This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What do people really mean when they talk about “left” and “right” politics?
The terms “right” and “left emerged from when in the French revolution, the group that sat on the right side of the Constituent Assembly were aligned with religion and the king, and the group that sat on the left side was aligned with democracy and secularization. The left-right spectrum has since endured, despite how often many of the parties we call “far right” have nothing to do with monarchism, and many of the parties we call “far left” are authoritarian and anti-democratic themselves. Many people have tried to create consistent frameworks to explain why party A is on the left and party B is on the right, but none that I have seen have actually consistently worked. Some people have tried to rectify the errors by adding more dimensions- such as “horseshoe theory” adding a vertical dimension so that the far left and far right loop back to being similar, the political compass that has an authoritarian axis which which separates right-libertarians from right-authoritarians and same with the left, or even the 8-Axis compass which like the name suggests has 8 different dimensions. In Part 1 of this comment I will explain my theory, and in Part 2 I will point out the many failure points of alternate theories.
Part 1
I think none of those theories really properly explain the left-right spectrum, and they all have flaws at capturing what the common person means when they talk about left-right. When trying to determine rules that capture the popular conception of the left-right spectrum, your definition should align with how it’s actually used. If your definition tries to say the Nazis are far left, or that the Democrats are center-right, it automatically fails as a definition of the popular conception. If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition. Your definition is just a map that is trying to capture the territory. Maybe your definition could still be useful as some other type of political spectrum model that identifies some parties as authoritarian vs libertarian, or good vs evil, or whatever, but it doesn’t work for capturing them as left vs right as popularly conceived.
How I think the left-right spectrum works is that it captures which parties are willing to cooperate with each other. For example, say we have this spectrum of parties elected to a parliament: Communists(far left), democratic socialists(left), liberals(center-left), conservatives(center-right), nationalists(right), fascists(far-right). A pretty standard spread going from the far left to far right. But why are the fascists far right while the communists are far left? Both groups have many similarities- they both want to abolish elections, both want to nationalize many or all industries under government control, both want to repress free speech. My thesis is that they make up opposite ends because they are the last parties that would be willing to positively cooperate in the parliament. On any bill that parliament passed, if the fascists and communists both vote yes, I guarantee that every party between them will also have voted yes. The far left and far right may have similarities, but you’ll never actually see them vote together on a bill like “Introduce new corporate taxes to fund the military” unless every party between them also voted yes. Maybe there will be some bill that the entire parliament from far left to far right cooperates on like a bill banning murdering puppies, meaning both the far left and far right vote yes together on it, but always all the more moderate parties will be voting yes too. But that rule only applies to positive cooperation- they might negatively cooperate against a bill from the centrist parties. For example, perhaps all the centrist parties want to pass a bill that will enable the nation to take out a large loan from the World Bank- but both the communists and fascists don’t like that sort of international debt to foreigners, and both vote against the bill. That sort of negative cooperation that is characterized by preventing action is allowed, and is even common, according to my theory.
This does not just apply to the farthest left and farthest right- it applies to every party in the parliament. The liberals and the communists will not cooperate positively on something unless the democratic socialists also cooperate positively. The liberals and democratic socialists cooperating positively does not guarantee the communists will also cooperate positively- it just enables it as a possibility. My theory is not about distance between parties either- for example, it’s not impossible in my theory for there to be a communist, socialist, liberal, conservative coalition, despite the conservatives being far closer to the nationalists and even the fascists than they are to the communists.
In more formal logic, you can express it as, If two parties vote yes together on a motion, Then every party between the two parties on the left-right spectrum will also vote yes on the motion. It can also be worded as “All parties that vote together on a motion form a continuous line of neighbors on the political spectrum”. In the real world, it’s useful to call a party “far left” or “center right” or what have you in order to describe which other parties they’re most likely to cooperate with. And whether a party is left or right is entirely relative- in the early 1800s Prussia, someone calling for a constitutional monarchy might be a radical leftist, but today would be a radical rightists, for example. Also, you can fairly easily predict which parties someone will be more willing to cooperate with even before they're elected- that lets you call a candidate who has never actually been elected far right or far left, by imagining who they'll be more likely to vote with.
