Is the idea of a left-right political spectrum an illusion? Is there actually no consistent idea of “left” and no consistent idea of “right”? My guest is Hyrum Lewis, co-author of “The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America.” He argues the left-right spectrum idea is a simplistic, faulty one and that, similar to embracing a faulty medical idea (like the theory of there being four humors), embracing a faulty political theory has hurt us in major ways. For one thing, it creates a perception that instead of there being many different issues, there is just a single issue (left versus right) and that choosing the right “team” gains you access to all the right ideas. Embracing that concept in turn amplifies conflict and anger, by making our divides seem like a war between two set and essential ideologies. It makes it easier to embrace a good-versus-bad way of seeing our political divides.
Topics include: why Hyrum believes the left-right spectrum is an illusion; common objections to their idea; how persuasive political thinkers have found their idea; the ways in which language and foundational concepts can amplify divides; the horseshoe theory; ways we might speak and write in better ways about our political disagreements, and more.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Related resources:
- Article summarizing the ideas in Myth of Left and Right
- Tangle News’ Isaac Saul talks with Hyrum
- A Reddit thread in a Centrist forum discussing the idea
- Hyrum responds to a common objection
- My work on polarization: american-anger.com
- My talk with Michael Macy about “opinion cascades” and how party stances can go very different ways
TRANSCRIPT
Edited clip from The Matrix: “The left-right spectrum is a system, Neo… You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.”
Zach Elwood: That was a scene from The Matrix; it might have been edited slightly, I’m not entirely sure.
This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com, and get various episode compilations there.
On this episode, as you may have gathered, we’ll be talking about the left-right spectrum: the idea that political thoughts and ideologies can be placed on one grand spectrum from the so-called “left” to the so-called “right.” So much of our political discourse is based on this concept; every day we see political leaders and pundits talk about who’s conservative or liberal; we hear our divides, and the divides in other countries, as being about some battle between the “left” and the “right”. We hear people talk about political parties and policies moving quote “to the right” or “to the left.” You may even view yourself as being on some spectrum of left-right; where you identity yourself on that spectrum as “on the left” or “on the right.”
But what if it’s all a massive illusion? What if it’s like the simulation in the Matrix; something that feels real to us but is just a communal delusion that we’ve embraced? What if embracing that delusion hurts us in serious ways, by setting us up to think we’re engaged in some grand one-side-versus-the-other battle.
If you’re anything like me, you may sometimes have felt confusion about how people use these terms. I’ve often been confused as it seems like people can describe totally different ideas as quote “left” or “right” or “liberal” or “conservative”, depending on the context. They can classify very different combinations of views and very different types of people as left or right. As someone who’s been thinking about politics and polarization seriously for 7 or so years now, and of course longer on and off before that, it’s been a bit mystifying to me to understand how people are using those terms. And then you throw in our political divides, and how quickly the party stances can seem to shift. Toxic polarization makes it so we reside in turbulent waters; for example, Trump has shifted the Republican parties in various ways, like embracing views on economic protectionism that were previously more associated with Democrat policies. It’s easy to see how Trump has the capability to massively shift the Republican party, just as other people have massively shifted political groups and parties in the past, which begs the question: what is essentially “left” or essentially “right” in these areas.
I’m going to talk to Hyrum Lewis, the co-author, along with his brother Verlan, of The Myth of Left and Right, which has the subtitle “How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America.” They argue that the idea of the quote “left and right” or a grand liberal-conservative spectrum doesn’t refer to any so-called essential properties, but that it is just about tribes; the specific beliefs and ideas people have referred to under the bundle of left or right change over time, and theoretically could entire reverse. What changes is the stories people tell, the narratives they tell, about those bundles of beliefs. Because you could take any random bundle of stances on issues – say mixing up various stances on guns, on abortion, on welfare, on immigration – and you could tell a coherent story, if you tried, about any combination of stances. This is an idea I’ve previously examined on this podcast with my talk with Michael Macy, who studied so-called “opinion cascades,” or how influential people can determine the direction and stances of a political group. Chance and chaos play a role in these things, too. The future stances of any political party are indeterminant and unpredictable; that was what Michael Macy’s work and other work has pointed to.
Another major point of Hyrum and Verlan’s book is that this illusion is massively harming us by amplifying our divides. By amplifying the sense that we are engaged in some largescale war between left and right, when what we’re really doing, they argue, is just fighting over a bunch of different ideas that have little connection.
Now you may be skeptical about this. Many people I expect will be. If you are, I’d recommend getting their book The Myth of Left and Right or, if you prefer, finding one of the few great articles they’ve written that explains this in short form. I recommend taking this idea seriously and looking into it. My interview with Hyrum does explain some of the concepts along the way but this talk was also a chance for me to ask Hyrum some questions that I’ve been wondering about his work, as opposed to just asking him to walk me through the whole theory from start to finish.
You owe it to yourself to read their work and listen to their ideas; it may even result in you being less stressed out in your personal lives; in how you think about and process politics. I will say that even if you aren’t entirely persuaded by their ideas and still walk away thinking “I still think there’s some meaning to ‘left’ and ‘right’,’ you’ll be in a much better position to see some of the ways people are clearly using these terms in ways that don’t make sense and that also just amplify divides and anger. You’ll be in a much better place to understand the political landscape and to be more careful and accurate in your own language. I’ll say that I myself am not entirely certain about their ideas: I’ve seen enough smart people disagree with them to be aware that maybe there’s something I’m missing in these areas. I don’t value certainty that highly; but I do think their ideas have a lot of clear and obvious value, regardless if there’s something they may be missing. While I’m not 100% certain that they’re entirely correct, I am near certain that they have many good and clearly valuable points.
