I'm impressed you know Danish party history. It gets even more funny in the fact that venstre/left split in 1905, with the left wing of the party founding Radikale venstre, which is litteraly the radical left in Danish but is actually the most neoliberal centre party in politics today. To add to the confusion former left chairman and PM Løkke Rasmussen foundet Moderaterne (the moderates), who are to the left of venstre and very close politically to radikale venstre - the radical left.
I'm sort of conservative (compared to other educated people in New England -- in Texas I'd be called a liberal). I'm an atheist, though somewhat sentimental about the Catholicism I grew up with.
I'd say my conservative point of view is: human society has gone through its own sort of evolution, which is continuing, slowly. There is progress, and it's mostly good. But I fear the progressive "best and brightest" don't fully understand the systems they so enthusiastically want to tamper with.
Matt's analysis overlooks the consolidation of secular hierarchies ostensibly based on rationalism or "expertise" (e.g., the highly regimented organization of health care) -- which have become, by far, the most salient manifestations of hierarchy in contemporary societies. It doesn't account for the condition observed by Kafka, or for "Brave New World."
The Enlightenment Deists (or even Spinoza) -- hinging the self-determination of the individual on "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God" -- were not atheists (even halfheartedly), despite a long-standing leftist tendency to imply that they were merely at a way-station along that road.
There's also a crucial difference between equality of opportunity (regardless of ethnicity), and the latter-day (race-conscious) notion of "equity," that's obfuscated (rather than clarified) by any attempt to consider both as characteristic of "a leveling impulse."
I would suggest two axes as more valid for viewing contemporary conditions: a horizontal (left/right) axis between collectivism and individualism, and a vertical axis denoting degree of authoritarianism. (Unlike many so-called libertarians, I don't equate capitalism -- especially corporate/managerial capitalism -- with "economic freedom.")
Where would Joseph Schumpeter fall on Matt's left/right axis? How about Isaiah Berlin?
Perhaps Chou En-Lai was correct (however apocryphally) about the French Revolution, after all! ;-)
I wholeheartedly agree with what I think of as "Heather Cox Richardson framing" - in which political history can mostly be seen as a struggle between authoritarians and egalitarians.
I'm an evolutionary biologist, so it wouldn't surprise anyone to hear that the question of whether there might be biological underpinnings to HCR framing has been percolating in my mind. I'd be curious to hear any brainstorming or push-back on the hypothesis posted here:
There is a lot of interesting stuff in this post. I enjoyed the details on FR seating arrangements. But I am not convinced by the argument. The post doesn't account for the idea that "liberalism" is its own thing, not just something somewhere between wherever the Right and Left are right now. I don't think "liberalism" as something different from "leftism" would have made sense to the French Revolutionaries, but it definitely was important during the 19th - 20th Century battle of ideas between capitalism and socialism.
Maybe part of the idea of the post is that the "capitalism v. socialism" debate is over in the 21st century b/c no one really believes in socialism any more, but MY believes that the "left v. right" has survived the death of "capitalism v. socialism." So, maybe I am talking myself into agreement, but still not sure where that leaves liberalism.
Big fan of this article overall. I feel like political nerds are sometimes opposed to the left-right distinction because it mitigates their ability to derive some special identity from their political leanings.
Where does all this “come from” in a certain sense? Like are conservative-liberal impulses biological? Is there a dynamic to the way civilizations have evolved?
If we're truly interested in simplicity here, why not just boil the Right-Left binary down to Tradition vs. Change? The Right's adherence to / respect for religion is downstream of their conservative instincts.
However, we can go one step deeper. Right and Left have different metaphysics. Left believes in simple determinism, Right believes in simple free will.
Left: "Don't punish crime--it's nobody's fault--and don't reward outperformance for the same reason."
Right: "Don't be poor--it's a choice--and, don't be gay for the same reason."
This leads to very different ideas about what fair public policy looks like. Anti-market sentiment on the Left is downstream of their idea of fairness. Law and order sentiment on the Right is downstream of theirs. This also explains why the Left has often been more forgiving of the Right than vice versa within liberal democracies - a deterministic metaphysics lends itself to pity: "Those rednecks on the Right. It's not their fault that they're ignorant." The Right's metaphysics lends itself to aggrieved resentment at the "injustice" of the Left's preferred policies and hatred of those who pursue them.
