Reams have been written — and years of oratory delivered — in political debates between “left” and “right,” between “conservative” and “progressive.” The left/right metaphor, and all the elaborate developments of political theory around it, usually present us with a binary framing— Marxist theory vs market theory, Keynesian economics vs the Chicago School, and so on. Whether in political science textbooks, party platforms, or policy documents, that “simple” binary framing nevertheless generates a blizzard of specialised jargon. Maybe we’ve buried the essential issues under this mountain of words — the core issues on which we are so deeply divided — and maybe there is more than one simple binary question of Left vs Right…
If they’re as fundamental as I think they are, these questions should be pretty basic and easily articulated. What might they be? At the roots of our political debates today (and yesterday, and probably forever) I think I see irreconcilable differences on three fundamental questions; and I ‘d add a fourth that touches on the first two.
- Is there, or is there not, an absolute moral imperative to mitigate or relieve misery and suffering when we encounter it in this world?
- Should all human beings be regarded as inherently equal, in the sense of having a core set of basic human rights?
- Should governance be based on empirical pragmatism, or received authority/tradition/religion?
- Are bullies admirable, or despicable?
So, if you care to bear with me for a longer read, let’s consider each of these questions in a political/policy light — as it contributes to the perceived binary of Left vs Right.
The first of these core questions, I think, underlies every aspect of left/right, progressive/conservative schism; and it goes something like this:
1 Is there, or is there not, an absolute moral imperative to mitigate or relieve misery and suffering when we encounter it in this world?
The inmost core of all politics that we might describe as “left” or “progressive” is an affirmative answer to this question: Yes, we as individuals, we as a society, have an absolute moral obligation to mitigate or reduce suffering when we encounter it in this world. [1]
Every piece of legislation that we could describe as progressive is, at its heart, an attempt to reduce suffering. The momentum for abolition of slavery sprang from enslaved people’s resistance, but also from the inability of abolitionists to witness the misery and suffering of slavery without doing something about it. Child labour laws were written by people who, having become aware of the suffering of children in brutal working conditions, felt compelled to intervene. Regulation of workplaces came in response to injuries and illness — pain and suffering — of workers. Regulation of polluting industries is intended to avert sickness, suffering, and death inflicted on random people by contaminated air and water. And so on.
We have written laws against cruelty to animals, laws against domestic battery, against the sexual abuse of minors — all things which were quite acceptable and normal in antiquity. We have even tried to draft laws against hate speech and systematic discrimination — in an attempt to mitigate and alleviate the pain and distress caused by bigotry and unfairness on a daily basis.
Reducing the sum total of suffering in this world is the key priority behind all politics and policy that we call “progressive” or “left.”
By contrast, a key belief of the conservative mindset is that there is no absolute moral imperative to alleviate the sufferings of others. While the individual person might choose to be charitable or helpful, and while this indeed might be virtuous, the conservative believes there is no obligation to help others — certainly no obligation that outweighs the individual’s right to property. Hence it is not the state’s business to alleviate suffering or help those in need. And hence the fervent opposition of far-right theorists to taxation for public services; the right-wing point of view is that the mandatory tithing of our wealth to alleviate the suffering or misfortune of other people is a far greater wrong than the suffering itself.
On this question there is scant room for compromise, though some uneasy compromises have been suggested — mostly having to do with our radius of concern. Some maintain there is an absolute moral imperative to alleviate suffering, but only for people related to us by blood — or by extension, people similar to ourselves in various ways (genome, language group, belief systems). And that brings us naturally to the next fundamental, foundational question that underlies political divides.
2 Should all human beings be regarded as inherently equal, in the sense of having a core set of basic human rights?
Or should “human rights” apply only to certain kinds of people and not to others? Are some people inherently, by birth, more worthy or valuable — more human — than others?
Here again there is very little room for compromise. Either people whose skin tone varies from my own are real human beings with the same rights as myself, or they are not; either women are real human beings with the same rights as men, or not. And so on. All the policies that we call “left” or “progressive” are founded on the endorsement of a basic set of human rights as universal, applying equally to every person. Liberal democracy is based on the related fundamental assumption that the law must apply equally to all citizens, that no one is above the law.
From the abolitionist movement to the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s and continuing to the present day, American politics has been divided between this belief in human rights that apply equally to all humans, and a competing belief in racial superiority and inferiority, gender superiority and inferiority, etc. — a belief which allocates human rights based on genotype, gender, religion, immigration status, etc. This is an irreconcilable difference.
