What is left? What is right?

A set of ideas, a group of people, and a series of tactics

Housekeeping: For Moment of Zen, we spoke to Marc Andreessen about AI, Religion, Longevity, The NPC meme, and more. For In the Arena, we spoke to Martin Shkreli about his rise and fall and his comeback arc. For Media Empires, we spoke to Steph Smith about the creator economy. For Econ 102, Noah Smith outlined libertarianism’s rise and fall and the need for it to rise again.

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In our post on political realignments, we talked about flippening between the democrats and the republicans.

This is not the first shift of course. Remember that the democrats were the party of the south and segregation until LBJ (Lincoln was a republican — confederates were Democrats). 

The Democratic party today is basically the country club Republicans of the 1970 with a university campus left. Or in other words, democrats today are more socially progressive and more economically conservative than they used to be. They are barely recognizable from Democrats before the 1960s. In contrast, you can make the case that today’s Republicans are actually just former Democrats. 

The Republicans, for their part, have responded to the democratic elite dominance by taking more working class views and attitudes. Brooks wrote in his piece: “If the elite bourgeois bohemians — the “bobos” — tend to have progressive values and metropolitan tastes, the boubours go out of their way to shock them with nativism, nationalism, and a willful lack of tact. Boubour leaders span the Western world: Trump in the U.S., Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy.”

The reversal is striking. Quoting Brooks again: “Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite.”

The ideological realignment begs the question: What is the left, anyway? What is the right? What do both parties stand for? We’ll discuss that in this piece, with the help of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State.

A series of ideas

What is leftism? 

A broad definition: Leftism is the belief that Society is on an upward trajectory towards greater and greater levels of moral perfection through the process of continuously solving social problems, which will inevitably lead to the perfect liberal state which provides equality for everyone.

This is nice but doesn’t really say anything concrete. So let’s get concrete on tradeoffs:

My favorite “liberal vs conservative” analysis I've heard is simply that liberals are obsessed with equality (at great cost) where conservatives respect inequality and hierarchy.

As Michael Malice once said: “Ask a right wing person if people are equal they’ll say no; ask a left wing person if people are equal and they’ll give you a speech.”

As Bryan Caplan would say, a core principle of the left is that the left hates markets. They hate markets of course because the left hates inequality and markets generate inequality.

OK, that’s the left. But what about the right? What does it stand for?

Well, the right doesn’t have as much as a unifying vision. The main principle of the right is that….it hates the left. The left is always revolutionary, the right is always reactionary. This is the old Buckley thing: the role of conservatism is to stand athwart history yelling “stop!”.

From the perspective of the right, all social change happening around us is from the left, and those things are bad because they’re against tradition, history, the way things have always worked and things that have been proven.

The trope that all conservatives stand for is “owning the libs” is actually not that far off. For the most part, there is no more conservative ideology. There is however a comprehensive liberal ideology, and conservatives merely try to slow it down or stop it. But there’s no reverse on the other side. That comprehensive view of history is what people mean when they say “the right side of history!”

Another angle of differentiation between the left and the right is universalizing vs particularist. Progressivism is universalizing, not tribalizing. Progressivism uses identity as a hammer to try to destroy existing hierarchies (and replace them w/ egalitarianism). But that's the opposite of tribalizing (e.g nation).

Another description is that it’s a philosophical difference that Sowell gets at in “A Conflict of Visions" that traces back centuries: What is the perfectibility of man and mankind?

If man and mankind (society) are perfectable, if utopia is possible, then it's an absolute moral requirement to do it. That’s liberalism. If it’s not possible, and attempts to perfect man and mankind lead to hell on earth, then it's an absolute moral requirement not to do it.

The right wing response is that man and mankind are fallen, and trying to fix it will destroy us all. Or that mankind can only flourish with freedom — improvement/perfection comes from the edges/ unexpected places.

Jonathan Haidt has a psychological disposition framework to describe the political parties. The left is egalitarian, universalist, open, and cares about care and fairness. The right is particularist, hierarchical, orderly and cares about Sanctity, Loyalty, Authority, and Liberty.

Of course, this doesn’t always track. In COVID the left were obsessed with cleanliness and order with vaccines, and the right were more skeptical—the exact opposite of what Haidt’s theory might expect.  

