Sheesh! I'm going to have to parse what appears to be the secular notion that "religion is about truth and only about truth" before I can read the rest of the essay critically. One step I'll probably be taking is to substitute "religion" with "cultural subsegment" or something - religion has always been a vehicle of culture, but there's a lot more religion than that. That's why "which religion?" is really a superficial question about culture in all its diversity, kind of like asking "which cultural region of the U.S." or "which generation's values".
Hint - religion is about human nature in all its possibilities: culture, authority, tradition, metaphor, story and poetry, transcendence, inspiration, joy, community, meaning (philosophy), metaphysics, intention, ethics, forgiveness (relational and social), ritual etc. Any cultural movements or ideologies that manage to embody most of these could probably be classified as "religions," deism or atheism aside. Anyone who hasn't been "in" a religion these days wants to reduce "religion" to "believing in something that's obviously not true because we have science now."
Yes, this was also the weirdest part of the essay for me. Matt seems to think that the instrumental case for religion is being used by religious people as evidence that Noah really did build an ark to survive the flood, or etc. And I'm sure that is true to some extent. People say all kinds of things.
But as you note, religion is not *really* about which set of facts and stories you believe. It's much closer to what sorts of things you *do* and appreciate. The former is actually a somewhat uniquely Protestant conception of what religion is, which is why it's a little surprising that Matt, who as I understand is Jewish, seems to see this as the logical way to understand religion. Outside of the narrow circles of Protestant Christianity it is extremely common for someone to say they are a member of a religion while also not affirming substantive and literal belief in every single facet of that religion.
The instrumental case for religion is basically just a reason why secularization is net-bad, and that a world where people were 'in' a religion by default would be good, even if those people were not particularly more likely to believe specific sets of facts & stories.
I also think it's difficult to have this conversation with highly educated atheists, as they project their own feelings about secularism onto the broader mass of the secularizing public, who are not highly disciplined, scientifically-literate physicalists but are instead an amorphous group that is just as if not more likely to believe in all kinds of weird stuff, like ghosts, psychics, astrology, tarot, etc.
When I was going to church as a youth in the south my understanding was that the Bible was the literal word of God and the only truth on which man could depend. We might have disagreed on some minor points but Noah did the build the Ark, Jesus rolled away the stone and those bowls of wrath will be poured out for the non believers.
There is lots of complication and nuance with any belief system but I think you are overselling it. If anyone in any of the churches I attended when I was younger said "Sodom and Gomorrah was an allegory" the preacher would have pulled them aside toot sweet.
I think this is precisely what I mean when I say this focus on believing the exact set of literal stories is a peculiar feature of Protestantism, and *especially* Evangelical Protestantism. I grew up in a similar religious environment to you and experienced the same thing, but it is not a common experience for Catholics, who frequently affirm all sorts of things that are technically heretical.
Absolutely. I do believe that many people are theists who have some beliefs associated with a traditional religion that they hold very sincerely. I myself am a theist, though I do not know that I hold particularly strongly with any mainstream religion.
But I think many of the more outrageously implausible elements of traditional organized religion are either only half-heartedly believed or simply rejected outright by people who otherwise identify with it. Most lay Catholics do not believe, for example, in transubstantiation. Many do not even realize they are technically supposed to believe in it.
I think the "Many do not even realize they are technically supposed to believe in it" is the key here. People often do believe the parts that are salient.
I agree with you as a read on religion qua religion, but I think Matt’s divide rings true for the left/right divide on religion in politics. What sort of things you *[demand that everyone be required to] do*, i.e. politics, stems heavily from what facts you think are true. So in real life I, a reconstructionist Jew for whom my Judaism is possibly the most important part of my identity, feel at home on the left because I believe that Jewish tradition should be one of many voices in a “reason”able debate about morality and law. But if I believed that religious doctrine was above such disputes, I would lean more toward hierarchy.
As for the rest of the public, part of it is that the reasoned-equality vs. traditional-hierarchy axis is just one of many motivating politics, and another is that most of those fringe identities (as you say, I have several nominally atheist friends who have… under-theorized “spiritual” beliefs), their beliefs don’t have strong political implications.
Many of us still need to finish our sleep and then become awake first! And of course, finish reading the article before we comment, which is always a proper practice.
From a perspective a notch or two to your left, I find it interesting how much you see religion as central to the left/right divide. I don’t think you need to take the vulgar Marxist “opiate of the masses” view of religion as a mystifying justification for inequality (itself something of a distortion of Marx’s original sentiment) to see the recurring correlation of religion and anti-egalitarianism as being driven more by the latter than the former. (As you note, in the First Estate, it was generally the bishops on the right and parish priests on the left.) Do you really think that the left/right divide is driven (at least in part) by religious views?
Put another way, while religion is certainly more often part of a right-wing worldview than a left-wing one, it’s both coherent to talk about left-wing religious people and movements in principle and possible to find actual historical examples of them (Martin Luther King, Jr. and liberation theology off the top of my head). And vice-versa on the right. Inequality can be naturalized through the use of science and pseudoscience (economics to justify class inequality, biology to justify gender and race) just as easily as religion. Nazism was able to find accommodation with traditional religion as it came to power, but it certainly wasn’t driven by it (though you could see it as being quasi-religious in the same way the far-left cults of reason you describe). The right can even be outright anti-religious: Ayn Rand and Nietzsche each thought religion was poisonous precisely because it held back members of the natural aristocracy. And you see today “barstool conservatives” and the alt-right (or whatever they are now) who have little use for religion except as something used to own the libs.
By contrast, I think that “right-wing egalitarianism” and “left-wing anti-egalitarianism” are almost contradictions in terms. In the real world, people and ideas are messy: obviously people generally seen as having overall left-wing views can be strong supporters of hierarchy along certain axes (esp. it seems in matters of gender), and people with egalitarian ideals or goals can mistakenly end up advocating policies that end up supporting existing hierarchies (or creating new ones). And as you note, a policy program or broader worldview (like liberalization or nationalism) that is left-wing in one context can be right-wing in another. But there’s at least a *tension* there that isn’t the case with respect to religion as such. The accusation that “you say you support equality, but your ideas seem to be popular with Hollywood celebrities and urban elites and unpopular with the rural working class” has bite—“you say you support equality but you believe in God” just doesn’t.
I think what you're picking up on, in a nutshell, is the Christian foundation on which the modern West still stands. People can take that legacy in all kinds of reactionary, liberal, leftist, whatever other directions but it's the source of the built in egalitarian impulse.
I think what I’m saying in a nutshell is that I don’t think religion (Christianity in particular) is a source of either the egalitarian or antiegalitarian impulse—that people inclined toward either can either find in religion what they need, ignore it, or dismiss it outright. And the pairing of religion and antiegalitarianism that Matt describes is a matter of correlation but not necessarily causation.
I would say that's inconsistent with the historical record. Our political conceptions of things like 'equality before the law' didn't come out of nowhere. They came from a long interplay of the thought of the ancient Mediterranean world, maybe a dialogue between Athens/Rome and Jerusalem, later built upon in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. There's nothing necessarily inherent about it, and the fact that it's hard for us as Westerners to imagine otherwise illustrates how deeply influential it has been.
I wasn't trying to make a point about any sort of deep sources of egalitarian ideas. (Though I'll note that Christianity predates "political conceptions of things like 'equality before the law'" by about a millennium and a half, so I'm skeptical of a view of Christianity as a straightforward explanation for the systematically egalitarian philosophies that emerged from the Enlightenment.) I was just saying that religiosity isn't inherent to a right-wing viewpoint the way that support for hierarchy is, though there is a positive correlation between the two.
One could argue that the development of Protestantism, with a more direct, personal relationship with God, opens the door to "equality before the law" much more so than the far more hierarchical Catholic Church. And one could argue that that strain was prevalent in the original form of Christianity before Catholicism (married with Roman political ideas and structures) became dominant.
Equality before the law is quite recent, true, but the 'rule of law', i.e. a notion that the law exists independently of authority and can be followed or broken by even the highest temporal power, is a much older phenomenon, and is a prerequisite to the development of legal equality.
I am not sure if it has anything to do with a particular religion, though. Religion encodes ideas, but I'm with you that I'm not sure it's *causal* of those ideas. The rule of law is at least as old as Rome, which certainly used religious mechanisms to encode and enforce the law, and is also a feature of Judaism. Rule of law, meanwhile, is not really present in other traditions, and does not feature in their religious traditions. As one example, the 'Mandate of Heaven' is perhaps a counterpart to the rule of law, conceptually, but is not really the same thing -- the Emperor does not lose the Mandate by breaking specific laws, he only loses it through poor virtue and bad stewardship.
I think Christianity probably had some causal role in egalitarianism as an ethos but it's still a bit simplistic to say that it's "the source of the built-in egalitarian impulse." And thinking that way, or in any strictly historicist way, seems to reject the idea that equality as a moral principle has some kind of rational or "natural law" foundation. Christianity is historically important to egalitarianism but it didn't invent it (nor did Judaism or any ancient Middle Eastern religion) and is not its exclusive source.
All caveats acknowledged. We're talking about huge historical developments over hundreds and at a certain point thousands of years. But the point remains that you cannot talk coherently about the trajectory of Western political thought without a major accounting of these influences, and it's a mistake to take it all as a granted natural state, or somehow self evident, absent those building blocks.
In terms of today's politics, I do think it's interesting that on the left the most hardcore egalitarians are usually pretty secular, while on the right the absence of Christianity seems to push conservatives to even more forthrightly reject egalitarianism. On the whole though you don't see a pattern where very secular countries are less inclined toward egalitarianism. So I am inclined to be skeptical when people predict that the decline of Christianity in Western countries spells the decline of egalitarian commitments (I'm not reading you as making this prediction).
I think if you have an antiegalitarian impulse, religion is a way to justify that impulse. If you have an egalitarian impulse, some religions may also be used to justify that impulse, but secular values of fairness could also work.
If you are an individual with antiegalitarian impulse but strong secular views, you're going to end up in weird intellectual circles that try to justify inequality with appeals to some ingrained genetic superiority of some individuals or groups. Or perhaps strict doctrines like Objectivism or the hard core approach of some libertarians.
It seems that right wing secularists don't have as much trouble adopting eugenics and objectivism as some of us might imagine. Those views pop up pretty frequently in some way or another in most comments sections here and that is frequently from folks who consider themselves secular moderates.
You definitely don't need to ground this in Christianity. There are egalitarian vs hierarchical disputes among Japanese Buddhists, among Hindus (where the arguments about the nature of caste are absolutely dizzying for an outsider), among Jews...
I agree with this. Here as elsewhere Matt has an unduly cynical view of religion. It's an important and highly heterogenous part of the moral landscape and can give rise to both egalitarian and hierarchical impulses. It's not surprising that equality movements have some seemingly religious features even in very secular environments; that both has very deep historical roots and is just kind of inevitable for a movement aiming at value shifts.
Maybe Matt will dig into this in the subsequent posts, but this gets at one of the most important divergences between old and new world. France and all of Europe have experienced religion as actual political/state authority. In America we may have experienced all of the political and state authority being religious, and a force with near complete social and cultural supremacy, but there is a difference between the two.
The greatly diminished role of religion in Northern Europe is a big part of why Northern Europe is more left-wing than America.
The left-right pattern still exists, obviously, but if the American right had the views on abortion and health care of the Danish right they would win every election.
True. But does this not imply that a more accurate description of the right attractor would be a desire to uphold the existing order and to honor tradition? In many societies (historically in particular) this aligns with religion, but today, "religion" does not seem like the best term to describe the right wing motivating force *in general*.
I think a good example of this is that the most right-wing country in Europe is Russia, but the Russian population is just as irreligious as the Northern European countries if not more so. Yes Putin will trot out the priests to validate things he's doing, but statistically no one really cares very much about the content of the faith.
The whole point is that Putin cares a great deal about the image of the Russian Orthodox Church. The religious content of religion is not important (and does not come from religion) but what matters is that the religious institution is respected. Another example is the War on Christmas coverage, the problem has nothing to do with anything that appears in Church or the Bible but is entirely based on how Christmas itself is treated by the public (is it venerated or reduced to a mere Happy Holiday).
I think the causality here is reversed. Northern Europe's persistent left-skew relative to the rest of the world predates its secularization. Italy is still so religious because it is still more right-wing, it is not more right-wing because it is still religious. Most people who are religious do so because they think tradition, structure, and hierarchy are good. Once those views are abandoned, people naturally begin to secularize.
I think it has more to do with social and kinship structures than directly to do with religion. Italy is very religious because it is very communal and has broad, deeply-rooted kinship structures in which social sanctions for deviation from tradition are much harsher than they are in places where it is very normal to form smaller and separate families. This is also why these places are persistently more right-wing.
The weirdo schizophrenic quasi-fascist rightism that is increasingly prevalent is, in my view, the rightist impulse expressed by people who are unmoored from deep traditional structures, who are less interested in preserving an existing hierarchy than they are in burning down the social structures they themselves exist in, which are far more atomized and secular.
This is true and yet there's also still an official state church in every Scandinavian country. I don't entirely understand the process but I know in Germany being part of a religion can mean registering it and actually paying a tax to the religious authorities. It's hugely diminished as a social and cultural force but also baked into state in ways that make it hard to say it's gone or that neatly fall on a left/right axis.
>This is true and yet there's also still an official state church in every Scandinavian country<
Lots of countries subsidize cultural institutions or pay lip service to historical traditions. In fact all of the rich ones do. Which is really all state churches are in Northern Europe at this point (England included). There's no compelling reason to push for disestablishment—the churches don't have enough influence to cause problems or become a nuisance—so they're left alone in a state of benign neglect. Contrast this with France (or, say, Quebec).
"There's no compelling reason to push for disestablishment—the churches don't have enough influence to cause problems or become a nuisance—so they're left alone in a state of benign neglect."
I think you're understating what's happened with state churches in northern Europe -- they've effectively become tools of government policy. E.g., when some American conservative says, "Sweden is forcing churches to perform gay marriages," what is actually occurring is that the "established" church is being required to do so since the national government can literally prescribe the tenets of state churches by law. "Non-established" churches in those countries retain the right to marry or not marry couples based on whatever their own religious principles dictate.
I believe your observation reinforces my point. InMD opined that (contra M.Y.) the role of religion in Northern Europe hasn't diminished as much as appearances suggest, as evidenced by the existence of state churches. If indeed, as you indicate, these churches are frequently used as tools of state policy—if they've been effectively reduced to stale, bureaucratic civic offices—that to me suggests their influence has waned even more than I had imagined.
Yeah, the official state church in Scandinavia is just a quaint tradition that they are paying lip service to because they don't want to really change things too much. It's about as relevant as the British monarchy.