Now, I was a bit extreme in my language above- you can probably find some examples of the right and left cooperating without centrists. Whenever I said guarantee, it was an exaggeration. Political science doesn’t have “hard” laws like how physics does after all. But examples of the left and right positively cooperating without centrists also cooperating are extremely rare, far more rare than you’d expect given how some parties on both extremes have seemingly very similar policies. For example, left libertarians and right libertarians both hate police, or nationalists and socialists both want the government to control economic industry. Yet you will not see such parties cooperating to pass bills on those topics at the same time as centrist parties vote against those policies. And on the other side, parties that you might think have relatively little in common like libertarians and conservatives often manage to find a lot of common ground to cooperate on. Also, this only applies to domestic politics. It can have some influence on geopolitics- I think governments generally prefer cooperating with other governments who are on a similar place to them on the political spectrum. But it’s not a requirement for cooperation like how it is domestically. As one example, the far left Soviets and far right Nazis cooperated to partition the relatively centrist Poland between them.
The phrase “It’s impossible to prove a negative” is untrue, it is often possible to prove negatives. But, sometimes it can be extremely hard to prove negatives. To prove that more extreme parties don’t positively cooperate with more moderate parties, I’d have to dig through all the records of voting history and just empirically show it doesn’t happen. I don’t have tools to do that and don’t particularly care to, but I invite everyone to present counter-examples- they probably exist, but I expect they’ll be generally quite rare. The closest I found was in 2015 the Greek far left and far right cooperating against the EU who wanted Greece to repay its debt, but even that from what I read looked more like negative cooperation where they just together refused to cooperate with the EU as opposed to work together to accomplish new things.
Part 2- Other theories
This section is less important but I want to elaborate on how I disagree with other positions.
I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right. For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police. Or how leftists want a strong(hierarchical) government that will control speech to ban hatred. The hierarchy theory of left vs right fails to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
Next, horse shoe theory. This theory states that along the extremes, the parties become more similar to each other, becoming increasingly authoritarian. Again, it doesn’t adequately explain libertarians, such as Milei in Argentina. He’s in many ways extreme and farther right than most politicians, but he’s farther right in a economic way, where he supports liberalization of markets, not in a way where he wants to consolidate all government power in his personal hands. He’s not far right in the sense that he’s a nationalist he promotes chauvinistic Argentinian superiority either- in fact he’s talked about how he’s considered converting to Judaism and has a lot of respect for Israel, something very different from the anti-Jewish stance many others on the far right take. Horseshoe theory fails to explain to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
The Political Compass. Probably the best known way to plot parties relative to each other after the standard linear model and horseshoe theory. It was original created by leftists and was extremely badly calibrated to try to trick people into thinking they were on the left- placing Obama in authoritarian right but if you actually put Obama’s positions into the compass you’re placed solidly libertarian left, for example. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden is even more far right and even more authoritarian, further demonstrating their bias since by their measures Biden would almost certainly be farther left than Obama. But, ignoring its creators bias, could the actual model be useful if you just recalibrated it? Maybe for some purposes, but not as an objectively accurate model for placing parties. It misses too many axis. What’s more economically left, a Republican party that wants to enact higher tariffs or a Democrat party that wants to enact higher corporate taxes? Is a government that’s a dictatorship but operates with a very light hand more or less authoritarian than an extremely democratic government that controls everything its people does? Do ISIS, the Nazis, and Bismarck really all belong together in a similar space despite their obvious extreme differences?
The 8 Axis test. Similar issues to the political compass, although it’s a bit more fine tuned, at the expense of being more unwieldy. It still doesn’t solve where a party really falls if it falls at opposite extremes within the same axis- e.g an autocratic government that doesn’t get involved in people’s personal lives, or a Georgist government that wants an extreme 100% land value tax, but that’s the only tax. You would have to add even more axis to address every nuance, but then it becomes even more unwieldy, and it becomes entirely divorced from what people actually mean when they say “right” or “left”.
My theory solely describes parties as well. I think ideologies are something separate. Ideologies have a lot of connections to parties, but I think cannot be actually properly mapped to the left or right. For one, as I said earlier, the degree of left-right depends on context- an ideologies position in early 1800s Prussia is completely different than the same ideology’s position today. When people try to extend the left-right spectrum out of domestic politics, they usually do it by kind of guessing at “If that ideology/foreign party did have a member elected to my legislature, which domestic party would they be most closely aligned with?”, but that method breaks down in manner ways. Also, where a party falls on a left-right spectrum in many ways in practice is determined by the personal relationships of party members to the members of the other parties, and the sorts of aesthetics the party likes to use. For example, do they invoke protecting the working class or do they invoke protecting Christianity to justify shutting down immigration- the same policy, with merely different aesthetics, can put them at opposite ends of the left-right.
