I am thinking that one possible asymetry between “the left” and “the right” is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist. The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of “the right”. What exactly do they have in common? (Religion: the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever? Individual or community? Mystery or reason? The great future or the great past? Selfishness or selflessness? Should women be allowed as leaders? Etc.) The common trait that classifies them both as “the right” is the fact that neither of them is a socialist.
Well, I could also says that neither of them “considers hinduism the best thing ever”… but why should that information be used to classify them? Well, for a hinduist that would be an important information. Then it follows that classifying many diverse views under one label of “the right” makes sense to you mostly if you are a socialist. (Or if being versus not-being a socialist is the dominant question in your political paradigm.) An “Ayn-Rand-type” non-socialist and a “Chesterton-type” non-socialist would otherwise feel uncomfortable under the common umbrella.
I am not saying there are no differences among “the left”, but to me they seem more like a matter of degree. This observation may be culture-dependent. I am from eastern Europe, where “the left” basically either wants “what communists did” or “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence”. -- I suppose in USA the diversity of “the left” is greater, because there is no such attractor. Actually, the Republican party may serve as a similar (though weaker) attractor for “the right”.
OK, what I tried to say was this: suppose that the leftist opinions are pretty similar, and the rightist opinions are very diverse. Assuming that both sides are about equally mindkilled (believe in about the same proportion of true statements, and the same proportion of false statements), for most statements the left will probably have either true believes or false beliefs as a whole, while the right will internally disagree—therefore even if each specific right political group has the same chance to have true beliefs, there is a very high chance that at least one of the right political groups will have a true belief.
For clarity, here is a model: There are true beliefs A, B, C, D; and every political group is correct only about one of them, and incorrect about three of them. There are three left groups, but all of them believe in A. There are three right groups, first of them believes in B, second in C, third in D. -- Now if we make a per-group statistics, we find that each party is 25% correct and 75% incorrect. However, if we make a per-true-belief statistics, we find that 25% of true beliefs are associated with the left (A), and 75% of true beliefs are associated with the right (B, C, D). -- In this model, if a group of people could succeed to hold all true beliefs (A, B, C, D), an external observer would judge they are mostly right (despite they happen to disagree with every individual right group in majority of beliefs).
Back to the beginning—we disagree with Ayn Rand about simplicity of values, or about importance of community; we also disagree with Chesterton about religion. That alone does not give us a political label. On the other hand, disagreeing with a socialist political idea is sufficient to get the label of political right, because any point outside of the socialist concept-space is called “the right”.
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between “the left” and “the right” is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. [...] The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
Beware the out-group homogeneity effect. People tend to see their own group as more heterogeneous than other groups, as differences that look small from far away look bigger up close.
With left and right, I have also heard the exact opposite claim: that the “right” represents a narrower, more coherent group. In the US, the “right” is based in the dominant, mainstream social group (sometimes called “real America”), drawing disproportionately from people who are white, male, Christian, relatively well-off, straight, etc., while the “left” is a coalition of the various groups that are left out of “real America” for one reason or another. Alternatively, conservatives are the people who support the existing social order and want to keep things roughly how they are; liberals are the ones who want change—and there are more degrees of freedom in changing things than in keeping things the same.
If a political group X, identified as A in {”left”, “right”}, becomes very powerful in some era, the following things happen:
people see X as a prototype of A;
other A groups are seen like less successful variations of X; if that is impossible, the cognitive dissonance will be solved by reclassifying the incompatible group as non-A;
after a while X (and therefore A) becomes the default position for people who don’t think too much about politics.
Later, when the political group X loses some power:
simple people still identify as X (A), which is reinforced by seeing the past with rose-colored glasses;
new opinions are automatically classified as non-A, because they don’t pattern-match X;
therefore smart people begin to identify as non-A, to signal intellectual superiority and independent thinking.
In USA, X = Republican / religious right, and A = “right”. In Eastern Europe, X = Communist, and A = “left”.
This is very simplified, but it explains why sometimes the same person could self-identify as “left wing” in USA (to express their incompatibility with the religious right), and as “right wing” in Eastern Europe (to express their incompatibility with the communists). On the other hand, people mostly compatible with the religious right or with the communists can self-identify the same in both places.
In Eastern Europe the distinction between “support the traditional model” and “support change” is rather confused, because it is not clear whether the traditional refers to the era before the fall of communism, or to era even before the communists. In some sense, both religious right and communists are literally the conservative parties here.