It's interesting that as the US secularizes, the cultural politics have shifted a little from "what do you think about the ideas near Jerry Falwell?" to "what do you think about the ideas near a prestigious liberal arts school?" Is this a result of us having a pretty weak state compared to our Northern European peers? Parts of European politics seem intensely focused on Muslim immigration, but US cultural politics keeps swinging between many issues, including abortion now. Goes to show the difference between the legacy of a nation-state vs a sprawling multiethnic republic.
You actually think that without religion, there aren't going to be voters who want to uphold tradition/hierarchy?
How do you explain Russia, Belarus, Hungary, etc? all who have lower religiosity than the European average, but also have large/majority constituencies who want to uphold tradition/hierarchy?
In the United States, yes. But I thought the argument was that the basic left-right spectrum is persistent across time and location. That rings true, but in many countries today, the religious aspect is negligible (with the Church often aligned more with the left).
The sarcasm here doesn’t obscure the main point. A little more of one kind of religion would make Team Slow Boring much more generous with welfare and much more skeptical of the rationality of markets. Would we call this more “left”?
I agree with Matt’s point! Trump reference aside I’m just saying that religion is more salient for Matt than me because of when we came of age politically.
And I agree that when you come of age determines not just what your politics are but where you position them theoretically. These terms break down when a gen-x and zoomer have similar politics but different terms. For that reason especially I don’t think the one-dimensional-spectrum labels are that good.
The Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Methodists are generally agree that there should be a right to an abortion. More conservative elements of some of those entities believe in a more limited right.
Ha! Matt and I are the same age, as it happens. But there’s been some useful discussion elsewhere about how the New Atheist movement that arose in reaction to Bush-era political religiosity (and I think was seen then as having a generally left-wing valence) split over issues of race and gender during the Obama years that I think is telling.
I think there's an argument to be made that the New Atheists were turned off by how un-cool Bush and his conservatives were. He was so parochial, he was inarticulate, he was mocked by people like Jon Stewart, etc.
But I don't think they ever really embraced the left, they just wanted to be cool and different. And with the Obama years, well why not shift back to the right and continue to be cool and counter-establishment.
Matt's not wrong that there is a long-standing difference between the left and the right about the relationship between religion and the state, but that can be understood as being about equality and pluralism impulses, which are more fundamental.
Historically, religious hierarchy and noble hierarchy were the two key features of the 18th century French right. “You say you support equality but you believe bishops and the pope have special authority” does have bite.
Of course, hierarchy isn’t the only way to characterize left-right. Another way of putting the divide is between tradition and progress, with religion clearly on the tradition side. “You say you want to end old superstitions and replace them with modern rational ideas, but you believe in god” does have bite.
No one characterization of the left-right divide is exactly right, and only some of them are in direct contradiction with the very idea of religion. But all of them are at least in tension with most religion as it is practiced.
Yeah, the left/right divide on religion I've always thought was much more about tradition vs change or maybe more narrowly to bring the possible father political conservativism into this Edmund Burke; respect for tradition and slower pace of change vs. radical break with tradition and faster pace of change.
In the French Revolution example. Those peasants who famously rebelled against the Revolutionary government due their attacks on the Catholic church were famously to a person illiterate. In addition, mass was in Latin, not French. I feel pretty certain those peasants who were resisting Robespierre and The Directory were not doing so out of some deep seated belief system regarding original sin, transubstantiation or basic religious beliefs. Instead, it's much more likely that while Peasants were understandably upset about the price of bread given their meager earnings, they were not interested in getting rid of one of the few institutions in their lives that actually may have helped them buy said bread* in the past as well as provide some ballast to their existence.
* As a side note and possible future Slow Boring post. I've seen research suggesting the number one reason religion has declined in the west is the welfare state. Namely, a robust welfare state takes the place of the church in regards to providing assistance in times of need. And without the need of the church to provide material ballast in times of woe, the need to go to church or believe in God drops with it. To me it helps explain a) why religiosity is strongest in the poorest parts of the country, both the deep south and specifically in African American communities b) why church leaders are often openly antagonistic of government programs to help the poor even though this seemingly contradicts very basic church doctrine about helping the poor.
I definitely wouldn't argue this is the whole story by any means. But I thought it did explain a lot to me if that makes any sense.
It's certainly true that during certain eras of the US experience that religion has been a major proponent of the left - William Jennings Bryan and the original progressive movement comes to mind as a prime example. But, in recent (as in post WWI) US history, religion has clearly been much more of a force for the right.
100%. Indeed, I think you could make the case that the "Social Gospel" saw itself as opposed to (among other things) a secular, "scientific" Social Darwinism--a subtext of Bryan's opposition to teaching biological evolution that I think is largely forgotten today.
And a century earlier, abolitionism, both in US and UK, was also much more strongly influenced by Second Great Awakening religious movements than it was by Enlightenment-type secular philosophies of the Equality of Man. (There's a reason the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was in my Methodist hymnal growing up: "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!") By contrast, while pro-slavery forces would use various religious arguments (from the mark of Ham to Paul telling slaves to obey their masters), the "positive good"/"mudsill" arguments in favor of slavery were based in secular, economic and sociological concerns.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic is such a great work of culture and of history and a real banger of a hymn to boot.
(I've also seen that particular lyric as "As He died to make men holy / let us live to make men free!" which I think also works extremely well, and arguably better although I understand why the unvarnished reference to martial sacrifice by analogy to martyrdom makes sense.)
But it's worth noting that William Jennings Bryan, while deeply religious, was not really known for that until much later in his career. His rise to national prominence was very class focused.
Christianity is not just a belief system, it serves as a cultural wellspring for a society to draw on for analogies, metaphors, etc. Calling someone a Judas provides context if both sides of the conversation understand who Judas is. The idea of a crucifixion provides a powerful imagery. But he's not arguing that bimetalism is divinely inspired.
Ha! I think we're both being comments-section facile. I'll concede that he was using a common cultural metaphor as a vivid rhetorical flourish, and the substance of the speech was based in public reason--but at the same time I'll say I absolutely think he personally viewed his broader egalitarian project as being in fulfilment of Christ's command to love thy neighbor as thyself.
And even rhetorically, while that sort of thing was much more common on all sides than it is today, I seem to recall (though I may be mistaken) that Bryan in particular was known at the time for using those religious rhetorical tropes and oratorical techniques, with both detractors and admirers comparing his orations to the fiery sermons of revivalist preachers (even if he didn't necessarily think or argue that you needed to be saved to see why you should vote for him).
I think we're in agreement with the specifics of the situation. Bryan himself was a deeply religious individual, as indicated by his overall career trajectory. Additionally, as a politician, he deployed rhetoric that would evoke religious imagery as well as behaviors during speaking that were in the style of revivalist preachers.
Modern day American leftists have lost a lot of the ability to speak to to an audience with religious imagery. Although like with Warnock we have some notable exceptions.
As Matt notes, a certain group of right-wing intellectuals keep trying to argue that the left is motivated by "their religions" like Marxism or environmentalism. In that case, what exactly is a religion defined as?
Nazism wasn't driven by religious motivations originating in Christianity, but it was motivated by a belief in the inherent superiority of the German, Aryan, people and their destiny to seize land to the East, expand their population in a weird return to land agrarianism across East Asia, and rule the future. It's an appeal to a bunch of bunk but still has some sort of chosen people, a grand narrative, and promise of a better future (although on Earth, not in heaven). It gets pretty close to religion though.
If the left wing is just appealing to a sense of fairness and equity, the right, even when secular, has to appeal to a view of humanity that's appealing to something harder to define.
I guess I know what *a* particular religion is (e.g., Christianity) but I'm not sure what "religion" is. Is North Korea run by a state religion? It sure seems like it. Was Nazism a religion? If not, why not?
There is definitely a correlation between religious ideas (R) & ideas about equality (E). Matt is arguing R->E, whereas you are arguing E->R. I used to think R->E, but now I tend to think R<-C->E, where C is something possibly obscure, but much more fundamental that drives them both and creates the manifest correlation we see. Either way, I think Matt is correctly pointing out the underlying structural continuities at play.
I'm not sure that "tolerance for Protestantism during the Reformation was liberal." Luther was a notorious anti-Semite and (for a while) radically populist. The totalitarian regimes of Calvin and his like were as far from being "liberal" as I can imagine.
I think we're better off not trying to apply a more modern term like "liberal" here. "Left" works much better.
This essay is a masterpiece of useful abstraction. Too many authors stack ideological categories upon one another like a juggler trying to wow an audience with performative complexity. By focusing on one category and showing how it has mostly held up over time, Matt gives it texture and meaning even though the world is much more complicated than “left good, right bad.”
I think a lot of my frustration with the left-right divide is the way people I know sometimes use “left” as a synonym for “correct”, which it clearly isn’t. This essay was really helpful to remind me that there is still a strong family resemblance that gives the terms “left” and “right” meaning, even if there’s no clear sense of whether wokism or Marxism is the more paradigmatic leftism.
When amateurs play with big abstractions, they often forget that big abstractions are big tents. The left does not describe anything too specific. It describes an anti-theocratic, egalitarian impulse. That’s it. In fact, its not even entirely clear whether the leveling impulse or the anti-theocratic impulse is more fundamental to leftism.
Say there were a hippy style religion with no pope or clergy but with strong social pressure to conform. Would adherence to this religion be left or right wing? I have no idea.
For my money, the leveling impulse is more essential to left wing movements than the anti-theocratic impulse. However, egalitarianism and secularism usually go together because established religions evolve powerful hierarchies that often control land and money.
I think there’s also just as well a progressive-traditionalist left-right axis, which also usually lines up with the two you mention, b it sometimes doesn’t. No one of these axes is *the* left-right axis, but they are all part of it, even though any one can be flipped in one cultural context.
I too get exhausted at all of that excessive complexity of categorization, which I also think is a symptom of failing to just take each issue at face value, and let people offer multiple unique takes that have overlaps of agreement, instead of just putting them into pro/con poles.
You mention that "the UK was untouched" by this revolution. But I live 15 minutes north of New Haven, where some of the Regicides lived after the English civil war, a revolution in which an (admittedly religious) movement with strong egalitarian impulses deposed and executed a king, juiced parliamentary power, wound up with a weirdo dictator, and then had a restoration in which some reforms were rolled back and some things weren't.
Those who escaped to English North America profoundly impacted the political formation of the New England colonies especially, and this impacted the political foundations of the US itself, which was the impulse beind the French Revolution.
Two things:
- does anyone else agree with my assessment that the English Civil War was a kind of dress rehearsal for the French Revolution?
- Matt is persuasive that the French left/right model is a good heuristic to understand fundamental political differences in Western society (hence its continuing utility in modern political analysis) but why doesn't the English civil war feature more prominently in American political thought?
Quite a few modern right-wing intellectuals (usually either secular or Catholic) trace a direct line between the Puritans and the modern left. I actually think they’re sort of right about this, but that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (The Puritans were a lot less bad than they’re stereotyped as.)
Fischer’s Albion’s Seed about 4 British migrations to America (New England Puritans, Penn’s Quakers, Chesapeake Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish Appalachian/back-country folk) draws lines to today’s political and cultural preferences. It’s very interesting.
"The Puritans were a lot less bad than they’re stereotyped as" : a perfectly designed scissor statement!
I'm tempted to contest it, but I'll try my hand at a similar proposition: "the Puritans did many good things that we often overlook, because we're repelled by several key aspects of their society "
I think that’s reasonable on its own terms, but I’d also note that a lot of the popular-imagination characterization of the both English Puritans and their New English offshoot are misleading, insensitive to important historical context, or straight-up factually untrue.
They didn’t hate colors, fun, and sex. (In fact, the most prominent Puritan writer, John Milton, spent a significant chunk of text in “Paradise Lost” insisting that Adam and Eve fucked before the Fall.) They weren’t significantly more religiously intolerant than their European contemporaries (with the notable exception of the Quakers.) They were generally somewhat less patriarchal than most of their European contemporaries. They weren’t anti-intellectual or generally hostile to the arts— Puritan New England was the world’s most literate society, and both it and its mother community in England produced plenty of noteworthy literature. Witch trials were uncommon events which only emerged in periods of unusual social stress, and were generally controversial.
Of course, as a modern social democrat with a commitment to state secularism, there’s plenty that I don’t like about the Puritans— but most of those things were also features of most other human societies of their era. On the other hand, their relative commitment to political egalitarianism (leading Europe’s first anti-monarchical revolution), their relatively anti-hierarchical approach to religion, their intense commitment to universal education, and the importance they ascribed to individual spiritual experience were both fairly distinctive and, I think, quite admirable. I probably would have been a Roundhead if I had fought in the English Civil War.
The derision accorded to impulses derided as "Puritan" tends to bring out the contrarian in me, in part because so often it seems like the order being derided actually had a point (America's pre-Prohibition relationship with alcohol genuinely was absolutely terrible and the government imprimatur against it had a fairly significant and lasting cultural impact for the better, e.g.). The Puritans are sort of my internal reference for "high-trust literate principled egalitarians that were smart enough to be aware that promulgating self-denial and other restrictions on personal hedonism is often broadly socially adaptive."
(One could make a good argument that the Quakers did this even better, although to be honest some of the weirder tenets of Quaker theology like silent services and absolute commitment to pacifism never stop seeming weird to me, because they're heterodox without being obviously theologically load-bearing[1]. More important I think is that the Quakers' own tolerance eventually led to them being subsumed by other cultures without the degree of lasting cultural imprint of Puritanism, combined with the fact that AIUI somewhat counterintuitively their own high-trust advantages were implicitly dependent on interacting with a community of other Quakers even as they nevertheless retained tolerance of heterodoxy. Seems like a bad combination).
[1] Obviously there *is* a theological argument for pacifism ("turn the other cheek") but it seems like most branches of Christianity opted not to commit to that principle quite so far as to embrace playing cooperate-defect.
Indeed, and I think that what people who didn’t grow up within American PMC liberal culture is that the description you offer here applies pretty strongly to them. (Except that, as with the Quakers, restraint, self-discipline, and strict moral self-regulation are mostly inculcated internally and enforced through tacit social pressure, with external punishments showing up only when something has gone very wrong.)
Quaker here. I think that while Quaker pacifism definitely didn't become a hallmark of American culture, the role Quaker's played in the early movement for Women's rights, Anti-Slavery movement, and early LGBTQ movements did make long term impacts on the way equality is understood in this country by both the religious left and secular left and that came very much from their commitment to "lived theology" of equality.
Also, the idea that Quakers have silent worship is a little oversimplified. They worship in silence unless someone in the Meeting feels moved by the spirit to offer testimony and stands up and gives ministry. In some meetings that is fairly rare and in some near constant. The time in between ministry is used for prayer, contemplation of earlier messages, meditation upon on advices and queries, or in open expectation of receiving a message to share. So it may look silent but silence isn't really the point, it is the context in which people wait for inspiration and it actually is all about the idea of ultimate equality in which God might chose to minister through anyone in the community as opposed to just an appointed minister.