To measure how likely parties are to cooperate in absolute terms, not just relative terms, you need a different model than mine. I think Nate Silver’s triangle model of Socialism, Conservatism, and Leftism has a good ratio of simplicity to explanatory power. I think to be more accurate too, you could change it to a triangle where the corners are wanting Equality of Opportunity(liberalism), Equality of Outcome(socialism), and openly desiring Hierarchy(conservatism). But that’s getting into an entirely different discussion that I’m much less confident on than my core theory.
Do You think I’m Wrong? Prove it with one easy test!
Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it. You do not need many examples at all- obviously by any theory they should have little in common. But most theories do posit they do have a little common and therefore should cooperate a little- I assert they do not cooperate at all on positive actions.
Several people have cited examples from countries with multiparty systems, I guess it was proved.
I think the attempts to come up with consistent "theories of left and right" fail because ... while it is not fully arbitrary random whether any particular party of random time period and historical circumstances is considered left or right, it is a result of partially random path-dependent process of self-sorting to tribal groups. People assign these labels to themselves and others according to what makes sense to them at the time. Then the next generation self-sorts again, in updated circumstances. Their thinking may have been influenced by systematic theories of politics and ideological treatises, so there is some amount of consistency (to the extent the systematic theories were self-consistent) ... but surprisingly often, the rank-and-file did not read the lengthy treatises. Sometimes the popular theories people acted upon turn out to be poor at modelling world, and lead unanticipated outcomes. If the process is not governed by systematic laws, attempts to draw systematic theories to explain the process will fail.
More options
Context Copy link
The Netherlands were governed by "Purple coalitions" including the left-wing PvdA and the right-liberal VVD but excluding the Christian centrist CDA from 1994-2002 and 2012-2017. The 1994-2002 Purple coalition explicitly excluded the CDA becuase the VVD, PvdA and left-liberal D66 wanted them out of office. The coalition passed significant social-left legislation opposed by the CDA including the legalisation of prostitution, gay marriage and euthanasia. (The 2012-7 purple coalition is a less good example because the only reason the CDA and D66 were excluded was that the VVD and PvdA didn't need their votes.)
This one, of course, makes perfect sense under a political compass style model - the PvdA is economic left, social centre, the VVD is economic right, social centre, the D66 is economic centre, social left, and the CDA is economic centre, social right. So PvdA-VVD-D66 is a social centre-left coalition which is all over the place on economics.
If you want to go full horseshoe, there are two important examples of the Communist KPD co-operating with the far right in Weimar Germany - the KPD had been ordered by Moscow to oppose the centre-left SDP as a priority. The 1931 Prussian referendum was an attempt to recall the SPD-led State government in Prussia which was supported by the Stahlhelm (an anti-democratic right-wing veteran's organisation tied to the DNVP), the Nazis and the KPD. There was a transport strike in Berlin in November 1932 where Nazi and KPD goon squads worked together to protect strikers and intimidate scabs.
I also endorse the modern German examples downthread.
More options
Context Copy link
Both far left and far right would likely agree on official policies of banning books and jailing opponents of the regime, whereas the middle left and middle right would likely oppose those policies as policies. Even in the case of Trump, I think the middle left is convinced that he broke the law and would not sanction a policy of government jailing opponents "without cause."
Sure, but they probably wouldn’t agree on which books, and which opponents.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, they'd both support those policies, yet they would never actually pass a bill together with those policies. That disconnect from the extremes supporting the same positions but never actually working together is the core point I'm making.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are states where ethnicity matters and linearizing different interest groups will (a) not always be possible and (b) result in some ordering which is drastically different from from the general usage of "left" or "right".
I mean, look at the Knesset. I am not an expert in Israeli politics, but Wikipedia describes Ra'am as "an Islamist and conservative political party". They sit on the far left, but apart from ethnic concerns would probably belong right of the center -- where none of the Zionist parties would have them in a coalition.