This belief in a set of absolute human rights underlies the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, anticolonialist movements. It insists that in civic association, in matters of citizenship and the law, all members of a nation-state must enjoy a fundamental equality. There should not be “one law for the rich and one for the poor,” nor one law for one race and a different law for another, nor even a double standard in moral strictures and expectations of men versus women.
The conservative position is, essentially, that multi-tier citizenship is an acceptable and even venerable institution. Frank Wilhoit summed this up for the ages when he commented “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Conservatives are therefore comfortable with the idea that designated “inferior” groups (women, for example, or people of a minority ethnicity) should have limited or lesser civil rights. Modern day ultra-rightists have advocated restricting the franchise to property owners, invalidating gay marriage, revoking the franchise for women, or even re-opening the question of miscegenation laws.
Systems such as apartheid, or the traditional caste system of India, uphold this same conservative, very ancient notion of arbitrary inborn social hierarchy; but “progressive” people deplore such systems and traditions. This is an irreconcilable difference.
And — particularly today, with theocracy being seriously proposed as a governance model for the US — we have another irreconcilable difference to consider: reason or faith? evidence, or received authority?
3 Should policy and law be based on empirical pragmatism, or received authority/tradition/religion?
We might boil this down to a very simple form: Do facts matter?
In governance and policy should we rely on the empirical method, on an evidence-based search for solutions to problems, with ongoing re-evaluation in face of new data? Or should policy be based on received authority: inerrant, unalterable religious or quasi-religious doctrine applied without adaptation to every problems?
The founders of the American Republic answered the question of religion in governance pretty definitively, in their correspondence and their official documents. They held that a separation of church and state was essential.
The religious persecutions and wars of the 16th, 17th. and 18th centuries were fairly fresh in historical memory at the time; these men knew the danger of allowing any religion to become the official State religion. Today, their legacy is twisted and misquoted, and their expressed position boldly contradicted by ultra-right theocratic blocs who want to remodel the US into a “Christian nationalist” state.
But the question applies more widely; “holy scripture” is not the only kind of document people get attached to and defend as inerrant. In the Soviet Union, genetic science was set back decades — and careers and lives destroyed — in an attempt to force biological science to conform to the inerrant scripture of Marxist-Leninist thought. In our own time, 40+ years of fanatical belief in the inerrant scripture of the Austrian school of economics has resulted in incalculable human suffering, environmental devastation, and staggering increases in inequity and corruption. The little red book of “Chairman Mao Thought” became for a while an inerrant, pseudo-biblical policy-determining document in China.
And the US today suffers from another case of “by the book” fanaticism — that of the “Federalists” and “Originalists,” who take the US Constitution to be a sacred text which must be interpreted and enforced exactly as it was written and intended at the time of writing. The opposing viewpoint is the “Living Constitution” bloc of legal opinion, which holds (like most people in other modern democratic states) that the nation’s Constitution is a document subject to revision and updating. (Swiss citizens, for example, can demand a modification of their Constitution at any time via popular initiative. And they did. The document was modified 140 times from 1874 to 1999, then rewritten completely after 30 years of work on the new version.). In general, progressives are more likely to favour a Living Constitution, and conservatives are more likely to be Originalists.
So what’s the problem with adherence to a quasi-sacred founding document which is unalterable or extremely difficult to alter? The problem is that received authority or inerrant scripture puts a hefty wrench in the OODA loop. And the OODA loop, so beloved of military tacticians, is key to success in any real world endeavour — not just warfare. Hanging on to a frozen snapshot of “how things are,” rather than regularly reconnoitring and re-evaluating, is a recipe for failure. History offers several examples of generals who attempted to fight “the last war” rather than the present one — with obsolete equipment or obsolete tactics — and suffered painful defeats.
OODA’s a close sibling of the empirical method — the process of gathering and evaluating data, then analysing the collected data, then conducting repeatability tests and peer review. Empirical research invites disconfirmation challenges, and thus “fact checks” and refines our understanding. The empirical method, particularly the value it placed on falsifiable propositions rather than received doctrine, was at the heart of a great change in philosophical, political, and intellectual life in Anglo-European history in the 17th and 18th centuries.