And I have a practical interest in their work; as someone who works on reducing toxic polarization it is very important to think about how my and others’ words may be unintentionally amplifying conflict and anger. We rarely examine that aspect of how our language and underlying concepts influence our political behavior but I think it’s a huge contributor, and agree with the Lewis’ brothers on that.
In this episode, we discuss why the left-right spectrum is an illusion; we discuss common objections to this idea; we talk about how people who’ve read and reviewed their book have received the idea and how persuasive they’ve found it; we talk about the ways in which language and underlying concepts can amplify divides; we talk about the horseshoe theory and how that relates to the left-right spectrum criticism; we talk about better ways to talk about our political disagreements, and more.
My guest Hyrum Lewis is a professor of history at Brigham Young University-Idaho and was previously a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Okay, so let’s jump into the talk with Hyrum, author of The Myth of Left and Right.
Zachary Elwood: Hi Hyrum, thanks for joining me.
Hyrum Lewis: Zach, it’s great to be with you.
Zach: Maybe I could start with… I’ll say when I first read your book, it actually made so much sense to me because it was a sense of confusion that I was feeling for years thinking about politics and thinking about the polarization work specifically. I often had so much confusion about the Liberal and Conservative language—the Left and the Right language that people often used—and especially, with the stances of the parties seeming to change so rapidly in recent times. And to be honest, I thought there was something kind of wrong with me because I thought I was missing something. I kept reading about the Left-Right thing and trying to understand what I might be missing and I thought I was just not well-read enough. That’s where your book came in and made a lot of sense to me in terms of the confusion I was feeling of trying to make sense of those words. So just to say, that’s my way into it from a practical perspective of trying to make sense of these things because I talk about them and write about them a good amount in the last few years. So just to say, you and your brother’s work made so much sense of that to me. I also want to ask, did you have a similar experience of coming to that kind of conclusion about the language people were using? Maybe you could talk a little bit about how your past reading and learning about these things led you to that work.
Hyrum: Oh, sure. Maybe I didn’t have quite the ‘aha moment’ that people might hope for. There was never a light bulb over the head. But gradually, I remember just being a kid and it never made sense to me. I’d go to school and the teachers would invariably, when they taught civics or history or government, draw a spectrum on the board and say, “Over here on the far Right, you have Hitler. Over here on the far Left, you got Stalin. The Republican Party is here on the center Right, the Democratic Party’s here on the center Left.” And they say, “The Republicans are fine, but if they go too far to the Right, then they become Hitler,” and I’m just thinking, “That’s strange. My parents always talk about freedom, how freedom is their highest value, and how they believe in free markets and free speech. And yet Hitler didn’t believe in free markets or free speech. It didn’t really fit.” And so I had the same confusion as you did. But it’s when I got to my doctoral program—I’m a historian by training—and my advisor said, “You know, a hot topic right now is conservatism, so I want you to write about conservatism.” So I started doing the research and there was just a complete inability to ever define my terms. The dictionary definition of a Conservative is somebody wants to conserve, and yet there was all these ideas about radical Conservatives radically changing things. You know, Ronald Reagan brought this Reagan revolution, and I’m just thinking this whole idea of a conservative being someone who doesn’t like to change things simply isn’t adequate to the facts on the ground. And so, you know, slow development from those seeds to developing a full theory about ideology and what’s wrong with our conceptions of it.
Zach: I know you go into this a bit in the book, but are there certain other thinkers and writers that stood out to you as being fundamental in your thoughts there, like people that have critiqued the same things in the same way or a similar way?
Hyrum: The closest thing to it, and the problem with them is they just did it kind of incidentally to a different argument they’re making. But Weeden and Kurzban wrote a book called The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, and their thesis in that book is basically we tell ourselves stories to justify our interests, and interest explains political outlooks better than what we tell ourselves; these stories of noble principles and things like that. They have a lot of data to back that thesis up. But the more important thesis that I saw was kind of reading between the lines, and they had a lot of information that suggested that the positions we associate with Liberal or Conservative don’t naturally aggregate. And they disaggregated them and showed them that they disaggregate depending upon the interests of the holders of those positions.
Zach: That was another thing I really liked about your book, is the focus on the narrative, the storytelling aspect of what we do. I think that just is such a fundamental thing about humans in general. It’s like we’re storytellers and we confabulate and we make up things to fit. I really like that section in your book where you try to get people to imagine taking a random assemblage of issue stances and building a narrative around it. Because you can easily do that. When you try to do that, you can easily do that. And it relates to so much, I think, of not just politics but how we just experience the world as narratives about ourselves, or narratives about people or things in our lives. There’s just so much that the narrative aspect of what we do as people plays into it. Yeah, I really like that part of your book. Not really a question there, but I just want to say that.
Moving on, I was going to say one thing I was majorly curious about with your work is how persuasive you found your points to be to people. Because I’ve read some of the reviews from people that you’ve done interviews with, or people that read your work who were skeptical a bit but who, largely from what I read, seemed to be mostly largely agreeing that you had very good points to make, even if they quibbled with, like, “Hey, maybe it’s still useful in these regards.” It made me wonder, from your perspective, how much good pushback have you seen or how much pushback, in general, how much have people absorbed your your views, that kind of thing?