(Of course, another anomaly would be the dirty trick when labor tried to form a coalition with the ultra-orthodox, but you can argue that the fate of that attempt is mostly proof that cutting out a middle party on the political spectrum does not work.)
In Germany (where I know the politics a bit better and they are simpler -- the Bundestag does not have a zillion different shades of blue and red like the Knesset on Wikipedia), a counterexample would be the Grosse Koalition.
German major parties go left to right (WP Bundestag colors in parenthesis):
(This is how they are arranged in the Bundestag, there is a case to be made that the Greens are actually left of the SPD.)
Take the 2005 Bundestag. Nobody wants to form federal coalitions with the Linke or the AFP (so far), so the following would get you a majority:
Per your "arranged by compatibility" argument, one of the first two options would be favored, covering as little as the political spectrum as possible. Even if you agree with me that the Greens really ought to be placed on the left of the SPD, an "Ampel" coalition would seem preferable.
The reason that they ended up having a grosse Koalition instead was that while seated next to each other, FDP and Greens had major policy differences. These differences are not well reflected on the traditional left-right-spectrum. The Greens wanted to shut down nuclear power plants, impose a speed limit on the Autobahn and generally have stricter environmental standards. The FDP wanted none of these. In the end, it was easier for SDP and CDU/CSU to compromise than to reconcile FDP and Greens. Three out of the four Merkel cabinets were such coalitions (the other was CDU/CSU+FDP).
To be fair, getting the FDP into the coalition boat would have been possible policy-wise without to many concessions, but other considerations made this unfavorable. (At an election, the previous administration is mostly not seen positive. Having the stink of culpability in the failures of the previous administration on you has to be balanced with being able to point your constituents to specific policy wins your ministers accomplished. This means that you generally go for the minimum viable majorities -- and the grosse Koalition already had a solid majority.)
I've always thought the FDP was to the right of the CSU.
In a political compass model, the FDP was to the right of the CDU on economic issues and to their left on social issues. (The CSU is a Bavarian party which has caucused with the CDU since forever, but is the farthest right of all the respectable parties on both economic and social issues because Bavaria is the Texas of Germany).
The fact that it is easy to explain the difference between the FDP and CDU but hard to given an unambiguous answer to "which is more right-wing?" is itself evidence against the 1D left-right model.
More options
Context Copy link
The FDP is kinda libertarian. On economic issues, I would place them to the right of the CDU/CSU.
But on purely social issues, they are clearly left of the CDU/CSU. For example, the Ampel recently legalized cannabis (with some caveats). This is not a position currently compatible with the CDU/CSU.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ra'am working more closely with the left parties despite having more in common with the conservative parties from a naive view is exactly what I'm describing. My model accepts that as normal behaviour, whereas most models would need to add a bunch of epicycles to explain it away.
I agree that this is a solid counter-example that goes against my model. But as you say, when you factor in voters eventually growing upset with the ruling coalition resulting in some real politik, it makes sense that the cost isn't worth the benefit for small parties. Did the FDP still mostly vote with the Grosse Koalition even if they weren't officially part of it, or did they do a lot of protest no votes?
The problem with classifying Ra'am as far-left is that this is that it flies very much in the face of common usage.
I guess German opposition parties vote against bills proposed by the governing coalition. Perhaps more so if the bill would contain a lot of messy details to nitpick over, and less so if the bill reflects a wide consensus in the population.
In times of stable majorities, the votes of the opposition do not matter for the outcome. It is mostly public perception "How could you vote for this?!" vs "How could you vote against this?!". One way to square the circle is for opposition parties to introduce their own bill -- which generally won't pass, of course. This signals "we care about this topic" without any risk of getting blamed for negative outcomes of the coalition bill.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the problem boils down to the fact that leftism is well-defined: its fundamental, terminal value is equality, or the absence of hierarchy. Given two hypothetical positions, it is therefore easy to determine which is more leftist. For instance, consider answers to this question: What special duties do you owe to your own family member, or your countryman, or a member of your race, as opposed to a random stranger? The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.” Or: To what extent should a person’s merits or hard work or whatever lead to increased social status? The pure leftist answer is “not at all.”
Rightism, on the other hand, is not well-defined. In practice, it just means “something other than leftism.” To the extent that a position deviates from pure leftism, it is more or less rightist. This is why George Washington and Hitler are both considered right-wing, even though their policy positions (and terminal values) are not very consonant.
