Perhaps a Better Categorization of the American Left and Right

Let's consider something more fundamental

After Richard Hanania’s really… awkward… essay about the difference between the American right and left, and my response, I want to put forward a another theory that might help clarify thought. Now, I am not convinced categorizing the right and left distinctly is a very worthy goal, because I don’t think there is a useful step after saying “Aha! That is a LEFT/RIGHT wing position!” I think it is more worthwhile to be able to recognize good positions and bad positions with regards to human flourishing, or some other goal. Additionally it seems that the left/right spectrum tends to swap its axis periodically on various issues, which is a nice way of saying that I don’t think there is a fundamental philosophy or set of principles besides “I want more power to make people stop liking what I don’t like,” at least at the elite level.

This probably sums up at least 80% of modern politics....

So where to start…?

I think the best place to start is with Bryan Caplan’s distillation of the vague philosophy of the two sides in America: the left is anti-market, and the right is anti-left. Here's the key bit:

1. Leftists are anti-market.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of market outcomes.  No matter how good market outcomes are, they can’t bear to say, “Markets have done a great job, who could ask for more?”

2. Rightists are anti-leftist.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of leftists.  No matter how much they agree with leftists on an issue, they can’t bear to say, “The left is totally right, it would be churlish to criticize them.”

I would add the addendum that when economists say “markets” we mean “social processes of individual choice and action resulting in complex adaptive systems with outcomes that are the result of human action but not of human design.” Money doesn’t have to be involved at all; humans exchange all sorts of things, arguably all possible things¹. Market behaviors then include things like private charity as well as businesses and trade².

So the left tends to see all these sorts of outcomes, some good some bad, and says “I don’t like how this worked out, let’s use the power of government to change that outcome.” This might take the form of forcible wealth redistribution, regulation, making certain things illegal or mandatory to buy, whatever. Whatever society is doing on its own, someone on the left won’t like that outcome and wants to change it³. The leftist (whether called a progressive, socialist, communist, left liberal, or democrat) sees the problems in the world and says government must do something⁴.

The right, on the other hand, has no particular love for market outcomes. How many serious “free trade” Republicans are there, let alone how many argue for legalizing drugs or prostitution? No, instead, the American right is merely anti-left on most issues, taking the opposite side of any issue the left holds up as a rallying cry. If the 2024 Democratic platform somehow includes “To Hell with it, let’s legalize every man-portable firearm!” I think the smart money is that the Republican leadership would oppose the measure, and likely using arguments penned by Democrats sometime in the late 20th century. We need never fear that, however, because if there is one thing elite Democrats hate it is the market process of people buying weapons they could use to resist government coercion, but the point is that the American right is driven less by aversion to government power, a desire for freedom and small government, or market fundamentalism, and more by “Things are pretty ok now, just leave us the hell alone.” This is why they are often called “conservatives”.

If you have ever asked yourself “Why do Republicans have such a hard time putting together a coherent policy platform beyond ‘Let’s go Brandon!’?” there’s your answer. Wanting to be left the hell alone is a perfectly fine, and indeed rather noble, political goal, but until the meddling gets so bad that revolution is a reasonable choice it is hard to form that into forward looking policy. As I will discuss shortly, other aspects of political reality tend to get in the way.

So, as a first cut, the American left is anti-market, the American right is anti-left, and the only pro-market people are a species of weirdo who write and talk a lot but don’t have a great deal of influence. Very few people in America today are particularly pro-market⁵. Very few people in America today (or ever, to be fair) have a strong set of core philosophical principles of what is right and wrong limiting the application of government coercion. Most people fall into the categories of “We need to fix market outcomes, by force if needed,” or “Stop trying to make changes, things are fine enough now! Unless you want to put things back the way they were… then maybe.”

But that leaves a lot of questions still…

At a very high level, broad strokes sort of thing, Caplan’s simple thesis seems to just about cover everything. Yet it still leaves a few questions that are worth trying to explain through a theory, such as:

1. Why didn’t Trump and the Republicans abolish Obamacare (the PPACA) when they took over in 2016? Wasn’t that sort of thing why people elected him?

2. Why have the big American cities all been run by Democrats for years, yet also have the biggest problems with crime, poverty, schools, and police brutality? Shouldn’t those have been solved given how much the left cares about them?