Hyrum: Usually, we have pretty good success convincing people. Because people who invite us on their shows and things like that are usually open-minded people like yourself, and those are the people open to being persuaded. Or when we give talks around the country, we’re not usually invited by some very Blue or very Red organization. We’re usually invited by an organization like the one you’re affiliated with that’s saying, “Gee, how can we get past the vitriol? How can we make political discourse more productive?” And people in those spaces, people who don’t have strong tribal commitments, are very open to our argument. We also find quite a bit of success among Never Trump Republicans like Jonah Goldberg. He is not completely sold on what we said, but I think by the end of our interview, he was with us, more or less. That’s the good news.
We usually persuade people who are willing to listen and don’t have strong entrenched interests and strong entrenched investment in a bad model. Because some people do have investments in that model, right? I mean, if you’re Sean Hannity, your entire livelihood depends upon this model. And if he is subscribed to our theory, he would lose his audience and lose his position. So we don’t expect people like him to agree with what we say. But among people who don’t have those strong entrenched interests, the good news is we’ve had very good success in convincing people that were correct. The bad news is even the people that we convince, we find them reverting to the language of Left and Right. Like—oh, what’s his name? He does Tangle.
Zach: Yeah, Isaac Saul.
Hyrum: Yeah, thank you. Terrific guy, and he was totally sold by what we said. But I listen to his podcast sometimes and he’s still just Left-Right. And I think just the language is so entrenched that you can hardly have a political conversation without it, and so he’s just stuck in the world that he’s been delivered, even if the conversation around that world is incorrect.
Zach: Yeah, I want to get back to the language part, because that’s a question I have for you about the practical aspect as somebody who writes about this a lot and often struggles with how do we even… You know? We’ll come back to that. But I do think it’s a tough thing for for a few reasons. Now, I could be wrong on this but I was curious, based on my sense of things these days, whether it’s your work, your ideas, or whether it’s more depolarization bridge-building ideas. I get the sense a lot of times. People will have a reaction like, “Well, those are nice ideas but we got more important things to worry about right now,” which, to me, are very important ideas because they’re like the underlying foundation of so much of our divides. As you write about, your work helps explain why the foundational illusions we have about the Left-Right divide can amplify conflict. Right? So whether it’s your work or the work I do related to that about reducing divides, I’m curious if you get that sense too, where some people are like, “Yeah, that’s all well and good, and you got some good points, but we’re over here trying to fight a serious battle, and don’t bother us with these ideas right now.”
Hyrum: Yeah, the most common pushback we get is, “Well, fine, whatever. But we need something.” That’s what my colleagues all give me. “We have to have something. You’re saying we shouldn’t have something. We’re not saying that at all. We are saying we should have something, just not a bad something.” That’s like a doctor in the 19th Century saying, “Well, I’m going to adhere to the four humors theory of disease because we need something.” That’s not a good argument. If the something that you think we need is killing people, then a nothing is better than a something – one. And two, we are proposing to replace the something we have with a better something; a more granular approach to politics. So, people who say, “Well, this is fine and dandy, but we’ve got to put out fires,” it’s like a doctor in the 19th Century saying, “Well, this is fine and dandy about germ theory of disease, but right now I’ve got to go bleed my patients to get them better.” It’s the work you think you have to do that is itself the problem. And if you’re operating under bad assumptions and under a bad model, you’re doing more harm than good. And so putting aside the idea of whether or not your fundamental model is rotten from the get go is not a good idea, getting that right is requisite for getting the other things right.
Zach: Yeah, maybe that’s a good spot to segue into the language challenges that I see. As somebody who tries to write about these things and in a nuanced way, I’m often struggling with, like, “Well, how do I in a shorthand way talk about this divide? Even if a lot of the parts of it are illusory and based on illusory understandings, there’s still this, let’s say in a lot of ways, it’s the anti-Trump pro-Trump divide right now. Right? Sometimes I found myself even just saying anti-Trump and pro-Trump because I think it’s a more accurate definition of the rough categories. But do you have tips—and I realize this is a broad question because it really does come down to granularity, I think you would say, but do you have tips about like, “Well, how do we refer to these rough tribes in ways that are not unnecessarily divisive or too simplistic?” Because one thing that I’ve often thought about is you could use Liberal and Conservative… I more often use Republican-Democrat because they’re more accurate tribal labels. But even if you could kind of defend using Liberal and Conservative, if you kind of defined it as, “Well, that’s loosely what Liberal means to people now, and that’s loosely what Conservative means to people now,” you can kind of defend that, too. But I’m curious, with all that said, do you have ways that you think are the best ways to refer to these rough tribes?
Hyrum: Sure. I wish we would have been more explicit about this in the book because when people say it’s useful to talk about Left and Right, we have to realize that when people talk Left and Right or Liberal and Conservative, they’re basically referring to one of three things. The first thing, as you mentioned, is a tribe. Sometimes you say, “Oh, he’s on the Left,” you just said, “Well, he belongs to this particular tribe.” Or, “He’s on the Right, he belongs to this particular tribe that opposes that particular tribe.” The other thing you might be doing is talking about one individual policy. So maybe you’re talking about the minimum wage and somebody says, “Well, I support a higher minimum wage,” and somebody will respond, “Well, I guess I’m a little more conservative than you. I want a lower minimum wage.” You’re talking about one policy. The third way that people use the term Left and Right is what we’re talking about as the error in the book is talking about a worldview. “Oh, I’m a Liberal. I have the liberal worldview, I’m on the Left.” And this is the monism. This is the fallacy.
Zach: The essentialism. Yeah.