You can create a political compass with an arbitrary number of axes, but so long as only leftism is well-defined, determining how right-wing a position is only means calculating the geometric distance between that position and pure leftism. There could be an infinite number of value systems that value something other than equality and that have nothing in common with one another other than the fact that they are not leftist. Hitler is considered more right-wing than Washington because his policy positions were, in aggregate, more not-leftist than Washington’s, but he was not “like Washington, just more of it.”
I’ve never found left and right, or even the four quadrants system to be really useful in describing political ideologies. When you try to simplify too much you end up suggesting that very different things are the same. Birds and dragonflies both have wings, they just have nothing else in common. I think political ideologies are best described by using aggregate similarities between systems. Confucius believed in hierarchy, but he also believed in the powerful not overstepping their authority and not abusing power and so on. He believed that education at least in theory should be available to anyone. I think we’d agree that this is a basic meritocracy. But I don’t think he’d believe in our system of economics or government. Cicero talks in The Laws about how laws should be aimed at the common good and not favor some over others. Would he count as a liberal?
I tend to see conservative and much of the right as trying to fix problems by looking to the past and traditional structures: classical economics, traditional family structure, traditional modes of behavior, and so on. And the liberal side seems to mostly want to either artificially reduce or eliminate the traditional system. They want a stronger welfare state because why should we be bound to the economy and have to produce something useful to live? Or have to get married or not dress in strange ways, or not twerk in public. Hitler wasn’t a classical economics enthusiast, he didn’t believe that one should be judged on the merits. Washington did (slavery excepted).
More options
Context Copy link
In theory, maybe, but in practice this runs into many, many problems.
First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? I.e, take Stalinists who say they to totally remove hierarchy once capitalism is totally defeated, but until they have a very strict hierarchy with the Party on top. Are they more or less leftist than social democrats who want to remove most of hierarchy but are still okay with parents controlling children and the hardest workers having some more money than people on welfare, and who actually implement anti-hierarchical policies? It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.
Second- Removing hierarchies in practice
It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction. And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.
Since we are speaking pragmatically, I would apply the rule you set forth in your original post:
Thus, Stalin is to the left of Biden.
Consider two tribes: Tribe A, which has a norm that the chief and his buddies have the power of life and death over everyone else, and will apply it according to their private notion of what constitutes justice, and Tribe B, which has a system of courts and laws and a norm that no tribesman may be deprived of life or property without due process. Applying the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, we can see that the norm in Tribe B is closer than Tribe A to theoretical pure leftism (where all would be treated equally, regardless of merit or station), and that leftists would prefer Tribe B over Tribe A.
It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that a commitment to justice (by which I mean “the giving of what is deserved”) and due process is therefore a feature of leftism; rather, in historical context, it is just an intermediate, instrumental goal. While Tribe B might be stable, with most members adhering to its norms, the leftmost elements in Tribe B will be dissatisfied with the unequal outcomes (even if those outcomes are just). They will eventually start to wring their hands about the disparate impact of the justice system (either by race or wealth or what have you) or maybe how society actually creates criminals and so they shouldn’t be punished, but only helped, and they will begin to abandon the norm of the pursuit of justice / due process once it is in the rear-view mirror on the road to increased equality / abolition of hierarchy. The historical Tribe B revolutionaries who dethroned the chief and established the courts in the first place — leftists themselves, likely, in relation to the norms in their day — will eventually be recast by the purer leftists of the future as only slightly less noxious right-wingers than the chief himself, so that the march to total equality — the true terminal goal — can continue.
The Social Democrats in your example are not as committed to equality as the Communists. They are like the Tribe B moderates in that they ascribe some ultimate, non-instrumental value to competing values, such as personal liberty, and therefore, they are not as purely leftist. The Communists were, at least ostensibly, aiming for greater equality than the Social Democrats. If they thought they could get there through liberalism and democracy, they might go that route, but the police state route is acceptable, too.
To my mind, the reason that leftists are opposed to hierarchies is not because they dislike organization, but because they abhor the notion that one person should have greater social status or prestige than another. The underlying feeling is something like: Bob should not even be able to pay Alice a salary because he ought not to have more money than her in the first place. Even if it were accepted that the reason Bob has more money is because he was born more talented than Alice and his labor is therefore more valuable, that is not Alice’s fault, and she should be made equal to Bob. How exactly this is going to work is typically left as an exercise to the reader.