Fun fact, in many meetings there is a flow chart for people to work through before they give a message either in a regular meeting for worship or a meeting for worship with attention to business. It goes something like: (1) Does this truly feel like a leading from Spirit or just my own ego wanting to share its thoughts or wanting to speak for attention and recognition? If yes, go to next question, if no, don't say anything. (2) is is possible that this message is really only a message for me and not for the group at large? If yes, just dwell with it, if no, go to the next question. (3) If it is not just for me, is it for one or just a few specific people or rises in response to what someone else just said that feels directed at me, if yes, just talk to them afterwards, if no, go to the next question. (4) Is what I feel moved to say substantively similar to what someone else has just said but I feel like the way I want to say it is more articulate or impactful? If yes, put away your ego and trust in others to be able to hear the truth in the first message, if no, go to the next question. (5) Is what I feel moved to say consistent with my understanding of the testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, compassion, community, equality, service, and stewardship? If no, season on this for at least a week before sharing and/or connect with your clearness community to explore this further. If yes, next question. (6) Does the urge to give this message still feel strong like a true leading or does it feel less pressing. If yes, speak, if no, let others worship and have space to raise more compelling message.
Obviously some meetings take this more to heart than others which is why some are more silent than others. But I had a friend who read the chart and adapted it with a more secular focus. God because "organization purpose," the testimonies became "organization mission" and provided them as the ground rules for speaking at meetings for a few non-profit groups he was involved in and claims that the meetings were much shorter and more useful.
So Quakers may still have something worthwhile to share with the wider world!
This is tricky: your comment involves a bit of strawmanning [1], I think a couple of your points are wrong on the merits, and I think one can make any society look good by highlighting its positive features.[2] But the reverse is true as well: it's easy to make any society look bad by focusing on the negatives. You also made a great point, that most of the things we don't like about Puritans weren't particular to them - they were features of the era.
But I'm not sure whether you're making a historical argument, declaring your values, or making the case for certain values that depends on a historically accurate picture of the Puritans. (Or all three.)
Puritans of Massachusetts Bay may have been no worse than any other society of their time, but they were *our* bastards, a historical group that most Americans are familiar with. Fairly or not, the Puritans serve as a shorthand for "sanctimonious intolerance" and "claustrophobic community surveillance". You and Ethics Gradient are right to observe the Puritans had several things going for them by our contemporary lights. Those tenacious individuals could wait longer for their cookies than anyone in recorded history; they were committed to universal education; they were (arguably) more egalitarian than most other social groups of the day. It's interesting to consider the psychological and moral economies that generate strange, conflicting packages of social traits. But to the extent that you think those particular advantages balance those particular drawbacks (real or imagined), we're really just talking about values and the history doesn't matter.
Given the difficulty of generalizing about historical social groups, you might as well offer a thought experiment in its place: "How much moral supervision by your dunbar group would you submit to in exchange for $desirable_social_goal?"
[1] "Hated colors"?
[2] I had a vivid flashback to pro-Castro arguments that defended his awful police state by touting Cuba's universal literacy.
This effort by the right-wing intellectuals feels off to me, it strikes me as intellectually lazy. It's really trying to substitute a geographic association (Look, both groups are big in New England!) for the fact that intellectually a group of highly religious, anti-Catholic Protestants is not exactly the best example of the predecessors of a modern day secular left.
It uses a bit of sleight of hand in that most Americans do not fully appreciate the range of ways Christianity can express itself, and the recent rise in evangelical Christianity has distorted what people, increasingly secular Americans with no real engagement with Christianity, accept as the normal expression of the religion.
It's also often right-wing intellectuals who are trying to get you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain by arguing that the left is the real authoritarian threat trying to be busy bodies telling people what to do, never mind the aggressive rollback of reproductive rights the right has fought for for over 50 years now.
Looking in the shadows to conjure a legal outcome that an individual judge desires to satisfy his personal political preferences is inherently illiberal. The correct view is that the Roe decision was the illiberal act, not the right’s opposition to it.
It's less about geography (hello, all major West Coast cities and nearly every college town!), and more about the attempt to establish a moral aristocracy, enforced by intense social pressure and ultimately ostracism, designed to cultivate constant introspection.
"does anyone else agree with my assessment that the English Civil War was a kind of dress rehearsal for the French Revolution"
I'm not sure it was a "dress rehearsal," but at the same time I remember years ago a British comedian (whose name sadly escapes me) doing a bit in which he goes through the history of the English/British monarchy and gets up to Charles I's beheading and says, "And then we got rid of the monarchy and became a commonwealth for a few years before saying, 'That was kind of weird, wasn't it?' and went back to being a monarchy while agreeing that we wouldn't talk about that again."
I think this take is funny, but I also think the British tendency to downplay the long-term effects of the ECW is misguided. Once “chop the king’s head off and abolish the monarchy” became a live option, the restored monarchs became an awful lot more deferential to Parliament (which proved itself perfectly happy to get rid of them and re-arrange the line of succession when they started getting ideas again.)
It seems to me that the French Revolution was strongly influenced by both the English Civil War and the American Revolution. The French just took things too far. (Though I suppose the English thought the same of us Yankees.)
The coalitions in the English Civil War were completely different than in the French revolution. Cromwell did not seize the church lands to fund the revolution— Henry VIII had already despoiled the church and Cromwell was as much if not more of a theocrat than Gallican Catholics. Ireton was hardly a leveler, much less an enragee, he was a social conservative who believed in the established economic order. Nor did the monarchies of Europe rally to the monarchist cause.
I think in terms of lopping off the head of a king, then yes, it was a dress rehearsal. But unless you're going to equate Oliver Cromwell to Robespierre and his allies, then no, and I wouldn't do so. Both were very authoritarian at the least, but the wellsprings of their ideas were very different. Now had the Levellers been far more prominent in England I could see a case.
UK definitely wasn't untouched. Peterloo Massacre in 1819 saw the military sent in to disperse a crown of working people advocating for political reform, with 18 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
Most Americans have no idea how unfree pre-reform Britain was, they think of English liberty and don’t know that a stamp was required to publish a paper, that prides were deliberately kept high to prevent the formation of a penny press, and that trials for sedition were not uncommon. I doubt many educates Americans know who the Tolpuddle martyrs were. Britain was just egalitarian enough to avoid a French style revolution, but it was close.
William Blake was put on trial for Sedition in 1803 for saying "Damn the King" while quarrelling with an off duty soldier named Scholfield, who winds up being memorialized in the epic poem Jerusalem as a symbol of evil. So yes, Napoleonic era Britain was pretty unfree. Also, don't get in fights with great poets.
Small pedantic comment: the Estates-General (and subsequent National Assembly) didn't initially meet in Paris; it met in Versailles. It did, of course, eventually move to Paris after the women of the city more or less dragged the royal court there by the ear, but all of the early stuff - e.g. Tennis Court Oath - happened in Versailles. It's a bit like saying that a thing that actually happened in Newark happened in New York.
Again, pedantic, but part of what keeps me coming back to the SB comments is an appreciation for pedantry!
The major role the Paris mobs played in the French Revolution is a lot of evidence for having the seat of government be in a separate location from the seat of culture and economics. If Congress had taken Gouveneur Morris' offer to build the Capitol on his estate in what is now The Bronx instead of a swamp in Maryland, I fear the NYC rabble may have played a much larger role in America's history than it already has.
It all comes down to zoning. Why do so many authoritarian states have capitals featuring broad open areas where mobs can congregate? With high density housing and fewer underutilized areas, those regimes would be more invulnerable.
I know you’re doing a bit here, but it probably still is worth noting that a lot of regimes put in big, open streets precisely so that soldiers can easily maneuver through the city and fight armed rebels more easily. A mob forming in a big public square isn’t really dangerous as long as you pay your troops well enough that they’ll disperse or kill them. An urban insurgency holed up in a maze of narrower streets is much harder to counter.
Mostly because Mubarak had cancer, information about it leaked out to the public, and most Egyptian officials assumed that he would die soon. The military wasn’t willing to stick its neck out or shoot their countrymen for a guy who wasn’t going to be around to reward them. (Indeed, a lot of autocracies fall when their leaders get sick and there’s not a clear succession plan.)
When did said information leak out? Certainly it came out in his trial, well after he had been overthrown. Prior to that, it was generally understood that his son Gamal would succeed him.
I don't find this argument about the military's reluctance to support him compelling.
This is an interesting theory, although sadly hard to test, as I reflect on it, because there are so few long-running examples of democratic countries without "metropoles" (in the sense of combined political, economic, financial, cultural, educational "capitals," like Paris, London, etc.) for comparison purposes.
Seoul is weird, though, because it's so big in relation to the rest of the country that it simply dominates the rest. Metro Seoul is very close to 50% of the population of SK.
All the former major British colonies fit that description: America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa. Spain and Italy have typical metropoles, but they also have competing centers of cultural and economic power (Barcelona in Spain and Milan in Italy). Frankfurt is an economic competitor to Berlin, although if Germany wasn't split after WWII that might not have happened.
I agree the other British colonies fit that pattern, although India and South Africa had numerous political issues related to colonialism that make them sui generis and hard to extrapolate from for any purpose in this context. Meanwhile, Canada and Australia were set up with a lot of UK oversight during their early years that limited opportunities for local "mob pressure" on the capital. E.g., the final court for appeals in both the Canadian and Australian legal systems for many decades after their independence was still the Privy Council in London. (I presume the same was true of New Zealand, but I have a lot less familiarity with it.)
I actually *don't* think Spain or Italy have true metropoles -- Barcelona is too important in Spain and the northern industrial cities are too important in Italy. (I've discussed the identification of metropoles with my children, oddly enough.) Pre-WW2 Berlin was arguably a metropole of Germany, although even then there wasn't as much of a gulf in terms of population and economic significance between Berlin and several of the other major German cities as there has for centuries been, e.g., between Paris and the rest of France or London and the rest of England/Great Britain/UK.
By the way, I learned the above from the aforementioned Mike Duncan. For what it's worth, I'll echo Matt's recommendation and say that both the History of Rome (despite its initial slightly rough going) and Revolutions are just fantastic.
You skip that during the French Revolution, Parisians were major partisans of the revolutionary left, whereas rural peasants strongly opposed the revolutionaries. My understanding is that this opposition infuriated the revolutionaries, leading to organized violence.
The way I look at most revolutions and class-conflicts is as a competition between elite groups. The lower classes are just get pulled along for the ride and end up joining oe team or the other, but it's never "about" the lower classes.
Events like the French and Russian revolution branded themselves as "fighting for the lower / middle class against the elites" but they were really just power struggles between urban professional elites and mostly rural, landed noble elites.
I think it’s misleading to say they’re *just* power struggles and that there’s *no* sense in which they’re about the lower classes. They often do result in changes for the lower classes, which often lead to greater mobility out of those classes, whether those groups want them or not.
Sure, I probably overstated my case, but I think the point stands that the driving force is often elite competition.
To clarify by example, France on the eve of the Revolution had some of the most prosperous and healthy lower classes in all of Europe. It was another 100 years before the wretchedly oppressed Russians began agitating.
Not giving land to the commissars was resisting collectivization. Russian peasants loved the Tsar, hated the local nobility, and wanted to do with their land as they pleased.
Marx quite famously called the peasantry “a sack of potatoes” and generally ascribed revolutionary agency to first the urban bourgeoisie and later to organized industrial workers, and both Bismarck and Disraeli enfranchised the peasants as a counterweight to urban liberals. Mao made leftist revolution with a rural support base work in the 20th century, but before that it was definitely an urban phenomenon.
That this is just wrong can be seen in the Soviet Union, where in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the conservatives of the party were the hard-core atheists. If atheism is the established thing, the right will be atheists and atheists will be right coded.
The War of the Three Kingdoms (fancy name of the English Civil War) is another demonstration. (Highly recommend the podcast Pax Britannica here).
Right and left, to the extent that they're coherent concepts are about order, hierarchy and tradition vs leveling and liberation. Some people align right because they like the established thing itself, some people align right because they emotionally align with the establishment. Same on the left, like minority religions.
Is a gay secularist opposed to conservative Islam right or left? Depends on the context, in the Netherlands right apparently.
'Right and left, to the extent that they're coherent concepts are about order, hierarchy and tradition vs leveling and liberation. Some people align right because they like the established thing itself, some people align right because they emotionally align with the establishment. '
I think this exactly right. Religion comes into play as a tool that can be used by either side. Matt needs to widen his perspective.
But it *usually* falls on the right, even if not always. Just as any other element of the dichotomy *sometimes* switches due to local conditions, even though each one has a more common tendency.
I think this could be related to some international research that shows that in non-developed, non-Western countries the right does tend to combine appeals to traditional religion with preference for robust welfare states, and the left is often combining new social traditions with an openness to economic reforms. In this way it's about traditional authorities, both economic and social, defining the right.
Interesting take. Also I think the cleavages between people drawn to the right by order, by tradition, or by hierarchy or drawn to the left by freedom or leveling are profitable to keep in mind.
I’m order and freedom guy, which is why I feel out of place politically so often, I think. And when those qualities are opposed, I am in genuine conflict (e.g. homeless camping).
"... two different poles of thought — one that emphasizes the existence of a God-given hierarchy that must be upheld and entrenched and one that wants to tear it down in the name of equality and reason."
That's a flattering framing for the left (not that there's anything wrong with that). And it may describe a good chunk of reality. But here's Michael Oakeshott's framing in his 1962 book "Rationalism in Politics."
"The conservative is a man who is more concerned to preserve what is good in the past than to change it for the better. The liberal is a man who is more concerned to correct the ills of the past than to preserve what is good in it."
Apart from the sexist 1962 language, I find this framing to have a lot of explanatory power and relevance. It feels honest and balanced (if you're into that sort of thing) in that both ends of the spectrum could sign onto it.
Or maybe it's just that we congenital moderates can see both impulses in ourselves. "God-given hierarchy" not so much.
I think this is a useful division, and a person's attitude towards egalitarianism in its most abstract form is probably the best way to predict whether they consider themselves a leftist. Yet, I would like to have seen some consideration of an internal tension at the heart of the commitment to egalitarianism: the tendency of all social groups to establish hierarchies.
Matt writes "The primary structural weakness of left politics is that most people mostly like their traditions", which is indeed *a* structural weakness, but there's another, deeper structural weakness, which is that social organizations are, as a descriptive / historical matter, inevitably hierarchical. This makes sense, because social groups with unclear or non-existent hierarchies are miserable; breeding grounds for stress and violence. Thus, the revolutions of the 18th century replaced a hierarchy of birth with a hierarchy of money, while our current revolutionaries are replacing the hierarchy of money with a hierarchy of verbal SAT achievement (and, perhaps, a moral hierarchy).
*Which* hierarchical ox gets gored is probably just a matter of historically contingent coalition politics, but that's probably the start of a completely different conversation.