Hyrum: The essentialism. The monism that there’s one issue that policy takes; if like change, you’re on the left, or if you don’t like change, you’re on the right. The problem is those are three separate things; tribe, single policy, and worldview. And yet we use the terms interchangeably as if they’re the same thing. So sometimes I do find people using the term Left or Right profitably. If they keep it within the bounds to talk about tribe, that works. The problem is we lapse into talking about those three things as if they’re the same. So we’re saying we’ve got this mistaken framework that politics is about one thing—Left wing, Right wing, and where are you on the political spectrum? That’s false. That’s a bad idea. And the problem is that we use the language associated with that bad idea to refer to real things like tribes or individual policies. So, what we’re saying is it would be more helpful if instead of using it to refer to an individual policy in terms of Left and Right, or to talk about tribes in terms of Left and Right, find better terms that indicate that we’re just talking about an individual policy. So if you’re talking about somebody’s tribe instead of saying Left and Right and conjuring up images of this spectrum with a worldview or a single issue, you could just talk about—like you do—Republicans and Democrats. That refers to something real. Or if maybe you say, “Well, they don’t belong to the Republican Party, how do we refer to them?” Maybe just say Red and Blue. Because if we talk Red and Blue, we’re not conjuring up images of, “Oh, this person has a philosophy or worldview,” they’re just associated with the Red tribe or the Blue tribe.
Zach: Which is what Braver Angels does, for example, in their language. Yeah.
Hyrum: That’s absolutely correct. We 100% support that. Or if you’re talking about an individual policy, just talk about that policy without invoking Left and Right. So if you’re talking about the minimum wage, don’t say, “I’m more to the Right or I’m more to the Left.” You don’t have a different worldview, you just disagree on this one policy. Just say, “Oh, I believe in a higher minimum wage. Oh, I believe in a lower.” Or, “I believe in more immigration. Oh, I believe in less immigration.”
Zach: Right, be really granular. Yeah. Well, that’s really helpful actually because that’s something I’ve struggled with, and what you’ve described is largely what I try to do. I’m really careful about, “Well, what exactly am I trying to say here,” and using different words in different situations depending on the context, but trying to avoid that essentialism kind of framing of this thing is more conservative or this thing is more liberal or whatever. Yeah.
Hyrum: Well, yeah. And it causes all kinds of confusion and bad feelings because it creates guilt by association. So, here you are having a conversation with somebody and you say,
“Oh, you’re in favor of raising the minimum wage?”
“Yeah, I think it should probably be a little lower.”
“Oh, you’re a Conservative, therefore you’re a racist and you supported the Iraq war.”
You know, they start making all kinds of assumptions about you based on what you say on one policy. That’s why, again, keeping these three things distinct—tribe, policy, essential worldview—keep those distinct and we won’t fall into those problems and we won’t make assumptions about people that are incorrect. Because that is a very common problem, and that’s where so much of the hostility comes from. You find out somebody’s view on one thing, “Oh my gosh!” They think we had a prayer in public school, “Well, they’re fascists and they want to kill illegal immigrants.” You know? They start making all kinds of assumptions.
Zach: Yeah, they extrapolate from this essentialist kind of framing. Yeah.
Hyrum: If you have one policy that agrees with this tribe, then you must have all the policies because that tribe is defined by our worldview. That’s the mistaken assumption. And those are the leaps we make based on this bad framework.
Zach: I don’t know if you saw this one study that was interesting to me, where it basically found that the necessary or seemingly necessary shorthand that we reach for when we use language can be a factor in amplifying polarization. It’s like say you found out Democrats and Republicans are mostly the same on this one policy, like, say, Democrats are just slightly more likely to support raising taxes or something. By shorthand, you’ll find yourself the necessary… The shortening of language you’ll reach for can be like, “Oh, Democrats are more pro-tax on that.” Even if in reality they’re pretty much the same, but to try to differentiate them with language, you’ll try to shorthand say that they’re more something or less something. And that kind of leads to perceptions of like, “Oh, Democrats are for this and Republicans are for this,” and then it plays into the tribalism of like, “Oh, that’s what we’re about. We’re for these things, and they’re for these things.” So it’s like these compounding conceptual issues, which I really liked that part of your book towards the end, talking about how the language and the concepts we use play out in all these major ways. And you say it quite clearly in the intro. It’s like we’re living in an illusion, basically, and that has major effects on us. Yeah.
Hyrum: Again, we keep bringing up the four humors theory because it’s just such a good analogy, right? You know, you’re talking about how all these associations… We’re not against categories. We are not against shorthands. Our minds work necessarily through shorthands and through categorizations and through lumping like things together into categories. We just are simply against bad categorizations. In the 19th Century, the four humors theory was all rampant, and if I was a doctor back then saying,
“Look, this is a bad way to look at things. A balance of humors does not make people healthy,”
And people backlashed and said,
“Oh, you want to get rid of categories?”
“No, just bad categories.”
And the category of sanguine saying that somebody who is cheerful also has too much blood and therefore is giving them fevers, those things don’t naturally go together. And this category of sanguine, which assumes they does, causes people to slice open patients and bleed them to cure them from a fever. So it’s bad categorizations where, again, it’s not bad shorthands. Not shorthands at all. Because we all need shorthands. And I would say there’s a lot of good political shorthands. For instance, the idea of free markets. You’re in favor of free markets. I’d say that’s a good shorthand. Even if there are nuances and there are differences there and somebody might be more free market in one area and less than another, I think putting on a scale of more free market versus more socialistic, I would say that’s a useful shorthand, even if it is reductive. But the Left-Right shorthand that boils all politics down to one thing is a non-useful shorthand.
