Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Left, Right, Individualists, Collectivists, and Occam’s Razor
Some interesting recent posts have delved into the nature of the modern progressive/leftist/radical — whatever we want to call the woke and their ilk.
Our prolific @drbastiat kicked it off with a characteristically thought-provoking piece with the problematic title Leftism is based on individualism. Conservatism is not. I read the piece, read the article that inspired it, and, in part for lack of time to give either the consideration they deserved, decided to refrain from commenting — and perhaps I just can’t get past the title, with which I reflexively take exception.
The piece seems to have stuck in @dontillman’s craw as well, prompting him to write Oh good grief. Leftism is not based on individualism in response. In his piece, Don proposes a more prosaic theory as to the motivation of the unhinged left: it’s the naked will to power. While that strikes me as plausible, I think it misses the mark: I know too many people I’d consider “woke” who seem to have no interest in personal power and winning elections. Indeed, I suspect that most people who hold what I consider to be the nuttier political views are relatively disinterested in participating in the political melee.
This post is prompted by another piece Doc gave us today: Leftist hatred of stay-at-home moms is not what it seems. It has me again thinking about what it is that really characterizes progressives.
I’ve stated my own views about the left/right political spectrum. (I haven’t written, yet, about how dissatisfied I am with the labels we use, given how overloaded they’ve become.) Briefly and broadly: I think the great political divide, at least among the vast majority of us who aren’t actually interested in participating in politics, is between radical and conservative personalities. In my way of thinking, radicals are people who feel little emotional attraction to or comfort in traditional norms and customs, and who are positively motivated to depart from those traditional forms. In contrast, conservatives are people who feel affinity for or security in established systems, and who generally feel a reflexive discomfort at the thought of change.
With that in mind, let me propose a simple, parsimonious alternative to Doc and Don’s theories.
People on the left like to change things. They like the frisson, the thrill, and even the chaos and destruction of disruptive change. Those of us on the right generally don’t. And it’s fundamentally emotional.
Published in Culture
And yet … the progressives who wanted tear society down in the 60’s have become hectoring scolds, demanding conformity. Except that they demand conformity in the service of radical ideas. What is the trans movement other than a full blooded assault on sexual identity in general?
It’s almost completely beyond understanding.
I understand how unintuitive that seems, but I think it isn’t. The hectoring scolds of the 60s still think they’re fighting the same fight. Traditions don’t happen in a lifetime. You have to grow up in a particular culture to see it as the orthodoxy, and that culture has to have been around for awhile. It can’t feel new, it has to feel like the status quo, like the thing normal people take for granted.
If the socialists win, eighty years from now the radicals will be calling for free markets.
Their goal of fundamentally transforming the US remains. The difference is that, back in the 60s, they didn’t have the power to DEMAND that the rest of society conform to their wishes. Now they do. Or, rather, so they thought. Boy, did we dodge a bullet with this election!
Hank, I have a number of thoughts about this.
The first thought is that the Left-Right dichotomy is an oversimplification. I observe little rhyme or reason to the positions taken presently by people on the supposedly “conservative” Right and those on the supposedly “liberal” or “radical” Left.
Consider how positions have changed on a number of issues, in the past century and even in our lifetimes. Tariffs used to be policy of the Right, the “conservatives” and Republicans. It was the radical, Left-wing Democrat FDR who slashed tariffs. By the 1980s, the positions of the parties were pretty much reversed, with the supposedly Right-wing, conservative, Republican Reagan opposing tariffs. Now, it’s switched again with Trump.
We saw similar changes with respect to immigration, though it was even stranger. In the 1920s, bipartisan majorities of both houses of Congress seriously restricted immigration, under a Republican President (Coolidge). In 1965, bipartisan majorities in both houses opened immigration, under a Democratic President. In 1986, there was a bipartisan amnesty for illegal aliens, supported by a Republican President with strong bipartisan support (though a small majority of House Republicans opposed it). In the 1990s, I recall the Democrats being opposed to immigration, especially black Democrats, while Republicans were pretty close to supporting open borders. Now, opposition to immigration is a supposedly Right-wing, conservative, Republican position.
If you expand the Left-Right dichotomy to a second dimension, you can create a Cartesian plane like the “Political Compass.” There are several ways to do it, with one way being to measure “social” policy on one axis and “economic” policy on the other. The supposedly Left or Democrat side tends to favor more economic regulation but less social regulation, while the supposedly Right or Republican side tends to favor the reverse. Even this is an oversimplification, though.
I submit that there is a fundamental flaw in thinking of politics as operating on a single, Left-Right axis. Any attempt to explain such a model is not useful, because the model itself is too simple.
That’s my first thought. I’ll cover the next in a second comment.
I don’t understand leftists.
