(Note: Bryan Caplan release his post on this book at same time as mine.) In their recent book The Myth of Left and Right, two professors who are brothers say that most of us see left and right as denoting stable principled philosophical essences, while in fact the positions associated with left and right are mainly tribal.
Judging from your summary, the book would seem to be profoundly ignorant (if that's not a contradiction in terms). Whilst, in a narrow sense, the Left/Right polarity does date from political jockeying in post revolutionary France, in a much more profound sense, in the 20th/21st c. West, the Left dreams of political 'Progress', the Right is deeply sceptical of this utopianism. This is a very big - and entirely non-arbitrary philosophical divide. To call it 'tribal' is fatuous.
That Left and Right hold positions that vary (and even switch over) in time does not at all mean that the divide is tribal and has no essence. It simply means that the essence in not policy-related, but linked to something else. As in, smallest stable coalition building (HLvM model).
Well if the differences are just tribal then how is it that the left and right parties of multiple countries across the globe align on policy issues related to things like labor, environmental issues, and civil rights? It is much more accurate to say that these differences are real, and that people's attitudes might become tribalist after discovering which movement aligns with their values.
They don't align. Chavistas in Venezuela loudly self-identified as "socialists" but their economic thinking was similar to that of Donald Trump in many respects. The idea that foreigners were stealing jobs was a very important part of their narrative. They ejected Colombians from the country to prevent them from competing for jobs and even bulldozed the homes of 6,000 Colombians to prevent them from returning. And many of their anti-market positions were right out of the standard playbook of economic nationalism. There were dissimilarities, of course, but scapegoating foreigners for unrelated economic problems was a central tenet for them just like it was for Trump. You can say that Trump is an outlier on the right, but only if you restrict your sample to the U.S. where there is a long tradition among conservatives of defending free markets. Trump's views would not make him an outlier in France, for example. He fits the Le Penn mold quite well.
"In both cases, we pretend that it is a thing outside of us that we care most about, while in fact we mainly use that external thing to bind us together." Why is it necessary to pretend? Is it because if we didn't it would be too obvious to ourselves what was motivating us and that's too undignified (to just want to be bound to others)? Seems more plausible that we want to be bound to others that share our values/tastes.
How do you explain the fact that the left-right distinction can be applied to political parties in *all* countries? It's not the arbitrary parties of one country. There's something about it that generalizes to every country in the world, where we can peg different parties globally as left or right. The following clear demarcation can be made:
Left: on the side of workers unions, increased taxes on the rich, increased funding for welfare and social programs, higher minimum wage, diversity initiatives, pollution control; make the strong help the weak
Right: on the side of most corporations, decreased taxes for the rich, decreased funding for welfare and social programs, no minimum wage, against diversity initiatives, against pollution control; let the strong do as they will
So, the simple ideological difference is, left="make the strong help the weak," right="let the strong do as they will."
I suppose the right-wing response to this would be that the government itself is strong, and should be constrained from doing as it wants. But the appeal of this argument, for the right, is specifically that the government should be prevented from making powerful private industry help the truly weak (the poorly-off individual). When the government is not doing that, but is instead an ally of powerful private industry, this is categorized as right wing (e.g. Italian fascism, Bolsonaro) and the right-wing favors increasing the power of that type of government, especially executive power.
There is also the view that *by* letting the strong do as they will, the weak will be helped indirectly because the economy as a whole is stronger. I'm not going to argue against this too much here, as my point here is not that the right wing is *bad*; the demarcation I made stands, whether or not the right-wing position is better for the weak in the end.
In Parliament there is the "Government" and "Opposition". Which party is in power will change, but there is always that binary, and a first-past-the-post election system further encourages it. In the US we've got DW-NOMINATE scores indicating the primary axis of politics. It begins with the Federalists being on the Right while the Democratic-Republicans are on the Left. Since the Democrats today are the successors to the latter, that puts them on the Left even though modern US parties have little to do policywise with their predecessors.
Judging from your summary, the book would seem to be profoundly ignorant (if that's not a contradiction in terms). Whilst, in a narrow sense, the Left/Right polarity does date from political jockeying in post revolutionary France, in a much more profound sense, in the 20th/21st c. West, the Left dreams of political 'Progress', the Right is deeply sceptical of this utopianism. This is a very big - and entirely non-arbitrary philosophical divide. To call it 'tribal' is fatuous.