Zach: Yeah, that’s really helpful. Yeah. I was curious, when it comes to objections and criticisms people have made of your work, do you think there are good objections there? Have you seen people make objections where you’re like, “Oh, as far as the objections go, that’s the best one.” Anything stand out like that?
Hyrum: Well, yeah. So, the objection—and I think we solved it with breaking those things down, you know, because the objection that Left and Right, placing people on a spectrum—political scientists do it to try to understand coalitions and alliances. They say, “Well, look, this is useful to talk about the coalitions and alliances,” and we’re saying, “Well, good. The problem is the assumption that the coalitions and alliances are formed around a world view.” There’s a mixing of concepts there, right? If you want to place somebody on a spectrum of more Republican, and he agrees with the Republicans more than the Democrats, that’s a big pushback. You say, “Hey, this is a useful thing. This person is a little more Republican than they are Democrat. So by center Right, we’re saying more Republican than Democrat.” Great. The problem is, people will jump in and say, “Oh, since he is more Republican than Democrat, he is more conservative than liberal, and he has a slightly more conservative worldview than the average person. Therefore, he doesn’t like change, and therefore, this, that, and the other.” So, the jumping through. I think that is a useful objection that using a spectrum to categorize how people relate to our different coalitions can be useful. The problem is, again, when people use the language of Left and Right, we’re assuming world view. We’re assuming political monism when the political monism isn’t there.
Zach: I think one of the probably pretty common objections people will have is—and this is just what I imagine people I know on the so-called liberal side of things—I think a lot of people would have the sense that like… And you address this in your book, but I’m just talking about common objections. People would think this liberal thing is associated with leaving apart the economic stuff too, because I think that’s much more easier to overcome those objections. I think many people would say, “Well, liberal things are about like moving to more socially permissive things like transgender things or racism-related things like moving away from what it was in the past.” I’m curious, do you have a shorthand way to overcome that specific way of people’s thinking about ‘This is what Liberal is, this is what Conservative is’ on these kinds of social topics?
Hyrum: Yeah, every time somebody tries to claim an essence for one side or the other, they always cherry-pick. You noticed a moment ago, you know, gay marriage, social permissiveness… See, Liberals like to change. They don’t like tradition. But notice they left out environmentalism. Why is it that it’s the Liberals who like to conserve the environment and don’t want to change the environment? Or you think of the, “Oh, well, they want to throw out traditional values. They want new values. Enough with the tradition. That’s Right-wing, that’s Conservative. Conservatives want to conserve things.” Give me a break. The most traditional value in the history of the world without question, is caring for the poor and needy. That is without question the oldest value. You look in every sacred text, every philosophy going back thousands of years to the Code of Hammurabi, you find this idea that morality requires care for the poor and needy. So if liberalism really was about transvaluating values, as Nietzsche said, and throwing out old values, they would be saying, “Enough with the care for the poor and needy. That’s so Right-wing. That’s so Christian. That’s so old-fashioned. Let’s move on. Let’s become more socially Darwinist. Let’s let the poor die out. This is the future. This is progress.” Right? But no, they cling to this traditional value of helping the poor. Social justice… My goodness, Plato was talking about social justice, what? 2500 years ago. And so they say, “No, we’re in favor of new value.” Give me a break. Social justice is the oldest value in the book. So the idea that one side is in favor of old values and the other side wants to replace those old values with new values simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It can only work when you cherry-pick certain values, which is what all essentialists do. And it sounds like you’re running into some of that yourself.
Zach: Yeah. The interesting thing about the abortion issue, too, is I relatively recently—well, a few years ago now—learned that there was a school of thought that the abortion issue in America could have gone either way. And it happened that an abortion writer or scholar, Dan Williams, I think his name is—sorry, I can’t remember his name—but he and other people have said, “Oh, the Republicans purposely went down that path and that previously more pro-life stances were associated with Catholics who were more associated with Democrats,” you know? So just to say, when you start reading about some of those things, it’s easy to see how some of these things can… And Michael Macy, you mentioned Michael Macy’s work in your work, the opinion cascades things of like the leaders of our time—like Trump, for example—can easily shift which direction some of these things go. Like if Trump stakes out some issue position, a very good chance the party is going to go that direction. That explains how these things can change so rapidly and then we’ll create narratives about why it goes that way.
Hyrum: Well, abortion is a great example, right? I mean, I’m glad you brought that one up because when you talk to people in the Blue tribe, they will say, “The essence of liberalism and the essence of progressivism and the essence of the Left is caring for the least fortunate and the most vulnerable. That’s what defines us. Every time there’s vulnerable and disadvantaged populations at risk, you will find the Left rushing to help.”
“Really? What about unborn children? What about unborn children?”
Oh, those don’t count suddenly. You know?
Zach: And that was the narrative before Republicans went down that. That was the narrative amongst people that would be called progressive. And people have drawn attention to that language being part of the so-called progressive mindset back then. Yeah.
Hyrum: Right, so you’ll just repurpose the same narrative to justify opposite policies as the tribe evolves. So had being anti-abortion gotten associated through an opinion cascade with the Blue tribe, they would of course be talking about, “Hey, this is social justice to protect these vulnerable populations and these unborn children.” And then, of course, the Red tribe would be talking about, “We stand for freedom. We stand for individual rights. You should be able to do what you want to do with your own property, with your own body. Individualism. Individualism. Rights, rights, rights!” They would be using the same Lockean language that they use for economics to justify abortion permissiveness. So you can see how the stories will persist even as the policies change because we can wrap any set of policies up with any story.
