I have a Simplistic Theory of Left and Right. A reader sent me their thoughts on the theory. Reprinted anonymously with their permission.
I’ve been thinking about your conception of the Right and Left in American Politics and thought I would run a thought by you.
You say:
1. Leftists are anti-market. On an emotional level, they’re critical of market outcomes. No matter how good market outcomes are, they can’t bear to say, “Markets have done a great job, who could ask for more?”
2. Rightists are anti-leftist. On an emotional level, they’re critical of leftists. No matter how much they agree with leftists on an issue, they can’t bear to say, “The left is totally right, it would be churlish to criticize them.”
While both sides form their views on an emotional level in this framework, the Left’s views appear more substantive. Disliking the market seems far less personal and petty than categorically disliking a group of people who disagree with you, and anti-market intuitions could, at least in principle, develop as a reasonable response to repeated experience with market processes.
But is this framework really getting to the heart of the matter? If we grant that the left broadly shares an instinctive skepticism of markets, no matter their performance, it is still a little puzzling WHY this is so.
In my view the left is reflexively critical of markets because they favor a society in which leftists have high status and exercise social control. The more social processes we assign to markets, the smaller the role there is for leftists.
At this point I can piggy-back off of the data brought to bear in this excellent article by Richard Hanania, which shows that leftists derive much more meaning from activism than the typical rightist, investing substantial time and money into these endeavors. Leftists want to be actively involved in shaping policy, not sitting idly by while markets claim the credit. In contrast, conservatives are often content to ignore politics–provided that leftists will leave them alone.
Looking at your model from this angle, the underlying motivations of left and right appear much more symmetric. “Anti-right” still doesn’t quite approximate the psycho-logic of the former, but conservatives become a natural enemy to the march of leftist-led progress. “Anti-left” still basically fits the psycho-logic of the latter, but begins to resemble a plausible low-information heuristic for someone wary of leftist control.*
At their best, leftists are proactive do-gooders and rightists are unassuming defenders of personal freedom. At their worst, leftists are hubristic and totalitarian while rightists are paranoid and conspiratorial.
*I noticed as I was writing this out that Thomas Sowell’s “Vision of the Anointed” analyzes the left and right in a similar vein.
READER COMMENTS
Jess Riedel
Apr 29 2021 at 9:49am
(Make sure you intended to include the writers first name. Not fully anonymous as is.)
Matt C
Apr 29 2021 at 9:49am
In my experience (i.e., this is entirely anecdotal and probably biased as well), Leftists typically believe that their collectivism makes them good people. It’s collectivism = care about others = I’m a good person. I think this is what makes them anti-market. It doesn’t appear to occur to them that if they cared about others, they would allow them the freedom to make economic decisions to their benefit.
robc
Apr 29 2021 at 10:04am
Elijah’s response brought that quote to mind, and Matt C’s reply enforced it. I think that is the source of the right’s anti-left mindset.
The funny part is, that quote could be directed at certain parts of the right as well, especially 30 years ago. But that faction is not in power now.
JFA
Apr 29 2021 at 11:14am
“rightists are unassuming defenders of personal freedom.”
Even at their “best” I don’t think this has characterized any side of the left-right split.
Tony
Apr 29 2021 at 11:24am
I presume you mean economic left-right, rather than liberal-authoritarian. Basically, there isn’t a left-right economic divide of any substance in the population. If you divide rich liberal democracies into four quadrants of left-right, liberal-authoritarian, pretty much the entire population is scattered across a narrow archipelago from centre left-centre right, with a small majority in the centre left, and from mildly authoritarian to mildly liberal, with a small majority of authoritarians. The average voter is economically centre left, mildly authoritarian. The economic right, culturally liberal quadrant is basically empty. It only has any salience in elite politics because of the rich donor class seeking to avoid paying taxes.
Julian
May 2 2021 at 3:45am
Populist nonsense.
First off, Gallup has been tracking a dozen moral issues for years (Google “gallup moral issues”), publishing the results every year. And in virtually every single issue with the exception of abortion (premarital sex, animal cloning, polygamy, pornography, gambling, prostitution, homosexuality, etc.) the public has been slowly but consistently moving to the culturally liberal direction.