We are in agreement here — systems such as Communism are necessarily to the right of theoretical pure leftism and yet have failed miserably — but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Very committed leftists would (incorrectly, in my opinion) resolve your paradox by asserting that once we have more equality, things will just magically work out, and we won’t need the police anymore.
My characterization of “pure leftism” is just a theoretical ideal — a single point in political space, useful for evaluating how leftist a particular position is. The fact that leftism, beyond a certain extreme, is probably unworkable in the real world is not a criticism of the measurement system.
Maybe you'll just dismiss this as another "left as an exercise to the reader", but let's say we forget money, and directly consider exchange of services. Let's say Alice really want a servant, like the previous scenario, but her society has abolished currency so she has no money to pay Bob with. She can still pay with services or goods she crafts herself. Maybe she's a brilliant poet that can write a poem that can move Bob to tears in five minutes, and Bob happily embraces being her full time servant in exchange for one such poem a day. Would leftists somehow try to shut down that moneyless hierarchy too? You can replace "poem" for anything too- maybe she cooks excellent meals, maybe she has a green thumb and can grow far more produce than any other individual, maybe she's a brilliant engineer who can design and build an entire house by herself.
And of course, once you allow for that sort of hierarchy, you by necessity allow for much more complex ones. Perhaps Alice pays Bob with a fraction of her own labour, and also employs a couple other people like Charlie and David the same way, all of them pledging 8 hours of their days to her. But she then has each of them use 4 of those 8 hours to do services for another 3 even less productive people to get those 3 people to do her 8 hours of service a day- and so on until she has a network of hundreds working for her. All voluntary, all without money or even necessarily any private property at all, yet without a doubt a hierarchy.
My point is that that single point in theoritical space is non-existent. Unless you mean the point is just how much people pledge themselves to the idea of "no hierarchy" with no relation to how anti-hierarchical they are in real life or even how hierarchical their utopian vision is. In which case I think that is a coherent measurement system to compare parties by, but also a pretty useless measurement system that doesn't tell you anything practical. Why should anyone care how much lip service a party pays to "no hierarchy"?
The point of my method is to apply a metric that enables us to answer this question: given two political positions, which is more leftist?
Let’s suppose that we live in a society like the one that your Alice lives in, where currency has been abolished and Alice has a network of hundreds of laborers who work for her, all happily, freely, and voluntarily, either (a) in direct exchange for her poems, or (b) in exchange for the labor of people who work in direct exchange for her poems. Alice’s poems are a form of wealth, and you correctly note that a hierarchy has been created, with Alice at the top. She likely enjoys a great deal of social status and prestige in this hypothetical society.
Now let’s suppose that there are two competing political parties: the Yellows and the Pinks, who take the following positions:
Yellows: “It is fine that Alice has such status and prestige — this system of voluntary association incentivizes the production of her poems, a valuable resource; it allows everyone involved the freedom to do what they like, and it makes society wealthier while directly harming nobody. It is nothing like the bad old days when people had to work for wages to survive.”
Pinks: “What right does Alice have to put on such airs? It is an accident of fate that she has this peculiar capacity to produce beautiful poetry. Morally, she has a duty to willingly share this gift with the community instead of exploiting it. We find it very problematic indeed that good people should be obliged to labor for hours every day only to receive a poem that takes her mere minutes — in the comfort of her well-appointed living quarters, we might add — to put forth. The watchword of the day should be: poems from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs, with special privileges for none. Alice should be set to producing poems all day for the benefit of all; her needs will be adequately taken care of in return, the same deal as everyone else. She is not better than anyone else.”
Now, using the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, it is pretty clear which of the parties is more leftist.
My claims are (1) that this metric can generally be pretty handily applied to any two political positions addressing the same issue, and will predict with good accuracy which will be perceived as more leftist, and (2) given a political position that is not equivalent to pure leftism, I can use the metric to construct a position on that same issue that is recognizably further to the left of it.
Your pinks party does sound rather leftist after that one paragraph. If you added another paragraph with what the Pinks would actually do about it, I think they'd sound a lot less leftist, since any sort of enforcement mechanism would be a hierarchy. I don't think the party that suggests throwing people in jail for trading poems would be recognizably more leftist than a party that is willing to just stick to currency abolition but otherwise lets people live free.