Zach: And in my understanding, a lot of people are surprised to learn, but my understanding is the so-called Right winger conservative stances in many other countries are just much more libertarian in, like, ‘Keep government out of my life, including about abortion.’ But some people are surprised to learn that. But it makes sense if you think about how we build our narratives in very different ways depending on how things go. Yeah.
Hyrum: Absolutely.
Zach: I’m curious if you agree with this. My general synopsis or diagnosis of our main problem when it comes to these kinds of… Or maybe the main human problem is our tendency to be extremely certain about ideologies or beliefs and really just go down this path of saying, “I’m completely right and society must do this thing I believe,” and that helps explain, no matter if you call it Right wing or Left wing or whatever, these instances of people doing horrible things to other people in the name of this highly certain ideology that they believe is 100% right. And I do think we don’t often separate that dimension of things. We talk too much about these, in my opinion and I agree with you, these illusory categories of Left and Right or whatever. And we don’t talk enough about, well, maybe it’s just like enforcing a highly certain ideology on society. That’s kind of like the method of engagement aspect is much more important than any kind of labels you want to give to things. But I’m curious, do you have any thoughts on that?
Hyrum: Yeah. That’s another thing. You talked about critiques that are valid. I think, again, a lot of the critiques come because people misunderstood what we were saying. They thought the social theory of ideology said that nobody has any principles, that everybody is tribal, and that nobody believes anything for any reason. It’s simply not true. I mean, somebody who is pro-life and pro-life to the core won’t change that. We’re not saying they only believe that because they’re tribal right now, they anchor and adopt the other views of the tribe. You know, they might favor tax cuts because they anchored into the Red tribe because of their abortion stance. So, we have to clarify what we’re saying here.
Zach: Yeah. I made this clear in my work, too. Nobody’s saying you’re stupid or unreasonable for your views, we’re just saying that there might be ways that these things play out in ways that you might not be-
Hyrum: Yeah, let us separate the views from the holders of those views. The holders of the views are not stupid. Paul Krugman is not a stupid man. He’s very smart. He won a Nobel Prize, and in my opinion, he deserved it and I think he’s very smart. But in his commentary, it is very hampered and limited, and his analysis is weakened substantially because he is a smart man with a dumb model. And the dumb model brings him down. So he says a lot of dumb things in his columns, not because he’s dumb, but because he has a dumb model. The same way that Benjamin Rush was not an idiot. This guy was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was a genius in my opinion as best I can tell, and yet he was bleeding patients and killing them to the end of his life because he had a bad model, right? Bad models can make good people and smart people do bad and dumb things. And that’s true of this model, too. So, you talked about it as a tool of certainty. Yeah, we wish we would have explained in our book more clearly. In fact, we should have replaced essentialist and social with monist and pluralist. The only thing we’re against is political monism; the idea that politics is about one thing. Because a political spectrum assumes that politics is about just one thing, and clearly it’s not.
So, why do we oppose political monism? It’s not a harmless delusion. It’s very problematic. Because if somebody believes politics is about one thing, then you only got to get that one thing right and then you’re correct about everything. No wonder people are so certain in their political views. No wonder they think they have omniscience about the minimum wage, about this or that foreign policy, about COVID policy. Everything. They’re certain that they know it all because our political paradigm is monist and it says you only have to get one thing right because politics is about one thing. So you’re either on the Left and one of the good guys who believe in social justice, or you’re on the Right and you’re one of the bad people who hate social justice and is a racist, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is what all my colleagues in history believe, by the way. They all believe once I’ve got that one thing right, now I know I’m omniscient. I’m God. I know exactly what abortion policy should be, I know exactly what the tax rate should be, I know exactly what we should do about race issues… Because it’s easy to be right about one thing, but it’s not easy to be right about a lot of things. And so the reality of monism makes us much humbler. It says, “Oh my gosh, there are hundreds and hundreds of very difficult policies out there.”
Let’s just take abortion for an example. This is not an easy issue. You are weighing an unquestionable moral reality that a woman has rights and has to be able to do what she wants with her own body. This is a very important right that our society believes in rightly. A woman clipping her fingernails should not have somebody coming in telling her how she should clip them, or how she should do her hair, or whether or not she should cut her hair, or whether or not she should lose weight or gain weight. This is her individual choice. So, the right of a woman’s bodily autonomy is a very important and sacred value. But then you’ve got the value of unborn children. What do we do about that, and at what point does an unborn child become a person? These are difficult questions. And if an unborn child is a person, then that has rights too. And yet we’re not thinking about it in complicated ways. Because we say it’s a simple matter of either believing in progress towards social justice Left-wing, or evil Right-wing fascist patriarchal trying to stop that. It kills all nuance. It kills all humility. So on a difficult issue like abortion, we should be talking to each other and trying to come up with compromises on a very complicated issue. But political monism says it’s not complicated, it’s simple because politics is simple. You’re either on the good side or you’re on the bad side. And if you’re on the good side, adopt everything that that side believes in, because it all grows out of the one good value of social justice. And if you believe in social justice, you will have these 500 other positions that grow out of your belief in social change. It turns people into dogmatic ideologues who do not think because they think the thinking has been done as soon as they chose the good side. This is where all my historical colleagues are, and it’s a tragedy to go to meetings with the American Historical Society and see so many smart people all agreeing very lemming-like on their politics and on what they choose to pursue in their historical research. It has killed their ability to think critically and it’s a tragedy.
