Caplan and Hanson on the Myth of Left and Right; Scott Sumner on demographics; Tevi Troy on moderating Presidential debates; Greg Clark tries to pass as a progressive
The Myth of Left and Right: If Robin Hanson's summary is a fair one, this book by two 'professors who are brothers' would seem to be one written by two people whose fraternal relationship has helped each to narrow the mind of the other.
Whilst (in a narrow sense) it is true that the Left/Right polarity originates from political jockeying in post revolutionary France, in the 20th/21st c. West it is a shorthand (albeit and imperfect one) for a very real and profound philosophical divide. The Left dreams that human society can be made to 'progress' via political means and the Right is (in varying degrees of intensity) sceptical of this - seeing it as springing from a willful blindness to eternal verities of human nature . This is a very big - and entirely non-arbitrary - philosophical divide. And to call it 'tribal' is merely fatuous.
Both are correct. Politics IS one important way to promote progress (no quotes necessary) and skepticism is the proper attitude toward any specific proposal for doing so.
I think, based on the interview, that this argument doesn't quite work, for two reasons.
Firstly, I don't think many on the American left/right (I am looking at this from an American view because I don't know enough about other political states elsewhere to say) would point to your foundational theory as their foundational theory. That is, using the state to make society improve, or progress, is something those on both sides seem to be ok with in many cases. Now, I think in practice your description holds pretty true for the bulk, describing what they do instead of why they do it. But in terms of actual foundational philosophy that guides their policy preferences, I don't think they are going from A to B to C to get there in a logical fashion. This unawareness is important, because it means that on particular issues there need be no adherence to this principle, and indeed it seems that there is very little. (Not zero, as I will get to.)
The American right definitely accepts political shaping of the people, if as you so to varying degrees between zero and lots. So the question of "does this person think the state can improve society?" is not terribly predictive of which side of the divide you are on. I think the brothers under appreciated this point in their favor when talking with Caplan. It would be interesting to see how people respond in a large survey to whether or not humans have definite natures, eternal verities of such which can be known, and how that tracks with political ideology. I suspect that would be fairly more predictive.
The other point is that the actual policies favored by left/right tend to swing around a lot, and I think that is a very fair point. I think both primary political parties are a bit random in their collection of stances: Planned Parenthood being the same tent as the NAACP is kind of crazy when you know their history. In the US this might be a result of the two party system, I don't know; possibly other countries have more coherent sets of policy groupings. However, I don't think we can entirely write off how nonsensical from a practice point of view many of the positions are.
All that said, I am inclined to agree with you and Caplan: it is likely 85% tribalism and 15% essentialism. I think your formulation works pretty well, as does Caplan's. I think it is mostly tribal when it comes down to most people and politicians, even though there is a little bit of through line of actual consistency. I suspect most people are unaware or unable to describe that essentialist root, and less able to explain why it means they should or should not support a particular issue.
"It is likely 85% tribalism and 15% essentialism."
The more you simply randomly choose some left/right member of the population and ask them to make a coherent statement about their collective issue positions, the more it looks arbitrary.
But the intellectuals who comprise left/right are going to be more coherent. One can wave this off as some kind of clever rationalization or cognitive bias, but the more charitable and verisimilitude-friendly interpretation is that they've simply made an argument. (If they all fail to give arguments that sound like *each other,* and instead some idiosyncratic thing, then we're back at arbitrary and incoherent, but they largely don't. They're on the same proverbial page.)
If we give more weight to the "creative synthesizers" at the top of left/right than the modal leftist/rightist, I think we can get awfully close to justifying the essentialist view.
I don't know about that. I think even if we focus on the thinkers, ignoring the politicians (which... well that's getting pretty far from the use case, but sure) we still find there are multiple relevant dimensions, not a single "more or less X". Looking at Arnold Kling's 3 Languages of Politics, there's at least 3 right there. Further, there seems to be a fair bit of competition for identifying the "essential" difference for defining the difference between left and right among those thought leaders. That, to me, signals that people are trying to back into an essential difference rather than starting from one and building their policy positions from there.
Now, some are a lot more consistent than others, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't be opposed to saying some thinkers are closer to 60-80% essentialist as opposed to tribal, possibly more. At the same time, those thinkers that are more essentialist are probably also more out of step with the rest of their side of the spectrum than others who are less consistent.
You are, of course correct that very few citizen/voters would articulate their political philosophy in the way I have above. But I believe that, for most of those 'on the Right', I have correctly depicted an underlying attitude - an instinct if you like - about the human condition.
I entirely agree with you though that (from what I have observed over the decades) very many people do swing about a bit - back and forth across my 'philosophical divide'. I think that part of the reason is that those not inclined to intellectualise (unlike us on Substack threads like this) - and so their main interface with political ideas is via MSM 'News' - do get bounced around by its essentially lets-get-you-nice-and-worked-up manipulative nature.
A caveat: My comment was picking up on the book title plus Hanson's "The least plausible claim in the book is that left vs right is 100% tribal, and 0% essential."
I've no motivation to read the book or even listen to the interview.
Nevertheless I'm still going to say that, whilst people's political response to ephemeral unfolding political 'news' may be quite reasonably called tribal, underneath all that are deeper philosophical 'instincts' and these 'instincts' are not very tribal at all.
They come from somewhere else - maybe from early life experiences or innate psychological tendencies; I don't really know. It would make an interesting field of psychological research along the lines of what makes for optimistic personality traits and what makes for sceptical/pessimistic ones?
I think even beyond the MSN manipulation (which is definitely a thing the past 40-50 years, more recently especially) there is a certain incoherence in policy positions that people are not comfortable addressing because they have no reason for holding them other than vague feelings and instincts along with peer group pressure. I should explain my model in more detail; short version:
Regular people have typically 2-3 issues they care a lot about, for some reason or another, and are largely indifferent or undecided on most other issues. Maybe animal welfare, gay rights, gun control, or taxes are their big bugaboos, whatever. The big ones they focus on, think about, argue for, while the others they don't give much thought to, and just kind of absorb what is normal for their upbringing.