All groups have hierarchy to a non-zero degree but not all groups are equally hierarchical. Perfectly coherent to see hierarchy as an intrinsically bad thing to minimise, whilst accepting that comes with some trade-offs and sometimes those make more hierarchy less bad than the alternative, and that you'll never eliminate hierarchy entirely.
That's fair, but under-specified. It isn't self-evident what it means to minimize hierarchy. I don't mean to be nihilistic: I just don't think things get interesting unless you push harder on the question. Consider two parameters that influence the experience of hierarchy:
- The degree of difference between levels of the hierarchy - what prerogatives and deference higher-level members get.
- The size of each level of the hierarchy.
Which is "more hierarchical"? Group one, which is entirely flat, except for a single executive or monarch that has absolute power over everyone? Or group two, which is completely and clearly ranked, but each gradient step only has a fractional amount more privilege than the others? Does the mobility within the hierarchy matter?
What about multiple, overlapping hierarchies? One interesting feature of chimpanzee societies is that they often have a formal hierarchy that's completely legible (subordinates make a public show of submission), but it's often out of sync with informal hierarchies, which determines who shares food with whom, or who gets groomed and who does the grooming. Human societies are infinitely more complex, with endless overlapping, cross-cutting, and sometimes contradictory hierarchies, which too often gets reduced to one or two simple dimensions.
Fair point, but I think the "I know it when I see it" property of "less/more hierarchy" applies to literally everything of moral or political interest, and also a most other stuff outside maths. But your questions are good ones.
This analysis really only holds up to me if you're doing a horseshoe theory. The way the "far" or "true" left impulses absolutely mirror the religious impulse of the far right is blatant. Both extremes of this spectrum are horribly illiberal to the point I'm really not sold on the utility of terms.
My preferred metaphors would be more like two different magnets or gravity wells or whirlpools, both attracting people into different authoritarian spirals. Liberalism exists in navigating the currents between them.
I agree there are many roads to authoritarianism. I don't actually think horseshoe theory holds up all that well. Donald Trump's authoritarianism doesn't come from being a right wing extremist. But at this point aren't we just talking about a compass? Why not embrace more constrained spectrums?
He’s not accepting “left=liberal”. He’s accepting that left-right is a meaningful distinction, that results from several precise axes that are all partially aligned. The liberal-absolutist axis is one precise axis that only partially aligns, and is in opposition to the market-welfare state axis that also only partially aligns.
Right, and where I got to is that I question the value of the left-right amalgamation rather than limiting oneself to those more constrained axes. Even if you squint your way to some sort of coherence like Matt is doing in this article, I'm not confident it makes the terminology any more illuminating in conversation.
I think each way of talking has its value. The specific axes make more sense ideologically speaking, while the left-right axis helps us see why ideologically apparently unrelated views have a strong (but not universal) tendency to come together in many different political contexts.
I had a high school teacher for International Studies who was a big proponent of the horseshoe theory. He had us all fill out a survey of our political beliefs on issues of divide in America at the time and then maps us all on a spectrum and put Stalin on one end and Hitler on the other and told us that everyone in the middle was "good" because they were far from either.
As the person in the class nearest Stalin, I took some umberage. I also pointed out that since some of the questions that got me to that position were my being strongly anti-death penalty, strongly free speech, and anti-incarceration for things like drug crimes, I thought Stalin and I had some fairly fundamental disagreement. I also said that I thought poor Dave who was by the Hitler dot was being unfairly treated since being pro-life and anti-tax where we disagreed weren't things that Hitler was more in favor of than Stalin.
Dave actually became a Democrat in college and found me on Facebook to thank me for being the only one to stand up for him against being called a Nazi by his high school teacher back in the day despite my being "Stalin". Perhaps realizing that being a leftist anti-authoritarian was going to make me more likely to stand up to that than his fellow compliant Republicans impacted his conversion!
That same teacher gave me one of my only Bs in High School because he marked me wrong for filling out our world map final by actually drawing in and labeling correctly all the countries created after the fall of the USSR (and the occupied territories of the West Bank) rather than comply with his provided answer key which he had been too lazy to update to not include the USSR even though it was 1993.
I will confess that he probably negatively impacted my view of folks who are reflexively moderate as a good in and of itself as being irrationally judgemental of folks with strongly held moral views and a little bit intellectually lazy to assume the middle of any issue is inherently rational. I am working on deprogramming myself from that which is part of why I am a subscriber.
Ironically, my mom brought up this B a few months ago when talking to my daughter about her obsession about keeping a 4.0. She pointed out that I had still gotten a college scholarship despite it although she said she assumed that with the wisdom of age I would probably admit that it would have been more beneficial to just use his answer key and get the A. I was shocked. I said "Hell no. My teenage rebellion caused me to memorize the location and border of every former Soviet Republic despite the fact that I was going to an Art major and that was definitely more helpful when I decided to switch to an International Studies degree than an extra A on my high school transcript would ever have been." When you add on to that the experience of learning to publicly defend myself from claims I was being "like Stalin" before that became common online discourse, I probably got more out of the B in that BS class than in many of my As.
Why can't there be three gravity wells with Liberalism having it's own gravity and failure mode? If it's because the left and right is more common, so it's better to just say that politics revolves around just those two modes then fine. I'd still argue that Liberalism deserves it's own seat at the table as a refutation of the left and the right and not just as another word for centrist.
“To me (and an important reason I am mostly on the left as an emotional and intellectual matter, despite my many disagreements), this does not make sense.”
I mostly agree with the sentiment of the paragraph preceding that quoted bit, and I agree that the religious grounding for the argument often does not make sense. But, rather unlike Matt, I find myself mostly on the right as an emotional and intellectual matter. A conservative outlook certainly can be tied to a religious one, but it need not be. The more general case is that “the disputes” he mentions are ultimately disputes about human nature. The modern, extreme leftist view that, for example, the roles of “sex and gender” in society are imposed by culture reject (or largely do) human nature, but, as you point out, so do the more extreme right views, or at least the ones informed by religious tradition.
Horseshoe theory is pretty silly and the quickest indication someone's doing a false dichotomy. You can take any two axis spectrum, super impose a horseshoe in any orientation, and then start making claims about how two unlike things are actually more in common on this new dimension.
I don't think horseshoe theory holds up for my own reasons, but this refutation is a bad one. To the extent there is a coherence to the horseshoe it's that the farther you want to go with any particular issue the more power one most be willing to consolidate and wield towards one's ends. At some point which flavor of totalitarian control you choose to impose is less significant than the means.
I think one could take Matt's Circle Of Sensible Banality political chart, and create something like a Sphere of Reasonable Liberalism that is surrounded by hierarchical threats in all directions.
I think the horseshoe makes sense because the horseshoe is a similar enough shape to a triangle, with an area towards the top where two corners are the most similar. This is the premise of Silver's post on the political triangle. https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
This is also why people who talk about the political horseshoe are usually more liberal than they are left or right, because they are trying to find a way to critique the left and right.
"You can take any two axis spectrum, super impose a horseshoe in any orientation, and then start making claims about how two unlike things are actually more in common on this new dimension."
I don't understand. Can you give an example of how this would work, for, say, the two-axis spectrum (N-S vs. E-W) of addresses in Manhattan?
“The basic principle that everyone should be treated equally without regard to race is actually more controversial than conservatives like to admit, as you see any time you ask them about racial profiling and statistical discrimination.”
I think this is a straw-man argument. Nobody (almost literally nobody) thinks race should be ignored in every circumstance. If somebody gets mugged by a guy with a fair complexion and blond hair, nobody will quarrel when the police limit their search to white people. The idea that people should be treated equally without regard to their race means that people should be treated equally without regard to their race when their race is irrelevant to the issue at hand (which it almost always is).
Figuring out those edge cases where race might be relevant - that’s what the disagreement is about.
Yes, exactly. The discussion should be (in my opinion) “when should race be relevant for policing?”, not simplistically claiming that it is never acceptable to consider race.
So there was this guy, smarter than you, who said that people should be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Would behoove you to heed that idea. Very easy to say profiling by cops is kosher when you know you’re never the one who’s going to be on the receiving end.
I don't know what spat you two got into previously that is leading to only ad hominems, but there is a more interesting debate to be had here than you are allowing for by just calling him racist and stupid. In many contexts, for example, there are many people on the Left who want people treated differently by skin color. For starters Yale probably wants it to be part of the admissions process.
But on the crime part the interesting starting point is something like in Zack's first example, where a crime is witnessed and people matching the criminal's physical description are profiled. It's hard to argues against some amount of profiling in that case. At the other extreme, simply profiling people on the basis or ethnicity alone is, well, extreme, and places a too-high burden on the people profiled.
But given the subjectivity and judgement calls inherent in effective policing there is a wide area between those extremes where intelligent debate and data would be very useful, because some amount of profiling based on superficial characteristics, some related to identity, are almost inevitable.
Two points: I am on record saying that Yale’s admissions policies with regard to race are bad; and again, it’s easy to say oh, we should do more profiling when you’re not the one who’s going to get profiled.
The part about Yale is why this part from Matt struck me as letting the left off the hook:
"The basic principle that everyone should be treated equally without regard to race is actually more controversial than conservatives like to admit"
But to the other part of your response:
"it’s easy to say oh, we should do more profiling when you’re not the one who’s going to get profiled"
Ok, noted. Now what? That doesn't really tell us much about what to do about issues of profiling. If a shooter in my neighborhood looked and dressed like me I wouldn't like to be profiled, but that doesn't end the discussion. By the same token it's easy to avoid thinking deeply about policing if you're not very likely to be a victim of crime.
One change that I’d like to see on the left is a commitment to public order. This would take away the argument that the religious right makes that lack of religion will lead to anarchy. It could but doesn’t have to.
Parties of the left clearly do commit to public order, both for pragmatic political reasons and also 'personal' ones related to the risks that elites face. But the message of this piece is that 'the left' will always contain people who are opposed to conventional understandings of 'public order', or at least more conditional about them than the median member of society. And people will always suspect that 'the left' are less trustworthy in their support of 'public order' because such thinking is always going to be the well from which the individuals in parties of the left are drawn.
Matt’s thesis is that leftists are levelers: if something is useful for leveling, they pick it up and try to use it, if not, they drop it and try to break it.
If public order means violently arresting vagrants, Jean Valjean shoplifter types, or public drug users and throwing them in inhumane jails, this is clearly not helping the leveling project.
If public order means providing even the residents of our poorest neighborhoods with safe and pleasant public spaces, this clearly is helping the leveling project.
One of the recurring examples of shoplifting is the Jean Valjean shoplifter type but almost none of the shoplifting in the West is about poor people stealing bread or a little hungry boy stealing an apple. We have food stamps/soup kitchens so there's no real need to commit a crime to feed yourself. I've grown up in a poor country (India) and witnessed real poverty. Almost everywhere around the world, poor people are skinny because of malnutrition. In the US, they are fat, like the general population.
Basically, public order involves following the laws which by definition are imposed by the power structures of a society. The more those power structures are viewed as unjust (a leftist perspective), the more the law isn't to be respected. MY had an excellent post on this, the idea of anarchism as being left-coded, a few weeks back.
Poor behavior in public places doesn't always violate laws, it's more about cultural values. I visited Seoul recently and people are just better behaved in public. Also, I would like the left to think about how affected individuals would treat criminals if there were no laws and they were allowed to punish them according to their own values. I grew up in India and shoplifters get brutally beaten by the public before the cops arrive. The lack of seriousness in dealing with these issues will almost certainly lead to people taking the law in their own hands.
I don't think it's this, exactly, and leftists (even left-wing anarchists) aren't necessarily poorly disposed toward rules. Equality itself is a kind of rule. The problem is with enforcement. Punishment inherently is somewhat non-egalitarian (we generally want to prevent suffering but for this particular person we deliberately inflict it) and the more it tends toward creating a marginalized status of person, and/or is associated with disadvantaged status (like poverty and race), the more problematic it might seem.
Agree and it seems that we are several people on this forum who are economically and culturally left to center-left while also having a strong preference for law and order and controlled immigration. We don’t neatly line up according to the established left-right axis. I guess the combination of egalitarianism and semi-authoritarianism (for lack of a better word) is unusual among humans. Egalitarians tend to be more anarchy prone/loving, and anti-egalitarians more authoritarian.
In Scandinavia you often have a split within the left where social democratic parties are center-left on economic and cultural issues plus semi-authoritarian on crime and immigration, while leftist parties are left wing on economic and cultural issues and semi-anarchic/anti-authoritarian on crime and immigration. In the US these two factions are uneasily lumped together in one political party
Is this thing on? Usually we get comments by now.
Sheesh! I'm going to have to parse what appears to be the secular notion that "religion is about truth and only about truth" before I can read the rest of the essay critically. One step I'll probably be taking is to substitute "religion" with "cultural subsegment" or something - religion has always been a vehicle of culture, but there's a lot more religion than that. That's why "which religion?" is really a superficial question about culture in all its diversity, kind of like asking "which cultural region of the U.S." or "which generation's values".
Hint - religion is about human nature in all its possibilities: culture, authority, tradition, metaphor, story and poetry, transcendence, inspiration, joy, community, meaning (philosophy), metaphysics, intention, ethics, forgiveness (relational and social), ritual etc. Any cultural movements or ideologies that manage to embody most of these could probably be classified as "religions," deism or atheism aside. Anyone who hasn't been "in" a religion these days wants to reduce "religion" to "believing in something that's obviously not true because we have science now."
Yes, this was also the weirdest part of the essay for me. Matt seems to think that the instrumental case for religion is being used by religious people as evidence that Noah really did build an ark to survive the flood, or etc. And I'm sure that is true to some extent. People say all kinds of things.
But as you note, religion is not *really* about which set of facts and stories you believe. It's much closer to what sorts of things you *do* and appreciate. The former is actually a somewhat uniquely Protestant conception of what religion is, which is why it's a little surprising that Matt, who as I understand is Jewish, seems to see this as the logical way to understand religion. Outside of the narrow circles of Protestant Christianity it is extremely common for someone to say they are a member of a religion while also not affirming substantive and literal belief in every single facet of that religion.
The instrumental case for religion is basically just a reason why secularization is net-bad, and that a world where people were 'in' a religion by default would be good, even if those people were not particularly more likely to believe specific sets of facts & stories.
I also think it's difficult to have this conversation with highly educated atheists, as they project their own feelings about secularism onto the broader mass of the secularizing public, who are not highly disciplined, scientifically-literate physicalists but are instead an amorphous group that is just as if not more likely to believe in all kinds of weird stuff, like ghosts, psychics, astrology, tarot, etc.
When I was going to church as a youth in the south my understanding was that the Bible was the literal word of God and the only truth on which man could depend. We might have disagreed on some minor points but Noah did the build the Ark, Jesus rolled away the stone and those bowls of wrath will be poured out for the non believers.
There is lots of complication and nuance with any belief system but I think you are overselling it. If anyone in any of the churches I attended when I was younger said "Sodom and Gomorrah was an allegory" the preacher would have pulled them aside toot sweet.