Recently, the Left has been adopting a more identity-based theory of determinism. All those who are not white, cis, male, etc. are at the whims of society and should not be held accountable for their actions. Those who are white, cis, male, etc. are, at the very least, under suspicion of having free will, and some control over their life outcomes.
However, in fairness to Matt, the Right's belief in simple free will may be supported by belief in God, and the Left's belief in simple determinism may be supported by a "rational" scientific materialism.
Defining the distinction between Right and Left as "Tradition vs. Progress" loads the dice in the Left's favor. "Tradition vs. Change" would be more precise, as well as more neutral, I think. The "like" is because the rest of your reasoning departed from the bias implicit in that first sentence.
Good point! Updated my comment to reflect (the irony here is that I was a bit irritated by the bias implicit in Matt's definition and then was careless with my own word choice)
I hear you on this. I am on the center left because I believe that hierarchy is necessary for good order and a functioning society, but hierarchy can only by justified by that utility. Any arbitrary or excessive hierarchy, any hierarchy that doesn’t serve a necessary social function, is an affront to the dignity of those below and should be eliminated. Positions of power should be about responsibility, not privilege.
I'm center right and agree with you. Hierarchies should be persistent but temporary as society's needs change, and should be hierarchies of service, not simply status.
Yea, I am sorry Matt but I just completely disagree
The modern Left in the West is clearly the elitist one. They are the party of the cultural heights and forcing their opinions on the rest of us, and the ones defending their enforced beliefs by harming free speech (see Scotland). The whole reason why I the Left-Right dichotomy is stupid is because it breaks in the case of reality. The left is about breaking the hierarchy and the right is about defending it. Well what about when the Left becomes the hierarchy? We have several Left wing examples where they caught the car and now run things. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Vietnam are all Communist, Left Wing, nations which are all also the hierarchy. They are just as capable of nationalism as the rest of us, and are just as capable of opposing free markets when it suits them.
It’s also quite clear that now religion is definitively NOT the hierarchy as the West secularists and abandons religion. Ross Douthat and writers like him speak for a declining share of the pie. Furthermore Leftists happily support nationalist causes and religions when it suits them (see Hamas).
To me the whole notion of left/right is simply barely useful when narrowly focused and personally I dislike the framework. Not every social movement that’s secular suddenly becomes accurate. I view the current Leftist push to make euthanasia permanently and ubiquitously legal part of that, and the demand that we pretend sex is a social construct another. Leftists movements are perfectly capable of being driven by dogma and philosophy instead of rationality (see Marxism).
Those awful, oppressive far-leftisms do evil things *in the name of equality*. Wokeness, Communism, etc. are what you get from people who are so passionate in their belief that inequality is completely unacceptable that they become willing to use oppressive and violent means to tear down the hierarchies they hate. These movements get terrible results in real life of course, and Communism famously ended up just as unequal as the monarchies it replaced, but an excessive passion for equality was the original motivation. So Matt’s schema does still hold true.
I’m struggling with the idea that religion itself is rightwing. To me, seems like some religions are about hierarchy and order, and those are rightwing. Others are more individualistic and egalitarian and those are leftwing. For example, Congregationalists were the left in the English Civil War. Presbyterians started on the left but flipped after the regicide. The Church of England was the right. These Protestant denominations sort in degree of hierarchy or central authority. And Congregationalists aren’t an ersatz religion. They just don’t have bishops.
Another thing is that, if you attend a sermon at a mainline Protestant church or a reform synagogue today, you’ll hear essentially a microwaved version of what you would read in the NYT opinion section. (I’m never getting over land acknowledgments, which to me are the same as prayer or creed recitation.)
I guess I can square the religion thing by noting that more rightwing religions tend to have more structure, things like rituals, fixed hierarchies, creeds, scripture, and that structure is defined at the level of a larger group. So maybe Congregationalists and mainline religious are just proto-secular, in that they haven’t dived into individual/egalitarian. And it seems true enough that there’s not so much of a “secular right.”