As to economics, they have a similar data for public’s desire for more or less government, and another for regulation of business, and it though it mildly fluctuate every handful of years, it has remained pretty consistent for a few decades now. Basically, the public is split on whether it wants bigger or smaller government, often evenly.
Tony
May 4 2021 at 4:54am
Hi. Thanks for your response Julian.
Firstly, I’d agree that on particular issues, say gay marriage, populations have thankfully become more liberal over time.
Secondly, I think the Gallup polling you refer to is how people self-identify. If the latter is incorrect, what follows may be need some adjustment. However, if it is the case, I don’t think that’s a very useful form of questioning.
The definition of authoritarian that I’m using is basically open-closed, in-out group identification, best discovered through a series of less-partisan questions such as attitudes to bringing up children.
In that case, what we tend to find is fairly stable identities across time that can be activated to a greater or lesser extent depending on particular situations and often the activities of elites (political parties/political entrepreneurs).
The definition of the in and out groups can certainly change. You only need glance at the history of US immigration to know this. In the case of gay marriage, one needs to think of how homosexuality was in earlier, darker times roped in with perversion and paedophilia, and now is mostly not, to see how in-out group definitions can change, without actually dissolving us and them divisions.
As an aside, fights over racism are no longer about whether racism is bad or not – as you say, such wars are won – but about what is defined as racism and which groups, if any, deserve protection.
I think we broadly agree on the population’s economic views. It has varied over past decades around a pretty narrow centre that’s miles away from either libertarian small government or statist socialism.
So, as I said, we have populations that average around a fairly tight centre right economically (I would speculate because of the rhetorical power of household budget analogies to the broader economy) and mildly authoritarian (probably because of the persistence of the nation state). Small state liberals are nowhere to seen in any numbers outside of donor-funded elite circles.
Many thanks for your time if you managed to get through all this! Tony
Tony
May 4 2021 at 5:03am
Erk… I meant centre LEFT in the penultimate paragraph.
Tony
May 5 2021 at 12:51pm
To illustrate, here’s a diagram of the average voter in England and various local councils (Bristol is more prosperous) based on survey data. It’s not the U.S., but the U.K. has a similar two-party FPTP political system and is unlikely to be dramatically different politically. That big empty quadrant in the bottom right? That’s the desert of right-wing economic values and liberal social values. Tell me why libertarians aren’t irrelevant to all but rich people who want to avoid taxes? Ready to learn. Thanks
https://twitter.com/UKandEU/status/1389852782157512706
John
Apr 29 2021 at 11:48am
Thomas Sowell also brings up something that I think adds an important point to this dichotomy of left and right here:
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/sowell-the-left-right-dichotomy/
The Left is largely united in their principles (bringing about more social/economic equality through more central-decision making) while the Right is simply Not the Left. The Left largely differ within themselves in how far they are willing to follow their principle, while the Right “can range from free-market libertarians to advocates of monarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship or innumerable other principles, systems and agendas.”
The one obvious thing that unites the right is its opposition to the Left, which is what I think Bryan is picking up on in his more simplistic theory.
Jose Pablo
Apr 29 2021 at 11:18pm
Talking about Thomas Sowell “A conflict of visions” is very useful to understand the differences between left and right (as the anonymous reader points out with his reference to “The Vision of the Anointed”.
The attachment of the left to the “unconstrained vision” keeps growing by the day (with the additional help of eventual pandemics)
Knut P. Heen
Apr 29 2021 at 12:39pm
There are also conservatives who will spend a lot of resources on stopping free markets in drugs, kidneys, foreign labor, etc. The money and time, probably goes through a religious organization rather than a political party. Hence, they may seem less politically active. The prohibition movement was not left-wing. Trump’s wall to stop a free movement of labor was not left-wing.
Anti-market ideas come from the dislike of market outcomes. Sometimes it is inequality between individuals. Sometimes it is inequality between regions. Sometimes it is consumption of alcohol or drugs. Sometimes it is emission of CO2. Sometimes it is immigration. This is very visible in Norway because we have one separate political party for each anti-market idea. When you combine these parties into a coalition, the coalition becomes more anti-market than each individual party.