Then they start voting and pick the party that matches their stance on their big issues. If they don't go any further in paying attention to politics they remain single issue voters (or 2-3 issue voters if they have that many priorities).
If, however, they are the sort that cares about having positions on all subjects, something that probably 60-80% of people who vote seem to do, they start absorbing the positions of their party/tribe. In part this is no doubt due to a "hey, they agree with me on the most important things, so they probably aren't too bad on the other things, not like those monsters who disagree with me" process, as well as a subtle minimization of cognitive dissonance; you aren't really allowed to say "I don't care about any other issues" in polite society, so it is easier to just agree with the other people in party without thinking about it too hard. This is especially the case on new issues, in part because those in their own tribe are likely to make the case in language (see Kling) they already appreciate.
From the political party side, the politicians are choosing their positions based largely on what will get them elected, choosing stances that will be popular. The salient example here for me is the rural Democrat who is anti-gun control, because he knows 70% of his potential voters are anti-gun control as a first order big issue. So politicians, and their parties, have coalitions of big issue positions, and over time people who vote for them adopt the positions on issues they care less about as their own, because that is "what people like us think". Big issues that are largely shared too much to be competed over, eg. guns in rural areas, quietly get dropped or competed over in the "My opponent claims to love mom and apple pie, but I am the TRUE mom and apple pie lover!" manner.
One does not get perfectly stable parties in this case, however. Sometimes the big issues are too conflicting within the party and the base splits. TERFS and Trans are probably the notable example on the left, along with AWFL moms and whatever the hell we are calling what is going on in schools. These splits seem to happen most when the party is in ascendance and decides it doesn't need all its current big ideas to win, and so doesn't work to downplay the dissonance between them. Sometimes they happen for deeper reasons, like how the "small l" libertarian right and the Republican party are always kind of at odds with each other, despite voting the same way most of the time.
Then there are the maybe 1-5% of the population who actually think enough about this kind of stuff, the intellectualizers as you put it, who care most about consistency and actual questions of right and wrong, and thus have really good reasons for why they have the positions they do. The vast majority of the population distrusts them, even those who are sort of on the same side, because they have the nasty habit of making them interrogate their tribal markers and pointing out inconsistencies.
Still, I agree with Caplan that it isn't 100% tribal, at the very least because people choose their tribes and don't do so entirely randomly. At the same time, I think the left-right scale is largely useless, as a three dimensional scale of the sort from Kling's "Three Languages of Politics" is more accurate, or at least a two dimensional scale (although I have trouble settling on two scales). So I kind of agree on the problem of the Left-Right axis being largely useless, but maybe not for the reasons the authors suggest.
(Incidentally, the interview is pretty decent. Worth listening to while you make dinner or something, at least.)
I basically agree with all this as far as voting tribalism is concerned. And I also agree with you to some extent with regard to the taking of positions on particular hot-topical 'issues' as well. But I think we've ended up partly at crossed purposes here because I was mainly thinking about something more ineffable than just how people vote and what position they take when some hot "issue" comes to the fore.
I was thinking more about how people go about their lives - whether they are a "so who can we blame here?"-type; how much they believe in personal responsibility; how much they like to be self-reliant.
I would be quite happy to ditch the Left/Right polarity but not the progressive/conservative polarity. I would still say that most people's instincts are either progressive or conservative (even if they don't THINK OF IT in those terms). And it's essence is 'psychological, not 'tribal' - except in so far as people are - at least to some extent - affected by the quality of their upbringing.
I am a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and, like a lot of conservatives, day-to-day hot topic 'issues' don't consume me (often bore me in fact). I believe that everyone who leans 'progressive' does so because they want to inflate their sense of their own righteousness beyond what it deserves and have an unhealthy urge to look for someone or something to BLAME for their personal discontents. To my ears calling people's instinctive conservatism - those with a psychological leaning towards self-reliance and personal responsibility - to call it 'tribal' insults them really.
I think, that your reference point of conservatives who ignore day to day hot topic issues, is referencing a very small proportion of people, although I also get the sense that the "very engaged with political activism" trait tends to be much more evident with leftists/progressives than with conservatives. In fact, I would be pretty comfortable using "thinks political action is the first tool to reach for to solve problems" as a mono-dimensional scale, expecting it to catch 15-20% of the differences. I definitely think there is a lot of truth in Sowell's Conflict of Visions set up. I just don't think that it captures more than 20%. (Ok, I could be talked into 25 or 35 % maybe :D )
I just think there is too much movement of the Overton Window over time, too much reshuffling of what constitutes right wing vs left wing positions over time to take the Left-Right scale as actually useful. Even in the last 5 years it seems to have swung around a fair bit. Possibly I am still annoyed that people code "national socialists" as right wing for some reason.
Even progressive/conservative I am a little skeptical on, although in part that is because I have never seem a good break down of what conservative means at a given time that all conservatives would agree with, and likewise for progressive, that could then be used to compare to conservatives/progressives at some other time to see if they changed. That pretty standard Democrat positions from the 80's and 90's seem to have become right wing, even extremist views in the past 40 years suggests to me that the terms have little meaning in an absolute sense, only relative to each other.
Put another way, would you and I be considered conservative 70 years ago? 100? 180? When would we be called "radicals for freedom", to use Rand's terminology.
In a sense, I really like the brothers' argument that the labels are just misleading because being "more right wing" or "less progressive" doesn't really tell you anything about the positions; better just to talk about what the positions are. However, I think saying positions are 100% tribal and 0% based on prior philosophies is a bridge way too far. Or at least 10-15% too far, and possibly 25 -30% :D
Your annoyance at the labelling of National Socialism as 'extreme right wing' is something I absolutely share. The reason it has persisted for so long is that, for at least 100 years, the intelligentsia of the liberal West have basically framed their nauseatingly self-deluding vanities under a rubric: Left=nice and Right=nasty.
Other than that, you and I seem to have got into a kind of intellectual log-jam that I don't know how to free-up.
People whose instincts lean towards self-reliance and personal responsibility; people who do not buy into today's fashionable (and selective) victimhood narratives: I call these people 'conservative'. There are millions of these people.... although far less than in former times. I do not call them 'tribal'. The tragedy of our era is that is has encouraged traits of narcissism, resentment and false piety. People high on these traits will almost certainly vote Left in an election. I kind of imagine that you agree with all this and so I can't quite see what we are 'arguing' about!
