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.
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?
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.”
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!
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.
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.
"... 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.
In defense of the "haha the left is being religious" point, the steel man is "us religious folks may have some irrational beliefs, but it frees us up to be rational elsewhere. Also, our religious tradition has been around for centuries, the current progressive obsession may be over next Tuesday."
And that actually brings me to a frustration with the right at the moment, they're extremely susceptible to momentary freakouts. Avoiding momentary freakouts is supposed to be the virtue of the right.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
I think historically the left has picked up some heuristics regarding religion that do not necessarily serve it well in modern, secular times. When religion is extremely powerful and privileged in society, with extravagant lifestyles for bishops or priests, and ecclesiastical courts that can hold sway over private life, a strong assault on religion as the "opiate of the masses" makes some sense because you really need to strike at the core of the church's claim to authority, the idea that it's power is divinely right.
I do think there are some specific niche cases where established religion has too much power, but by and large today the power of religion is through the impact of voters who hold religiously inspired views. It's hard to persuade voters to change their mind when you're attacking their views directly. And elsewhere religion is so weak in the culture attacking the religious institutions just seems like kicking someone while they are down.
I'm glad this is going to be a four part series, as it will give me more challenges to my longstanding resistance to a simplistic left/right one dimensional ideological scale, even when I sometimes relent to it as to how overwhelmingly common it is. I've always felt that the concept of forcing everyone toward one of only two poles is not good, as it's similarly forcing people to take sides on issues that they may not have a side on, or are opposed to. I think it leads to a quite unhealthy discourse that forces conformity to one side, and disapproval and disdain come to any who don't want to fully conform.
And although I'm glad Matt offered several examples of where who is supporting/opposing the hierarchy is less clear, I think there's plenty of times where people have major disagreements on what is hierarchical. A recent example that came to my mind is a provocative take Matt recently had about his strong support of automated traffic enforcement. Opposition to it is generally coded as a left wing view on being discriminatory against disadvantaged groups, but Matt argued that instead its *support* should be seen as in turn supportive of those groups, since it is a benefit to them to make their neighborhoods safer.
I could further extrapolate this to law enforcement in general: supporting the police is overwhelmingly seen as a right wing pro-hierarchy view, but one could argue that having a police force is a *left wing* view in the sense that in its absence, organized mobs and gangs would emerge to create their own hierarchies and implement rules that would be much more infringing on general liberal principles.
As can be seen, I'm still skeptical, but I'm looking forward to the next three parts to see if my priors can shift.
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.
Is this thing on? Usually we get comments by now.
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.
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?
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.”
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!
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.
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.
"... 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.
In defense of the "haha the left is being religious" point, the steel man is "us religious folks may have some irrational beliefs, but it frees us up to be rational elsewhere. Also, our religious tradition has been around for centuries, the current progressive obsession may be over next Tuesday."
And that actually brings me to a frustration with the right at the moment, they're extremely susceptible to momentary freakouts. Avoiding momentary freakouts is supposed to be the virtue of the right.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
I think historically the left has picked up some heuristics regarding religion that do not necessarily serve it well in modern, secular times. When religion is extremely powerful and privileged in society, with extravagant lifestyles for bishops or priests, and ecclesiastical courts that can hold sway over private life, a strong assault on religion as the "opiate of the masses" makes some sense because you really need to strike at the core of the church's claim to authority, the idea that it's power is divinely right.
I do think there are some specific niche cases where established religion has too much power, but by and large today the power of religion is through the impact of voters who hold religiously inspired views. It's hard to persuade voters to change their mind when you're attacking their views directly. And elsewhere religion is so weak in the culture attacking the religious institutions just seems like kicking someone while they are down.
I'm glad this is going to be a four part series, as it will give me more challenges to my longstanding resistance to a simplistic left/right one dimensional ideological scale, even when I sometimes relent to it as to how overwhelmingly common it is. I've always felt that the concept of forcing everyone toward one of only two poles is not good, as it's similarly forcing people to take sides on issues that they may not have a side on, or are opposed to. I think it leads to a quite unhealthy discourse that forces conformity to one side, and disapproval and disdain come to any who don't want to fully conform.
And although I'm glad Matt offered several examples of where who is supporting/opposing the hierarchy is less clear, I think there's plenty of times where people have major disagreements on what is hierarchical. A recent example that came to my mind is a provocative take Matt recently had about his strong support of automated traffic enforcement. Opposition to it is generally coded as a left wing view on being discriminatory against disadvantaged groups, but Matt argued that instead its *support* should be seen as in turn supportive of those groups, since it is a benefit to them to make their neighborhoods safer.
I could further extrapolate this to law enforcement in general: supporting the police is overwhelmingly seen as a right wing pro-hierarchy view, but one could argue that having a police force is a *left wing* view in the sense that in its absence, organized mobs and gangs would emerge to create their own hierarchies and implement rules that would be much more infringing on general liberal principles.
As can be seen, I'm still skeptical, but I'm looking forward to the next three parts to see if my priors can shift.
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.