I think the closest I have come to understanding was an article I wrote which compared leftists to Amish. Both dislike the internal combustion engine etc, and view the industrial revolution with distrust. And there are many more similarities.
But there’s one big difference:
I’ve been exploring lots of other perspectives recently. I think all of them have at least some merit.
But I also think that one thing that a lot of leftists have in common, regardless of the particular flavor of leftism they practice, is that they are angry if you don’t practice it with them.
I don’t care what people do. Leftists do care.
Maybe that’s it?
I don’t know. I could be wrong on all this…
Jerry, I think your analysis probably relies too much on events of the moment. If we dig a little deeper, I think we’ll find that I’m broadly correct.
For example, the support for tariffs isn’t really motivated by an affinity for tariffs. It’s motivated by a desire to restore what most of us perceive as the traditional America, a country where, if a man gets up in the morning and goes to work and puts in a full day, he’ll earn enough to make a living. That is the tradition people are remembering. If they’re persuaded that tariffs are a way to restore that, then a lot of people will embrace tariffs. Most people don’t care about tax policy anyway, and don’t really understand how tariffs work. They hear “tariff” and think “restoring American jobs.”
Similarly, the antipathy toward unchecked illegal immigration isn’t simply a random flip-flopping regarding immigration. It’s a cry for a return to a standard that said that immigrants would assimilate, would become American.
The whole Make America Great Again thing is an appeal to tradition. It’s a call to restore what many think is the American birthright, a nation in which jobs pay well, immigrants assimilate, crime is punished, and cultural revolution isn’t rammed down our throats by an overweening progressive state.
It does seem that way. But I wonder how much that’s an artifact of cultural dominance. That is, while America is, I maintain, a generally conservative country full of generally conservative people, the opinion-shaping organs are largely controlled by leftists. That means that leftists are in a position to express disapproval, and to do what people tend to do when they disapprove of someone else and have the cultural confidence to act on that disapproval.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m rewatching Mad Men and vicariously remembering what the world looked like when conservatives still controlled the levers of popular opinion.
So here’s thought number two.
Even if it were valid to conceptualize politics as existing along a single, Left-Right axis, why would you think that there is a single explanation?
Doc’s post suggested that “individualism” is the explanatory variable, though in fairness, it wasn’t clear to me that Doc was committed to this idea, as opposed to presenting an interesting idea raised in an article that he read. (A very useful thing to do.) Don’s contrary post disputed Doc’s point, essentially arguing that the Left are sociopaths, if not psychopaths, devoted to power at any cost. Your post, Hank, disputed both of these, presenting temperament as the most important factor.
This reminds me of the nature-nurture debate that we see with respect to a variety of issues, though in this case we already have three explanations offered — and I’ll offer two more. The most important point, though, is that in the nature-nurture debate, I think that the answer that is usually correct is “both.”
As best we can determine it, using things such as twin studies and the so-called “ACE” model, a particular human characteristic or behavior is rarely 100% “nature” or 100% “nurture.” It is usually some combination of the two.
So Doc may have a point that explains part of the Left-Right divide, and Don may explain part of it, and you may explain part of it, Hank. My ranking of the three, with a brief explanation, is:
Now to the caveats. Two come to mind.
The first is interest. If, by your inherent genetic endowment and your environment, you are set up to do pretty well in the established order, you’re likely to be a conservative. It’s good for you. On the other hand, if you’ve been dealt a tough hand in life, you’re more likely to be a radical because, well, why not? If you’re not likely to succeed, what do you have to lose?
For me, memories of high school typify the various types of people, probably because it was the institution in which I came into contact with the broadest range of ability and endowment. Even then, I did go to private school, so it was a group that was significantly better off than a cross-section of the general population, but it was a fairly large, Catholic private school, so it wasn’t too badly unrepresentative.
There were smart kids, regular kids, and some dumb kids. There were some who were good at sports, and some who were not. There were rich kids, middle-class kids, and working-class kids, though only a small number of the poor.
The stereotype is that the “jocks” are dumb, and the smart “nerds” are athletically useless. This was not the case, in my school.
Say that you were one of the smartest in the class, and one of the best athletes — a National Merit Scholar and city champion. Maybe you dated one of the cheerleaders. Maybe your folks were pretty well off, and dad bought you a car and gave you enough spending money that you didn’t have to work. Maybe you were the homecoming king, or senior class president.
Well, a guy like that is more likely to be a conservative. The world is his oyster. Why would he want to rock the boat?
But what if you’re small, awkward, ordinary looking (or worse), and not particularly bright. Would a guy like that tend to be a conservative?
I submit that this hypothesis about “interest” goes a bit further than aspiring to be a fourth explanation on the list. It may be a pretty good explanation for Hank’s hypothesis, temperament.