3. Why was it Bush II that signed off on expanding Medicare and Clinton that signed off on limiting welfare?

4. Why the bloody hell is the FCC still a thing? Or the Post Office? When was the last time ANY federal bureaucracy or other institution has been abolished? Does anyone want a small government? I’d have sworn I heard a few different Republican like people talking about that over the past 40 years…

I think we can answer these questions by making another cut besides left and right, adding another dimension to our model along the lines of Elite vs Common.

• Elites: Those that actually engage in government and policy creation, ie. those who can wield and/or directly benefit from government’s coercive powers

• Commoners: The rest of us that have to live with government’s actions, and may ask for policy change, but generally do not wield or directly benefit

This is in a sense a class distinction, between the political ruling class and the rest of us, but it is worth noting that it is a more fluid group than class usually implies. The rich are not automatically in the Elites class, nore are the relatively poor banned from it. Another description of the difference between the two groups might be closer to the saying “There are two types of people who laugh at the laws: those who break them and those who make them.⁶” Those who make the laws are the Elites, those who do not laugh at the laws are the Commoners. Those who laughingly break the laws tend to span both categories.

So why is this distinction useful in addition to “anti-market vs anti-left”? Because the dynamics of politics, of power, of getting elected in America means that those in the Elite have very different incentives and goals than us Commoners. In many ways, the politicians in the two major parties have a lot more in common with each other than they do with their bases. When banks fail and get bailed out, it isn’t the bankers or the politicians that lose their house or pay the tax bills. If new regulations push small businesses into bankruptcy or make it effectively illegal for them to operate, it isn’t Fortune 500 CEO’s or politicians who have to lay off all their employees and close the doors on the family business. When politicians declare that unpaid or sub-minimum wage internships without health insurance are illegal, it isn’t Congress who has to actually follow the rules.

In a nutshell then, Elites want to acquire and use power for their own ends, and Commoners want to avoid having power used against them and want their Elites to use it against those they disagree with. Sometimes the ends of both groups align, and sometimes they don’t.

Simple Public Choice theory thus suggests answers to the questions above.

Why don’t the Elite right tear down the works of the Elite left once they take office? Because the Elite right wants to both gain power and oppose the left, with opposition to the left being a means to get power. Once they have power from office, destroying a source of power they might control such as an institution is less appealing. If the Commoners have already voted their Elites into power, there little reason to do what they say so long as you think they will keep voting for you.

Why aren’t big cities run by Democrats leftist utopia’s? Because the self interest of Elites keeps them from enacting all the policies a leftist utopia would have; at the very least solving the problems would obviate the need for politicians wielding power, so the Elite would be out of a job. Even assuming all the leftist anti-market policies would usher in utopia, one has to ask whether Elites actually could benefit themselves more if such a utopia occurred. Public employee unions are huge contributors to the Democratic party, after all, so if they are the ones misbehaving... If we stop assuming the policies are good ones to begin with, we have to wonder about the career prospects of a politician who says “Whoops, we have been running this city into the ground for the past 50 years, but now we have some really great new plans! Vote for me!⁷”

Why do presidents support policies that seem inimical to their party’s philosophies? Simple: they want to be elected, and to do that they need to appeal to more people than just their hard core party members. Compromising your principles might not be the first price of power, but it definitely seems to be a key part of the subscription plan.

The Commoners in this model have a somewhat different role. In America of course they vote for their Elites, but not all of them and not very directly. Some elites are appointed. Some are Elites by virtue of wealth or social power and not official government power; they buy power. Often the primary process of the big parties will weed out Elites the Commoners might prefer to vote for and only present least bad options in the polls. Yet the Commoners are not entirely at the whim of the Elite; so long as elections have to happen the Commers can stir things up.

The tension between the Elites needing the Commoners’ votes but also wishing to use the power of government against them, combined with the Elites’ shakey leadership of their side’s Commoners leads to a very strange dynamic. Imagine the state as a great sailing ship steered by a colossal rudder. Attached to this rudder are two great ropes for pulling it left and right allowing it to be steered by the Elites at the ends, pulling against each other. It is not only the two groups of Elites with a hand on a rope, however; a myriad of smaller ropes are attached to the ends of each great cord, held by the masses of Commoners behind each side’s Elites. In some cases the Elites can lead the Commoners on their side, asking them to pull more or less in a given direction, and in any case the Commoners on each side tend to work at cross purposes and so their influence is largely irrelevant to the Elites. But sometimes the Commoners take it into their heads to pull strongly in some direction regardless of the wishes of the Elites, who cannot resist and the Commoners find themselves suddenly with a lot of influence on the direction of the ship of state. (Often with a new set of Elites that is willing to go along with their new direction as well.)