We call it the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment — a profound sociocultural shift which liberated readers and thinkers from centuries of hegemonic religious dogma. The resulting explosion of creativity, invention, research and human understanding of the world around us continues to this day.
All this change was disruptive of longstanding social hierarchies. It was also, for some, disorienting. There’s a persistent tendency in us humans to yearn for the comfort of inerrant scripture: for a single text holding all the answers, answers we can count on for all time. During the Covid epidemic, much mud was flung at the medical profession and scientists because “they kept changing their story.” Some of the public apparently expected inerrant scripture — rather than evolving real world results from frantic, ongoing research on a rapidly expanding data set drawn from an unfolding global pandemic.
Whether their pet scripture be Marxist-Leninist Thought, neoliberal economics, or the KJV, there are always people who will ignore (or even try to suppress) any real-world evidence that disagrees with their particular Holy Text. Others are on Team OODA: they will insist that no text is definitive and final, all results are subject to review and re-evaluation, and new data must always be considered and integrated into an ever-evolving worldview.
For the first group, deviating from the holy text is the paramount sin; for the second, ignoring or denying real-world evidence is the paramount sin.
This is an irreconcilable difference, and it underlies a great deal of political conflict in the US and elsewhere. [2]
The fourth question is tightly coupled to the first two, yet seems to me to merit its own discussion…
(4) Are bullies admirable, or despicable? (does might make right?)
Much of what we call ‘progressive’ politics is strongly linked to a condemnation of bullying, a desire to constrain and prevent the arbitrary abuse of power. [3]
Whether that be the abuse of animals by humans — battery and sexual assault committed by men against women, by grownups against children — coercive criminal activity undertaken by gangs against whole neighbourhoods — bullying among children — intimidation and suppression of LGBTQ people — exploitation of the poor by the rich — or heavy-handed state censorship of arts and letters …the progressive mindset is generally appalled by bullying and wants to punish or prevent it. The progressive mindset generally will be found rooting for the underdog.
But the politics of the far right, where it leans into neo-fascism and white supremacy, where it leans heavily into misogyny and homophobia, actually valorises bullying and admires overdogs. American “Conservatives” when polled are far more likely to say that their country needs a “strong leader” with dictatorial powers. They are more likely to maintain their loyalty to a right wing public figure even if (or perhaps because) that person engages in performative or spontaneous bullying. They are more likely to perceive bullying (of people they don’t like) as a sign of “strength” — and particularly to admire men who display swaggering and bullying behaviour and perceive them as good candidates for national leadership... men such as ex-President Donald Trump.
The division of humanity into “winners” and “losers,” with admiration for the winners and contempt for the losers, is a common thread in far-right discourse. A kind of naive Darwinism and “might makes right” reasoning inform traditional right-wing attitudes to colonised peoples (they lost, therefore they deserved to lose), poor people (losers are undeserving), people with disabilities (Trump actually mocked a disabled man from the rostrum at a political rally) etc. Taken to its most grotesque extreme, this winner/loser mentality leads to the kind of exterminism practised by the Nazi state in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In milder doses, it informs fairly mainstream “conservative” stances.
Conservatives are more likely than progressives to admire the very wealthy (winners), and to attribute wealth to personal excellence and intelligence rather than patrimony or good luck. They are more likely to see the benefits of wealth — including membership in a social class with heritable privileged status — as rightfully “earned” or “natural.” Progressives are more likely to be wary of extreme wealth because money, like muscle, can be used to bully others; they are more likely to be skeptical about the virtue or excellence of those who possess it. Progressives are more likely to advocate for taxation of extreme wealth to fund social services that alleviate the precarity of poor people, thus making them less vulnerable to bullying by the affluent.
There’s a gendered aspect to this question — the values that many conservatives see as “manly” include domineering, forceful, and/or threatening behaviour. Far-right rhetoric often paints liberals or progressives as “sissy,” womanish, weak, etc. But even our perceptions of manliness and other gendered virtues differ: progressives are more likely to perceive a swaggering, bullying “alpha” male as weak, insecure, and overcompensating (unmanly) than to admire him as dominant, impressive, or attractive.
Far-right voters will on average be attracted to bullying, domineering candidates who insult and demean people not like themselves and promise to use strong-arm tactics to enforce their beliefs and policies. Left-leaning voters are likely to be repelled by such candidates, preferring politicians who promise to treat citizens equally, resolve disagreements by negotiation and compromise rather than brute force, and ensure public safety for everyone, not just for people like themselves or who agree with them.