The claim is easily contradicted by the correlation between character traits and political position and it's highly heritable.
AI can actually predict political position from facial features with quite an accuracy. I was surprised none of you mentioning that: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1
That Left and Right hold positions that vary (and even switch over) in time does not at all mean that the divide is tribal and has no essence. It simply means that the essence in not policy-related, but linked to something else. As in, smallest stable coalition building (HLvM model).
Well if the differences are just tribal then how is it that the left and right parties of multiple countries across the globe align on policy issues related to things like labor, environmental issues, and civil rights? It is much more accurate to say that these differences are real, and that people's attitudes might become tribalist after discovering which movement aligns with their values.
They don't align. Chavistas in Venezuela loudly self-identified as "socialists" but their economic thinking was similar to that of Donald Trump in many respects. The idea that foreigners were stealing jobs was a very important part of their narrative. They ejected Colombians from the country to prevent them from competing for jobs and even bulldozed the homes of 6,000 Colombians to prevent them from returning. And many of their anti-market positions were right out of the standard playbook of economic nationalism. There were dissimilarities, of course, but scapegoating foreigners for unrelated economic problems was a central tenet for them just like it was for Trump. You can say that Trump is an outlier on the right, but only if you restrict your sample to the U.S. where there is a long tradition among conservatives of defending free markets. Trump's views would not make him an outlier in France, for example. He fits the Le Penn mold quite well.
I'll repaste here a better model for left and right:
https://expressiveegg.org/2021/11/28/the-return-of-the-lockdown-left/
The left-right and progressive-conservative essence is clearly distilled in the theories of Nietzsche and Thomas Sowell respectively
"In both cases, we pretend that it is a thing outside of us that we care most about, while in fact we mainly use that external thing to bind us together." Why is it necessary to pretend? Is it because if we didn't it would be too obvious to ourselves what was motivating us and that's too undignified (to just want to be bound to others)? Seems more plausible that we want to be bound to others that share our values/tastes.
ITP BryCap and Robin arguing that Lewis brothers argument against essentialism is too essentialist.
How do you explain the fact that the left-right distinction can be applied to political parties in *all* countries? It's not the arbitrary parties of one country. There's something about it that generalizes to every country in the world, where we can peg different parties globally as left or right. The following clear demarcation can be made:
Left: on the side of workers unions, increased taxes on the rich, increased funding for welfare and social programs, higher minimum wage, diversity initiatives, pollution control; make the strong help the weak
Right: on the side of most corporations, decreased taxes for the rich, decreased funding for welfare and social programs, no minimum wage, against diversity initiatives, against pollution control; let the strong do as they will
So, the simple ideological difference is, left="make the strong help the weak," right="let the strong do as they will."
I suppose the right-wing response to this would be that the government itself is strong, and should be constrained from doing as it wants. But the appeal of this argument, for the right, is specifically that the government should be prevented from making powerful private industry help the truly weak (the poorly-off individual). When the government is not doing that, but is instead an ally of powerful private industry, this is categorized as right wing (e.g. Italian fascism, Bolsonaro) and the right-wing favors increasing the power of that type of government, especially executive power.
There is also the view that *by* letting the strong do as they will, the weak will be helped indirectly because the economy as a whole is stronger. I'm not going to argue against this too much here, as my point here is not that the right wing is *bad*; the demarcation I made stands, whether or not the right-wing position is better for the weak in the end.
In Parliament there is the "Government" and "Opposition". Which party is in power will change, but there is always that binary, and a first-past-the-post election system further encourages it. In the US we've got DW-NOMINATE scores indicating the primary axis of politics. It begins with the Federalists being on the Right while the Democratic-Republicans are on the Left. Since the Democrats today are the successors to the latter, that puts them on the Left even though modern US parties have little to do policywise with their predecessors.
Here is a much better fitting model:
https://expressiveegg.org/2021/11/28/the-return-of-the-lockdown-left/
right -- the ownership elite,
left -- the management elite.
Fascism is when both elites unite.