OVB
Apr 29 2021 at 5:40pm
Prohibition may be a bad example. My sense is that support for prohibition was largely bipartisan until the state became desperate for revenue during the Great Depression.
Julian
May 2 2021 at 3:48am
Not to mention it was pushed by the so-called Progressives of the time, who were also pro-public school and for more labor regulations.
Hana
Apr 29 2021 at 1:37pm
This seems off. The left is just as likely to critical of right. It may only for power or because the righteosness of their views make them believe that other people should do as they’re told. Hillary described those who disagreed with her view as “deplorables”, that hardly sounds like someone who just has issues on markets. Left and Right are tribal designations. Real people are much more interesting and worthwhile. Talk with them.
TheShermanator
Apr 29 2021 at 1:49pm
One elephant-in-the-room variable that has bearing on this kind of (basically compelling) tribe level armchair psychology: power asymmetry. Often, we talk about these right vs. left dichotomies as if we were discussing comparable, equally resourced opponents slugging it out on level footing. It should go without saying, though, that the left has accrued social, cultural, and economic soft powerthat is clearly disproportionate to its share of the population. Forget the electoral political state in any given electoral cycle; even when conservatives manage to win majorities, the left retains (and even further consolidates) control of most of the non-democratic cultural soft power institutions. Just about all continuing conflicts over those soft power institutions take the form of center-left liberals trying to hold off zealous progressive crusaders (or weighing the pros and cons of abdication). The right – even, by and large, the center-right – is a marginal gadfly, dismissed as a non-player.
So yes, of course most right-of-center political commentary and ideological energy is informed by oppositional reaction to the left. That’s pretty much how hedgemony works.
None of this, of course, constitutes moral sanction – especially validation of the cynical own-the-libs or Pizzagate industrial complexes. Every individual still has an ethical obligation to participate in public discourse responsibly. That duty to be responsible, furthermore, includes a duty to present a positive case for political alternatives.
But in a country of millions, it is just inevitable that the marginalized tribe is going to define itself largely by contrast to (and criticism of) the hegdemnous tribe. When I see discussions like this that try to define fundemental right vs. left value systems – but rely largely on the conditions current political landscape for data, anecdotal or otherwise … it makes me scratch my head a little bit.
Ghatanathoah
Apr 30 2021 at 2:28pm
@The Shermanator
I’m not sure it should go without saying. Every time I have a conversation with leftists they talk about how far right neoliberals have taken over all of society and suppressed any real leftist reforms. They talk about how all our cultural institutions are incredibly far-right, racist, colonialist, etc. They talk about the “ratchet effect” where the government, like a ratchet, turns more and more right wing, but is prevented from turning leftwards.
It seems more likely that this is a variant of the “Hostile Media Effect.” People with sufficiently strong left and right wing views will view the media as being biased against their side. A leftist and a rightist who read the exact same news story will each think it is biased against them. It seems like the same rule works for government institutions, people seem to think their enemies are always the ones with all the power. This effect continues to work no matter how objectively powerful a faction is, supporters of repressive totalitarian governments often believe that their leaders are holding on for dear life, besieged on all sides by powerful foes.
Evan Sherman
Apr 30 2021 at 4:15pm
Sure, the Hostile Media Effect is a thing. And, more broadly speaking, a soceity that values victimhood incentivizes grievance-posturing behaviors in all actors – right, left, and center. Self-pity is a heck of a drug.
But the existence of these psychological phenomena is not mutually exclusive with the existence of real power asymmetry. E.g. If two people are in a car accident, they may both understand (consciously or otherwise) that claiming victimhood will produce better outcomes for them, and they may both deploy that strategy accordingly. But it may nonetheless be true that one is actually at fault and the other is not. The deployment of the victimhood strategy is agnostic to the truth.
If you do not already see the leftist hedgemony (with, again, the caveat of a still hot center-left vs. progressive conflict) across the elite strata of the entertainment industry, literature and publishing, academia, corporate culture, etc. ala the managerial class, I am not sure that I am going to be able to persuasively outline such a big picture trend in the context of a comment thread. I won’t waste your time with some snappy anecdote or single comprehensively telling stat. If I think of a reasonably quick but also sound way to explain it, I’ll come back.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Apr 29 2021 at 2:00pm
I’m not persuaded by this on “Leftist” positions. (Of course as a member of the tribe, even though I’m on the right of the Left, I wouldn’t.)