YMMV of course.
I think this is precisely what I mean when I say this focus on believing the exact set of literal stories is a peculiar feature of Protestantism, and *especially* Evangelical Protestantism. I grew up in a similar religious environment to you and experienced the same thing, but it is not a common experience for Catholics, who frequently affirm all sorts of things that are technically heretical.
As an historical matter, religious people and leaders for years have been clustered around both ends of the political spectrum.
Evangellicals take it to an extreme, but people really do believe.
Absolutely. I do believe that many people are theists who have some beliefs associated with a traditional religion that they hold very sincerely. I myself am a theist, though I do not know that I hold particularly strongly with any mainstream religion.
But I think many of the more outrageously implausible elements of traditional organized religion are either only half-heartedly believed or simply rejected outright by people who otherwise identify with it. Most lay Catholics do not believe, for example, in transubstantiation. Many do not even realize they are technically supposed to believe in it.
I think the "Many do not even realize they are technically supposed to believe in it" is the key here. People often do believe the parts that are salient.
I agree with you as a read on religion qua religion, but I think Matt’s divide rings true for the left/right divide on religion in politics. What sort of things you *[demand that everyone be required to] do*, i.e. politics, stems heavily from what facts you think are true. So in real life I, a reconstructionist Jew for whom my Judaism is possibly the most important part of my identity, feel at home on the left because I believe that Jewish tradition should be one of many voices in a “reason”able debate about morality and law. But if I believed that religious doctrine was above such disputes, I would lean more toward hierarchy.
As for the rest of the public, part of it is that the reasoned-equality vs. traditional-hierarchy axis is just one of many motivating politics, and another is that most of those fringe identities (as you say, I have several nominally atheist friends who have… under-theorized “spiritual” beliefs), their beliefs don’t have strong political implications.
Many of us still need to finish our sleep and then become awake first! And of course, finish reading the article before we comment, which is always a proper practice.
MattY wrote an article that takes 20 minutes to read and 20 minutes after posting it he was like “where’s the comments?” All before 6:30 :)
I think this is a topic he enjoyed writing about.
Given that this is the first of a four part series, I agree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9EBhaULToU
Ha, I just didn't have time till now
Plus, I am not a morning person, I am still in bed at 6;30...lol....and these are the first comments I have ever made on here
Wonderful work, thank you!
Bueller? ...Bueller?
From a perspective a notch or two to your left, I find it interesting how much you see religion as central to the left/right divide. I don’t think you need to take the vulgar Marxist “opiate of the masses” view of religion as a mystifying justification for inequality (itself something of a distortion of Marx’s original sentiment) to see the recurring correlation of religion and anti-egalitarianism as being driven more by the latter than the former. (As you note, in the First Estate, it was generally the bishops on the right and parish priests on the left.) Do you really think that the left/right divide is driven (at least in part) by religious views?
Put another way, while religion is certainly more often part of a right-wing worldview than a left-wing one, it’s both coherent to talk about left-wing religious people and movements in principle and possible to find actual historical examples of them (Martin Luther King, Jr. and liberation theology off the top of my head). And vice-versa on the right. Inequality can be naturalized through the use of science and pseudoscience (economics to justify class inequality, biology to justify gender and race) just as easily as religion. Nazism was able to find accommodation with traditional religion as it came to power, but it certainly wasn’t driven by it (though you could see it as being quasi-religious in the same way the far-left cults of reason you describe). The right can even be outright anti-religious: Ayn Rand and Nietzsche each thought religion was poisonous precisely because it held back members of the natural aristocracy. And you see today “barstool conservatives” and the alt-right (or whatever they are now) who have little use for religion except as something used to own the libs.
By contrast, I think that “right-wing egalitarianism” and “left-wing anti-egalitarianism” are almost contradictions in terms. In the real world, people and ideas are messy: obviously people generally seen as having overall left-wing views can be strong supporters of hierarchy along certain axes (esp. it seems in matters of gender), and people with egalitarian ideals or goals can mistakenly end up advocating policies that end up supporting existing hierarchies (or creating new ones). And as you note, a policy program or broader worldview (like liberalization or nationalism) that is left-wing in one context can be right-wing in another. But there’s at least a *tension* there that isn’t the case with respect to religion as such. The accusation that “you say you support equality, but your ideas seem to be popular with Hollywood celebrities and urban elites and unpopular with the rural working class” has bite—“you say you support equality but you believe in God” just doesn’t.
I think what you're picking up on, in a nutshell, is the Christian foundation on which the modern West still stands. People can take that legacy in all kinds of reactionary, liberal, leftist, whatever other directions but it's the source of the built in egalitarian impulse.
I think what I’m saying in a nutshell is that I don’t think religion (Christianity in particular) is a source of either the egalitarian or antiegalitarian impulse—that people inclined toward either can either find in religion what they need, ignore it, or dismiss it outright. And the pairing of religion and antiegalitarianism that Matt describes is a matter of correlation but not necessarily causation.
I would say that's inconsistent with the historical record. Our political conceptions of things like 'equality before the law' didn't come out of nowhere. They came from a long interplay of the thought of the ancient Mediterranean world, maybe a dialogue between Athens/Rome and Jerusalem, later built upon in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. There's nothing necessarily inherent about it, and the fact that it's hard for us as Westerners to imagine otherwise illustrates how deeply influential it has been.
I wasn't trying to make a point about any sort of deep sources of egalitarian ideas. (Though I'll note that Christianity predates "political conceptions of things like 'equality before the law'" by about a millennium and a half, so I'm skeptical of a view of Christianity as a straightforward explanation for the systematically egalitarian philosophies that emerged from the Enlightenment.) I was just saying that religiosity isn't inherent to a right-wing viewpoint the way that support for hierarchy is, though there is a positive correlation between the two.
One could argue that the development of Protestantism, with a more direct, personal relationship with God, opens the door to "equality before the law" much more so than the far more hierarchical Catholic Church. And one could argue that that strain was prevalent in the original form of Christianity before Catholicism (married with Roman political ideas and structures) became dominant.
Equality before the law is quite recent, true, but the 'rule of law', i.e. a notion that the law exists independently of authority and can be followed or broken by even the highest temporal power, is a much older phenomenon, and is a prerequisite to the development of legal equality.
I am not sure if it has anything to do with a particular religion, though. Religion encodes ideas, but I'm with you that I'm not sure it's *causal* of those ideas. The rule of law is at least as old as Rome, which certainly used religious mechanisms to encode and enforce the law, and is also a feature of Judaism. Rule of law, meanwhile, is not really present in other traditions, and does not feature in their religious traditions. As one example, the 'Mandate of Heaven' is perhaps a counterpart to the rule of law, conceptually, but is not really the same thing -- the Emperor does not lose the Mandate by breaking specific laws, he only loses it through poor virtue and bad stewardship.
I think Christianity probably had some causal role in egalitarianism as an ethos but it's still a bit simplistic to say that it's "the source of the built-in egalitarian impulse." And thinking that way, or in any strictly historicist way, seems to reject the idea that equality as a moral principle has some kind of rational or "natural law" foundation. Christianity is historically important to egalitarianism but it didn't invent it (nor did Judaism or any ancient Middle Eastern religion) and is not its exclusive source.
All caveats acknowledged. We're talking about huge historical developments over hundreds and at a certain point thousands of years. But the point remains that you cannot talk coherently about the trajectory of Western political thought without a major accounting of these influences, and it's a mistake to take it all as a granted natural state, or somehow self evident, absent those building blocks.
Sure.
In terms of today's politics, I do think it's interesting that on the left the most hardcore egalitarians are usually pretty secular, while on the right the absence of Christianity seems to push conservatives to even more forthrightly reject egalitarianism. On the whole though you don't see a pattern where very secular countries are less inclined toward egalitarianism. So I am inclined to be skeptical when people predict that the decline of Christianity in Western countries spells the decline of egalitarian commitments (I'm not reading you as making this prediction).
I think if you have an antiegalitarian impulse, religion is a way to justify that impulse. If you have an egalitarian impulse, some religions may also be used to justify that impulse, but secular values of fairness could also work.
If you are an individual with antiegalitarian impulse but strong secular views, you're going to end up in weird intellectual circles that try to justify inequality with appeals to some ingrained genetic superiority of some individuals or groups. Or perhaps strict doctrines like Objectivism or the hard core approach of some libertarians.
It seems that right wing secularists don't have as much trouble adopting eugenics and objectivism as some of us might imagine. Those views pop up pretty frequently in some way or another in most comments sections here and that is frequently from folks who consider themselves secular moderates.
You definitely don't need to ground this in Christianity. There are egalitarian vs hierarchical disputes among Japanese Buddhists, among Hindus (where the arguments about the nature of caste are absolutely dizzying for an outsider), among Jews...
I agree with this. Here as elsewhere Matt has an unduly cynical view of religion. It's an important and highly heterogenous part of the moral landscape and can give rise to both egalitarian and hierarchical impulses. It's not surprising that equality movements have some seemingly religious features even in very secular environments; that both has very deep historical roots and is just kind of inevitable for a movement aiming at value shifts.
Maybe Matt will dig into this in the subsequent posts, but this gets at one of the most important divergences between old and new world. France and all of Europe have experienced religion as actual political/state authority. In America we may have experienced all of the political and state authority being religious, and a force with near complete social and cultural supremacy, but there is a difference between the two.
"France and all of Europe have experienced religion as actual political/state authority. In America we [did not]."
FWIW, Connecticut did not officially disestablish the Congregational churches until 1818. Massachusetts continued to pay them tax revenues until 1833.
In America, religion has been a way for the elite to organize opinions whether on the left or right.
Putting religion in such a central position did not resonate with me either, as somebody a notch or two to the right of Matt.
I grew up in Northern Europe. Religion has played almost no role in politics for generations. But the basic left-right pattern is still very clear.
The greatly diminished role of religion in Northern Europe is a big part of why Northern Europe is more left-wing than America.
The left-right pattern still exists, obviously, but if the American right had the views on abortion and health care of the Danish right they would win every election.
(or maybe face right-wing spoiler candidates)
True. But does this not imply that a more accurate description of the right attractor would be a desire to uphold the existing order and to honor tradition? In many societies (historically in particular) this aligns with religion, but today, "religion" does not seem like the best term to describe the right wing motivating force *in general*.
I think a good example of this is that the most right-wing country in Europe is Russia, but the Russian population is just as irreligious as the Northern European countries if not more so. Yes Putin will trot out the priests to validate things he's doing, but statistically no one really cares very much about the content of the faith.
The whole point is that Putin cares a great deal about the image of the Russian Orthodox Church. The religious content of religion is not important (and does not come from religion) but what matters is that the religious institution is respected. Another example is the War on Christmas coverage, the problem has nothing to do with anything that appears in Church or the Bible but is entirely based on how Christmas itself is treated by the public (is it venerated or reduced to a mere Happy Holiday).
Huh, that’s what I thought the position of the essay was. Seems like lots of commenters didn’t think so.
I think the causality here is reversed. Northern Europe's persistent left-skew relative to the rest of the world predates its secularization. Italy is still so religious because it is still more right-wing, it is not more right-wing because it is still religious. Most people who are religious do so because they think tradition, structure, and hierarchy are good. Once those views are abandoned, people naturally begin to secularize.
I think it has more to do with social and kinship structures than directly to do with religion. Italy is very religious because it is very communal and has broad, deeply-rooted kinship structures in which social sanctions for deviation from tradition are much harsher than they are in places where it is very normal to form smaller and separate families. This is also why these places are persistently more right-wing.
The weirdo schizophrenic quasi-fascist rightism that is increasingly prevalent is, in my view, the rightist impulse expressed by people who are unmoored from deep traditional structures, who are less interested in preserving an existing hierarchy than they are in burning down the social structures they themselves exist in, which are far more atomized and secular.
This is true and yet there's also still an official state church in every Scandinavian country. I don't entirely understand the process but I know in Germany being part of a religion can mean registering it and actually paying a tax to the religious authorities. It's hugely diminished as a social and cultural force but also baked into state in ways that make it hard to say it's gone or that neatly fall on a left/right axis.
>This is true and yet there's also still an official state church in every Scandinavian country<
Lots of countries subsidize cultural institutions or pay lip service to historical traditions. In fact all of the rich ones do. Which is really all state churches are in Northern Europe at this point (England included). There's no compelling reason to push for disestablishment—the churches don't have enough influence to cause problems or become a nuisance—so they're left alone in a state of benign neglect. Contrast this with France (or, say, Quebec).
"There's no compelling reason to push for disestablishment—the churches don't have enough influence to cause problems or become a nuisance—so they're left alone in a state of benign neglect."
I think you're understating what's happened with state churches in northern Europe -- they've effectively become tools of government policy. E.g., when some American conservative says, "Sweden is forcing churches to perform gay marriages," what is actually occurring is that the "established" church is being required to do so since the national government can literally prescribe the tenets of state churches by law. "Non-established" churches in those countries retain the right to marry or not marry couples based on whatever their own religious principles dictate.
I believe your observation reinforces my point. InMD opined that (contra M.Y.) the role of religion in Northern Europe hasn't diminished as much as appearances suggest, as evidenced by the existence of state churches. If indeed, as you indicate, these churches are frequently used as tools of state policy—if they've been effectively reduced to stale, bureaucratic civic offices—that to me suggests their influence has waned even more than I had imagined.
Yeah, the official state church in Scandinavia is just a quaint tradition that they are paying lip service to because they don't want to really change things too much. It's about as relevant as the British monarchy.
It's interesting that as the US secularizes, the cultural politics have shifted a little from "what do you think about the ideas near Jerry Falwell?" to "what do you think about the ideas near a prestigious liberal arts school?" Is this a result of us having a pretty weak state compared to our Northern European peers? Parts of European politics seem intensely focused on Muslim immigration, but US cultural politics keeps swinging between many issues, including abortion now. Goes to show the difference between the legacy of a nation-state vs a sprawling multiethnic republic.
How do you reconcile that the left/right divide in Europe does not track religiosity very well?
If the whole country isn’t religious there’s no block of believers who want to uphold tradition/hierarchy.
You actually think that without religion, there aren't going to be voters who want to uphold tradition/hierarchy?
How do you explain Russia, Belarus, Hungary, etc? all who have lower religiosity than the European average, but also have large/majority constituencies who want to uphold tradition/hierarchy?
Well Matt came of age in the Bush era during which I am told liberals/Democrats were very concerned about Christian nationalism on the right
I’ve heard that abortion rights is a topic of significant interest in the Biden years.
In the United States, yes. But I thought the argument was that the basic left-right spectrum is persistent across time and location. That rings true, but in many countries today, the religious aspect is negligible (with the Church often aligned more with the left).
Wow…I didn’t know that…you’re telling me this for the first time…
The sarcasm here doesn’t obscure the main point. A little more of one kind of religion would make Team Slow Boring much more generous with welfare and much more skeptical of the rationality of markets. Would we call this more “left”?
