What the left gets right

Lofty moral ambitions, and a culture that values intelligence and systematic thinking

In the first post of this series, I defended the utility of the general left/right political dichotomy and offered a little sketch of its history across the past two centuries. In the next few posts, I want to write about what I think the left and right get correct, respectively, with an eye more toward the current situation than to deep history. Then I’m going to sum it up with some thought on my political trajectory, starting pretty firmly on the left and then moving more to the center.

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Left politics as an actually existing political formation has a lot of problems, in my opinion. But the coalition grounded more in the value of equality than in hierarchy has a lot going for it, including the basic reality that systems of political equality are the best and most durable for conducting stable and prosperous politics.

This is so much the case that I think healthy, functioning hierarchical systems nonetheless acknowledge it. Contemporary conservatives are unhealthily obsessed with the concepts of “virtue signaling” and “luxury beliefs,” which are both essentially ways of observing that it can be high-status to espouse egalitarian notions, even if the specific proposition in question doesn’t work or doesn’t make sense. This is true, as an observation, but I think rightists ignore at their peril the fact that there is a good reason why humans assign high status to people who espouse high-minded ideas and generous disposition.

If you look at Elon Musk’s increasingly “based” mindset, he comes across as someone you would really not want to put in charge of your hunter-gatherer band. Yes, he’s in some ways smart and capable. But he’s also a selfish asshole who believes the rules shouldn’t apply to him. He will use his combination of empowerment, smarts, and capabilities to steal your food and kill your sons. The guy you want in charge is someone who does a lot of virtue signaling, costly signaling. Signaling that is ideally so costly that it’s not “just” signaling — the signal is that you actually behave in a virtuous manner, displaying consistent concern for others.

Rightists make a lot of hay out of liberal hypocrisy, and they are almost certainly correct that there is more hypocrisy on the left than on the right.

But this really is a case of the tribute that virtue pays to vice, where contemporary rightists have reduced hypocrisy by lowering their aspirations and wallowing in small-minded selfishness.

One of the core things that the left gets right is that it’s better to try to eradicate these hypocrisies by pushing people to level up their conduct to meet humane and egalitarian values. This is not inefficacious and it’s not civilizational suicide either. Even the most die hard “America First” right-winger would not publicly propose that the United States invade Canada, conquer it, and exploit its natural resources. Why not? Well, that’s the power of woke virtue signaling. For the vast majority of human history, invading a weaker neighboring state to steal its natural resources would be a no-brainer. But the contemporary United States of America isn’t going to do that because progressive high-mindedness has worked like a “mind virus” to create a more peaceful world. We don’t murder the disabled. Health care is consistently Democrats’ best issue, because the vast majority of voters share the basic left intuition that it is morally wrong to let a person die of treatable illness due to inability to pay. It is correct and good to care about other people and to push others to care more about other people.

The widening circle

Conservatives, of course, would tend to insist that they actually do care about other people and aren’t just promoting an ethic of total selfishness.

But really if you look at the core political weaknesses of contemporary center-left parties, a lot of it comes down to wanting to care about the interests of refugees and wanting to care about the global impact of climate change. I think progressive minded people need to proceed carefully around this topics and avoid counterproductive overreach. Of course, nobody really wants to make personal sacrifices in the here-and-now to reduce the suffering induced by coastal flood in Nigeria in the 2080s. At the same time, rationally speaking, Nigerians are human beings just like you and me and their interests count — as do the interests of people in the future. It’s bad politics to stand up for those interests, but it is morally correct to observe that people ought to care about them.

You ought to care about the interests of poor people. You ought to worry about the welfare of chickens. You should bend over backwards to worry about the interests of racial and ethnic minorities being scanted in democratic politics.

Dealing with progressive politics can be exhausting on that level, and it’s genuinely bad that progressive movements sometimes cultivate an atmosphere of anxiety and depression. But the idea that it’s good to be less self-directed is correct. The conservative patch of trying to address all these concerns through the afterlife or divine justice is psychologically comforting, but not persuasive or true.

A lot of conservatism strikes me as a morally and intellectually lazy failure to attempt any empathy or empirical rigor. How would I feel about this if I were a member of X group? Is the principle that I’d like to invoke because it benefits me right now something I would espouse in general? The phenomenon of liberal hypocrisy that conservatives point to is real. But there’s also a very typical mode of conservative hypocrisy where, like, Bob Dole championed the interests of farmers and the disabled because he happened to be a disabled guy from South Dakota. Sarah Palin was very interested in supporting kids with special needs because she had one. Several prominent conservatives decided they supported gay marriage because they turned out to have gay kids. In practice, this is how a lot of progress is made in the world, and I am a realist about it. But a major strength of progressive politics is that it asks people to stretch themselves to think about things even when they aren’t personally impacted by them.

The best and the brightest

A related issue, in a practical sense, is that the preponderance of smart people are on the left, and this is increasingly the case in an era of rising education polarization.

It’s not that there are no smart people on the right. Tucker Carlson, for example, is clearly a smart person. And at an earlier point in his career, he challenged a conservative audience to acknowledge that whatever the flaws of the New York Times, it is clearly the world’s premiere news-gathering institution and conservatives had simply failed to build anything comparable. “Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions,” he told CPAC in 2009, “that’s the truth.”

For his trouble he got booed.