Zach: Yeah. And I would add too, even if you’re 100% sure you are right on whatever issue, avoiding this kind of Left-Right good guys-bad guys perspective allows you to have more empathy for people that have reached a completely different conclusion and prioritize different things. Regardless if you think you’re 100% percent right, I think it just is an empathy-understanding thing too, because that’s really what this is about. It’s so much of, “I’m right and I really think you’re a bad person for this whole bundle of things that you believe.”
Hyrum: You’re saying it kills empathy as well as humility, and I completely agree.
Zach: Yeah, so many aspects of it. I’m curious, I was actually thinking about your work recently because I saw some people talking about horseshoe theory, which occasionally people will bring up in this space. I’m curious, as someone who’s done the work you’ve done, what do you think about the horseshoe theory concept when people bring that up?
Hyrum: I think they don’t know what they’re talking about. [laughs] It’s the idea that if you go too far to the Left or go too far to the Right, you wind up in the same place. Nobody knows what they’re talking about. Look, what do you mean when we say Right and Left? When we’re going towards Stalin, what’s this treasured value that Stalin holds that makes him the exact opposite of Hitler? Okay, now you’re saying it circles around and joins each other. Well, wait a minute, what’s the up and down you’ve added now? You say they go up to become the same thing. What’s the up? And nobody knows what they’re talking about. If we just recognize the reality of there’s many values in politics, and one of those values is authoritarianism, then there’s no puzzle to solve. There’s no horseshoe. You just say Stalin was a socialist totalitarian dictator, Hitler was a socialist totalitarian dictator, We don’t have to draw magic lines. We just recognize these two people as having the same values. And trying to place them on a spectrum, “Oh, they’re opposite in some ways, but they come together because they took things too far,” is really preposterous. So, I don’t know. I do have some respect for those models of politics which instead of having one line, they have two lines and have an X axis. Because that’s political dualism, right? What we’re against is monism, one issue, one spectrum. And they say, “No, political dualism.”
Zach: It’s getting a little bit better.
Hyrum: It’s better! It’s getting closer, but it’s still not the reality.
Zach: Yeah, it’s still very simplistic and probably bad in various ways.
Hyrum: Oh, yeah. Because there’s not one issue in politics, there’s not two issues in politics, but at least two is closer to the real number of issues in politics than one is. So it’s at least an improvement upon the political spectrum.
Zach: Yeah, the more dimensions, the better. Yeah. But to the horseshoe thing, the reason I brought it up is I’ve seen people… This gets into what I was saying about the inability to differentiate beliefs from how we engage with people or how authoritarian we are is another way to put that. Because it’s like what some of these people are really trying to say is the things that the horseshoe theory or the thing they’re trying to point to is like these are just very authoritarian, highly control-oriented ways of enforcing whatever ideology or whatever belief. Right? Which is getting into your point. It’s like, don’t try to put some kind of spectrum or linear thing to it. It doesn’t matter. Any kind of belief structure could theoretically be authoritarian and high control, right? So I think that’s what they’re trying to get at. But I think the inability to differentiate that dimension of things is causing them to reach for the spectrum idea, which everyone has embraced, obviously. But I think we need to do more talking about that. It’s like the thing we don’t like about the far Left or the far Right, as we call them, is that they are often much too authoritarian-seeming in the way they want to control other people.
Hyrum: Yeah. If you’re going to give credit to the horseshoe theory, I guess, at its best, it’s adding another dimension and a meaningful dimension. So if you conceive of, “Okay, Hitler was radically inegalitarian. He believed in racial hierarchy, for instance. And then Stalin was radically egalitarian. He believed working men of the world unite, everybody’s the same, we’re going to abolish all hierarchy.” Okay, so there you have a dimension; egalitarianism versus hierarchy. That’s a real dimension. Okay, then you’ve got another dimension of government control; we’re going enforce this by control. And so both Hitler and Stalin wanted to enforce their egalitarianism, or inegalitarianism as it be, using the force of the state. Now, we have government control as a second dimension. All right, but there’s other dimensions beyond those two dimensions. Right? The one that they left out, obviously, is change versus preservation. So you have somebody like Ed Glaeser at Harvard. He’s in favor of change, he’s in favor of egalitarianism, and he’s in favor of less government control. He’s a believer in free markets, right? I mean, those are three distinct dimensions. And you can’t put Ed Glaser on a spectrum anywhere, even though people try to put him on the right because I think they’re trying to discredit his free-market views by associating them with fascism, which I think is one of the many reasons we need to get rid of the political spectrum.
Zach: Well, that reminds me too—and cut me off if you think we’re going too long—but the thing I’ve also seen people push back about, “Well, no, liberalism is always about egalitarianism in some form or another,” but to your point about creating narratives, it’s like you can easily create a narrative that if too strict or perceived authoritarian measures to enforce egalitarianism are enacted, then you can easily create the narrative that those things are now not egalitarian. Like, we need freedom from that and egalitarianism from those things that are trying to enforce egalitarianism. Just to your point about the ease with which we can create narratives. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that.
Hyrum: Yeah. Well, the point is pluralism lets us see these distinctions. Right? It allows us to say, “Oh, here’s somebody who wants egalitarianism through more government control. Two different dimensions; government control, and egalitarianism. Here’s somebody who wants to create egalitarianism through less government control. Two dimensions. That’s profitable when we break these dimensions out. But when you say, “No, more government control and egalitarianism go together,” now you’re pretending that two things are one thing, when in fact, they’re not. So it’s always better to disaggregate in political conversation. It’s always better to talk about the individual value and the individual policy under consideration, rather than pretending that they all coalesce into one which they clearly don’t.