This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.
A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn’t it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country’s right being as homogeneous as the same country’s left? (The objection hasn’t a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)
The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist.
B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.
Environmentalists aren’t necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren’t the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren’t necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market capitalism. Feminists rarely dream about socialist utopias as they have a different fish to fry. Yet both feminists and anarchists are usually considered standing on the left. In fact I could use the examples of these groups to make a mirror argument of yours, namely, that the right is capitalist(-ish) while the left is everything opposed to capitalism. I don’t think this is a good definition since there are counter-examples to it too (e.g. the nazis who are against capitalism but still “right-wing”) but at least I don’t immediately see this description being less reasonable than yours.
Of course this all hinges on the definitions of socialism or capitalism, discussions about which might better be avoided for their pointlessness. It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially). This definition has several advantages: for one thing, it has no problems with the fact that in the late 18th century the market liberals were considered left.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of “the right”. What exactly do they have in common?
C) Both Jacques Derrida and Lenin would be examples of “the left”. What do they have in common? Or Pol Pot and Bertrand Russell? Neither of them was a big fan of free markets (or hinduism, for that matter), but that doesn’t guarantee much ideological homogeneity.
I am from eastern Europe, where “the left” basically either wants “what communists did” or “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence”.
D) When I still thought that “left” and “right” were more than two rather arbitrary labels, I considered myself a leftist and “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence” wasn’t the way I would summarise my political preferences. Of course, there is a sense in which any government intervention into the markets is “what communists did, just less”, but it is a sense on such a level of vagueness and generality that it lacks significant information value. In any case, for ideologically oriented both social democrats and greens communism is primarily a negative example rather than an attractor. (I don’t claim deep knowledge of the contemporary left in Slovakia, but feel quite certain to object to your statement being formulated as valid for the whole Eastern Europe).
It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially).
I don’t think that quite described the US, or Western Europe—the stereotypical redneck is low-status but on the right (same for ploucs here in France), and buying organic food seems to be more common with the rich, but is associated to the left.
A better description of the left/right gap may be that each represents a status ladder, and that people support the status ladder on which they have the best relative position. The details of what counts tend to vary with time and place, but on the left you tend to get status for being educated, open-minded, environmentally aware, original, etc., and on the right you tend to get status for being rich, responsible, having a family, being loyal to your country, etc.
At least, that angle of approach seems better than looking at policies; if you compare the policies of the French left and the American left, the policies might seem so different that they don’t deserve the same label; but if you compare the kind of people who support either parties, the similarities are much more apparent.
I have a notion that in the US, left-wingers tend to focus on defection by high-status people and right-wingers tend to focus on defection by low-status people.
It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially).
Except where “the left” has become the elites, there the dynamic is reversed.
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely. There is a lot of self-serving political decisions made by both left and right politicians from which politicians benefit, but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
Somewhat special example were/are communist countries where the non-political aspects of social status are reduced and the groups of communists and elites have large overlap. These countries, when compared internationally, are “left”, but in the internal politics there is usually little place for using “left” and “right” as the left and right are relative characteristics which are useless when there is only one political party.
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely.
I wasn’t just referring to politicians, but to the liberal intelligentsia.
but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today. (Although of course liberals like to think it’s still true.)
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today.
I’m reminded of a quote from a hippy band during the Vietnam War. Paraphrased:
We thought we were representing the working class. Then we realized the working class were the ones beating us with nightsticks.
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today. (Although of course liberals like to think it’s still true.)
Especially when you consider things like gay marriage or free immigration, causes universally approved of (in public, at least) by the liberal intelligentsia, but very unpopular among several core Democratic groups.
But there are any number of sub-varieties of socialism, so it is itself a fuzzy blob. Moreover, the non-right in many
countries, particularly the US, barely has a whiff of classical socialism, Who is advocating a centrally planned economy
or worker control of production in the US? It’s a standing joke in Europe that the US has two parties of the right. That’s “perception” of course. It’s also a US perception that public healthcare “is” socialism—the idea is seen as mainstream
and cross-party elsewhere. What is going on is that the right have this convenient label “socialist” to lambast
the non-right with, and the non-right don’t have a corresponding term to hit back with. That doesnt mean anything about ideaspace.
Which question? Wanting some but not all things under state/provision control is not socialsim by any strict definition. More like moderate or centrel-left or social democracy or something. But “social democrat!” doens’t have the right insulting ring.