I agree with Matt’s point! Trump reference aside I’m just saying that religion is more salient for Matt than me because of when we came of age politically.
And I agree that when you come of age determines not just what your politics are but where you position them theoretically. These terms break down when a gen-x and zoomer have similar politics but different terms. For that reason especially I don’t think the one-dimensional-spectrum labels are that good.
The Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Methodists are generally agree that there should be a right to an abortion. More conservative elements of some of those entities believe in a more limited right.
Ha! Matt and I are the same age, as it happens. But there’s been some useful discussion elsewhere about how the New Atheist movement that arose in reaction to Bush-era political religiosity (and I think was seen then as having a generally left-wing valence) split over issues of race and gender during the Obama years that I think is telling.
I think there's an argument to be made that the New Atheists were turned off by how un-cool Bush and his conservatives were. He was so parochial, he was inarticulate, he was mocked by people like Jon Stewart, etc.
But I don't think they ever really embraced the left, they just wanted to be cool and different. And with the Obama years, well why not shift back to the right and continue to be cool and counter-establishment.
God told George W Bush to invade Iraq, so libs were mad at God for a little while. 🤷
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
Matt's not wrong that there is a long-standing difference between the left and the right about the relationship between religion and the state, but that can be understood as being about equality and pluralism impulses, which are more fundamental.
Historically, religious hierarchy and noble hierarchy were the two key features of the 18th century French right. “You say you support equality but you believe bishops and the pope have special authority” does have bite.
Of course, hierarchy isn’t the only way to characterize left-right. Another way of putting the divide is between tradition and progress, with religion clearly on the tradition side. “You say you want to end old superstitions and replace them with modern rational ideas, but you believe in god” does have bite.
No one characterization of the left-right divide is exactly right, and only some of them are in direct contradiction with the very idea of religion. But all of them are at least in tension with most religion as it is practiced.
Yeah, the left/right divide on religion I've always thought was much more about tradition vs change or maybe more narrowly to bring the possible father political conservativism into this Edmund Burke; respect for tradition and slower pace of change vs. radical break with tradition and faster pace of change.
In the French Revolution example. Those peasants who famously rebelled against the Revolutionary government due their attacks on the Catholic church were famously to a person illiterate. In addition, mass was in Latin, not French. I feel pretty certain those peasants who were resisting Robespierre and The Directory were not doing so out of some deep seated belief system regarding original sin, transubstantiation or basic religious beliefs. Instead, it's much more likely that while Peasants were understandably upset about the price of bread given their meager earnings, they were not interested in getting rid of one of the few institutions in their lives that actually may have helped them buy said bread* in the past as well as provide some ballast to their existence.
* As a side note and possible future Slow Boring post. I've seen research suggesting the number one reason religion has declined in the west is the welfare state. Namely, a robust welfare state takes the place of the church in regards to providing assistance in times of need. And without the need of the church to provide material ballast in times of woe, the need to go to church or believe in God drops with it. To me it helps explain a) why religiosity is strongest in the poorest parts of the country, both the deep south and specifically in African American communities b) why church leaders are often openly antagonistic of government programs to help the poor even though this seemingly contradicts very basic church doctrine about helping the poor.
I definitely wouldn't argue this is the whole story by any means. But I thought it did explain a lot to me if that makes any sense.
It's certainly true that during certain eras of the US experience that religion has been a major proponent of the left - William Jennings Bryan and the original progressive movement comes to mind as a prime example. But, in recent (as in post WWI) US history, religion has clearly been much more of a force for the right.
100%. Indeed, I think you could make the case that the "Social Gospel" saw itself as opposed to (among other things) a secular, "scientific" Social Darwinism--a subtext of Bryan's opposition to teaching biological evolution that I think is largely forgotten today.
And a century earlier, abolitionism, both in US and UK, was also much more strongly influenced by Second Great Awakening religious movements than it was by Enlightenment-type secular philosophies of the Equality of Man. (There's a reason the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was in my Methodist hymnal growing up: "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!") By contrast, while pro-slavery forces would use various religious arguments (from the mark of Ham to Paul telling slaves to obey their masters), the "positive good"/"mudsill" arguments in favor of slavery were based in secular, economic and sociological concerns.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic is such a great work of culture and of history and a real banger of a hymn to boot.
(I've also seen that particular lyric as "As He died to make men holy / let us live to make men free!" which I think also works extremely well, and arguably better although I understand why the unvarnished reference to martial sacrifice by analogy to martyrdom makes sense.)
But it's worth noting that William Jennings Bryan, while deeply religious, was not really known for that until much later in his career. His rise to national prominence was very class focused.
I mean, his most famous speech is called "Cross of Gold." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Christianity is not just a belief system, it serves as a cultural wellspring for a society to draw on for analogies, metaphors, etc. Calling someone a Judas provides context if both sides of the conversation understand who Judas is. The idea of a crucifixion provides a powerful imagery. But he's not arguing that bimetalism is divinely inspired.
Ha! I think we're both being comments-section facile. I'll concede that he was using a common cultural metaphor as a vivid rhetorical flourish, and the substance of the speech was based in public reason--but at the same time I'll say I absolutely think he personally viewed his broader egalitarian project as being in fulfilment of Christ's command to love thy neighbor as thyself.
And even rhetorically, while that sort of thing was much more common on all sides than it is today, I seem to recall (though I may be mistaken) that Bryan in particular was known at the time for using those religious rhetorical tropes and oratorical techniques, with both detractors and admirers comparing his orations to the fiery sermons of revivalist preachers (even if he didn't necessarily think or argue that you needed to be saved to see why you should vote for him).
I think we're in agreement with the specifics of the situation. Bryan himself was a deeply religious individual, as indicated by his overall career trajectory. Additionally, as a politician, he deployed rhetoric that would evoke religious imagery as well as behaviors during speaking that were in the style of revivalist preachers.
Modern day American leftists have lost a lot of the ability to speak to to an audience with religious imagery. Although like with Warnock we have some notable exceptions.
As Matt notes, a certain group of right-wing intellectuals keep trying to argue that the left is motivated by "their religions" like Marxism or environmentalism. In that case, what exactly is a religion defined as?
Nazism wasn't driven by religious motivations originating in Christianity, but it was motivated by a belief in the inherent superiority of the German, Aryan, people and their destiny to seize land to the East, expand their population in a weird return to land agrarianism across East Asia, and rule the future. It's an appeal to a bunch of bunk but still has some sort of chosen people, a grand narrative, and promise of a better future (although on Earth, not in heaven). It gets pretty close to religion though.
If the left wing is just appealing to a sense of fairness and equity, the right, even when secular, has to appeal to a view of humanity that's appealing to something harder to define.
I guess I know what *a* particular religion is (e.g., Christianity) but I'm not sure what "religion" is. Is North Korea run by a state religion? It sure seems like it. Was Nazism a religion? If not, why not?
There is definitely a correlation between religious ideas (R) & ideas about equality (E). Matt is arguing R->E, whereas you are arguing E->R. I used to think R->E, but now I tend to think R<-C->E, where C is something possibly obscure, but much more fundamental that drives them both and creates the manifest correlation we see. Either way, I think Matt is correctly pointing out the underlying structural continuities at play.
I'm not sure that "tolerance for Protestantism during the Reformation was liberal." Luther was a notorious anti-Semite and (for a while) radically populist. The totalitarian regimes of Calvin and his like were as far from being "liberal" as I can imagine.
I think we're better off not trying to apply a more modern term like "liberal" here. "Left" works much better.
This essay is a masterpiece of useful abstraction. Too many authors stack ideological categories upon one another like a juggler trying to wow an audience with performative complexity. By focusing on one category and showing how it has mostly held up over time, Matt gives it texture and meaning even though the world is much more complicated than “left good, right bad.”
I think a lot of my frustration with the left-right divide is the way people I know sometimes use “left” as a synonym for “correct”, which it clearly isn’t. This essay was really helpful to remind me that there is still a strong family resemblance that gives the terms “left” and “right” meaning, even if there’s no clear sense of whether wokism or Marxism is the more paradigmatic leftism.
When amateurs play with big abstractions, they often forget that big abstractions are big tents. The left does not describe anything too specific. It describes an anti-theocratic, egalitarian impulse. That’s it. In fact, its not even entirely clear whether the leveling impulse or the anti-theocratic impulse is more fundamental to leftism.
Say there were a hippy style religion with no pope or clergy but with strong social pressure to conform. Would adherence to this religion be left or right wing? I have no idea.
For my money, the leveling impulse is more essential to left wing movements than the anti-theocratic impulse. However, egalitarianism and secularism usually go together because established religions evolve powerful hierarchies that often control land and money.
I think there’s also just as well a progressive-traditionalist left-right axis, which also usually lines up with the two you mention, b it sometimes doesn’t. No one of these axes is *the* left-right axis, but they are all part of it, even though any one can be flipped in one cultural context.
I too get exhausted at all of that excessive complexity of categorization, which I also think is a symptom of failing to just take each issue at face value, and let people offer multiple unique takes that have overlaps of agreement, instead of just putting them into pro/con poles.
Well said, David!
You mention that "the UK was untouched" by this revolution. But I live 15 minutes north of New Haven, where some of the Regicides lived after the English civil war, a revolution in which an (admittedly religious) movement with strong egalitarian impulses deposed and executed a king, juiced parliamentary power, wound up with a weirdo dictator, and then had a restoration in which some reforms were rolled back and some things weren't.
Those who escaped to English North America profoundly impacted the political formation of the New England colonies especially, and this impacted the political foundations of the US itself, which was the impulse beind the French Revolution.
Two things:
- does anyone else agree with my assessment that the English Civil War was a kind of dress rehearsal for the French Revolution?
- Matt is persuasive that the French left/right model is a good heuristic to understand fundamental political differences in Western society (hence its continuing utility in modern political analysis) but why doesn't the English civil war feature more prominently in American political thought?
Quite a few modern right-wing intellectuals (usually either secular or Catholic) trace a direct line between the Puritans and the modern left. I actually think they’re sort of right about this, but that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (The Puritans were a lot less bad than they’re stereotyped as.)
Fischer’s Albion’s Seed about 4 British migrations to America (New England Puritans, Penn’s Quakers, Chesapeake Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish Appalachian/back-country folk) draws lines to today’s political and cultural preferences. It’s very interesting.
"The Puritans were a lot less bad than they’re stereotyped as" : a perfectly designed scissor statement!
I'm tempted to contest it, but I'll try my hand at a similar proposition: "the Puritans did many good things that we often overlook, because we're repelled by several key aspects of their society "
I think that’s reasonable on its own terms, but I’d also note that a lot of the popular-imagination characterization of the both English Puritans and their New English offshoot are misleading, insensitive to important historical context, or straight-up factually untrue.
They didn’t hate colors, fun, and sex. (In fact, the most prominent Puritan writer, John Milton, spent a significant chunk of text in “Paradise Lost” insisting that Adam and Eve fucked before the Fall.) They weren’t significantly more religiously intolerant than their European contemporaries (with the notable exception of the Quakers.) They were generally somewhat less patriarchal than most of their European contemporaries. They weren’t anti-intellectual or generally hostile to the arts— Puritan New England was the world’s most literate society, and both it and its mother community in England produced plenty of noteworthy literature. Witch trials were uncommon events which only emerged in periods of unusual social stress, and were generally controversial.
Of course, as a modern social democrat with a commitment to state secularism, there’s plenty that I don’t like about the Puritans— but most of those things were also features of most other human societies of their era. On the other hand, their relative commitment to political egalitarianism (leading Europe’s first anti-monarchical revolution), their relatively anti-hierarchical approach to religion, their intense commitment to universal education, and the importance they ascribed to individual spiritual experience were both fairly distinctive and, I think, quite admirable. I probably would have been a Roundhead if I had fought in the English Civil War.
The derision accorded to impulses derided as "Puritan" tends to bring out the contrarian in me, in part because so often it seems like the order being derided actually had a point (America's pre-Prohibition relationship with alcohol genuinely was absolutely terrible and the government imprimatur against it had a fairly significant and lasting cultural impact for the better, e.g.). The Puritans are sort of my internal reference for "high-trust literate principled egalitarians that were smart enough to be aware that promulgating self-denial and other restrictions on personal hedonism is often broadly socially adaptive."
(One could make a good argument that the Quakers did this even better, although to be honest some of the weirder tenets of Quaker theology like silent services and absolute commitment to pacifism never stop seeming weird to me, because they're heterodox without being obviously theologically load-bearing[1]. More important I think is that the Quakers' own tolerance eventually led to them being subsumed by other cultures without the degree of lasting cultural imprint of Puritanism, combined with the fact that AIUI somewhat counterintuitively their own high-trust advantages were implicitly dependent on interacting with a community of other Quakers even as they nevertheless retained tolerance of heterodoxy. Seems like a bad combination).
[1] Obviously there *is* a theological argument for pacifism ("turn the other cheek") but it seems like most branches of Christianity opted not to commit to that principle quite so far as to embrace playing cooperate-defect.
Indeed, and I think that what people who didn’t grow up within American PMC liberal culture is that the description you offer here applies pretty strongly to them. (Except that, as with the Quakers, restraint, self-discipline, and strict moral self-regulation are mostly inculcated internally and enforced through tacit social pressure, with external punishments showing up only when something has gone very wrong.)
Quaker here. I think that while Quaker pacifism definitely didn't become a hallmark of American culture, the role Quaker's played in the early movement for Women's rights, Anti-Slavery movement, and early LGBTQ movements did make long term impacts on the way equality is understood in this country by both the religious left and secular left and that came very much from their commitment to "lived theology" of equality.
Also, the idea that Quakers have silent worship is a little oversimplified. They worship in silence unless someone in the Meeting feels moved by the spirit to offer testimony and stands up and gives ministry. In some meetings that is fairly rare and in some near constant. The time in between ministry is used for prayer, contemplation of earlier messages, meditation upon on advices and queries, or in open expectation of receiving a message to share. So it may look silent but silence isn't really the point, it is the context in which people wait for inspiration and it actually is all about the idea of ultimate equality in which God might chose to minister through anyone in the community as opposed to just an appointed minister.
Fun fact, in many meetings there is a flow chart for people to work through before they give a message either in a regular meeting for worship or a meeting for worship with attention to business. It goes something like: (1) Does this truly feel like a leading from Spirit or just my own ego wanting to share its thoughts or wanting to speak for attention and recognition? If yes, go to next question, if no, don't say anything. (2) is is possible that this message is really only a message for me and not for the group at large? If yes, just dwell with it, if no, go to the next question. (3) If it is not just for me, is it for one or just a few specific people or rises in response to what someone else just said that feels directed at me, if yes, just talk to them afterwards, if no, go to the next question. (4) Is what I feel moved to say substantively similar to what someone else has just said but I feel like the way I want to say it is more articulate or impactful? If yes, put away your ego and trust in others to be able to hear the truth in the first message, if no, go to the next question. (5) Is what I feel moved to say consistent with my understanding of the testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, compassion, community, equality, service, and stewardship? If no, season on this for at least a week before sharing and/or connect with your clearness community to explore this further. If yes, next question. (6) Does the urge to give this message still feel strong like a true leading or does it feel less pressing. If yes, speak, if no, let others worship and have space to raise more compelling message.