I think that it's fair to classify religion as generally right leaning, but with huge caveats and sizeable cutouts, as you say. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Mainline Protestantism, and Judaism all tend to be at least somewhat supportive of established authority if the authority is viewed as normally acting justly, through a preference for social peace and the desire, as Saint Basil the Great put it, "that within their peace we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty." That doesn't at all prevent them, of course, from opposing religious persecution, and it's practically impossible to square doctrinaire right wing economic thought with Catholic and Orthodox social teaching, or Protestant and Jewish social activism. So support for the status quo from religious people always comes with exceptions and red lines, mostly left leaning.
None of the above applies to the MAGA churches, but aside from the name that they've misappropriated, there's very little left about them that's "Christian".
I tend to what I'd call a "character" view of left and right but many would regard it as "psychological".
I think it overstates but also usefully clarifies the bifurcation of the left: one verson of leftness is an instinctive favouring of the powerless over the powerful: this is mostly economic, though it also expressed itself in the various movements to expand the right to vote, and in movements to treat capital wealth as equal to landed wealth rather than inferior. It's an anti-hierarchial view. The extreme versions are in opposition to all hierarchy - abolishing the concept of management, etc.
The other version of leftness is an instinctive favouring of weird people against the conventional. This is where the support for LGBT+ comes from, most obviously.
Racial equality is obviously driven by both.
The British Liberal Party (and its modern Liberal Democrat successor) has, as it's official objective in the party constitution that "no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity", which I think does a good job of expressing the two strands (in terms of poverty and conformity) of left-wing thought [I don't know where the phrase came from, it appears as far back as the 1950s] and the concept of being "enslaved by ignorance" rather points to why education is such a left-wing value.
You can certainly interpret anti-conformity as being pro-chaos, and the right certainly does: but I think it's fair to see the desire for order as being the fundamental character of the right. This is why the right is not instinctively pro-market; they're instinctively pro-current-winners (which nets out as being relatively pro-market in a market economy).
There are some things that don't align well with either - the libertarian position which favours disruptive new small businesses overthrowing the existing economic order and creating new entrepreneurial billionaires and disfavours established large businesses is leftwing in the sense of being nonconformist but rightwing in the sense of being in favour of economic inequality.
Here's the problem with this sort of analysis. The French Revolution was largely about questions of taking power away from the Crown, the Church, and the landed nobility with the Left being for that to various degrees and the Right being against it to various degrees. And while this is helpful for thinking about European politics broadly in the 19th and to a lesser degree 20th Century (see the ultra-royalists in restoration France or German conservatives who wanted to put the Kaiser's nephew back on the throne during the Weimar and early Nazi years) it breaks down with America where we've never had a king, an established religion, or much of a landed nobility (the closest thing I guess would be the slave owning plantation families of the Ante-Bellum south) since the creation of the country. The reality is American poltiics doesn't easily fit into the box because it's driven by things that largely didn't exist in 19th Century Europe like racial divisions (things are changing now though) that confuse a lot. Start looking at other countries and Left-Right is even left helpful. Mexican politics is basically still a battle of the PRI (which is sort of left and right?) versus everyone else from socialists to conservatives who hate the PRI like Vicente Fox. Japan has been dominated by one party since 1955 etc etc.
It's a useful shorthand in someways (less government vs more) but when you start getting down into the weeds it becomes less helpful and writers who want to be clear should think about other divisions like authoritarianism vs liberal pluarlism, libertarianism vs government involvement, politics organized around racial/ethnic identities vs class based interests. Nobody's trying to restore the king or create or return land to "the emegres" here.
Did you see the Tucker interview with the Palestinian priest in Bethlehem last night?
An interesting example of this kind of thing. Even the most religious people in the world are turbo-libs when they are a super-minority.
Was also interesting in listening to him complain about American Evangelicals being completely insane for trying to bring about the apocalypse and his confusion on people don't consider Christian Zionists to be antisemitic.