Yet, for the most part, the Commoners largely ignore the functioning of the state. After all, they can have very little individual influence on policies and modern political parasites are good at subtle blood sucking, and besides, politics doesn’t put food on the table or pay the mortgage for the vast majority. Commoners have better things to do than engage in politics.

Commoners do enjoy a good team sport, however, and for many politics is that team sport. In the end they want to cheer for their team against the hated rivals, even as the supporters of the hated rivals are their co-workers and neighbors. The Commoners want to see their team score points against the opposition and win the game; the Elite want to make sure there is still a game for them to play in the future. Whether or not the game is a net positive for society or not is hardly the question.

Actually… let’s go for one more dimension.

I think it is worth putting in one more dimension of difference into the model. Not just because Kling does in “The Three Languages of Politics” and I think he was wise to, and not just because a three dimensional model is awkward enough to draw that I can excuse myself from putting up diagrams for the simpler versions. I think there is a fundamental human divide over whether or not it is proper to force people into doing things for their own good, or to prevent them doing things that don’t hurt other people that some people happen not to like. This is in a sense the Libertarian Party dimension, but it is more important than that party has ever managed to be: it is the coercive vs anti-coercion dimension.

As I mentioned before, there isn’t a pro-market party. The Republican party is only sometimes pro-market by accident because the Democratic party is so anti-market. As Scott Alexander is fond of saying, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Republican administrations at every level are quite happy to limit trade through product bans, onerous regulations, subsidies for favored businesses and industries, etc. If they are less so than Democrats it is only because they cannot be explicitly as anti-market as their opponents⁸ and still get elected.

That is at the level of the Elites; being a pro-market Elite is difficult because most of the people who want to give you money in exchange for using your power to help them in the market are by definition anti-market. At the level of Commoners, however, there is a huge range of positions occupied by people with varying levels of concern about coercion within the left and right.

As an example, a friend of mine was a lifelong Democrat until very recently. He is keen on helping unfortunate people with state programs, thus a little on the anti-market side, but otherwise thinks people who aren’t hurting others should be left alone, which puts him… where on our two dimensional chart from before? In fact, he is what I would call a “Bleeding Heart Libertarian.” He no longer feels at home in the Democratic party, with its ever increasing authoritarianism sliding into totalitarianism, and doesn’t feel comfortable in a Republican party that can’t bring itself to say “Look, it isn’t my business what two consenting adults want to do with each other.⁹”

Likewise, I am not comfortable in the Republican party that seems willing to engage in all sorts of immense governmental overreach and malfeasance, with no coherent sense of what is the proper behavior of government and what is not beyond “Whatever the Democrats want to do is wrong”. It seems to me that most Republican Elites do not want less corruption, only more opportunity to engage in it. Smaller government is apparently only popular with Elites before they are sufficiently Elite to fully benefit from big government.

Oh, and I am pro-market, so… yea, I am right out of both the right and left.

Yet I do think there is a role for government, both in the bare bones night watchman state sense and social safety net sense. I would just be in favor of reducing the safety net such that it is more like a way of keeping from dying and less like a noose around all our collective necks that cuts blood off to the heads of the poor the most. (That’s an awkward way of saying that I think most social programs do more harm than good to the poor they are meant to help, if not directly than indirectly through incentives encouraging short sighted behaviors badly adapted to success in the world. When I can sort out the metaphor into something more elegant there will be a long essay on the subject, I assure you!)

We two might just be strange, but considering the ever increasing number of registered independents, the tensions on the left between the Woke Warriors and the establishment Democrats, the tensions on the right between the Trumpettes and the establishment Republicans, and the general sense that the only reason anyone votes for their political party is because they hate them slightly less than the alternative… well clearly there are many different dimensions of interest at play¹⁰.

So what do we have?

Our model now has three dimensions that attempt to describe the American populace, such that if we know someone’s position across each attribute we can guess where they fall politically, and if we know how they identify politically we can guess their attributes.

• Anti-market vs anti-left

• Elite vs Common

• Coercion vs Anti-Coercion

Note that the first one there is a little circular, and might be combined with the last to be “Anti-Market vs Anti-Coercion” but I think they might be better separated because it seems that the dominant political forces in any state always take using government force to solve problems as a given. The whole “let people figure it out for themselves, they are really good at that” is a more modern notion, and only seems to have existed in history because governments were unable to control people in a detailed manner relatively recently, and generally didn’t care to anyway outside of getting money and soldiers.