And if the writers of the book that triggered this conversation cannot see the truth of this then I think they must have got themselves down some sort of 'political science' rabbit hole. One that is dismally lacking in philosophical wisdom.
Tribalism denotes a kind of mindless randomness. Ala sports teams.
But when I look at the left and right across the world today, one would generally say the right is middle class families with lots of kids, and the left would be "not that".
The positions mostly seem to fall out from that.
Why is planned parenthood in the same camp as the NAACP. Because blacks want to screw around promiscuously usually without condoms and use abortions as birth control.
Why do middle class families with lots of kids hate abortion? Because it lowers the status of child rearing and chastity.
There are certain areas where I think there is very little consistency (foreign policy) and there is some degree of coalition give and take. But it's remarkable to me how consistent what Steve Sailer would call the "core vs fringes" political formation has been for some time. If politics has been swimming left, its because the fringes are overtaking the core.
Tribalism doesn't denote randomness, rather adhering to the beliefs that support your group, the tribe that supports your beliefs.
Further, I think your "middle class families with lots of kids" definition of the right is... well kind of bonkers.
How many kids is "lots"? 2? 3? If it is 3, my parents are somehow out; if it is more than 3 I am. If it is 2, well, ok that is more than the average I guess, but hardly predictive.
And what about single people? Do they never lean right in politics until they have kids? Or does it matter how many kids they want to have, whether or not they have them now?
How many kids does it take to go from pro to anti union?
Planned Parenthood and the NAACP have more history than that. The founder of PP was one of the early 20th century progressives who wanted fewer poor blacks, and since forced sterilization was off the table, abortion was it. That there is no memory of that rather existential difference of opinion is not perhaps surprising. However, the fact that they went together when both were in contemporary living memory suggests that either blacks are extremely forgiving, or Democrats didn't care that their politicians were talking out of both sides of their mouths and promising mutually exclusive things. If the latter, that is evidence that the positions do not have to be logically coherent to exist under the same ideology, and thus don't spring from the same essentialist source.
If one were to be very cynical, and possibly more correct, one could posit that the Democratic party mouths their interest in the social advancement of black Americans while simultaneously preventing it so that they always have a problem to solve for them come election day. The common D voter seems blissfully unaware of this possibility, yet is highly contentious of suggestions that the very things their party advocates to help the black population have in fact harmed them over the past 80+ years. That is an odd stance to take if you actually care about helping black people instead of just supporting your party.
Conservatives have a TFR of about 2.3 and liberals about 1.2. So a little more than a kid.
It's even more stark if we limit it to people scoring in the top of the IQ range. High IQ liberals clock in at 0.6 TFR. Conservatives near replacement.
Another way of looking at it is how many children the various primary candidates in each party have. It's way higher for the GOP than the DEMs.
"How many kids does it take to go from pro to anti union?"
There are a lot of things that shape voting habits. My view is simply that having kids makes you less leftist than your would otherwise be, and that the effect is significant. Maybe your union job is a big enough payoff to get over that.
"the fact that they went together when both were in contemporary living memory suggests that either blacks are extremely forgiving"
What have you done for me lately?
Democrats no longer say they want a bunch of blacks aborted. Blacks what abortions. That's good enough. Some slut black woman isn't going to have kids she doesn't want because she's got some decades old grudge against Margaret Singers motivations.
"and thus don't spring from the same essentialist source"
I don't have any clue what an "essentialist" source is. The only thing that is essential to people is their most vital self interest.
"while simultaneously preventing it"
Genetics prevent it.
Any other idea you have would take too long and get mediocre results. The best blacks can hope for is the kind of giveaways DEMs give them, which are more certain and immediate then any long term theory that might not even work.
If you don't know what "essentialist" means in this context, I recommend actually watching the interview, because it suggests that you do not understand what is actually being discussed here.
I get it, Sumner wants to remind us that he's not racist.
Look, I'm an actuary. I'm as aware as anyone the limits of long term forecasting. But I also don't through up my hands and go "wow, long term demographics are hard to predict, guess I'll stop selling life insurance".
And I guarantee the office of the actuary doesn't stop publishing the annual shortfall projections for SS & Medicare because robot caretakers and artificial wombs will solve the situation real soon now.
"While I don’t favor policies explicitly aimed at boosting fertility"
Jeez man just get OK with child tax credits. And yeah it's OK for them to be bigger for people who make more income. We aren't equal.
It's so hard for these people to admit that the childless are free riders and low IQ immigration is bad. So judgmental. We must bury our heads in the sand and do nothing. God (or robots) will save us.
Arnold on Gregory Clark: "He insists on stressing the importance of genetics and the inability of other policy interventions to overcome genetic factors. This analysis leads him to support income redistribution." Unstated assumption: the government ought to try to make outcomes equal. Collective efforts to relieve extreme poverty might be justifiable, but that is not the same thing. Better than redistribution would be steps to make it less difficult for people to take care of themselves.
Re: "Those on the left gravitate toward beliefs that help them to feel qualified to steer society."
The history of political ideas/leaders/movements/regimes that have been labelled "right-wing" is replete with dirigisme!
My view is the following:
• Left and right are labels that have no general content, no coherence, no consistency over time.
• Majority rule induces binary coalition-formation, sometimes expressed in a 2-party system, in which each coalition or party has an idiosyncratic, eclectic mix of positions at any political moment. People have labeled these kaleidoscopic binary coalitions 'left' and 'right' since the French revolution.
• The real tradition here is the simplistic use of political categories of the French revolution to label kaleidoscopic binary coalitions.
Political discourse is full of procrustean concepts, which extrapolate unduly from an original historical example. Another instance is the concept of a "generation" (millennials, gen z, etc). The "baby boomer generation" was a real thing, defined by a spike in births; and, upon coming of age, the expansion of higher education, the anti-Vietnam War movement (conscription, college deferments); and rapid, radical impact of contemporaneous technology shock on culture (the pill, the sexual revolution, the counter-culture). By contrast, "millennial," "gen z," are very fuzzy, very thin concepts.