I'm impressed you know Danish party history. It gets even more funny in the fact that venstre/left split in 1905, with the left wing of the party founding Radikale venstre, which is litteraly the radical left in Danish but is actually the most neoliberal centre party in politics today. To add to the confusion former left chairman and PM Løkke Rasmussen foundet Moderaterne (the moderates), who are to the left of venstre and very close politically to radikale venstre - the radical left.
I'm sort of conservative (compared to other educated people in New England -- in Texas I'd be called a liberal). I'm an atheist, though somewhat sentimental about the Catholicism I grew up with.
I'd say my conservative point of view is: human society has gone through its own sort of evolution, which is continuing, slowly. There is progress, and it's mostly good. But I fear the progressive "best and brightest" don't fully understand the systems they so enthusiastically want to tamper with.
Matt's analysis overlooks the consolidation of secular hierarchies ostensibly based on rationalism or "expertise" (e.g., the highly regimented organization of health care) -- which have become, by far, the most salient manifestations of hierarchy in contemporary societies. It doesn't account for the condition observed by Kafka, or for "Brave New World."
The Enlightenment Deists (or even Spinoza) -- hinging the self-determination of the individual on "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God" -- were not atheists (even halfheartedly), despite a long-standing leftist tendency to imply that they were merely at a way-station along that road.
There's also a crucial difference between equality of opportunity (regardless of ethnicity), and the latter-day (race-conscious) notion of "equity," that's obfuscated (rather than clarified) by any attempt to consider both as characteristic of "a leveling impulse."
I would suggest two axes as more valid for viewing contemporary conditions: a horizontal (left/right) axis between collectivism and individualism, and a vertical axis denoting degree of authoritarianism. (Unlike many so-called libertarians, I don't equate capitalism -- especially corporate/managerial capitalism -- with "economic freedom.")
Where would Joseph Schumpeter fall on Matt's left/right axis? How about Isaiah Berlin?
Perhaps Chou En-Lai was correct (however apocryphally) about the French Revolution, after all! ;-)
I wholeheartedly agree with what I think of as "Heather Cox Richardson framing" - in which political history can mostly be seen as a struggle between authoritarians and egalitarians.
I'm an evolutionary biologist, so it wouldn't surprise anyone to hear that the question of whether there might be biological underpinnings to HCR framing has been percolating in my mind. I'd be curious to hear any brainstorming or push-back on the hypothesis posted here:
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/why-i-love-domestic-jesus?r=5cli6
There is a lot of interesting stuff in this post. I enjoyed the details on FR seating arrangements. But I am not convinced by the argument. The post doesn't account for the idea that "liberalism" is its own thing, not just something somewhere between wherever the Right and Left are right now. I don't think "liberalism" as something different from "leftism" would have made sense to the French Revolutionaries, but it definitely was important during the 19th - 20th Century battle of ideas between capitalism and socialism.
Maybe part of the idea of the post is that the "capitalism v. socialism" debate is over in the 21st century b/c no one really believes in socialism any more, but MY believes that the "left v. right" has survived the death of "capitalism v. socialism." So, maybe I am talking myself into agreement, but still not sure where that leaves liberalism.
I'm confused what the ideological tension is between environmentalism and defending abortion rights. I get the Child Tax Credit part though.
Big fan of this article overall. I feel like political nerds are sometimes opposed to the left-right distinction because it mitigates their ability to derive some special identity from their political leanings.
Where does all this “come from” in a certain sense? Like are conservative-liberal impulses biological? Is there a dynamic to the way civilizations have evolved?
If we're truly interested in simplicity here, why not just boil the Right-Left binary down to Tradition vs. Change? The Right's adherence to / respect for religion is downstream of their conservative instincts.
However, we can go one step deeper. Right and Left have different metaphysics. Left believes in simple determinism, Right believes in simple free will.
Left: "Don't punish crime--it's nobody's fault--and don't reward outperformance for the same reason."
Right: "Don't be poor--it's a choice--and, don't be gay for the same reason."
This leads to very different ideas about what fair public policy looks like. Anti-market sentiment on the Left is downstream of their idea of fairness. Law and order sentiment on the Right is downstream of theirs. This also explains why the Left has often been more forgiving of the Right than vice versa within liberal democracies - a deterministic metaphysics lends itself to pity: "Those rednecks on the Right. It's not their fault that they're ignorant." The Right's metaphysics lends itself to aggrieved resentment at the "injustice" of the Left's preferred policies and hatred of those who pursue them.
