TL;DR
Most discussions of politics and government tend to use descriptors of “left” and “right” as shorthand for referring to a constellation of positions by individuals and/or parties. While it is usually clear who is being referred to by the left/right labels, it’s often unclear what those labels mean exactly. In addition, the whole left/right axis may mean a very different set of policy positions when transposed to, say, a different country (or point in history).
There are other ways of organizing these ideas that are still graphic (thus simplifying) but that have more than one axis, hence are a bit less simplistic than the one-dimensional left-right axis generally used. This essay discusses one of those, and demonstrates how it can be used to gain a bit of insight into how our current situation differs from a couple of historical situations that are often used in contemporary discussions without realizing that the “left/right axis” may be leading us astray.
The basic idea…
Let me first make it completely clear that this is not original with me. Similar ideas are discussed here, here and here as well as in Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions (and other works) and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.
The idea is that the “left/right” sides, while they have advocated a variety of different policies over the years (and across geographical boundaries) have tended to be stable in their view of human nature. Specifically, the “left” tends to hold to what Sowell calls the Utopian Vision (that human nature is quite malleable and the fundamental problems of humanity can ultimately be solved by education and intellectual progress) while the “right” tends to hold to the Tragic Vision (that human nature is stubbornly stable, and thus improvement in the human condition comes from careful design of society so as to provide incentives for beneficial behavior). Said differently, the “right” understands the importance of trade-offs and incentives, while the “left” wants grand solutions that will make future trade-offs unnecessary.*
This dichotomy of visions, though, is insufficient to predict actual policy preferences – there are other considerations as well that are necessary to flesh out the “visions” into policy. One of the most pervasive and important of these is the role of the state in the particular vision: that is, statism vs. individualism. Putting these two “axes” together (and adding a few admittedly overly-generalized labels for the corners) yields this 2-dimensional graph**:
Note that locating an individual (or a government) on this graph actually gives useful information about that individual/government. In particular, one can observe that, though Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR were both totalitarian and nominally “socialist,” there is actually a good deal of difference between the two (upper-right and upper-left), so the fact that they were on opposite sides in WW2 was not just a “zero-sum struggle” between two competing dictatorships. It also correctly “predicts” that Mussolini would align with Hitler, not Stalin (beyond geographical considerations).
Now, how does this help us understand the political landscape of the US? Think back to, say, the 1970s – at that point, the government largely held to the Tragic Vision (though the New Deal and the Great Society had already started the push that would eventually reverse this – recall in particular that, McCarthy’s later excesses aside, Alger Hiss was a Communist spy!). Those holding to the Utopian Vision were largely also individualists, since they saw the power of the state as resisting their views. Thus, the principal political axis at the time was approximately along the red line depicted below:
Note that the ends of this axis are NOT at the corners of this graph, in line with the dictum that politics in the US is “played between the 40-yard lines,” compared to other countries.***
I’m not claiming that everyone’s opinions lay somewhere along that line, but that was the general sense of the political landscape at the time – the individualistic Utopians felt they were being held down by “The Man” who was more authoritarian and held to the Tragic View.
As time went on, the huge expansion of Federal government power (and reduction in effective oversight) that occurred in the second half of the 20th century ensured that most of the Federal government was on board with the Utopian View – in that view, it didn’t really matter whether or not government programs actually helped anyone or helped ensure appropriate trade-offs. No, the point was that we were moving toward the grand Utopian future where we wouldn’t have to do these trade-offs any more, so ANY costs now are fully justified!
At the moment, the government is nearly completely captured by the Utopian View. Utopians may still wish to rail against “The Man” but they are The Man – thus, the current central tendency is along the blue line depicted below.
Now, “right-wing” and “fascist” aren’t even in the same quadrant of the graph. Sentiments left over from the 1970s about the political “right” and “left” are quite likely to be inaccurate, as many of those have to do with the projection of government power.†
As another slight variant on this, I would note that there is also a “cultural” interpretation of the Utopian-Tragic axis that is also possible: the “Libertine-Traditional” axis. Here I am using “Libertine” to mean support for public displays of eccentric (often sexual) self-expression, and “Traditional” to mean support for more or less keeping one’s eccentricities to one’s self. It is not completely clear to me why the Libertine View and the Utopian View should correlate (or that conversely, the Traditional View and the Tragic View should correlate), but through the last couple of centuries, they certainly do.
Relabeling the horizontal axes of the two diagrams above makes it clear that, while the backlash against the Libertinism of Weimar Germany pushed that country toward fascism (pushing right along the “red line”), a similar backlash against the Libertinism of “Weimar America” today would likely push us instead toward an individualistic Traditionalism (pushing right along the “blue line”). This seems to be what is happening with the current “parental rights” movement pushing back against the wholesale adoption of the LGBTQ+ agenda and transgenderism in public schools (see, for example, Virginia after the election of Glenn Youngkin as governor – Youngkin is much closer to the “Libertarian” corner than the “Fascist” corner). I realize that it seems oxymoronic to think of our current LGBTQ+ and “trans-kid” activists as “Libertine statists” but that’s really fairly accurate – they not only wish to be able to parade their eccentricities in public (and in schools), but also wish to use the power of the state to punish anyone who disagrees.
* Incidentally, this also explains the tendency of the “left” to argue in bad faith, use deceptive definitions, and in general to operate under an “ends justify the means” modus operandi – their belief that the Utopian future (no further trade-offs necessary) for which they are working is worth any trade-off today.
It also explains the general antipathy of the “left” toward the Christian faith, since orthodox Christianity holds to the Tragic Vision, not the Utopian one.
** I strongly suspect that Sowell would object to my “northeast” corner label, as he made the case in a number of places that the fascists weren’t “right-wing” in the sense of the Tragic Vision at all. I’m really not trying to argue with Sowell in any way, but neither do I have a better label for that corner. It is at least true that the “right wing” is often smeared as fascist by opponents, so perhaps I should have labelled that corner using scare-quotes.
*** the ultimate origin of this idea is unclear, but it was used as early as 1970 by Scammon and Watterberg. Subsequently, it’s been used by Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Barack Obama (though I can’t seem to find links for these last two), and many others.
† After the writing of this essay, Victor Davis Hanson made similar observations here. Read the whole thing.