Here is the same thing I wrote at Aporia. I just don't buy that acknowledgement of genetics leads to redistribution.
"Acknowledgement of innate differences in ability is an argument for redistribution and economic protection, not against them."
There are three arguments for redistribution:
1) It has a high ROI, because the poor can improve themselves by using those funds better then the rich.
2) It is "fair" in some cosmic sense.
3) It is necessary for social and political stability (cheaper to pay then not to pay).
#1 is the justification for most social spending. Education, healthcare, etc are justified mostly based on ROI. If someone want to justify universal pre-K then show a study showing that earlier interventions raise IQ or some nonsense.
If the ROI isn't there most of what we spend money on collapses into little more then make-work jobs for professional class vote banks.
#2 should probably acknowledge fairness to the future. Higher economic growth benefits the unborn, so if redistribution today slows growth then it's unfair to the future.
#3 Is a sound argument, but do we really need to spend 50%+ of GDP? Again most of the big expenditures are #1 related and generally benefit the providers more than the provided for.
"...This was that over four hundred years, social outcomes for lineage members were closely tied to their genetic similarity, even down to the level of fourth cousins.
He insists on stressing the importance of genetics and the inability of other policy interventions to overcome genetic factors. This analysis leads him to support income redistribution."
If his argument is basically that genetics controls destiny and that is indeed correct, he still needs to provide evidence that the benefits of income distribution are outweighed by whatever secondary harms they cause.
there are only two political groups and there have always been only two political groups
those who want to tell other people what do do - women/elves
those who just want to grill - men/hobbits
the justifications for why everyone HAS to obey (and correspondingly the objections) will change with the times and that's why you'll have a problem making them cohere
Myth of Left and Right: Yours is not the first post I've seen that says something like, "Left is for those focused on what we can achieve while Right is for what we can sustain or preserve." I get the appeal of this but am not sure it's what we see in our daily lives. Although some of the counter-revolutionaries against Soviet Marxism were said to be "rightists," were they trying to sustain and preserve the status quo of the Soviet Marxism?
Perhaps the *rhetoric* of the left expresses optimism about change and the *rhetoric* of the right tends to be more cautious but, in a world where left and right alternate in power, it seems kind of guaranteed that neither partisan side can be much more or less pro-establishment or anti-establishment than the other. To phrase this a joke, would an establishment that says it's anti-establishment hold onto power by truly being anti-establishment?
“Clark and deBoer paint a realistic picture, and as a result they get right-coded.” I can’t say anything about Clark, but this is ridiculously unfair to Freddie. In the right circumstances, he’d probably be the first on a barricade with a big ole red flag. He’s just too principled to go with a flow of BS. (I disagree with all those principles, but I respect his integrity.) I guess it’s good for everyone not on the left that the left can’t even recognize their most principled proponents.
Greg Clark's comments on associative mating among the British snob class should be expected from their culture. However, this doesn't back up the concept of actual genetics and not cultural effects determining this outcome. With snobs always marrying snobs the heritability appears high and social mobility low.
The smarter lower classes moved to the Americas and created our wealth and our own elite class. We no longer having the boss marrying the secretary and we have evolved massive associative mating in our educated class. Just look around and you see smart educated people marrying smart educated people which is just a larger % of our population that the British royals. Our government is creating a heritable political class but at least our business sectors (what is left outside the government control) will allow social mobility and new people getting rich by starting new businesses.
I'm not sure tradition vs elite direction gets to the most fundamental difference. Conservative elites are increasingly comfortable with radical departures from the status quo and what is change and what is stasis can be largely a matter of framing.
However badly they execute it, I think the Left does want to redistribute resources and influence more broadly, "equitably."
Arnold wrote "Those on the left gravitate toward beliefs that help them to feel qualified to steer society... Socialism and strong government direction of the economy perennially serves this purpose, no matter how often it fails in practice." The imperviousness of these ideas to empirical disconfirmation shows they serve unstated purposes, in particular, left meliorism or the politics of the transformative future are the ideological cover and provide a spurious justification for the system of grift into which liberalism has devolved.
Re: tradition as the test of left-vs-right -- not all traditions are the same, so this means that left and right-wings will have different values in different times and places.
The Spartans under the constitution set by the mythical Lycurgus were swingers within the highest caste, often for breeding purposes but also for enjoyment. Women had much higher status in the Spartan high castes than they did in Athens. When Athenian women did gain something of higher status, it was in the context of being forced to work more because of the collapse of the polis and the depletion of the silver mines. Yet in modern discussions of the two leading cultures of that era and region, we often map the Spartans to the right and the Athenians to the left. Thomas More modeled Utopia on the Spartans, but we usually consider "Utopian schemes" to be left-wing visions rather than right-wing visions of ret\/rning to tradition.
Similarly, Islamic sects that downplay luxury, sexual license, and stamp out exceptions to the ban on alcohol are not necessarily traditional, but were rather reactions to the collapse of the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the other great Islamic empires that were basically built around the lechery of the aristocracy. Even today, you see that dynamic between the Salafists and the lived values of the aristocrats of Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Kuwait, et al. In our own history, the cavaliers were louche traditionalists and the roundheads carried the banner of a new, pure vision of austere morality.
In general people associate "the left" with "equality".
There are almost an infinite set of possible metrics to be equal on, so it would be best to think of it as "more equality on the most salient political issues of the day."
The most salient political issue in the Pelopenessian war was political equality between free male citizens. Oligarchy (Sparta) vs Democracy (Athens). This was the internal conflict amongst all the other city states in the war. Whenever Sparta brought someone over to their side it became an oligarchy. Wherever Athens took over a city it installed a democracy.
Other things like rights of women or slaves were not salient issues (though the extreme level of slavery in Sparta kind of made it an oligarchy by default).
The salient issue can change over time, but that doesn't make it random.
I also think there is a male vs female coded aspect to this. The male is inherently unequal and the female is inherently equal. Rightest tend to refer to the fatherland and leftists to the motherland. The Spartans were certainly male coded relative to the Athenians.