It seems the or at least “a” reason for Leftist pro tax/regulation bias (that seems more accurate than “anti-market”) is that Leftist see “problems” in the existing distribution of consumption and figure that if the market was going to fix things, it already would have. So how else to solve the problem? Then, too, even when regulations/taxes are or are part of the problem — land use, health insurance. etc. — the solution look like “better” taxes or regulation; the “market” solution is not obvious or just looks too radical.
Jose Pablo
Apr 30 2021 at 10:23am
“Better taxes” and “Better regulation” are great examples of “chasing unicorns”: the triumph of hope over experience.
In every generation of leftish there is this group that thinks that the problem with taxes and regulation is that they were designed by others and they, of course, know better … and yet they are proved wrong once and again.
Like with the nuclear power in this Cochrane analysis; regulation (and taxes) are, very likely, killing growth and harming the very same people they claim (wrongly) to protect. But, of course, never left the facts take any “intelectual feel good sensation” from you.
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/04/nuclear-power-and-growth.html
Henri Hein
Apr 29 2021 at 2:07pm
I don’t find the theory descriptive. For a grab-bag of examples, my leftist friends have been consistently against the Kelo decision, waterboarding and police brutality. I have heard defenses of these events only from rightists. Using your theory, I don’t see how those people arrived at those positions.
You are an Economist, so you think about the market every day. Most people don’t. They don’t evaluate everything based on whether the market was involved or not. An economist categorizing people based on their views of the market is a bit like a physicist categorizing people based on their views of quantum mechanics. It’s not necessarily invalid, but it’s mostly interesting to others in the profession.
robc
Apr 29 2021 at 3:04pm
I have noticed a tendency (not universal, but pretty large) that when you have someone who agrees with me on random issue X, Y, and Z but disagree on economic issues (for example, they are anti-market), that they will sell out on X, Y, and Z before they move on the market issues.
However, to your point, the other occurs too. I will call it the Bill Maher effect. Someone calls themselves a libertarian or “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” and turns out they aren’t willing to comment on the fiscal part of it. When the pressure is on, they will back down from libertarianism because they don’t care enough about markets to be consistent. But there are few “libertarians” who become hard core social conservatives. These people dont think in terms of markets until they are forced into supporting markets, then they back down.
Dan C
Apr 29 2021 at 2:38pm
Would your characterization pass the ideological Turing test?
While broad generalizations will leave everybody unsatisfied, here is a stab. Left wingers (in the US) have a strong conception of Justice and Fairness. Unequal outcomes are seen as unjust and unfair, especially when attributable to luck. Since everything is attributable to luck – birth, circumstances, genetics, history, etc., all unequal outcomes are suspect and subject to criticism. Left wingers also have a strong conviction of the corrupting influence of money. Therefore, “profit” is seen through the lens of corruption. They often see “free markets” as an ideology to promote the profits and unequal outcomes of the rich and exploit the poor. Thus, the poor built the country that the rich enjoy. The country’s wealth is seen as a product of history – colonization or wealth extraction, resource endowment, and scientific achievement. It should therefore be distributed fairly and justly.
However, (exiting Turing test) left wingers, like most individuals, have a weak understanding of what “markets” actually are and how they work. Rather than an invisible force that imposes constraints like gravity or electromagnetic radiation, “markets” and “capitalism” are really just institutional frameworks for exploitation. Markets therefore are not a solution to poverty, rather they are a cause of poverty.
Not many left wingers go the extreme of socialism – history is hard to ignore. But their critique of extractive private and public institutions, and related history history, are not make believe. Wealth can be and often is accumulated through extraction or dumb luck. The luck and fairness arguments are empirically, morally, and intuitively strong.
However, neither is it fair that I can’t fly like a bird. Economic constraints are real, and quite brutal – even deadly – when ignored. The pie often can only be enlarged when markets are allowed to be free, because humans are the most creative, motivated, and innovative when they are free to enjoy the rewards from their labors. The pie contracts when markets are restricted or banned. Indeed, exploitation thrives when market restrictions abound. The story of extractive institutions (like slavery) is one of control not freedom, poverty not wealth (except for a few).