So, if you know someone who says things like “X is a really big problem; if only the government would do Y, we could solve it quickly,” where X is some endemic human condition like poverty or crime or disliking people because they don’t pronounce vowels the proper way, and Y isn’t some lesser version of “abolish the government”, you can be pretty sure they are going to be on the left and common, albeit perhaps with hopes of being elite someday, and perfectly happy coercing people into their plan. If someone replies “X isn’t a problem, and even if it was, Y wouldn’t do any good!” they are probably on the right. If they say that, then get elected to office after Y was done and do nothing to abolish Y, they are definitely Elite right and not anti-coercion.

If they reply “You guys are all ass holes who want to tell everyone what to do regardless of whether it makes things better or worse because all you want is power” you know they will never get elected to public office, ever. As to whether or not they are a 70’s era hippy or a Randian super man… well you will just have to look at the bumper stickers on their van.

---

Anyway, the model needs work and is too limited; maybe it does need an axis around “Is the world perfectable?” But I think it gets into some of the more fundamental differences in how people think and how that predicts how they are going to come down on certain issues. Although the positions of the major American political parties are pretty damned near random, I think there is an underlying logic in why people fall the way they do between them. Some is no doubt “I only care about this single issue, and I am willing to adopt the views of other people who support my issue for those issues I don’t care much about.” Some is “My political team must be right because the other team is so evil! My team leaders told me so"!” Some might even be due to how much time a person spends reading political news instead of watching it on TV or listening to the radio.

But I really doubt that last one.

1. Love, attention, approval, time… all the sorts of things we like and don’t like.

2. Sometimes people make a three fold distinction between government (coercion), markets (voluntary trade) and civil society (voluntary non-commercial activities). I don’t make that here because I think the key aspect is coercive vs. voluntary behaviors when it comes to discussing politics. See Politics is Evil. Social processes that largely take care of themselves without coercion is what the left tends to dislike, I think.

3. Someone more clever than I, as evidenced by the fact I can’t remember their name, quipped “It is amazing how much socialists hate the outcomes of social processes.” It might be more charitably put as “the left thinks the world is perfectible.” I personally think that would be a very damning criticism of someone’s thinking, but maybe the alternative is worse still?

4. Arnold Kling’s “The Three Languages of Politics” argues that the American left frames situations as “oppressor vs oppressed”, which makes the use of government coercion against the oppressor to solve the problem make a lot of sense. Every social problem is seen in the same light as “X is stealing from Y” to which the sensible response is “Well, government exists to stop stealing, so go stop X, government!” I think Kling is on to something there, and I would like to know more about why some people see everything in the “oppressor vs oppressed” spectrum.

5. See Bryan Caplan’s “Myth of the Rational Voter.”

6. I read this first in a Terry Pratchett novel, but I have seen it other places as well, so I don’t know if it is originally his. Even if he didn’t originate it, you should still read “Night Watch” because it is an amazingly funny and enjoyable book that just happens to have a lot of political theory hidden inside the story.

7. As to why Republicans don’t manage to take over badly run cities, my suspicion is that the nature of cities (thousands of people living right on top of each other) tends to make people favor someone having the power to make other people stop doing things that annoy them, other people’s bad behavior and the results of their poor decisions are right there all around you to be seen. Add in that in most places the city itself is responsible for providing all utilities and many amenities, and you get the bulk of the people expecting a great deal of governmental involvement and anti-market policies, ie. leftist policies. Against that inertia, those who are anti-left either move out of the cities or keep their mouths shut. Apparently in America most moved out of the cities in the 50-70’s and never went back. That is all just my guess though… something seems to be really wrong with cities in America, but maybe it is just because I am a country boy at heart.

8. It might need to be pointed out that “pro-market” and “pro-business” are not necessarily the same thing. Lots of businesses fail in a properly functioning market, and those businesses are quite keen on using the power of government to keep that from happening, making them very anti-market.

9. I am paraphrasing a bit on his part. I think he would buy that interpretation, though.

10. I can easily imagine the US sporting 6-10 different political parties if some rule change allowed for more granular party distinctions. We had that many in Congress historically prior to 1939, and many smaller nations in Europe sport numbers of parties in that range.