Obviously some meetings take this more to heart than others which is why some are more silent than others. But I had a friend who read the chart and adapted it with a more secular focus. God because "organization purpose," the testimonies became "organization mission" and provided them as the ground rules for speaking at meetings for a few non-profit groups he was involved in and claims that the meetings were much shorter and more useful.
So Quakers may still have something worthwhile to share with the wider world!
This is tricky: your comment involves a bit of strawmanning [1], I think a couple of your points are wrong on the merits, and I think one can make any society look good by highlighting its positive features.[2] But the reverse is true as well: it's easy to make any society look bad by focusing on the negatives. You also made a great point, that most of the things we don't like about Puritans weren't particular to them - they were features of the era.
But I'm not sure whether you're making a historical argument, declaring your values, or making the case for certain values that depends on a historically accurate picture of the Puritans. (Or all three.)
Puritans of Massachusetts Bay may have been no worse than any other society of their time, but they were *our* bastards, a historical group that most Americans are familiar with. Fairly or not, the Puritans serve as a shorthand for "sanctimonious intolerance" and "claustrophobic community surveillance". You and Ethics Gradient are right to observe the Puritans had several things going for them by our contemporary lights. Those tenacious individuals could wait longer for their cookies than anyone in recorded history; they were committed to universal education; they were (arguably) more egalitarian than most other social groups of the day. It's interesting to consider the psychological and moral economies that generate strange, conflicting packages of social traits. But to the extent that you think those particular advantages balance those particular drawbacks (real or imagined), we're really just talking about values and the history doesn't matter.
Given the difficulty of generalizing about historical social groups, you might as well offer a thought experiment in its place: "How much moral supervision by your dunbar group would you submit to in exchange for $desirable_social_goal?"
[1] "Hated colors"?
[2] I had a vivid flashback to pro-Castro arguments that defended his awful police state by touting Cuba's universal literacy.
Sadd.
This effort by the right-wing intellectuals feels off to me, it strikes me as intellectually lazy. It's really trying to substitute a geographic association (Look, both groups are big in New England!) for the fact that intellectually a group of highly religious, anti-Catholic Protestants is not exactly the best example of the predecessors of a modern day secular left.
It uses a bit of sleight of hand in that most Americans do not fully appreciate the range of ways Christianity can express itself, and the recent rise in evangelical Christianity has distorted what people, increasingly secular Americans with no real engagement with Christianity, accept as the normal expression of the religion.
It's also often right-wing intellectuals who are trying to get you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain by arguing that the left is the real authoritarian threat trying to be busy bodies telling people what to do, never mind the aggressive rollback of reproductive rights the right has fought for for over 50 years now.
Looking in the shadows to conjure a legal outcome that an individual judge desires to satisfy his personal political preferences is inherently illiberal. The correct view is that the Roe decision was the illiberal act, not the right’s opposition to it.
I have no idea how what you're saying is relevant.
I believe you.
It's less about geography (hello, all major West Coast cities and nearly every college town!), and more about the attempt to establish a moral aristocracy, enforced by intense social pressure and ultimately ostracism, designed to cultivate constant introspection.
Marxists explicitly talk about the Dutch, English, American, and French revolutions as being a single set of “bourgeois revolutions”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_revolution
"does anyone else agree with my assessment that the English Civil War was a kind of dress rehearsal for the French Revolution"
I'm not sure it was a "dress rehearsal," but at the same time I remember years ago a British comedian (whose name sadly escapes me) doing a bit in which he goes through the history of the English/British monarchy and gets up to Charles I's beheading and says, "And then we got rid of the monarchy and became a commonwealth for a few years before saying, 'That was kind of weird, wasn't it?' and went back to being a monarchy while agreeing that we wouldn't talk about that again."
I think this take is funny, but I also think the British tendency to downplay the long-term effects of the ECW is misguided. Once “chop the king’s head off and abolish the monarchy” became a live option, the restored monarchs became an awful lot more deferential to Parliament (which proved itself perfectly happy to get rid of them and re-arrange the line of succession when they started getting ideas again.)
Sounds like Eddie Izzard’s style.
It seems to me that the French Revolution was strongly influenced by both the English Civil War and the American Revolution. The French just took things too far. (Though I suppose the English thought the same of us Yankees.)
And, to be fair, I think the Americans thought the same of Cromwell!
Also Matt, to be clear, I have enjoyed this post and the alternative history post. Keep cookin
The coalitions in the English Civil War were completely different than in the French revolution. Cromwell did not seize the church lands to fund the revolution— Henry VIII had already despoiled the church and Cromwell was as much if not more of a theocrat than Gallican Catholics. Ireton was hardly a leveler, much less an enragee, he was a social conservative who believed in the established economic order. Nor did the monarchies of Europe rally to the monarchist cause.
This is true, but if you squint it’s not all that different than if Lafayette’s coalition had stayed in charge.
I think in terms of lopping off the head of a king, then yes, it was a dress rehearsal. But unless you're going to equate Oliver Cromwell to Robespierre and his allies, then no, and I wouldn't do so. Both were very authoritarian at the least, but the wellsprings of their ideas were very different. Now had the Levellers been far more prominent in England I could see a case.
If you’re ever in town shoot me an email and we can grab a beer milan.singh@yale.edu
UK definitely wasn't untouched. Peterloo Massacre in 1819 saw the military sent in to disperse a crown of working people advocating for political reform, with 18 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
Most Americans have no idea how unfree pre-reform Britain was, they think of English liberty and don’t know that a stamp was required to publish a paper, that prides were deliberately kept high to prevent the formation of a penny press, and that trials for sedition were not uncommon. I doubt many educates Americans know who the Tolpuddle martyrs were. Britain was just egalitarian enough to avoid a French style revolution, but it was close.
William Blake was put on trial for Sedition in 1803 for saying "Damn the King" while quarrelling with an off duty soldier named Scholfield, who winds up being memorialized in the epic poem Jerusalem as a symbol of evil. So yes, Napoleonic era Britain was pretty unfree. Also, don't get in fights with great poets.
Small pedantic comment: the Estates-General (and subsequent National Assembly) didn't initially meet in Paris; it met in Versailles. It did, of course, eventually move to Paris after the women of the city more or less dragged the royal court there by the ear, but all of the early stuff - e.g. Tennis Court Oath - happened in Versailles. It's a bit like saying that a thing that actually happened in Newark happened in New York.
Again, pedantic, but part of what keeps me coming back to the SB comments is an appreciation for pedantry!
Fair enough. It's all easily accessible on the RER!
And the Newark airport is definitely a New York airport even though it’s not technically on the PATH!
Hot take!
Re: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/s-f-oakland-airport-name-19391937.php
The major role the Paris mobs played in the French Revolution is a lot of evidence for having the seat of government be in a separate location from the seat of culture and economics. If Congress had taken Gouveneur Morris' offer to build the Capitol on his estate in what is now The Bronx instead of a swamp in Maryland, I fear the NYC rabble may have played a much larger role in America's history than it already has.
It all comes down to zoning. Why do so many authoritarian states have capitals featuring broad open areas where mobs can congregate? With high density housing and fewer underutilized areas, those regimes would be more invulnerable.
I know you’re doing a bit here, but it probably still is worth noting that a lot of regimes put in big, open streets precisely so that soldiers can easily maneuver through the city and fight armed rebels more easily. A mob forming in a big public square isn’t really dangerous as long as you pay your troops well enough that they’ll disperse or kill them. An urban insurgency holed up in a maze of narrower streets is much harder to counter.
This was literally an explicit part of the justifications for Haussmann's redesign of Paris, although Haussmann himself seems to claim that he did that for cynical reasons to get more national financing, and there are questions about just how effective the redesign was from a military perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris#The_debate_about_the_military_purposes_of_Haussmann's_boulevards
Yes, that worked like a charm for Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.
Not so much for Hosni Mubarrak.
Mostly because Mubarak had cancer, information about it leaked out to the public, and most Egyptian officials assumed that he would die soon. The military wasn’t willing to stick its neck out or shoot their countrymen for a guy who wasn’t going to be around to reward them. (Indeed, a lot of autocracies fall when their leaders get sick and there’s not a clear succession plan.)
When did said information leak out? Certainly it came out in his trial, well after he had been overthrown. Prior to that, it was generally understood that his son Gamal would succeed him.
I don't find this argument about the military's reluctance to support him compelling.
This is an interesting theory, although sadly hard to test, as I reflect on it, because there are so few long-running examples of democratic countries without "metropoles" (in the sense of combined political, economic, financial, cultural, educational "capitals," like Paris, London, etc.) for comparison purposes.
Seoul is an example.
Seoul is weird, though, because it's so big in relation to the rest of the country that it simply dominates the rest. Metro Seoul is very close to 50% of the population of SK.
That’s if you include all of Gyeongi-Do in the metro ares, but that’s not the right way to look at it, I don’t think.
There are other artificial capitals like Brasilia and Canberra. There was Bonn in the old West Germany.
All the former major British colonies fit that description: America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa. Spain and Italy have typical metropoles, but they also have competing centers of cultural and economic power (Barcelona in Spain and Milan in Italy). Frankfurt is an economic competitor to Berlin, although if Germany wasn't split after WWII that might not have happened.
I agree the other British colonies fit that pattern, although India and South Africa had numerous political issues related to colonialism that make them sui generis and hard to extrapolate from for any purpose in this context. Meanwhile, Canada and Australia were set up with a lot of UK oversight during their early years that limited opportunities for local "mob pressure" on the capital. E.g., the final court for appeals in both the Canadian and Australian legal systems for many decades after their independence was still the Privy Council in London. (I presume the same was true of New Zealand, but I have a lot less familiarity with it.)
I actually *don't* think Spain or Italy have true metropoles -- Barcelona is too important in Spain and the northern industrial cities are too important in Italy. (I've discussed the identification of metropoles with my children, oddly enough.) Pre-WW2 Berlin was arguably a metropole of Germany, although even then there wasn't as much of a gulf in terms of population and economic significance between Berlin and several of the other major German cities as there has for centuries been, e.g., between Paris and the rest of France or London and the rest of England/Great Britain/UK.
By the way, I learned the above from the aforementioned Mike Duncan. For what it's worth, I'll echo Matt's recommendation and say that both the History of Rome (despite its initial slightly rough going) and Revolutions are just fantastic.
You skip that during the French Revolution, Parisians were major partisans of the revolutionary left, whereas rural peasants strongly opposed the revolutionaries. My understanding is that this opposition infuriated the revolutionaries, leading to organized violence.
White rural rage
I believe the rage was reciprocal, possibly moreso from the Urban Elite?
Actually true in the Vendée!
Surely the Vendée is the opposite, genocidal white urban rage directed against the rurals?
Still enraged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bc0x8bIKSA&ab_channel=FRANCE24English
The Marqis de La Fayette says the revolution is for the people but in this diner in Sainte-Genevieve-de-Bois...
Russian peasants likewise were loyal to the Tsar, and actively resisted Bolshevik land and farming collectivization.
The way I look at most revolutions and class-conflicts is as a competition between elite groups. The lower classes are just get pulled along for the ride and end up joining oe team or the other, but it's never "about" the lower classes.
Events like the French and Russian revolution branded themselves as "fighting for the lower / middle class against the elites" but they were really just power struggles between urban professional elites and mostly rural, landed noble elites.
I think it’s misleading to say they’re *just* power struggles and that there’s *no* sense in which they’re about the lower classes. They often do result in changes for the lower classes, which often lead to greater mobility out of those classes, whether those groups want them or not.
Sure, I probably overstated my case, but I think the point stands that the driving force is often elite competition.
To clarify by example, France on the eve of the Revolution had some of the most prosperous and healthy lower classes in all of Europe. It was another 100 years before the wretchedly oppressed Russians began agitating.
Not really, Russian peasants wanted to take the nobles land and didn’t want to give it to the commissars.
Not giving land to the commissars was resisting collectivization. Russian peasants loved the Tsar, hated the local nobility, and wanted to do with their land as they pleased.
Marx quite famously called the peasantry “a sack of potatoes” and generally ascribed revolutionary agency to first the urban bourgeoisie and later to organized industrial workers, and both Bismarck and Disraeli enfranchised the peasants as a counterweight to urban liberals. Mao made leftist revolution with a rural support base work in the 20th century, but before that it was definitely an urban phenomenon.
Matt writes:
"Left and right are largely about religion"
That this is just wrong can be seen in the Soviet Union, where in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the conservatives of the party were the hard-core atheists. If atheism is the established thing, the right will be atheists and atheists will be right coded.
The War of the Three Kingdoms (fancy name of the English Civil War) is another demonstration. (Highly recommend the podcast Pax Britannica here).
Right and left, to the extent that they're coherent concepts are about order, hierarchy and tradition vs leveling and liberation. Some people align right because they like the established thing itself, some people align right because they emotionally align with the establishment. Same on the left, like minority religions.
Is a gay secularist opposed to conservative Islam right or left? Depends on the context, in the Netherlands right apparently.
'Right and left, to the extent that they're coherent concepts are about order, hierarchy and tradition vs leveling and liberation. Some people align right because they like the established thing itself, some people align right because they emotionally align with the establishment. '
I think this exactly right. Religion comes into play as a tool that can be used by either side. Matt needs to widen his perspective.
But it *usually* falls on the right, even if not always. Just as any other element of the dichotomy *sometimes* switches due to local conditions, even though each one has a more common tendency.
I think this could be related to some international research that shows that in non-developed, non-Western countries the right does tend to combine appeals to traditional religion with preference for robust welfare states, and the left is often combining new social traditions with an openness to economic reforms. In this way it's about traditional authorities, both economic and social, defining the right.
Interesting take. Also I think the cleavages between people drawn to the right by order, by tradition, or by hierarchy or drawn to the left by freedom or leveling are profitable to keep in mind.
I’m order and freedom guy, which is why I feel out of place politically so often, I think. And when those qualities are opposed, I am in genuine conflict (e.g. homeless camping).
"... two different poles of thought — one that emphasizes the existence of a God-given hierarchy that must be upheld and entrenched and one that wants to tear it down in the name of equality and reason."
That's a flattering framing for the left (not that there's anything wrong with that). And it may describe a good chunk of reality. But here's Michael Oakeshott's framing in his 1962 book "Rationalism in Politics."
"The conservative is a man who is more concerned to preserve what is good in the past than to change it for the better. The liberal is a man who is more concerned to correct the ills of the past than to preserve what is good in it."