The Myth of Left and Right: If Robin Hanson's summary is a fair one, this book by two 'professors who are brothers' would seem to be one written by two people whose fraternal relationship has helped each to narrow the mind of the other.
Whilst (in a narrow sense) it is true that the Left/Right polarity originates from political jockeying in post revolutionary France, in the 20th/21st c. West it is a shorthand (albeit and imperfect one) for a very real and profound philosophical divide. The Left dreams that human society can be made to 'progress' via political means and the Right is (in varying degrees of intensity) sceptical of this - seeing it as springing from a willful blindness to eternal verities of human nature . This is a very big - and entirely non-arbitrary - philosophical divide. And to call it 'tribal' is merely fatuous.
Both are correct. Politics IS one important way to promote progress (no quotes necessary) and skepticism is the proper attitude toward any specific proposal for doing so.
I think, based on the interview, that this argument doesn't quite work, for two reasons.
Firstly, I don't think many on the American left/right (I am looking at this from an American view because I don't know enough about other political states elsewhere to say) would point to your foundational theory as their foundational theory. That is, using the state to make society improve, or progress, is something those on both sides seem to be ok with in many cases. Now, I think in practice your description holds pretty true for the bulk, describing what they do instead of why they do it. But in terms of actual foundational philosophy that guides their policy preferences, I don't think they are going from A to B to C to get there in a logical fashion. This unawareness is important, because it means that on particular issues there need be no adherence to this principle, and indeed it seems that there is very little. (Not zero, as I will get to.)
The American right definitely accepts political shaping of the people, if as you so to varying degrees between zero and lots. So the question of "does this person think the state can improve society?" is not terribly predictive of which side of the divide you are on. I think the brothers under appreciated this point in their favor when talking with Caplan. It would be interesting to see how people respond in a large survey to whether or not humans have definite natures, eternal verities of such which can be known, and how that tracks with political ideology. I suspect that would be fairly more predictive.
The other point is that the actual policies favored by left/right tend to swing around a lot, and I think that is a very fair point. I think both primary political parties are a bit random in their collection of stances: Planned Parenthood being the same tent as the NAACP is kind of crazy when you know their history. In the US this might be a result of the two party system, I don't know; possibly other countries have more coherent sets of policy groupings. However, I don't think we can entirely write off how nonsensical from a practice point of view many of the positions are.
All that said, I am inclined to agree with you and Caplan: it is likely 85% tribalism and 15% essentialism. I think your formulation works pretty well, as does Caplan's. I think it is mostly tribal when it comes down to most people and politicians, even though there is a little bit of through line of actual consistency. I suspect most people are unaware or unable to describe that essentialist root, and less able to explain why it means they should or should not support a particular issue.
"It is likely 85% tribalism and 15% essentialism."
The more you simply randomly choose some left/right member of the population and ask them to make a coherent statement about their collective issue positions, the more it looks arbitrary.
But the intellectuals who comprise left/right are going to be more coherent. One can wave this off as some kind of clever rationalization or cognitive bias, but the more charitable and verisimilitude-friendly interpretation is that they've simply made an argument. (If they all fail to give arguments that sound like *each other,* and instead some idiosyncratic thing, then we're back at arbitrary and incoherent, but they largely don't. They're on the same proverbial page.)
If we give more weight to the "creative synthesizers" at the top of left/right than the modal leftist/rightist, I think we can get awfully close to justifying the essentialist view.
I don't know about that. I think even if we focus on the thinkers, ignoring the politicians (which... well that's getting pretty far from the use case, but sure) we still find there are multiple relevant dimensions, not a single "more or less X". Looking at Arnold Kling's 3 Languages of Politics, there's at least 3 right there. Further, there seems to be a fair bit of competition for identifying the "essential" difference for defining the difference between left and right among those thought leaders. That, to me, signals that people are trying to back into an essential difference rather than starting from one and building their policy positions from there.
Now, some are a lot more consistent than others, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't be opposed to saying some thinkers are closer to 60-80% essentialist as opposed to tribal, possibly more. At the same time, those thinkers that are more essentialist are probably also more out of step with the rest of their side of the spectrum than others who are less consistent.
You are, of course correct that very few citizen/voters would articulate their political philosophy in the way I have above. But I believe that, for most of those 'on the Right', I have correctly depicted an underlying attitude - an instinct if you like - about the human condition.
I entirely agree with you though that (from what I have observed over the decades) very many people do swing about a bit - back and forth across my 'philosophical divide'. I think that part of the reason is that those not inclined to intellectualise (unlike us on Substack threads like this) - and so their main interface with political ideas is via MSM 'News' - do get bounced around by its essentially lets-get-you-nice-and-worked-up manipulative nature.
A caveat: My comment was picking up on the book title plus Hanson's "The least plausible claim in the book is that left vs right is 100% tribal, and 0% essential."
I've no motivation to read the book or even listen to the interview.
Nevertheless I'm still going to say that, whilst people's political response to ephemeral unfolding political 'news' may be quite reasonably called tribal, underneath all that are deeper philosophical 'instincts' and these 'instincts' are not very tribal at all.
They come from somewhere else - maybe from early life experiences or innate psychological tendencies; I don't really know. It would make an interesting field of psychological research along the lines of what makes for optimistic personality traits and what makes for sceptical/pessimistic ones?
Just off the cuff thoughts really.
I think even beyond the MSN manipulation (which is definitely a thing the past 40-50 years, more recently especially) there is a certain incoherence in policy positions that people are not comfortable addressing because they have no reason for holding them other than vague feelings and instincts along with peer group pressure. I should explain my model in more detail; short version:
Regular people have typically 2-3 issues they care a lot about, for some reason or another, and are largely indifferent or undecided on most other issues. Maybe animal welfare, gay rights, gun control, or taxes are their big bugaboos, whatever. The big ones they focus on, think about, argue for, while the others they don't give much thought to, and just kind of absorb what is normal for their upbringing.
Then they start voting and pick the party that matches their stance on their big issues. If they don't go any further in paying attention to politics they remain single issue voters (or 2-3 issue voters if they have that many priorities).