It’s also both Machiavellian, Washingtonian, and Madisonian, so I can present a fairly distinguished pedigree for this hypothesis.
I’ll save the final point for a separate comment.
Jerry, as with most (all?) aspects of human nature, we’re talking about a bell curve here. I think all but a portion of the left tail of the bell curve is to one degree or another “conservative” by my definition; a minority, and generally a pretty small one, is actually “radical.”
I think there’s an evolutionary reason for this. Traditions represent tested ideas. In a world with little margin, doing untested things is dangerous; best stick to the practices that kept your ancestors alive. We’re evolved for such a world, a world of high risk, little surplus, and few second chances.
We need radicals, at least a few, to nudge us off the hilltops of local maxima and encourage us to find new, higher hilltops. But we don’t need very many radicals, because all new ideas are untested and most of them are bad: we don’t want reckless gamblers deciding whether or not we’ll have enough wheat set aside to make it through the winter.
The final point is theological.
I can start with a bit of a joke. There are two types of people in the world: those who think that you can divide people into two types, and those who don’t.
In all seriousness, I do think that you can divide people into two types, called male and female. This one isn’t particularly interesting from the perspective of ideology. At present, women tend to lean more Left and men, more Right, but I suspect that this is principally due to other explanations like temperament and interest.
As a theological matter, though, I believe that the world is divided into two types of people. Believers and unbelievers. Some will believe, and attempt to learn and follow, the teachings of Jesus. Others will not.
If a society is generally in conformity with Christian teaching and values, then believers will tend to be “conservative,” which is associated with the political “Right.” To some degree, I think that this was the case in our country through the 1920s, and to a lesser extent, the 1950s.
I think that we now live in a post-Christian America, with the actual believers being quite a small group. From this perspective, both the Republicans and Democrats look like radicals. Almost no one defends traditional values.
Exactly. Nice clarification Henry.
I think that this is completely incorrect. I don’t understand how both of you could believe this.
The Right wants to control the behavior of others on many issues. Examples are abortion, illegal drug use, crime generally, immigration, even which bathroom to use.
The Let wants to control the behavior of others on different issues.
The true conservatives, in my view, want to control even more. I’d like to see an end to easy divorce. Get women out of the military. Sanction homosexuality and outlaw the entire trans perversion. Discourage both extramarital and premarital sex. Ban marijuana — or, at the moment, simply enforce the federal law that still bans this drug, a policy hypocritically ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike. Prohibit abortion. Freeze immigration and deport the illegals, preferably with a hefty fine. Heck, let’s confiscate all of their wealth. Return to the husband having sole management and control of the family finances.
I don’t think, Doc and Hank, that either of you would be on board with any of this. Maybe I’m wrong.
Interestingly, Trump is appointing RFK Jr. as his HHS Secretary, with control over the FDA. As I understand it, one of RFK’s goals is to make our food healthier by regulating things like sugar and food additives. That’s “controlling the behavior of others,” and I think that it’s probably a good thing.
I think that the explanation for this is that you’re actually pretty radical yourself, Hank, by historical standards. You don’t realize it, I think, because we swim in a sea of radicalism in this country.
Our country’s tradition was marriage and family, with the husband working and being in charge of the family, the wife submitting and caring for the household and children. Illegitimacy was sanctioned, adultery and premarital sex were illegal, divorce was extremely rare. Women rarely worked outside the home, and certainly weren’t put in the military. Abortion was illegal. Very few women went to college and the professions were closed to them, because they were supposed to focus on being wives and mothers.
How much of that do you support, Hank?
Edited to add: I didn’t even mention sodomy, which was severely punished. The whole trans perversion wasn’t even imagined, I think.
I would just amend this to say the entire West is post-Christian. Otherwise I think this comment is very close to the mark.
I’m glad you’re giving this some thought, but what about me, a radical conservative?
Jerry,
In the old American tradition, the wife worked too: both husband and wife worked on the farm, with the man (and children) doing most of the outdoor work, and the woman (and children) the plentiful indoor work. Both contributed to the family’s survival and, quite often, to the family’s income.
That tradition was particular to a time and place, to America before the service-and-information age, when farm and factory were the primary sources of income, and when taxes and lifestyle were such that a modest income could support a family and a home.
That was American tradition, once upon a time, but times change and, eventually, tradition changes with them. That’s why we take it for granted that women can vote and slavery is bad: traditions change over time, usually slowly.
Tradition isn’t frozen in time. It does evolve, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better.
By the time I was old enough to have a sense of “traditional America,” it included the legal equality of women, women in the workplace, smaller families (I’m the oldest of seven and the father of six), no-fault divorce, birth control, equal rights for blacks (I lived in New York, and my best friend was the only black kid I knew; it never occurred to me that there were still outposts of racism in America in 1966.) and a bunch of other modernizations that, for me, were part of America’s tradition of individual freedom and equality under the law. All of those things were my sense of American tradition.