Another framework: A new people you've never encountered before shows up at your border. Are you excited to exchange ideas and culture (left) or do you instantly begin preparations for war (right)?

This doesn’t always track either: 20 years ago, the left used to be anti-immigration, anti-trade, and anti-war. The right used to be pro immigration, pro-free trade, and pro-war in Iraq. Now the right are anti-immigrant, anti-trade, and anti-war in ukraine. And the left is the opposite. Many such cases. 

Some beliefs have stayed the same (abortion, gay marriage), but many other ideas have converted. The ideas are schelling points, but in many ways they’re more about the tribal affiliation than ideological consistency, which explains why the ideas might switch sides but the same tribes carry on fighting.

A tribe of people

Indeed, many of the ideas change, but the tribes remain. Democrats and Republicans still use the same logos, just like the Chinese Communist Party has kept the hammer and sickle more than 40 years after Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist revolution. 

COVID showed how our fights aren’t really about consistent ideology, but about tribes (“who/whom”). First the Republicans were concerned about the virus, and the Democrats were calling people racists for paying attention to it. Then the Democrats switched and became concerned about COVID once Trump downplayed it, and Republicans switched and became anti-vaxxers. Whatever position one group adopted, the other did the opposite. Put differently, the left was for whatever Trump was against, and the right was against whatever the left was against.

Richard Hanania has the provocative thesis that leftism is a way of signaling eliteness. Elites are constantly looking to distinguish themselves from non-elites, and egalitarian ideology prevents them from using the normal differentiators (e.g. intelligence, industriousness), so they use other status signifiers (beliefs, taste, language). Saying you know about heteronormativity is actually a signal you went to college. It’s a way to separate yourself from the masses, while also not becoming a threat to them

If the ideas change, why is there always a left and a right to begin with? For a few reasons. First, there’s always two parties that are roughly 50/50. It’s the efficient hypothesis for politics. As Balaji writes, ”Two factions consistently arise because coalition-forming behavior is game-theoretically optimal. That is, when fighting over any scarce resource, if one group teams up and the other doesn’t, the first group tends to win.”

A Series of tactics

Besides a collection of ideas and tribe of people, another way of thinking about the left is as a series of tactics. Quoting Balaji again:

“The left tactic is to delegitimize the existing order, argue it is unjust, and angle for redistributing the scarce resource (power, money, status, land), while the right tactic is to argue that the current order is fair, that the left is causing chaos, and that the ensuing conflict will destroy the scarce resource and not simply redistribute it.”  

Why do people get more right wing as they get older? 

There’s a famous (simplistic) aphorism: “If you aren't a liberal when you're young, you have no heart, but if you aren't a conservative when you’re older, you have no brain”. 

Part of this can be explained by when you’re older you have more status. Basically, you’re left when you’re low status and want more status, and right when you’re high status and want to just maintain it and enjoy your life. Leftism is a status-acquisition tactic, the logic goes, and rightism is a status-retaining tactic. 

Here are just a handful of status-acqusition tactics:

• Redefining concepts of prejudice such that the criteria is much more expansive but we keep the same punishment as the old crime—while also not explicitly defining them so people are violating by default, and don’t know how to comply even if they want to.

• Redefining words in general. One example is the word equality, now rebranded as equity. It used to mean same legal treatment. Now it means same economic outcome.

• Standpoint epistemology: The idea that one's identity is relevant to the truth of their belief. This elevates certain groups over other groups relative to their standing in the progressive stack.

• Prioritizing experiences over population studies. Oppression is in the eye of the beholder—as long as they're not oppressors themselves. By prioritizing specific anecdotes over dispassionate population analysis, it can make it harder to address systemic discrimination.

• Redefining speech as violence, which justifies attacking people for use speech since you’re doing it in the name of “self-defense”. However, if you are above the oppressor/oppressed line, then you are violating by default & any defense is an attack.

Well then, why are nearly all fortune 500 CEOs publicly left wing and not right wing? Put differently, why are the most powerful people using status-acquisition tactics, instead of status-retention tactics? Well, it makes sense that the people with the most status would also be the people most skilled at and most interested in status acquisition tactics—that’s why they’re so successful in the first place. But also because leftism legitimizes their power, it’s a cover for why they have it in the first place, otherwise they’d perhaps be at risk.

More from Balaji on why the powerful keep the status-acquiring tendencies as they continue to rise up.