If, however, they are the sort that cares about having positions on all subjects, something that probably 60-80% of people who vote seem to do, they start absorbing the positions of their party/tribe. In part this is no doubt due to a "hey, they agree with me on the most important things, so they probably aren't too bad on the other things, not like those monsters who disagree with me" process, as well as a subtle minimization of cognitive dissonance; you aren't really allowed to say "I don't care about any other issues" in polite society, so it is easier to just agree with the other people in party without thinking about it too hard. This is especially the case on new issues, in part because those in their own tribe are likely to make the case in language (see Kling) they already appreciate.
From the political party side, the politicians are choosing their positions based largely on what will get them elected, choosing stances that will be popular. The salient example here for me is the rural Democrat who is anti-gun control, because he knows 70% of his potential voters are anti-gun control as a first order big issue. So politicians, and their parties, have coalitions of big issue positions, and over time people who vote for them adopt the positions on issues they care less about as their own, because that is "what people like us think". Big issues that are largely shared too much to be competed over, eg. guns in rural areas, quietly get dropped or competed over in the "My opponent claims to love mom and apple pie, but I am the TRUE mom and apple pie lover!" manner.
One does not get perfectly stable parties in this case, however. Sometimes the big issues are too conflicting within the party and the base splits. TERFS and Trans are probably the notable example on the left, along with AWFL moms and whatever the hell we are calling what is going on in schools. These splits seem to happen most when the party is in ascendance and decides it doesn't need all its current big ideas to win, and so doesn't work to downplay the dissonance between them. Sometimes they happen for deeper reasons, like how the "small l" libertarian right and the Republican party are always kind of at odds with each other, despite voting the same way most of the time.
Then there are the maybe 1-5% of the population who actually think enough about this kind of stuff, the intellectualizers as you put it, who care most about consistency and actual questions of right and wrong, and thus have really good reasons for why they have the positions they do. The vast majority of the population distrusts them, even those who are sort of on the same side, because they have the nasty habit of making them interrogate their tribal markers and pointing out inconsistencies.
Still, I agree with Caplan that it isn't 100% tribal, at the very least because people choose their tribes and don't do so entirely randomly. At the same time, I think the left-right scale is largely useless, as a three dimensional scale of the sort from Kling's "Three Languages of Politics" is more accurate, or at least a two dimensional scale (although I have trouble settling on two scales). So I kind of agree on the problem of the Left-Right axis being largely useless, but maybe not for the reasons the authors suggest.
(Incidentally, the interview is pretty decent. Worth listening to while you make dinner or something, at least.)
I basically agree with all this as far as voting tribalism is concerned. And I also agree with you to some extent with regard to the taking of positions on particular hot-topical 'issues' as well. But I think we've ended up partly at crossed purposes here because I was mainly thinking about something more ineffable than just how people vote and what position they take when some hot "issue" comes to the fore.
I was thinking more about how people go about their lives - whether they are a "so who can we blame here?"-type; how much they believe in personal responsibility; how much they like to be self-reliant.
I would be quite happy to ditch the Left/Right polarity but not the progressive/conservative polarity. I would still say that most people's instincts are either progressive or conservative (even if they don't THINK OF IT in those terms). And it's essence is 'psychological, not 'tribal' - except in so far as people are - at least to some extent - affected by the quality of their upbringing.
I am a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and, like a lot of conservatives, day-to-day hot topic 'issues' don't consume me (often bore me in fact). I believe that everyone who leans 'progressive' does so because they want to inflate their sense of their own righteousness beyond what it deserves and have an unhealthy urge to look for someone or something to BLAME for their personal discontents. To my ears calling people's instinctive conservatism - those with a psychological leaning towards self-reliance and personal responsibility - to call it 'tribal' insults them really.
I think, that your reference point of conservatives who ignore day to day hot topic issues, is referencing a very small proportion of people, although I also get the sense that the "very engaged with political activism" trait tends to be much more evident with leftists/progressives than with conservatives. In fact, I would be pretty comfortable using "thinks political action is the first tool to reach for to solve problems" as a mono-dimensional scale, expecting it to catch 15-20% of the differences. I definitely think there is a lot of truth in Sowell's Conflict of Visions set up. I just don't think that it captures more than 20%. (Ok, I could be talked into 25 or 35 % maybe :D )
I just think there is too much movement of the Overton Window over time, too much reshuffling of what constitutes right wing vs left wing positions over time to take the Left-Right scale as actually useful. Even in the last 5 years it seems to have swung around a fair bit. Possibly I am still annoyed that people code "national socialists" as right wing for some reason.
Even progressive/conservative I am a little skeptical on, although in part that is because I have never seem a good break down of what conservative means at a given time that all conservatives would agree with, and likewise for progressive, that could then be used to compare to conservatives/progressives at some other time to see if they changed. That pretty standard Democrat positions from the 80's and 90's seem to have become right wing, even extremist views in the past 40 years suggests to me that the terms have little meaning in an absolute sense, only relative to each other.
Put another way, would you and I be considered conservative 70 years ago? 100? 180? When would we be called "radicals for freedom", to use Rand's terminology.
In a sense, I really like the brothers' argument that the labels are just misleading because being "more right wing" or "less progressive" doesn't really tell you anything about the positions; better just to talk about what the positions are. However, I think saying positions are 100% tribal and 0% based on prior philosophies is a bridge way too far. Or at least 10-15% too far, and possibly 25 -30% :D
Your annoyance at the labelling of National Socialism as 'extreme right wing' is something I absolutely share. The reason it has persisted for so long is that, for at least 100 years, the intelligentsia of the liberal West have basically framed their nauseatingly self-deluding vanities under a rubric: Left=nice and Right=nasty.
Other than that, you and I seem to have got into a kind of intellectual log-jam that I don't know how to free-up.
People whose instincts lean towards self-reliance and personal responsibility; people who do not buy into today's fashionable (and selective) victimhood narratives: I call these people 'conservative'. There are millions of these people.... although far less than in former times. I do not call them 'tribal'. The tragedy of our era is that is has encouraged traits of narcissism, resentment and false piety. People high on these traits will almost certainly vote Left in an election. I kind of imagine that you agree with all this and so I can't quite see what we are 'arguing' about!