Recently, the Left has been adopting a more identity-based theory of determinism. All those who are not white, cis, male, etc. are at the whims of society and should not be held accountable for their actions. Those who are white, cis, male, etc. are, at the very least, under suspicion of having free will, and some control over their life outcomes.
However, in fairness to Matt, the Right's belief in simple free will may be supported by belief in God, and the Left's belief in simple determinism may be supported by a "rational" scientific materialism.
Defining the distinction between Right and Left as "Tradition vs. Progress" loads the dice in the Left's favor. "Tradition vs. Change" would be more precise, as well as more neutral, I think. The "like" is because the rest of your reasoning departed from the bias implicit in that first sentence.
Good point! Updated my comment to reflect (the irony here is that I was a bit irritated by the bias implicit in Matt's definition and then was careless with my own word choice)
I hear you on this. I am on the center left because I believe that hierarchy is necessary for good order and a functioning society, but hierarchy can only by justified by that utility. Any arbitrary or excessive hierarchy, any hierarchy that doesn’t serve a necessary social function, is an affront to the dignity of those below and should be eliminated. Positions of power should be about responsibility, not privilege.
I'm center right and agree with you. Hierarchies should be persistent but temporary as society's needs change, and should be hierarchies of service, not simply status.
Yea, I am sorry Matt but I just completely disagree
The modern Left in the West is clearly the elitist one. They are the party of the cultural heights and forcing their opinions on the rest of us, and the ones defending their enforced beliefs by harming free speech (see Scotland). The whole reason why I the Left-Right dichotomy is stupid is because it breaks in the case of reality. The left is about breaking the hierarchy and the right is about defending it. Well what about when the Left becomes the hierarchy? We have several Left wing examples where they caught the car and now run things. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Vietnam are all Communist, Left Wing, nations which are all also the hierarchy. They are just as capable of nationalism as the rest of us, and are just as capable of opposing free markets when it suits them.
It’s also quite clear that now religion is definitively NOT the hierarchy as the West secularists and abandons religion. Ross Douthat and writers like him speak for a declining share of the pie. Furthermore Leftists happily support nationalist causes and religions when it suits them (see Hamas).
To me the whole notion of left/right is simply barely useful when narrowly focused and personally I dislike the framework. Not every social movement that’s secular suddenly becomes accurate. I view the current Leftist push to make euthanasia permanently and ubiquitously legal part of that, and the demand that we pretend sex is a social construct another. Leftists movements are perfectly capable of being driven by dogma and philosophy instead of rationality (see Marxism).
Those awful, oppressive far-leftisms do evil things *in the name of equality*. Wokeness, Communism, etc. are what you get from people who are so passionate in their belief that inequality is completely unacceptable that they become willing to use oppressive and violent means to tear down the hierarchies they hate. These movements get terrible results in real life of course, and Communism famously ended up just as unequal as the monarchies it replaced, but an excessive passion for equality was the original motivation. So Matt’s schema does still hold true.
I’m struggling with the idea that religion itself is rightwing. To me, seems like some religions are about hierarchy and order, and those are rightwing. Others are more individualistic and egalitarian and those are leftwing. For example, Congregationalists were the left in the English Civil War. Presbyterians started on the left but flipped after the regicide. The Church of England was the right. These Protestant denominations sort in degree of hierarchy or central authority. And Congregationalists aren’t an ersatz religion. They just don’t have bishops.
Another thing is that, if you attend a sermon at a mainline Protestant church or a reform synagogue today, you’ll hear essentially a microwaved version of what you would read in the NYT opinion section. (I’m never getting over land acknowledgments, which to me are the same as prayer or creed recitation.)
I guess I can square the religion thing by noting that more rightwing religions tend to have more structure, things like rituals, fixed hierarchies, creeds, scripture, and that structure is defined at the level of a larger group. So maybe Congregationalists and mainline religious are just proto-secular, in that they haven’t dived into individual/egalitarian. And it seems true enough that there’s not so much of a “secular right.”