We can take the two current US Presidential candidates as fairly typical of the two stereotypes. Kamala Harris repeatedly talks about “crossing the aisle,” “unity,” and cooperation/negotiation. Donald Trump repeatedly talks about firing, prosecuting, jailing, or exiling anyone who disagrees with or disobeys him. Most Trump voters see his threatening and bullying demeanour as a sign of strength and fitness. Most Harris voters see these same qualities in Trump as disqualifying him for office. [4]
How we feel about bullies and bullying is an important element of the irreconcilable Left/Right divide.
What Is To Be Done?
We can argue till the cows come home, and go on vacation, and come home again, about monetary theory, the long-term implications of compound interest, what the carrying capacity of our planet might be and how far we’ve overshot it, the virtues of ranked choice voting and proportional representation, the best way to draw district boundaries, optimal taxation structures, and so on. Those arguments are data-based, and can be civil. Civil disagreement and compromise are possible in political and personal life — so long as there’s a fundamental agreement about the problem space.
As I have written elsewhere, we can argue productively about a jointly owned horse; we can argue about which kind of feed to buy, or how often the stall should be cleaned out, or whether you (or I) are doing our fair share of the chores. We might even sue each other over who owes whom how much for the joint purchase of the horse. But we can’t have a productive discussion if one of us insists the horse is actually a magical blue giraffe from outer space that lives on sunlight.
We can have a productive (if rather hectic) conversation about how to respond to a house fire — but not if one of us staunchly insists that the fire is not real, the smell of smoke is faked, fire is actually a good thing, and it’s time to fix dinner instead of running for our lives.
When we run into one of these irreconcilable differences, we’ve hit the blue giraffe moment. We’ve hit the moment where Person A says, “That’s selfish, and selfishness is bad,” and Person B says, “No, selfishness is good.” Person A says, “But if we pursue this policy, people will be harmed.” Person B says, “But those people are not really human, so why should I care?” Person A says, “But this policy will cause environmental disaster,” and Person B says, “It doesn’t matter, the Rapture is coming soon anyway.” Person A says, “What’s wrong with gay people getting married, there’s no evidence that they’re hurting anyone,” and Person B says, “God hates gays, it says so in the Bible.”
The problem space is no longer a consensus reality. There is a disconnect in our perceptions of reality and morality so profound that the only resolution is a majority vote. Neither side is ever going to convince the other, because the difference is too fundamental. Cogent arguments backed by data might convince me that ranked-choice voting is not the best electoral mechanism; but no right-wing orator is going to convince me that brown people are inherently inferior to pink people, or that bullying is admirable, or that the Earth is 6,000 years old just because his Bible says so.
Unfortunately, I am just as unlikely to convince him of any of the converse positions which — to me — are fundamental to meaningful political discourse. The only recourse either of us has at this point, is to try to convince as many other “somewhat in the middle” people as possible that our point of view on the essentials is correct — and then we hold a referendum.
Consensus is never going to be reached. Arguing with “the opposition” has become pointless; what counts now is organising, not debating.
And this is where we are today in North American politics (and elsewhere in the world). Our elections are now not so much a referendum on how to allocate budgets or the optimal wording of laws, as they are a struggle over bone-deep irreconcilable differences —
— between people who believe compassion is a paramount moral obligation… and people who think it takes a back seat to property rights.
— between people who think all humans have certain universal rights… and those who are comfortable with a caste system of greater and lesser humanity.
— between people who welcome new information, trust the empirical method, and take a flexible, pragmatic, evidence-based approach to problem solving… and people who adhere to familiar certainties, an inerrant text or calcified ideology, and refuse to accept new information that would require updating their worldview.
— between people who admire bullies and “strong men” … and people who find bullying repulsive and contemptible.
In this sense, “bipartisan” political initiatives seem doomed to failure. When people are operating from completely different moral compasses, it’s hard to see how they can ever agree on public policy.
A “Left” and “Right” binary only scratches the surface of these differences, which are multi-axial. We could call them (and I have, elsewhere) “modernity” vs “antiquity.” Some might call them “civilisation” vs “barbarism.” A subset of questions might define “authoritarianism” vs “liberalism.” Some psychologists suggest these differences are actually etched into our brain structure, and represent some kind of neurodivergence among humankind.