And if the writers of the book that triggered this conversation cannot see the truth of this then I think they must have got themselves down some sort of 'political science' rabbit hole. One that is dismally lacking in philosophical wisdom.
Tribalism denotes a kind of mindless randomness. Ala sports teams.
But when I look at the left and right across the world today, one would generally say the right is middle class families with lots of kids, and the left would be "not that".
The positions mostly seem to fall out from that.
Why is planned parenthood in the same camp as the NAACP. Because blacks want to screw around promiscuously usually without condoms and use abortions as birth control.
Why do middle class families with lots of kids hate abortion? Because it lowers the status of child rearing and chastity.
There are certain areas where I think there is very little consistency (foreign policy) and there is some degree of coalition give and take. But it's remarkable to me how consistent what Steve Sailer would call the "core vs fringes" political formation has been for some time. If politics has been swimming left, its because the fringes are overtaking the core.
Tribalism doesn't denote randomness, rather adhering to the beliefs that support your group, the tribe that supports your beliefs.
Further, I think your "middle class families with lots of kids" definition of the right is... well kind of bonkers.
How many kids is "lots"? 2? 3? If it is 3, my parents are somehow out; if it is more than 3 I am. If it is 2, well, ok that is more than the average I guess, but hardly predictive.
And what about single people? Do they never lean right in politics until they have kids? Or does it matter how many kids they want to have, whether or not they have them now?
How many kids does it take to go from pro to anti union?
Planned Parenthood and the NAACP have more history than that. The founder of PP was one of the early 20th century progressives who wanted fewer poor blacks, and since forced sterilization was off the table, abortion was it. That there is no memory of that rather existential difference of opinion is not perhaps surprising. However, the fact that they went together when both were in contemporary living memory suggests that either blacks are extremely forgiving, or Democrats didn't care that their politicians were talking out of both sides of their mouths and promising mutually exclusive things. If the latter, that is evidence that the positions do not have to be logically coherent to exist under the same ideology, and thus don't spring from the same essentialist source.
If one were to be very cynical, and possibly more correct, one could posit that the Democratic party mouths their interest in the social advancement of black Americans while simultaneously preventing it so that they always have a problem to solve for them come election day. The common D voter seems blissfully unaware of this possibility, yet is highly contentious of suggestions that the very things their party advocates to help the black population have in fact harmed them over the past 80+ years. That is an odd stance to take if you actually care about helping black people instead of just supporting your party.
Conservatives have a TFR of about 2.3 and liberals about 1.2. So a little more than a kid.
It's even more stark if we limit it to people scoring in the top of the IQ range. High IQ liberals clock in at 0.6 TFR. Conservatives near replacement.
https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/lib-cons-tfr-30-43-iq.png
Another way of looking at it is how many children the various primary candidates in each party have. It's way higher for the GOP than the DEMs.
"How many kids does it take to go from pro to anti union?"
There are a lot of things that shape voting habits. My view is simply that having kids makes you less leftist than your would otherwise be, and that the effect is significant. Maybe your union job is a big enough payoff to get over that.
"the fact that they went together when both were in contemporary living memory suggests that either blacks are extremely forgiving"
What have you done for me lately?
Democrats no longer say they want a bunch of blacks aborted. Blacks what abortions. That's good enough. Some slut black woman isn't going to have kids she doesn't want because she's got some decades old grudge against Margaret Singers motivations.
"and thus don't spring from the same essentialist source"
I don't have any clue what an "essentialist" source is. The only thing that is essential to people is their most vital self interest.
"while simultaneously preventing it"
Genetics prevent it.
Any other idea you have would take too long and get mediocre results. The best blacks can hope for is the kind of giveaways DEMs give them, which are more certain and immediate then any long term theory that might not even work.
If you don't know what "essentialist" means in this context, I recommend actually watching the interview, because it suggests that you do not understand what is actually being discussed here.
I get it, Sumner wants to remind us that he's not racist.
Look, I'm an actuary. I'm as aware as anyone the limits of long term forecasting. But I also don't through up my hands and go "wow, long term demographics are hard to predict, guess I'll stop selling life insurance".
And I guarantee the office of the actuary doesn't stop publishing the annual shortfall projections for SS & Medicare because robot caretakers and artificial wombs will solve the situation real soon now.
"While I don’t favor policies explicitly aimed at boosting fertility"
Jeez man just get OK with child tax credits. And yeah it's OK for them to be bigger for people who make more income. We aren't equal.
It's so hard for these people to admit that the childless are free riders and low IQ immigration is bad. So judgmental. We must bury our heads in the sand and do nothing. God (or robots) will save us.
Arnold on Gregory Clark: "He insists on stressing the importance of genetics and the inability of other policy interventions to overcome genetic factors. This analysis leads him to support income redistribution." Unstated assumption: the government ought to try to make outcomes equal. Collective efforts to relieve extreme poverty might be justifiable, but that is not the same thing. Better than redistribution would be steps to make it less difficult for people to take care of themselves.
Re: "Those on the left gravitate toward beliefs that help them to feel qualified to steer society."
The history of political ideas/leaders/movements/regimes that have been labelled "right-wing" is replete with dirigisme!
My view is the following:
• Left and right are labels that have no general content, no coherence, no consistency over time.
• Majority rule induces binary coalition-formation, sometimes expressed in a 2-party system, in which each coalition or party has an idiosyncratic, eclectic mix of positions at any political moment. People have labeled these kaleidoscopic binary coalitions 'left' and 'right' since the French revolution.
• The real tradition here is the simplistic use of political categories of the French revolution to label kaleidoscopic binary coalitions.
Political discourse is full of procrustean concepts, which extrapolate unduly from an original historical example. Another instance is the concept of a "generation" (millennials, gen z, etc). The "baby boomer generation" was a real thing, defined by a spike in births; and, upon coming of age, the expansion of higher education, the anti-Vietnam War movement (conscription, college deferments); and rapid, radical impact of contemporaneous technology shock on culture (the pill, the sexual revolution, the counter-culture). By contrast, "millennial," "gen z," are very fuzzy, very thin concepts.