Your framework also doesn't work well for comparing parties that are different amounts of leftist on different issues. Lets say there's a country of Examplestan, in which everyone is a fervent follower of Examplestani Leftism. They all work hard to make Examplestan a better place, they don't use any currency and simply ask for goods and services but never ask for more than they need, no one ever coerces anyone or creates any sort of hierarchy within Examplestan. However, they think every human outside of Examplestan is less than a worm. They don't expand past their borders, but anyone who enters Examplestan from the outside is either shot dead or enslaved because of their ethnic impurity. Is Examplestan far right or far left?
You've already said your model fails at describing how far right parties are, at best it can try to calculate how not-leftist a party is. But it also cannot accurately assess any party which are left on some issues and right on other issues, since it can't asses the issues they're right-wing on. Which is many parties.
Where would it place something like Ba'athism? Or Peronism?
In my model, you simply would not try to compare them to Democrats or Republicans or Stalinists or Nazis, at least not in an international context. You can try to guess where a Peronist or Stalinist or Ba'athist would fall if you brought them into the context US election, or brought the US parties into the context of a specific foreign election, but you couldn't compare them in a purely international context. If you do compare them in an international context, that goes outside my model.
And I think trying to model them in an international context is a flawed endeavor doomed to fail, personally. There's a reason why people argue about whether Peronists and Ba'athists are far left or far right or if you need to bring a political compass in it whatever- I don't think it is possible to compare parties in an international way. I think people intuitively use the principles I've laid out when modeling domestic politics, without consciously knowing what those principles are. And people try to apply the same principles to international politics to come up for a label for Ba'athists or Peronists, but they can't draw an intuitive conclusion and start disagreeing with each other and even themselves about where such parties fall. They start making up rules like yours and try to calculate how anti-hierarchy a party is in sum, or a right-libertarian might say the more pro-freedom a party is in sum the more right-wing they are, or they might use some other model. Whatever set of rules they use, it doesn't work well, because it's an impossible to task.
Like we agreed as a guiding principle, any definition should match how people actually use the terms left and right. If people call the same party both left and right, then it's impossible for any definition that assigns each party to a single point on a line to function. I don't know whether people inside Argentina call Peronists left or right, but whatever they call Peronists inside their country, I'm sure it's internally consistent, although perhaps only for a single election and are not consistent across time even within Argentina. Same with Ba'athists in Syria.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This reminds me of Bryan Caplan's framing: "The left hates markets, and the right hates the left", in that a market creates natural hierarchies. The left doesn't like that, and wants to correct it toward equality as much as possible.
I have my doubts about Caplan's framing, mainly because I consider my self an "economically literate" left-leaning person, and I think markets are great at a bunch of things, but I'm also aware of famous market failures where government intervention was useful.
Bank runs are a good example of a market failure that I think the central government is well-equipped to fix with things like FDIC insurance. I'm aware of proposals by committed, principled libertarians for how we could solve bank runs through market mechanisms, but I also think that when something like FDIC insurance has worked reasonably well for the last 90+ years, it seems silly to abandon a form of government intervention that works just because there's some fancy mechanism design that accomplishes the same thing through market means.
I think a lot of market fundamentalists are guilty of "infinite frictionless plane" or "spherical cow" type reasoning. Yes, in a society of rational agents, with perfect information, no transaction costs, and perfect ability to insure against negative externalities, we can arrive at Pareto efficient outcomes through market mechanisms. But that seems to ignore that humans aren't rational agents, we don't have perfect information, there often are transaction costs, and we don't have insurance for all possible negative externalities.
We should use markets where they're empirically known to work, and use government intervention where markets empirically veer the furthest from realizing the ideal models used by economists. I'm okay with using government intervention to prop up and support the market, if it gets us closer to the economist's utopia of Pareto efficient outcomes, since even that sounds like it would be an improvement upon the world where we actually live as far as distribution of resources goes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The many documented examples of Senators Hawley and Sanders voting together against the center. Sometimes they're joined by Cruz, Warren, etc.
I acknowledged that as negative cooperation. It is common. I am saying postive cooperation is shockingly rare or even non-existent. Have Hawley and Sanders ever voted yes together on a bill that the centrists voted no on?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it can; libertarians are pro hierarchies, but natural hierarchies. They consider police to be an intrusion on natural hierarchies of force. Those who are stronger or better armed, or can afford the loyalty of stronger or better armed people to defend them deserve the better protection/law enforcement. To them, the police is like a communist state trying to make the protection/law enforcement market egalitarian.