And the truth is, it would be extremely difficult to build a full-service news organization like the Times while having a conservative slant. That’s because the vast majority of the people who work at the Times don’t primarily, or even at all, cover politics. It just takes a large army of diligent, literate people to craft a comprehensive news organization. Is it impossible to find a person who can write good movie reviews or be a copy editor or pen a recipe column who is also a conservative? Of course not. But they are rarer on the ground. Building a whole institution full of those people would be expensive. And it’s not clear that there would be an audience for it since conservatives don’t really like to read anyway. Conservatives like to tell themselves that more rigorous academic disciplines are less left-wing than the softer humanities, which is true — but if you look at economists or chemistry professors, these fields are still all wildly to the left of the American average.

As you can see in the arc of Carlson’s career, operating in an ecosystem that’s stupid leads smart people down the path of doing stupid work.

Meanwhile, though progressive epistemic institutions have a lot of flaws, they still fundamentally have larger numbers of competent people working at them. The output of the better conservative advocacy institutions tends to be kind of shockingly shallow, not because they are run by hacks (everyone has hacks), but because there literally are not enough people on the right who have the skills to do persuasive causal identification and conduct good studies across a broad range of topics. You can see the latent strength of progressive brainpower in the fact that when conservatives want to attack the left consensus on something, they normally rely on the work of other leftists. When the 1619 Project was all the rage, it was a Trotskyite website that led the charge to criticize the heavily racialized view of American history. Everyone learned the term “TERF” because, again, the right actually lacks the intellectual resources to combat the left without recruiting allies from among dissident left-wing intellectuals.

The right has fewer smart people, and a large share of them — like Carlson — end up primarily operating in an ecosystem of grifting. Some of that is rooted in the deep structure of conservative politics, which is fundamentally about economic elites getting people to vote against redistribution. That means you find yourself recruiting people willing to say that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer or that tax cuts raise revenue. You end up with Donald Trump as your leader and no capacity to formulate a policy agenda.

Problems worth solving

This has all been pretty abstract, but when I zoom out and think about the United States of America in 2024, I see a few big things.

One is that all things considered, this is one of — if not the — richest and most successful societies that has ever existed.

Nonetheless, we do fall short in key ways relative to a few benchmarks that are set by other countries. And most of those ways have fairly straightforward solutions that fit much more comfortably within the basic ideological structure of left politics than right politics. The most noteworthy one, I think, is that our life expectancy is weirdly low. This is a problem that would have to be mostly tackled with more paternalistic lifestyle regulations on things like food and booze and automobile safety, all of which would be left-coded ideas. America’s high homicide rate is another relevant factor, and some right-coded ideas are important to reducing that. But the broad availability of handguns in the United States is a really important factor here, too.

Simply put, the most important way in which America compares poorly to our peer countries is life expectancy, and empowering conservatives stands roughly no chance of making that better.

The United States is also a big outlier on child poverty, and we stand out in the extent to which medical misfortune can lead to personal financial calamity. These are among the biggest enduring problems of American social and economic life. I don’t think it makes sense to promote negative affect about the Biden economy as a means to addressing these problems, but leftists are very right to note their enduring significance. There are lots of problems with the contemporary left, including most notably a constitutional aversion to setting priorities in a way that would let us actually focus on the best progressive ideas. But the left really does contain both good ideas and the intellectual and moral resources to help drive society forward.

The coming storm

A big question in my mind is how progressive politics in the United States will adapt to a climate of rising international tensions.

In the short-term, the US-China rivalry has kind of helped American labor unions win some long-running intra-party arguments about free trade versus protectionism. You can also see in something like the CHIPS Act an instance when progressive willingness to buck laissez faire propaganda suggests itself as the natural complement to a new Cold War dynamic.

My concern, though, is that this kind of thing is a little bit superficial. The climate movement seems to me to really struggle to take seriously the fact that this is an international problem and the United States can’t force China and India to cut emissions. The impulse to try to get the United States to stop exporting liquified natural gas puts environmentalists on a collision course with American national security goals. It’s a fairly marginal issue right at the moment, but I think it’s a sign of things to come. The fact is that the United States is blessed with abundant hydrocarbon resources, and as a matter of foreign policy, it makes sense for us to supply the world with them rather than leave it in the hands of Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia.

The same holds in basic fiscal terms. Progressives would really like to make the American social safety net more generous. But the budget deficit is already big, Medicare and Social Security costs are already growing, and it now seems like we probably need to increase military spending as well. That’s a lot of tax increases. I’m happy to bite the bullet and say we should consider broad-based revenue raisers. But the American people don’t seem to be in a mood for that, and not only do Democrats not want to run the risk of trying to propose it (sensible), but I don’t even really see left intellectuals trying to persuade anyone about this.

Meanwhile, something you see really clearly in the debate over Gaza is that there’s a big left/right difference of opinion in how to think about alliances.

To conservatives, Israel deserves extra leeway because they are America’s allies, whereas to leftists it deserves extra scrutiny — atrocities committed by random regimes don’t matter, but we have a responsible to find a way to micromanage our allies’ behavior for maximum compliance with impartial ethical concerns. This directly connects to the admirable universalism of the left, but I’m not sure that it really “works” if you’re taking geopolitical competition seriously. One thing to say about all this is that it underscores that geopolitical competition is bad for the world. The old philosophy of “engagement” with China and trying to have world peace had a lot of merit to it. In fact, I would say one of the greatest and most important left insights is that nationalistic rivalries are extremely destructive and leave everyone worse off. But just knowing that’s true doesn’t mean you have a way to actually make world peace happen.

On the other hand, the current crop of American conservatives seems excessively comfortable aligning with Russia or even China in exchange for money. Being overly indulgent of selfishness is the signature conservative flaw, and hopefully we can muster an effective liberal patriotism to call everyone together in service of some higher values. Realistically, though, that means achieving some synthesis with the better aspects of conservative politics — which is the subject of the next post in the series.