Apart from the sexist 1962 language, I find this framing to have a lot of explanatory power and relevance. It feels honest and balanced (if you're into that sort of thing) in that both ends of the spectrum could sign onto it.
Or maybe it's just that we congenital moderates can see both impulses in ourselves. "God-given hierarchy" not so much.
I think this is a useful division, and a person's attitude towards egalitarianism in its most abstract form is probably the best way to predict whether they consider themselves a leftist. Yet, I would like to have seen some consideration of an internal tension at the heart of the commitment to egalitarianism: the tendency of all social groups to establish hierarchies.
Matt writes "The primary structural weakness of left politics is that most people mostly like their traditions", which is indeed *a* structural weakness, but there's another, deeper structural weakness, which is that social organizations are, as a descriptive / historical matter, inevitably hierarchical. This makes sense, because social groups with unclear or non-existent hierarchies are miserable; breeding grounds for stress and violence. Thus, the revolutions of the 18th century replaced a hierarchy of birth with a hierarchy of money, while our current revolutionaries are replacing the hierarchy of money with a hierarchy of verbal SAT achievement (and, perhaps, a moral hierarchy).
*Which* hierarchical ox gets gored is probably just a matter of historically contingent coalition politics, but that's probably the start of a completely different conversation.
All groups have hierarchy to a non-zero degree but not all groups are equally hierarchical. Perfectly coherent to see hierarchy as an intrinsically bad thing to minimise, whilst accepting that comes with some trade-offs and sometimes those make more hierarchy less bad than the alternative, and that you'll never eliminate hierarchy entirely.
That's fair, but under-specified. It isn't self-evident what it means to minimize hierarchy. I don't mean to be nihilistic: I just don't think things get interesting unless you push harder on the question. Consider two parameters that influence the experience of hierarchy:
- The degree of difference between levels of the hierarchy - what prerogatives and deference higher-level members get.
- The size of each level of the hierarchy.
Which is "more hierarchical"? Group one, which is entirely flat, except for a single executive or monarch that has absolute power over everyone? Or group two, which is completely and clearly ranked, but each gradient step only has a fractional amount more privilege than the others? Does the mobility within the hierarchy matter?
What about multiple, overlapping hierarchies? One interesting feature of chimpanzee societies is that they often have a formal hierarchy that's completely legible (subordinates make a public show of submission), but it's often out of sync with informal hierarchies, which determines who shares food with whom, or who gets groomed and who does the grooming. Human societies are infinitely more complex, with endless overlapping, cross-cutting, and sometimes contradictory hierarchies, which too often gets reduced to one or two simple dimensions.
Fair point, but I think the "I know it when I see it" property of "less/more hierarchy" applies to literally everything of moral or political interest, and also a most other stuff outside maths. But your questions are good ones.
This analysis really only holds up to me if you're doing a horseshoe theory. The way the "far" or "true" left impulses absolutely mirror the religious impulse of the far right is blatant. Both extremes of this spectrum are horribly illiberal to the point I'm really not sold on the utility of terms.
I don't see it as a horseshoe, exactly.
My preferred metaphors would be more like two different magnets or gravity wells or whirlpools, both attracting people into different authoritarian spirals. Liberalism exists in navigating the currents between them.
As seen in the classic sidebar picture on the Neoliberal subreddit:
https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/xdvOdA-htZupQWLQj5AAwo1BZh8BTppLTobs46Yet1E.png
I love this!
I agree there are many roads to authoritarianism. I don't actually think horseshoe theory holds up all that well. Donald Trump's authoritarianism doesn't come from being a right wing extremist. But at this point aren't we just talking about a compass? Why not embrace more constrained spectrums?
More specifically why not embrace "liberal" in the pluralist vs totalitarian sense instead of the undifferentiated left=liberal formulation?
He’s not accepting “left=liberal”. He’s accepting that left-right is a meaningful distinction, that results from several precise axes that are all partially aligned. The liberal-absolutist axis is one precise axis that only partially aligns, and is in opposition to the market-welfare state axis that also only partially aligns.
Right, and where I got to is that I question the value of the left-right amalgamation rather than limiting oneself to those more constrained axes. Even if you squint your way to some sort of coherence like Matt is doing in this article, I'm not confident it makes the terminology any more illuminating in conversation.
I think each way of talking has its value. The specific axes make more sense ideologically speaking, while the left-right axis helps us see why ideologically apparently unrelated views have a strong (but not universal) tendency to come together in many different political contexts.
I had a high school teacher for International Studies who was a big proponent of the horseshoe theory. He had us all fill out a survey of our political beliefs on issues of divide in America at the time and then maps us all on a spectrum and put Stalin on one end and Hitler on the other and told us that everyone in the middle was "good" because they were far from either.
As the person in the class nearest Stalin, I took some umberage. I also pointed out that since some of the questions that got me to that position were my being strongly anti-death penalty, strongly free speech, and anti-incarceration for things like drug crimes, I thought Stalin and I had some fairly fundamental disagreement. I also said that I thought poor Dave who was by the Hitler dot was being unfairly treated since being pro-life and anti-tax where we disagreed weren't things that Hitler was more in favor of than Stalin.
Dave actually became a Democrat in college and found me on Facebook to thank me for being the only one to stand up for him against being called a Nazi by his high school teacher back in the day despite my being "Stalin". Perhaps realizing that being a leftist anti-authoritarian was going to make me more likely to stand up to that than his fellow compliant Republicans impacted his conversion!
That same teacher gave me one of my only Bs in High School because he marked me wrong for filling out our world map final by actually drawing in and labeling correctly all the countries created after the fall of the USSR (and the occupied territories of the West Bank) rather than comply with his provided answer key which he had been too lazy to update to not include the USSR even though it was 1993.
I will confess that he probably negatively impacted my view of folks who are reflexively moderate as a good in and of itself as being irrationally judgemental of folks with strongly held moral views and a little bit intellectually lazy to assume the middle of any issue is inherently rational. I am working on deprogramming myself from that which is part of why I am a subscriber.
Ironically, my mom brought up this B a few months ago when talking to my daughter about her obsession about keeping a 4.0. She pointed out that I had still gotten a college scholarship despite it although she said she assumed that with the wisdom of age I would probably admit that it would have been more beneficial to just use his answer key and get the A. I was shocked. I said "Hell no. My teenage rebellion caused me to memorize the location and border of every former Soviet Republic despite the fact that I was going to an Art major and that was definitely more helpful when I decided to switch to an International Studies degree than an extra A on my high school transcript would ever have been." When you add on to that the experience of learning to publicly defend myself from claims I was being "like Stalin" before that became common online discourse, I probably got more out of the B in that BS class than in many of my As.
Why can't there be three gravity wells with Liberalism having it's own gravity and failure mode? If it's because the left and right is more common, so it's better to just say that politics revolves around just those two modes then fine. I'd still argue that Liberalism deserves it's own seat at the table as a refutation of the left and the right and not just as another word for centrist.
Here’s where I think he went off the rails:
“To me (and an important reason I am mostly on the left as an emotional and intellectual matter, despite my many disagreements), this does not make sense.”
I mostly agree with the sentiment of the paragraph preceding that quoted bit, and I agree that the religious grounding for the argument often does not make sense. But, rather unlike Matt, I find myself mostly on the right as an emotional and intellectual matter. A conservative outlook certainly can be tied to a religious one, but it need not be. The more general case is that “the disputes” he mentions are ultimately disputes about human nature. The modern, extreme leftist view that, for example, the roles of “sex and gender” in society are imposed by culture reject (or largely do) human nature, but, as you point out, so do the more extreme right views, or at least the ones informed by religious tradition.
Horseshoe theory is pretty silly and the quickest indication someone's doing a false dichotomy. You can take any two axis spectrum, super impose a horseshoe in any orientation, and then start making claims about how two unlike things are actually more in common on this new dimension.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/
I don't think horseshoe theory holds up for my own reasons, but this refutation is a bad one. To the extent there is a coherence to the horseshoe it's that the farther you want to go with any particular issue the more power one most be willing to consolidate and wield towards one's ends. At some point which flavor of totalitarian control you choose to impose is less significant than the means.
I think one could take Matt's Circle Of Sensible Banality political chart, and create something like a Sphere of Reasonable Liberalism that is surrounded by hierarchical threats in all directions.
What is at the center of the sphere?
Obviously it’s a turtle.
And at the center of the turtle is another turtle.
I think the horseshoe makes sense because the horseshoe is a similar enough shape to a triangle, with an area towards the top where two corners are the most similar. This is the premise of Silver's post on the political triangle. https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
This is also why people who talk about the political horseshoe are usually more liberal than they are left or right, because they are trying to find a way to critique the left and right.
"You can take any two axis spectrum, super impose a horseshoe in any orientation, and then start making claims about how two unlike things are actually more in common on this new dimension."
I don't understand. Can you give an example of how this would work, for, say, the two-axis spectrum (N-S vs. E-W) of addresses in Manhattan?
Well said.
“The basic principle that everyone should be treated equally without regard to race is actually more controversial than conservatives like to admit, as you see any time you ask them about racial profiling and statistical discrimination.”
I think this is a straw-man argument. Nobody (almost literally nobody) thinks race should be ignored in every circumstance. If somebody gets mugged by a guy with a fair complexion and blond hair, nobody will quarrel when the police limit their search to white people. The idea that people should be treated equally without regard to their race means that people should be treated equally without regard to their race when their race is irrelevant to the issue at hand (which it almost always is).
Figuring out those edge cases where race might be relevant - that’s what the disagreement is about.
Buddy you were arguing for “how come cops can’t do some racial profiling?” a few weeks back
Yes, exactly. The discussion should be (in my opinion) “when should race be relevant for policing?”, not simplistically claiming that it is never acceptable to consider race.
So there was this guy, smarter than you, who said that people should be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Would behoove you to heed that idea. Very easy to say profiling by cops is kosher when you know you’re never the one who’s going to be on the receiving end.
I don't know what spat you two got into previously that is leading to only ad hominems, but there is a more interesting debate to be had here than you are allowing for by just calling him racist and stupid. In many contexts, for example, there are many people on the Left who want people treated differently by skin color. For starters Yale probably wants it to be part of the admissions process.
But on the crime part the interesting starting point is something like in Zack's first example, where a crime is witnessed and people matching the criminal's physical description are profiled. It's hard to argues against some amount of profiling in that case. At the other extreme, simply profiling people on the basis or ethnicity alone is, well, extreme, and places a too-high burden on the people profiled.
But given the subjectivity and judgement calls inherent in effective policing there is a wide area between those extremes where intelligent debate and data would be very useful, because some amount of profiling based on superficial characteristics, some related to identity, are almost inevitable.
Two points: I am on record saying that Yale’s admissions policies with regard to race are bad; and again, it’s easy to say oh, we should do more profiling when you’re not the one who’s going to get profiled.
The part about Yale is why this part from Matt struck me as letting the left off the hook:
"The basic principle that everyone should be treated equally without regard to race is actually more controversial than conservatives like to admit"
But to the other part of your response:
"it’s easy to say oh, we should do more profiling when you’re not the one who’s going to get profiled"
Ok, noted. Now what? That doesn't really tell us much about what to do about issues of profiling. If a shooter in my neighborhood looked and dressed like me I wouldn't like to be profiled, but that doesn't end the discussion. By the same token it's easy to avoid thinking deeply about policing if you're not very likely to be a victim of crime.
This piece btw that MY linked to is really good on this and worth re-reading https://www.slowboring.com/p/tim-scotts-wise-words?utm_medium=email
One change that I’d like to see on the left is a commitment to public order. This would take away the argument that the religious right makes that lack of religion will lead to anarchy. It could but doesn’t have to.
Parties of the left clearly do commit to public order, both for pragmatic political reasons and also 'personal' ones related to the risks that elites face. But the message of this piece is that 'the left' will always contain people who are opposed to conventional understandings of 'public order', or at least more conditional about them than the median member of society. And people will always suspect that 'the left' are less trustworthy in their support of 'public order' because such thinking is always going to be the well from which the individuals in parties of the left are drawn.
I live in the SF Bay Area, so I don’t just “suspect”. I know for a fact that the left turns a blind eye to crime and poor public behavior in general.
Yes, you're just not very left-wing.
It’s not clear why leftist shouldn’t value public order for its own sake, i.e. not just pragmatically to not lose voters to the right.
Matt’s thesis is that leftists are levelers: if something is useful for leveling, they pick it up and try to use it, if not, they drop it and try to break it.
If public order means violently arresting vagrants, Jean Valjean shoplifter types, or public drug users and throwing them in inhumane jails, this is clearly not helping the leveling project.
If public order means providing even the residents of our poorest neighborhoods with safe and pleasant public spaces, this clearly is helping the leveling project.
So, leftists are ambivalent.
One of the recurring examples of shoplifting is the Jean Valjean shoplifter type but almost none of the shoplifting in the West is about poor people stealing bread or a little hungry boy stealing an apple. We have food stamps/soup kitchens so there's no real need to commit a crime to feed yourself. I've grown up in a poor country (India) and witnessed real poverty. Almost everywhere around the world, poor people are skinny because of malnutrition. In the US, they are fat, like the general population.
Basically, public order involves following the laws which by definition are imposed by the power structures of a society. The more those power structures are viewed as unjust (a leftist perspective), the more the law isn't to be respected. MY had an excellent post on this, the idea of anarchism as being left-coded, a few weeks back.
Poor behavior in public places doesn't always violate laws, it's more about cultural values. I visited Seoul recently and people are just better behaved in public. Also, I would like the left to think about how affected individuals would treat criminals if there were no laws and they were allowed to punish them according to their own values. I grew up in India and shoplifters get brutally beaten by the public before the cops arrive. The lack of seriousness in dealing with these issues will almost certainly lead to people taking the law in their own hands.
I don't think it's this, exactly, and leftists (even left-wing anarchists) aren't necessarily poorly disposed toward rules. Equality itself is a kind of rule. The problem is with enforcement. Punishment inherently is somewhat non-egalitarian (we generally want to prevent suffering but for this particular person we deliberately inflict it) and the more it tends toward creating a marginalized status of person, and/or is associated with disadvantaged status (like poverty and race), the more problematic it might seem.
I’m not because the left-wing in CA sucks.
Agree and it seems that we are several people on this forum who are economically and culturally left to center-left while also having a strong preference for law and order and controlled immigration. We don’t neatly line up according to the established left-right axis. I guess the combination of egalitarianism and semi-authoritarianism (for lack of a better word) is unusual among humans. Egalitarians tend to be more anarchy prone/loving, and anti-egalitarians more authoritarian.
In Scandinavia you often have a split within the left where social democratic parties are center-left on economic and cultural issues plus semi-authoritarian on crime and immigration, while leftist parties are left wing on economic and cultural issues and semi-anarchic/anti-authoritarian on crime and immigration. In the US these two factions are uneasily lumped together in one political party