That seems like a bit of a reach to me. Leftists don't usually want to abolish literally every hierarchy either. And it doesn't explain why authoritarian communists are on the left side of the political spectrum, since those states involve a very strict hierarchy.
Authoritarian communists will never get there(because it's pie in the sky ridiculosity), but they'll happily tell you that the increasing power to the state is about abolishing the hierarchy between men.
And Christians will tell you we'll be all equal in Heaven. Many democratic socialists who don't want a revolutions, just socialized control of industry, want a very hierarchical burearacracy that must be obeyed. Organized crime tends to be extremely hierarchical- are they all farther right than the Nazis? There are examples of parties all over the spectrum that don't fit the pattern of "less hierarchy = more left, more hierarchy = more right". Especially when you play fast and loose about artificial hierarchies vs natural hierarchies mean.
There are plenty of Christians who will tell you that, no, we will not all be equal in heaven, and some will be closer to God than others. In fact, angels, who are by definition normally in heaven, are in Christian thought held to exist in a particularly strict hierarchy.
That's without even addressing the elephant in the living room that heaven is inherently unequal because God(duh) and also some don't get in.
"Closer" is probably the wrong word. God will be as close to the glorified in heaven as he can be; if it were otherwise there could be no salvation.
The best description of heaven in the saint-venerating Churches comes from St. Therese of Liseaux, in Story of a Soul:
In other words, all the saints are full of God, but some are capable of being fuller than others. And one among them is so full of grace that she is "more spacious than the heavens" (in any other context, a grievous insult) and so densely filled with God that he took physical form in her womb.
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe Christians have to sadly stay in the far right category then. But would a type of Theist that believes in something nearly identical to Christian theocracy, with the tweak that they think God is just the spiritual union of all humanity's souls and that we are all equal in Heaven(and that everyone goes to Heaven), get to be called far leftist? Again, in the material world, their actual policies are identical to something like Byzantine Rome.
Many Christians do believe this. Interestingly, they also tend to be on the left politically. Make of that what you will.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You've made a good description of political extremism, but not it seems to me the left/right divide.
There are further complications: The discrete policy positions are completely untethered to the right or the left. Is gun control right or left? Well, it depends a lot on whether you're talking about France in 1790 or the US in the 2000s. Is war right or left? Depends on the war! Is trade protectionism right or left? You get the idea.
Then you have the problem that political coalitions are shifting constantly, pressure groups, identities rise and fall etc. "Gay" was a big political identity for twenty years or so. Black people shifted parties, and will do so again, so which one is the racists? The liberal assimilationist jews are on one side, but the nationalistic hardcore jews are on the other! Which group hates the jews?
I think Sailer's "leapfrogging loyalty" remains the best predictor of what is meant by "right" and "left" so far, but it's far from perfect.
I'm a fan of Scott's Thrive vs Survive theory. It is true that it's kind of hard to construct a good definition of "left" and "right" that perfectly encompasses all the ways we use the term.
More options
Context Copy link
My theory does not apply to parties positions on policies, identities, or individual's positions on policies. You'd need another theory to describe all that. My theory is solely about how parties actually behave relative to each other, and what to label parties as a whole.
Political coalitions shift, maybe one day the socialists prefer working with the liberals, and the next they prefer the communists. But the core of my theory is that no matter have much coalitions shift, you'll never see a discontinuous coalition that excludes centrists while including both the right and left. At least not a coalition that ever actually ever passes anything.
It's not an unified theory of everything political. But I think it is useful. It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.
I think the complaint is that left and right just don’t mean anything. Instead, I generally see them as boo lights.
I think these are useful observations that do mean something. People often do use left/right as boo lights. But they also use them as meaningful terms. Calling someone "far right" or "far left" wouldn't be an insult if they didn't have real meaning. There's a reason why libertarians want to convince you that Hitler was actually a leftist, and why progressives want to convince you Bernie is a centrist in Europe. My model gives a framework to ignore those people without losing the utility of the terms "far right", "right", "centrist", "left", and "far left" to describe how willing a party is to cooperate with other parties quickly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link