I think that it's fair to classify religion as generally right leaning, but with huge caveats and sizeable cutouts, as you say. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Mainline Protestantism, and Judaism all tend to be at least somewhat supportive of established authority if the authority is viewed as normally acting justly, through a preference for social peace and the desire, as Saint Basil the Great put it, "that within their peace we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty." That doesn't at all prevent them, of course, from opposing religious persecution, and it's practically impossible to square doctrinaire right wing economic thought with Catholic and Orthodox social teaching, or Protestant and Jewish social activism. So support for the status quo from religious people always comes with exceptions and red lines, mostly left leaning.
None of the above applies to the MAGA churches, but aside from the name that they've misappropriated, there's very little left about them that's "Christian".
I had never thought of global warming as Ragnarrok. But now I can’t unsee it.
I tend to what I'd call a "character" view of left and right but many would regard it as "psychological".
I think it overstates but also usefully clarifies the bifurcation of the left: one verson of leftness is an instinctive favouring of the powerless over the powerful: this is mostly economic, though it also expressed itself in the various movements to expand the right to vote, and in movements to treat capital wealth as equal to landed wealth rather than inferior. It's an anti-hierarchial view. The extreme versions are in opposition to all hierarchy - abolishing the concept of management, etc.
The other version of leftness is an instinctive favouring of weird people against the conventional. This is where the support for LGBT+ comes from, most obviously.
Racial equality is obviously driven by both.
The British Liberal Party (and its modern Liberal Democrat successor) has, as it's official objective in the party constitution that "no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity", which I think does a good job of expressing the two strands (in terms of poverty and conformity) of left-wing thought [I don't know where the phrase came from, it appears as far back as the 1950s] and the concept of being "enslaved by ignorance" rather points to why education is such a left-wing value.
You can certainly interpret anti-conformity as being pro-chaos, and the right certainly does: but I think it's fair to see the desire for order as being the fundamental character of the right. This is why the right is not instinctively pro-market; they're instinctively pro-current-winners (which nets out as being relatively pro-market in a market economy).
There are some things that don't align well with either - the libertarian position which favours disruptive new small businesses overthrowing the existing economic order and creating new entrepreneurial billionaires and disfavours established large businesses is leftwing in the sense of being nonconformist but rightwing in the sense of being in favour of economic inequality.
Here's the problem with this sort of analysis. The French Revolution was largely about questions of taking power away from the Crown, the Church, and the landed nobility with the Left being for that to various degrees and the Right being against it to various degrees. And while this is helpful for thinking about European politics broadly in the 19th and to a lesser degree 20th Century (see the ultra-royalists in restoration France or German conservatives who wanted to put the Kaiser's nephew back on the throne during the Weimar and early Nazi years) it breaks down with America where we've never had a king, an established religion, or much of a landed nobility (the closest thing I guess would be the slave owning plantation families of the Ante-Bellum south) since the creation of the country. The reality is American poltiics doesn't easily fit into the box because it's driven by things that largely didn't exist in 19th Century Europe like racial divisions (things are changing now though) that confuse a lot. Start looking at other countries and Left-Right is even left helpful. Mexican politics is basically still a battle of the PRI (which is sort of left and right?) versus everyone else from socialists to conservatives who hate the PRI like Vicente Fox. Japan has been dominated by one party since 1955 etc etc.
It's a useful shorthand in someways (less government vs more) but when you start getting down into the weeds it becomes less helpful and writers who want to be clear should think about other divisions like authoritarianism vs liberal pluarlism, libertarianism vs government involvement, politics organized around racial/ethnic identities vs class based interests. Nobody's trying to restore the king or create or return land to "the emegres" here.
You really need to hook up with a great cartoon illustrator and do graphical versions of your big-picture swings such as this one.
Did you see the Tucker interview with the Palestinian priest in Bethlehem last night?
An interesting example of this kind of thing. Even the most religious people in the world are turbo-libs when they are a super-minority.
Was also interesting in listening to him complain about American Evangelicals being completely insane for trying to bring about the apocalypse and his confusion on people don't consider Christian Zionists to be antisemitic.