Zach: I think that it’s possible, in my mind, that your book is maybe the most important book about political divides, at least in the West. But I’m curious, do you believe that is true? Obviously, you’re biased, but I’m curious if you think of the future history, do you see your book as people look back on it and be like, “That was a really important book.” Is that how you see it?
Hyrum: [laughs] Well, I think every academic at least holds out that hope. But look, I don’t establish any special importance to what we’re doing. To us, it’s the emperor has no clothes. It’s just everybody’s going along with this. It’s not because we have any special brilliance, it’s just we look and see that this is very obvious. It’s obvious to any child. If you were to sit down a child before they had been corrupted by Left-Right nonsense and said,
“Do you think there’s lots of issues in politics or just one?”
They would say, “Well, there’s lots.”
“Good, Tommy. Good. You got it.”
I mean, this is very obvious to a little kid. So to say that there’s more than one issue in politics that doesn’t require any great insight or any penetrating analysis, it just requires us to step out of popular prejudices for a moment. Unfortunately, this prejudice and the Left-Right spectrum, as absurd as it is, has so taken over our society that that’s strangely very hard to do. So, yeah, I think getting rid of the political spectrum is very important. I would say politically, concepts have consequences. Ideas have consequences. And this bad idea is having huge consequences, so yes, I do believe that this won’t solve all of our problems in fixing our concepts. There are real disagreements. If tomorrow people stop talking about Left and Right liberal conservatives and started debating issues granularly, there would still be a very heated debate over abortion. Probably not as heated and in probably more good faith, and you wouldn’t be calling people who disagree with you a fascist or whatever. It’d be more in good faith. But it would still be heated, and it would probably be unproductive in many situations, but we think it would improve things. That’s really all we can ask for. And so yes, I do think that what we’re saying is of utmost importance. I doubt that people 100 years from now will look back at our book as some big landmark or something like that, no matter how much we might hope it, but we are glad it’s having influence on the margins with good important people like you and the important work you’re doing. And so if we can have that kind of influence on the grassroots level on open-minded people like yourself, we’re content with that. It doesn’t have to be the most important book of political science.
Zach: Sure. Yeah, I was merely just curious if you had high hopes for it because I often think about how important the concept is. One thing I want to end with is something that just occurred to me which is I think part of the thing that explains why these things are so attractive is because there is a real existential anxiety around having to think through all these various issues. Right? And I’ve heard this talking to people when it comes to our divides, where they’ll be like, “Oh, now that you’ve gotten me to see some of these things, now that people have gotten me to think more about these things, it’s actually a lot more stressful because I can’t just embrace a view that answers the questions on all these things for me, and I have to do my own work and think about the nuance.” I think that does help explain why some of these things are so attractive in terms of just stress and the existential stress of trying to process meaning and find meaning and our place in this world and what’s right and wrong and how we should live our lives. But I’m curious, do you see that more existential anxiety thing as playing a role in liking these simplistic categories?
Hyrum: Yeah. Obviously, the desire for simplicity is attractive in and of itself. I mean, we like simple models. You know, the monism of pre-Socratic times was very attractive when people looked at the world. “Oh, it’s all water. It’s all fire,” says Heraclitus. Monism has always been attractive in whatever realm we talk about it simply because simplicity is attractive. I get it. We like simple things. But we think the attraction goes beyond that. And I think in this case, what we’re really dealing with is epistemic closure. Humans have the need to consider things closed. We don’t like to be uncertain. We don’t like to be unsettled. It’s not a good space for us to be as far as day-to-day. It’s good for us, obviously. Epistemic openness is better for society, and it’s better for us as human beings long term. But the kind of dopamine hits we get by feeling things are settled is very attractive. Now, I say this as a religious person. Religion did that for people all throughout history. “Oh, I sign up for the religion, I was born into this religion or that religion, I adopt its tenets, I don’t have to think anymore about the nature of the universe. I don’t have to think about where the animals came from. I don’t have to think about the stars or the earth or why I’m here or what’s right and wrong. It’s all been handed to me. It’s closed.” That is such a relief. That’s such a burden off your back. And as our society is secularized, I think that’s one of the reasons partisan politics has gotten so nasty. Because the desire for epistemic closure is as strong as it was a thousand years ago, and yet we don’t have religion as much to provide that epistemic closure. So we need it in other things, and the political spectrum is a tool of epistemic closure. Political monism is so attractive because it just says, “Ah, it’s over. I’ve chosen the good side, I have all the answers, I don’t have to think anymore.” Episteme being open, though, being a scout rather than a soldier, is the right place to be, and long term, it’s better for all of us and it’s better for us as far as being charitable and being open-minded and humble and all these things. But it’s harder, and it means we always have to be doing our Bayesian Updating. It means we always have to be looking at gathering new evidence, and we don’t get that very satisfying sense of epistemic closure. But what’s more satisfying for us as humans long term is getting at the truth, and that requires epistemic openness and I hope more people will be epistemically open, no matter how good it feels to be epistemically closed.
Zach: Yeah, I think that need for closure stuff is really important and relevant. Well, this has been great, Hyrum. I appreciate your time, and thanks for coming on and talking to me.
Hyrum: Happy to do it, Zach, thanks for inviting me.
Zach: That was a talk with Hyrum Lewis, co-author of “The Myth of Left and Right.”