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between “the left” and “the right” is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist. The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of “the right”. What exactly do they have in common? (Religion: the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever? Individual or community? Mystery or reason? The great future or the great past? Selfishness or selflessness? Should women be allowed as leaders? Etc.) The common trait that classifies them both as “the right” is the fact that neither of them is a socialist.
Well, I could also says that neither of them “considers hinduism the best thing ever”… but why should that information be used to classify them? Well, for a hinduist that would be an important information. Then it follows that classifying many diverse views under one label of “the right” makes sense to you mostly if you are a socialist. (Or if being versus not-being a socialist is the dominant question in your political paradigm.) An “Ayn-Rand-type” non-socialist and a “Chesterton-type” non-socialist would otherwise feel uncomfortable under the common umbrella.
I am not saying there are no differences among “the left”, but to me they seem more like a matter of degree. This observation may be culture-dependent. I am from eastern Europe, where “the left” basically either wants “what communists did” or “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence”. -- I suppose in USA the diversity of “the left” is greater, because there is no such attractor. Actually, the Republican party may serve as a similar (though weaker) attractor for “the right”.
OK, what I tried to say was this: suppose that the leftist opinions are pretty similar, and the rightist opinions are very diverse. Assuming that both sides are about equally mindkilled (believe in about the same proportion of true statements, and the same proportion of false statements), for most statements the left will probably have either true believes or false beliefs as a whole, while the right will internally disagree—therefore even if each specific right political group has the same chance to have true beliefs, there is a very high chance that at least one of the right political groups will have a true belief.
For clarity, here is a model: There are true beliefs A, B, C, D; and every political group is correct only about one of them, and incorrect about three of them. There are three left groups, but all of them believe in A. There are three right groups, first of them believes in B, second in C, third in D. -- Now if we make a per-group statistics, we find that each party is 25% correct and 75% incorrect. However, if we make a per-true-belief statistics, we find that 25% of true beliefs are associated with the left (A), and 75% of true beliefs are associated with the right (B, C, D). -- In this model, if a group of people could succeed to hold all true beliefs (A, B, C, D), an external observer would judge they are mostly right (despite they happen to disagree with every individual right group in majority of beliefs).
Back to the beginning—we disagree with Ayn Rand about simplicity of values, or about importance of community; we also disagree with Chesterton about religion. That alone does not give us a political label. On the other hand, disagreeing with a socialist political idea is sufficient to get the label of political right, because any point outside of the socialist concept-space is called “the right”.
Beware the out-group homogeneity effect. People tend to see their own group as more heterogeneous than other groups, as differences that look small from far away look bigger up close.
With left and right, I have also heard the exact opposite claim: that the “right” represents a narrower, more coherent group. In the US, the “right” is based in the dominant, mainstream social group (sometimes called “real America”), drawing disproportionately from people who are white, male, Christian, relatively well-off, straight, etc., while the “left” is a coalition of the various groups that are left out of “real America” for one reason or another. Alternatively, conservatives are the people who support the existing social order and want to keep things roughly how they are; liberals are the ones who want change—and there are more degrees of freedom in changing things than in keeping things the same.
Seems to me there could be a common pattern:
If a political group X, identified as A in {”left”, “right”}, becomes very powerful in some era, the following things happen:
people see X as a prototype of A;
other A groups are seen like less successful variations of X; if that is impossible, the cognitive dissonance will be solved by reclassifying the incompatible group as non-A;
after a while X (and therefore A) becomes the default position for people who don’t think too much about politics.
Later, when the political group X loses some power:
simple people still identify as X (A), which is reinforced by seeing the past with rose-colored glasses;
new opinions are automatically classified as non-A, because they don’t pattern-match X;
therefore smart people begin to identify as non-A, to signal intellectual superiority and independent thinking.
In USA, X = Republican / religious right, and A = “right”. In Eastern Europe, X = Communist, and A = “left”.
This is very simplified, but it explains why sometimes the same person could self-identify as “left wing” in USA (to express their incompatibility with the religious right), and as “right wing” in Eastern Europe (to express their incompatibility with the communists). On the other hand, people mostly compatible with the religious right or with the communists can self-identify the same in both places.
In Eastern Europe the distinction between “support the traditional model” and “support change” is rather confused, because it is not clear whether the traditional refers to the era before the fall of communism, or to era even before the communists. In some sense, both religious right and communists are literally the conservative parties here.
This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.