“One answer comes from an analogy to tech startups. Just like a startup wants to maintain the pretense of being “revolutionary” for as long as possible, and a big company wants to maintain the pretense of being “dominant” for as long as possible, so too does it take a while for a revolutionary leftist to admit that they’ve becoming ruling class, or for a self-conceptualized member of the ruling class to admit they’ve actually become dispossessed. Paradoxically, both such admissions are demoralizing. Obviously, for the former member of the ruling class to concede that they’ve completely lost is a blow to morale. But for the former revolutionary to recognize they’ve won likewise takes the sails out of their movement, the moral justification for their revolution

Some people will question the authenticity of corporate progressivism. They’ll say, yeah, all corporations are left, but they don't really mean it. It’s all for show. Talk left, act right.

A Left-Right Fusion

It’s true. They’re not only left-wing, they’re also right-wing. The most effective people and movements often have a synthesis of left and right. Quoting Balaji again:

We’ve also seen firsthand that a successful tech startup is typically a left/right fusion. It has the leftist aspects of missionary zeal, critique of the existing order, desire to change things, informal dress and style, initially flat org chart, and revolutionary ambition. But it also has the rightist aspects of hierarchy, leadership, capitalism, accountability, and contractual order. If you only have one without the other, you can’t really build a meaningful company. Right without left is at best Dunder Mifflin Paper Company; left without right is an idealistic co-op that never ships a product. Finally, we’ve also seen that just like most revolutions, most startups do fail. Failed startups don’t capture enough of the market for dollars, while the failed revolutions don’t capture enough of the political market for followers. But those startups that do succeed then need to fight off both startups and even bigger companies, until and unless they become a global goliath themselves (which is rare!). The unified theory is thus a centralization, decentralization, and recentralization cycle. 

A leader needs aspects of both to win. The left gives the holy justification to fight the war, the right gives the might to win the fight, and together they allow that leader to prosecute a holy war. 

The point is that in any holy war, the left is the word, and the right is the sword. It’s the priest and the warrior; you need both. The left programs the minds. The priests and journalists, the academia and media, they imbue the warriors with a sense of righteous purpose. They also justify the conflict to the many bystanders, convincing them to either not get involved — or to get involved on the warriors’ side. In this concept of left, the priests transmit a revolutionary zeal that justifies the war against the opposing order, blesses it, consecrates it, says it is necessary and virtuous, motivates the warriors, boosts their morale, and turns them into missionaries that can defeat any mercenary. The right furnishes the resources. They bring the warriors themselves, the farmers and the miners, the engineers and the locomotives, the rugged physicality, the requisite hierarchy, the necessary frugality, the profit and the loss, the determination and the organization, the hard truths to keep a movement going.

I’ll close with this piece with one last passage from The Network State

Think about the following concepts: Christian King, Protestant Establishment, Republican Conservative, Soviet Nationalist, CCP Entrepreneur, or Woke Capitalist. Each of these compound nouns has within it a fusion of a once-left-associated concept and a right-associated one. That prefix is important: once-left-associated. At one point, Christians led a revolutionary movement against the Roman Empire, Protestants led a decentralist movement against the Catholic Church, Republicans led an abolitionist movement against the South, the Soviets led an internationalist movement against the nationalist White Russians, the CCP led a communist movement against the capitalists, and the Wokes led a critical movement against American institutions. But then they gained power, and with power came new habits. The revolutionary left that justified the rise to power morphed partially into an institutional right that justified the use of power. By its nature, a revolutionary group adopts leftist tactics to gain power, but once it wins, finds it needs to use rightist tactics to maintain power against a new crop of leftist insurgents. Lenin promised land, peace, and bread — then Trotsky quickly organized the Red Army. Thus does the leftist revolutionary rebuild a rightist hierarchy. If you told this in story form, a manifesto-motivated group of revolutionaries would fight the man and gain power, only to have some Stalin character compromise the revolution, capture it, and just become the man all over again.

I used to wonder, probably like you do, if all political debates necessarily just resolve back down to left vs right.

I was like, is that really all there is? I now think, yes.

But isn't there some other—

No.

But what if—

No.

But how about—

No.

But if only the—

No.

But I also now believe that left vs right isn’t just a bundle of ideas. It’s also a group of tribes and a series of tactics.