisan sorting also happens regarding consumption habits and hobbies, whereby Starbucks coffee might seem “blue” and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee might seem “red.” And maybe most crucially, partisan sorting occurs at the individual level, with people forming ideologies that “fit” what we understand to be the available groupings of beliefs held by existing groups. Pollsters find relatively few people who agree strongly with Democrats on immigration but with Republicans on abortion.
So is the combination of ideas on each side just a semi-random cluster, or does the line between right and left carve nature at its joints? If there really is some essential political-theory distinction between progressives or the “Left” and conservatives or the “Right,” partisan sorting is just what we should expect in a population that has a mix of left-wingers and right-wingers.
In their new book, The Myth of Left and Right, Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis argue such an essential distinction does not exist. Rather, “left” and “right” are social labels, always shifting with the times, and their ossification has been terrible news for American politics. Lewis and Lewis make their case by a variety of means. First, they cite psychological and sociological research on political belief formation. People don’t appear to join political parties with a fully worked-out set of issue positions but rather for social reasons or because of one issue they feel strongly about, with their other positions following their party’s relatively unthinkingly. People who are unaware of party platforms will often hold a variety of views across the left-right spectrum. Partisans try to match their peers and are usually incapable of articulating anything close to an ideology. And a wide variety of stories about ideology can be told to explain any set of beliefs.
The authors also make a historical case. Originally applied to those who supported and opposed the French Revolution, respectively, the left-right spectrum was first “reported” on in America as an aspect of intrasocialist disputes abroad, then “imported” to America as part of disputes among American socialists. It was finally “domesticated” in the wake of the New Deal to refer more broadly to those who preferred a large, interventionist government (Left) and those who preferred a small, hands-off government (Right). This simple spectrum, too, unraveled as the Right became more hawkish in foreign policy and began to support more anti-communist measures at home. Things were complicated even more by the “Republican Southern Strategy,” before which progressives and Democrats were more supportive of racist policies than right-wingers were, and by the decision to make religious social issues a central part of Republican political identity, which further alienated small-government libertarians.
The maddening thing for Lewis and Lewis is that, as all of these changes occurred, political differences were still explained by the old left-right spectrum: “The ideological landscape had changed, but the map of the landscape had not.” They note, too, that it gets things backward to talk about parties moving “left” or “right” over time. Rather, “left” and “right” in America are defined by party politics as are “progressive” and “liberal” and “conservative.” Examining the actual stances politicians have taken — they use the examples of Barry Goldwater and former President Ronald Reagan — creates a much more informative picture. This even goes for former President Donald Trump, popularly understood as a far-right ideologue: “Republicans under Trump became significantly more favorable to gay rights, economic regulation, minimum wages, pacifism, and restriction of private transactions.”
Things start to make more sense once we understand the order of explanation: We start by defining Trump as right-wing, and then from that, decide what the right-wing positions are, rather than vice versa. The authors write: “There is no principle so essential to ‘liberalism’ that it hasn’t at some point been identified with ‘conservatism,’ and vice versa.”
Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking: “Well, maybe they’re right that all that happens. But I know what left versus right is really about.” Lewis and Lewis devote a whole chapter to undermining virtually every possible principled conception of the left-right spectrum, noting that “usually, the ideology that essentialists consider ‘authentic’ is simply the one they grew up with.” That’s certainly true for me. Their targets include change versus status quo maintenance, “compassion versus greed,” “idealism versus realism,” “equality versus hierarchy,” and “tolerance versus authoritarianism.” They also take on psychological and genetic theories of ideological formation, such as Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory. I found these takedowns pretty convincing, but I’m not sure every reader will.
The view that “left” and “right” have real essences that split citizens neatly into two groups has a lot of bad consequences, which Lewis and Lewis outline. It makes us worse reasoners and worse people. We’re worse reasoners because we end up relatively inflexible, kept in thrall to one view or another because of our dedication to our side. We also might not put enough effort into considering specific issues to begin with, so sure are we that we’ve gotten the one big question — left or right? — correct. It also helps us demonize the other side — they got the one big question wrong. Our society is rife with what they call “ideologism,” or hatred of one’s political opponents. They might have done well to spend a little time on a slight variation to their thesis that academics call out-group homogeneity bias: We perceive the other side as having a core ideology (a nefarious one), but our own side as being diverse and multifaceted. If you often see opinion writers tarring the entire Right with some fringe wacko from the internet (or, fine, Congress) while holding the Left’s wackos as obviously an exception rather than an exemplar, this is why.
Polarization as partisan sorting occurs, according to The Myth of Left and Right, not because we are getting more familiar with the essences of political left-ness and political right-ness over time and acquainting ourselves better with our own relationship to those essences but because those essences don’t exist at all. Our politics will improve, then, when we unsort ourselves not just socially, by disagreeing more productively with those on the other side, but intellectually, by untethering our views about one political issue from our views about others. Lewis and Lewis make a compelling case that, once we do that, it’ll surprise us what’s left.
Oliver Traldi is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.