A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn’t it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country’s right being as homogeneous as the same country’s left? (The objection hasn’t a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)
B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.
Environmentalists aren’t necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren’t the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren’t necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market capitalism. Feminists rarely dream about socialist utopias as they have a different fish to fry. Yet both feminists and anarchists are usually considered standing on the left. In fact I could use the examples of these groups to make a mirror argument of yours, namely, that the right is capitalist(-ish) while the left is everything opposed to capitalism. I don’t think this is a good definition since there are counter-examples to it too (e.g. the nazis who are against capitalism but still “right-wing”) but at least I don’t immediately see this description being less reasonable than yours.
Of course this all hinges on the definitions of socialism or capitalism, discussions about which might better be avoided for their pointlessness. It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than “arbitrary convention set up by historical accident”, but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially). This definition has several advantages: for one thing, it has no problems with the fact that in the late 18th century the market liberals were considered left.
C) Both Jacques Derrida and Lenin would be examples of “the left”. What do they have in common? Or Pol Pot and Bertrand Russell? Neither of them was a big fan of free markets (or hinduism, for that matter), but that doesn’t guarantee much ideological homogeneity.
D) When I still thought that “left” and “right” were more than two rather arbitrary labels, I considered myself a leftist and “something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence” wasn’t the way I would summarise my political preferences. Of course, there is a sense in which any government intervention into the markets is “what communists did, just less”, but it is a sense on such a level of vagueness and generality that it lacks significant information value. In any case, for ideologically oriented both social democrats and greens communism is primarily a negative example rather than an attractor. (I don’t claim deep knowledge of the contemporary left in Slovakia, but feel quite certain to object to your statement being formulated as valid for the whole Eastern Europe).
I don’t think that quite described the US, or Western Europe—the stereotypical redneck is low-status but on the right (same for ploucs here in France), and buying organic food seems to be more common with the rich, but is associated to the left.
A better description of the left/right gap may be that each represents a status ladder, and that people support the status ladder on which they have the best relative position. The details of what counts tend to vary with time and place, but on the left you tend to get status for being educated, open-minded, environmentally aware, original, etc., and on the right you tend to get status for being rich, responsible, having a family, being loyal to your country, etc.
At least, that angle of approach seems better than looking at policies; if you compare the policies of the French left and the American left, the policies might seem so different that they don’t deserve the same label; but if you compare the kind of people who support either parties, the similarities are much more apparent.
I have a notion that in the US, left-wingers tend to focus on defection by high-status people and right-wingers tend to focus on defection by low-status people.
Except where “the left” has become the elites, there the dynamic is reversed.
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely. There is a lot of self-serving political decisions made by both left and right politicians from which politicians benefit, but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
Somewhat special example were/are communist countries where the non-political aspects of social status are reduced and the groups of communists and elites have large overlap. These countries, when compared internationally, are “left”, but in the internal politics there is usually little place for using “left” and “right” as the left and right are relative characteristics which are useless when there is only one political party.
I wasn’t just referring to politicians, but to the liberal intelligentsia.
I don’t know what the situation is in the Czech Republic, but in the US while this was probably somewhat true a generation ago, it’s highly dubious today. (Although of course liberals like to think it’s still true.)
I’m reminded of a quote from a hippy band during the Vietnam War. Paraphrased:
Especially when you consider things like gay marriage or free immigration, causes universally approved of (in public, at least) by the liberal intelligentsia, but very unpopular among several core Democratic groups.
But there are any number of sub-varieties of socialism, so it is itself a fuzzy blob. Moreover, the non-right in many countries, particularly the US, barely has a whiff of classical socialism, Who is advocating a centrally planned economy or worker control of production in the US? It’s a standing joke in Europe that the US has two parties of the right. That’s “perception” of course. It’s also a US perception that public healthcare “is” socialism—the idea is seen as mainstream and cross-party elsewhere. What is going on is that the right have this convenient label “socialist” to lambast the non-right with, and the non-right don’t have a corresponding term to hit back with. That doesnt mean anything about ideaspace.
Well, that depends on the industry. For example, as you mentioned below, the left here is advocating central planning in the medical industry.
Of course I meant central planning of (pretty much) everything. Every polity has some central planning of some things.
The question is how much of the economy is under central planning and which factions are trying to increase or decrease it.
Which question? Wanting some but not all things under state/provision control is not socialsim by any strict definition. More like moderate or centrel-left or social democracy or something. But “social democrat!” doens’t have the right insulting ring.