End of rant.
Here is the same thing I wrote at Aporia. I just don't buy that acknowledgement of genetics leads to redistribution.
"Acknowledgement of innate differences in ability is an argument for redistribution and economic protection, not against them."
There are three arguments for redistribution:
1) It has a high ROI, because the poor can improve themselves by using those funds better then the rich.
2) It is "fair" in some cosmic sense.
3) It is necessary for social and political stability (cheaper to pay then not to pay).
#1 is the justification for most social spending. Education, healthcare, etc are justified mostly based on ROI. If someone want to justify universal pre-K then show a study showing that earlier interventions raise IQ or some nonsense.
If the ROI isn't there most of what we spend money on collapses into little more then make-work jobs for professional class vote banks.
#2 should probably acknowledge fairness to the future. Higher economic growth benefits the unborn, so if redistribution today slows growth then it's unfair to the future.
#3 Is a sound argument, but do we really need to spend 50%+ of GDP? Again most of the big expenditures are #1 related and generally benefit the providers more than the provided for.
"...This was that over four hundred years, social outcomes for lineage members were closely tied to their genetic similarity, even down to the level of fourth cousins.
He insists on stressing the importance of genetics and the inability of other policy interventions to overcome genetic factors. This analysis leads him to support income redistribution."
If his argument is basically that genetics controls destiny and that is indeed correct, he still needs to provide evidence that the benefits of income distribution are outweighed by whatever secondary harms they cause.
there are only two political groups and there have always been only two political groups
those who want to tell other people what do do - women/elves
those who just want to grill - men/hobbits
the justifications for why everyone HAS to obey (and correspondingly the objections) will change with the times and that's why you'll have a problem making them cohere
Myth of Left and Right: Yours is not the first post I've seen that says something like, "Left is for those focused on what we can achieve while Right is for what we can sustain or preserve." I get the appeal of this but am not sure it's what we see in our daily lives. Although some of the counter-revolutionaries against Soviet Marxism were said to be "rightists," were they trying to sustain and preserve the status quo of the Soviet Marxism?
Perhaps the *rhetoric* of the left expresses optimism about change and the *rhetoric* of the right tends to be more cautious but, in a world where left and right alternate in power, it seems kind of guaranteed that neither partisan side can be much more or less pro-establishment or anti-establishment than the other. To phrase this a joke, would an establishment that says it's anti-establishment hold onto power by truly being anti-establishment?
“Clark and deBoer paint a realistic picture, and as a result they get right-coded.” I can’t say anything about Clark, but this is ridiculously unfair to Freddie. In the right circumstances, he’d probably be the first on a barricade with a big ole red flag. He’s just too principled to go with a flow of BS. (I disagree with all those principles, but I respect his integrity.) I guess it’s good for everyone not on the left that the left can’t even recognize their most principled proponents.
Greg Clark's comments on associative mating among the British snob class should be expected from their culture. However, this doesn't back up the concept of actual genetics and not cultural effects determining this outcome. With snobs always marrying snobs the heritability appears high and social mobility low.
The smarter lower classes moved to the Americas and created our wealth and our own elite class. We no longer having the boss marrying the secretary and we have evolved massive associative mating in our educated class. Just look around and you see smart educated people marrying smart educated people which is just a larger % of our population that the British royals. Our government is creating a heritable political class but at least our business sectors (what is left outside the government control) will allow social mobility and new people getting rich by starting new businesses.
I'm not sure tradition vs elite direction gets to the most fundamental difference. Conservative elites are increasingly comfortable with radical departures from the status quo and what is change and what is stasis can be largely a matter of framing.
However badly they execute it, I think the Left does want to redistribute resources and influence more broadly, "equitably."
Arnold wrote "Those on the left gravitate toward beliefs that help them to feel qualified to steer society... Socialism and strong government direction of the economy perennially serves this purpose, no matter how often it fails in practice." The imperviousness of these ideas to empirical disconfirmation shows they serve unstated purposes, in particular, left meliorism or the politics of the transformative future are the ideological cover and provide a spurious justification for the system of grift into which liberalism has devolved.
Re: tradition as the test of left-vs-right -- not all traditions are the same, so this means that left and right-wings will have different values in different times and places.
The Spartans under the constitution set by the mythical Lycurgus were swingers within the highest caste, often for breeding purposes but also for enjoyment. Women had much higher status in the Spartan high castes than they did in Athens. When Athenian women did gain something of higher status, it was in the context of being forced to work more because of the collapse of the polis and the depletion of the silver mines. Yet in modern discussions of the two leading cultures of that era and region, we often map the Spartans to the right and the Athenians to the left. Thomas More modeled Utopia on the Spartans, but we usually consider "Utopian schemes" to be left-wing visions rather than right-wing visions of ret\/rning to tradition.
Similarly, Islamic sects that downplay luxury, sexual license, and stamp out exceptions to the ban on alcohol are not necessarily traditional, but were rather reactions to the collapse of the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the other great Islamic empires that were basically built around the lechery of the aristocracy. Even today, you see that dynamic between the Salafists and the lived values of the aristocrats of Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Kuwait, et al. In our own history, the cavaliers were louche traditionalists and the roundheads carried the banner of a new, pure vision of austere morality.
In general people associate "the left" with "equality".
There are almost an infinite set of possible metrics to be equal on, so it would be best to think of it as "more equality on the most salient political issues of the day."
The most salient political issue in the Pelopenessian war was political equality between free male citizens. Oligarchy (Sparta) vs Democracy (Athens). This was the internal conflict amongst all the other city states in the war. Whenever Sparta brought someone over to their side it became an oligarchy. Wherever Athens took over a city it installed a democracy.
Other things like rights of women or slaves were not salient issues (though the extreme level of slavery in Sparta kind of made it an oligarchy by default).
The salient issue can change over time, but that doesn't make it random.
I also think there is a male vs female coded aspect to this. The male is inherently unequal and the female is inherently equal. Rightest tend to refer to the fatherland and leftists to the motherland. The Spartans were certainly male coded relative to the Athenians.