If I want to procrastinate more, maybe I’ll provide my explanation of economic conservatives.
robc
Apr 29 2021 at 2:53pm
Ignoring that for Kelo, you have the left and right members of the court backwards.
Henri Hein
Apr 29 2021 at 4:19pm
True. I should have made it clear I was talking about people I discuss with in person, on Facebook, etc. But Bryan’s definitions aim to sweep, so just pointing out they aren’t inclusive.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Apr 30 2021 at 6:52am
To say that regulations and taxes result from “Leftists” hating markets, is like saying that racist outcomes result from racists hating racial minorities. It is certainly true in some case, but really mis-diagnoses the problem.
Ghatanathoah
Apr 30 2021 at 2:42pm
This theory seems to go against Bryan’s own “Myth of the Rational Voter.” It does not make sense for leftists, as a group, to be working together in order to increase the power and prestige of leftists, as a class, in society. The odds of a single vote changing the election is so small that it is better to vote expressively instead. This means people will vote based on idealistic beliefs. They will note vote to increase their self-interest, or the collective self-interest of a group that they identify with, such as leftists.
If you want to know why people support a policy or a politician, you need to do what I call a “Warm Fuzzy Check.” When you think of a reason, imagine stating that reason out loud to yourself. Does it make you feel warm and fuzzy, like you would if you were stating a sincere, deeply held belief? If it doesn’t, then it isn’t what is motivating people to support someone.
Evan Sherman
Apr 30 2021 at 4:29pm
You said: “It does not make sense for leftists, as a group, to be working together in order to increase the power and prestige of leftists, as a class, in society.”
This only makes sense if you assume that people only engage in any kind of politics to acheive policy outcomes directly through the publically sactioned electoral process. But that’s pretty clearly not why most people care about politics. When ideological values intertwine with class norms, then virtue signalling (i.e. signaling loyalty to values within an ideological system) is class signalling. People like to signal affiliation with a class people people like to feel that they belong to a group for obvious atavistic psychological reasons. Think of the MAGA hat plumber.
Furthermore, if the class with which they affiliate enjoys privileges and advantages at the expense of other classes, then the class signalling is also status signalling. And status signalling is desirable because … well, power is desirable.
In any case, though, signalling affiliation (even if, vis-a-vis the secret ballot, only to oneself) doesn’t necessarily anything to do with actual policy or electoral outcomes. People who voted for Trump for the wall might be disappointed that they didn’t really get it, but that outcome has, for most of the MAGA faithful, fairly lmited bearing on whether or not they got satisfaction from voting for him. Simply reinforcing one’s identity as one of the faithful is reason enough for many.
In other words, when it comes to squishy fields like politics, psychological goods are goods too.
Mark Z
May 1 2021 at 2:42pm
Do you think (2) is the case because individuals on the right are driven by antipathy for the left rather than specific beliefs of their own, or because the right, collectively, is composed of individuals who oppose the left for very different reasons (in some cases opposite reasons, such as libertarians and populists), and thus, as a group, the right is only unified by a common opposition to the left?
John
May 1 2021 at 4:40pm
I agree with your second hypothesis. I think it’s natural (and maybe easier linguistically) to assume there is a symmetrical coherent ideology called “the Right” that opposes “the Left” but it doesn’t really exist. There is just “the Left” (which can fit a rough broad definition)…and everybody else.
Will
May 7 2021 at 4:41pm
I think the simplistic theory of left and right works surprisingly well for how simplistic it is. I think for really nuanced discussion, you need to go to something more complicated like Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. But for simple cases, the simplistic theory is surprisingly good.
To throw out my explanation why it fits the right so well: the right in much of the West is made of two groups that don’t particular like eachother. They are stuck together since FPTP would punish them hard for separating. In Canada, we call these two groups Social Conservatives (commonly: socons) and Progressive Conservatives (less commonly: progcons). Both groups have a vision for the country but they don’t like their counterpart’s vision. The main thing they have in common is their mutual opposition of the left’s vision.
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