My wife and I raised six children on a farm. I earned the money and milked the cow, she made the butter and baked the bread. She educated the children, I read to the family at night. She planted the garden and made our daughter’s clothes; the boys mended fences and fed the animals. I wrote robotics software and castrated calves.
I didn’t think those things were traditional. I thought they were, at least to some extent, anachronistic. Had my wife wanted to work outside of the home, I wouldn’t have thought that radical: women in the workplace is part of America as I understand it. But not requiring that of her was also part of what I understood to be America’s traditional values. What seemed traditional, for me, was that I was the breadwinner and protector, the disciplinarian, the one who did the heavy lifting, and earning money was, for my wife, optional.
I’m not radical, but neither was my sense of America frozen in 1935. I’d like things to remain pretty much as they were in the early 1980s, in the golden era of Ronald Reagan and feathered blondes and foreign supercars and blockbuster action movies. That felt like the future to me, the material realization of those traditions that I believed defined America. It wasn’t radical. It was just the payoff for living the American dream.
David Horowitz said it best, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”
Note that I differentiate between the party insiders and the voters. The party insiders are the ones driven to win elections at any cost, so that they can enjoy the fruits of a corrupt bureaucracy. And to do that they’ll need make up a good sales pitch to present to the voters (who won’t be enjoying the fruits of a corrupt bureaucracy).
“Woke” is an example of such a sales pitch.
It makes complete sense if you consider the possibility of such an operation being funded by enemies; the Chinese Communist Party, the World Economic Forum, George Soros, etc.
Dude…
Jerry, of course, we swim in a sea of radicalism in this country. This country was founded by radicals that destroyed the known world order by introducing a country governed by the citizens and rejecting monarchy.
Yes. And yet…
…the founders did it by calling upon something even more traditional, if you will, than King and Country. They cited the Creator, and in doing so asserted a fundamentally human tradition, casting the King himself as the radical who undermined the natural order.
But I agree with you: the founders were, I’m pretty sure, radicals in the sense I suggest, people willing, even eager, to break rules. It would be interesting to know how many of them lived heterodox lives, heterodox for their times, before becoming involved in actual revolution.
In any case, I believe it’s the dominant human nature to be conservative, and most Americans then and now were and are conservative. (Many of them undoubtedly thought the founders rabblerousers and troublemakers.)
Especially Sam Adams. The Brits made the mistake of thinking that if they got rid of him, their troubles with the Americans would be over. Maybe if they had done it early enough it would have worked, and maybe it was already too late.
Yes, they cited the Creator and they looked back at the Greeks and Romans as well. They put together documents to help build a country that radicals would flourish in but also be constrained against minority opinions. They were governmentally extremely radical for the time while being socially conservative by our standards. I think they were also extremely radical socially for the time but maybe I’m wrong on that.
Many of the people of the 60’s are not at all fond of the co-opting of ideals. The New Left’s radicals have bastardized ideals, such that these days, Martin Luther King Jr’s statements are ignored.
Both King and JFK held fast to the idea that skin color should be no more significant to one’s identity than hair color. Both men are churning in their graves.
The force feeding of even grammar school children into the new religion of “trans” would most likely be beyond their comprehension.
The former writer at Reason magazine Virgina Postell proposed the real continuum is not left and right it is statist vs non-statist.
It will be far less than eighty years, more like twenty.
I propose the distinguishing feature of leftists/progressives (call them whatever) is narcissism, which sort of comports with Dr. Bastiat’s “individualism” theme. They’re either badly damaged people who came up through terribly dysfunctional families and communities, or they’re products of the “self-esteem” generation (also dysfunctional parenting). It’s no wonder they reject what they’ve known (“traditional” norms) and seek fundamental transformation.
This is true of, for a presidential example, Barack Obama. His upbringing was chaotic and he was rejected by his (communist) father. Dreams, my a@@. It was a nightmare.
It’s also true of the lefties in my life. Their insecurities and need to be validated as “good” people leads them to focus on the self and to reject transcendent authority. “You will be as gods.”
I view this as mainly a spiritual battle, and we’re contending with a lot of lost souls.
One other theory about this which I keep thinking about is that leftists are the ones who most embody the tribalist “us v them” mentality which anthropologists have recognized as a basic human trait. Leftists need to be constantly differentiating themselves from others and do so by attacking them or their values. The trans issue is a perfect example of an invented issue which has no purpose other than to cause division in society and the resulting posturing that the leftists can engage in to make them appear to be the morally superior ones.
That would also explain why the movements constantly splinter as it becomes harder to differentiate one’s self.