Meanwhile, real-world data — which as an evidence-based pragmatist I find convincing — strongly suggest that measurable social outcomes are more positive, general prosperity is greater, lives are longer, peace is better assured, if our policies are based on the three core values of mutual aid, universal human rights theory, and the empirical method. In other words, the “progressive” triad.
Unfortunately, in our time we are witnessing a well-funded international right-wing movement dedicated to rejecting the empirical method, repudiating universal human rights theory, and abandoning social contracts of mutual aid and compassion. On every axis, to all three core questions, this movement’s answer is No; and its response to bullies is to elect them as national leaders.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. There were several digressions in early drafts which I thought best to move to end-notes. Here they are, if you are still interested!
Notes
[1] Why do I add the curiously quaint phrase “in this world”? Because I want to invalidate a priori any fundamentalist religious beliefs that justify inflicting pain and suffering on people in real life, by claiming this will spare them imaginary torments in an imaginary afterlife. The mindset that can describe the torture of heretics as a kindness because it “saves their souls” and permits them (upon recantation or conversion) to avoid the fires of Hell… is to me merely an excuse for cruelty and authoritarian control. So let’s confine our ethical questions to the real world.
[2]. When we argue about abortion rights, for example, the progressive advocate’s goal is pragmatic harm reduction: to alleviate the suffering and misery of women forced to give birth against their will, particularly to babies conceived through rape or other sexual predation. The progressive argues that unwanted children are also likely to suffer — either by being dumped into the foster care system, or by being raised by resentful, unloving parents. The conservative viewpoint by contrast is rooted in an appeal to religious authority, and arguments about the moment at which “ensoulment” happens and a zygote or fetus becomes a person. Science-based guidelines for this legal definition — such as viability — are rejected in favour of received religious authority, even when a woman’s life is at stake as in the case of a septic or ectopic pregnancy.
In the “pro-life” movement we see several threads in conservative thought come together: received religious authority outweighs the prevention of suffering, and the lives of women are valued less highly than the lives of men and their “property,” i.e. a fetus understood as the property of its sire.
[3] I think we could make a case that admiration of dominance and bullying — a love of “winners” and dislike of “losers” — is not really a fourth and separate question, but a combination of our first two questions. Do we have an obligation to reduce suffering? — if we do, we would have to oppose bullying because of the suffering inflicted on the victim. Are all human beings inherently equal in the sense of human rights? — if we believe they are, we would not find it okay to bully anyone, infringing on their human rights…. not even people we dislike, or who are not like us in some way. What should not be done to a “winner” should also not be done to a “loser.” Rights are not made by might, but are a universal principle applied equally to all. Nevertheless, the significance of bullying and bullies as a central theme in rightwing/conservative politics seemed to justify treating it as a question in its own right.
[4] I think this might be the moment to point out that not every person will have the same answers to the entire set of four questions, and this is what makes political stances multi-axial rather than a simple binary. A doctrinaire Bolshevik for example, might strongly believe in the alleviation of suffering as a moral imperative (this is the mainspring of Communist idealism), yet support the suspension of human rights for “bourgeois elements.” If sufficiently doctrinaire, our Bolshevik might even refuse to accept data (such as poor results from five-year plans) which don’t match the inerrant theory of Marxist-Leninist thought. And of course, the Soviet Union provided many examples of Bolsheviks admiring bullies of historic dimensions, like Beria and Stalin.
A doctrinaire Christian might answer Yes to question 1, believing strongly in New Testament dicta regarding charity. The same person however, depending on their flavour of Christianity, might grimly oppose equal equal human rights for people they consider “sinful” — such as LGBTQ perhaps, or unwed mothers. Fundamentalist Christians are more likely than most to refuse scientific evidence that in any way contradicts a literal reading of the Bible; but someone from a more modern sect might be able to reconcile scientific curiosity with religious belief. Any Christian with a sincere belief in the NT would have to deplore bullies; yet many Far Right evangelical sects in the US are quite comfortable with bullying behaviour in the pulpit, in the home and on the campaign trail.
A rightist libertarian might give a fierce No to question 1, yet answer Yes to question 2 (all people should have the same universal human rights and be treated equally by the law) and 3 (empiricism is the best basis for policy.). His conscious answer to question 4 would probably be that bullying is wrong… but unfortunately a visible subset of US right-wing libertarians oppose age-of-consent laws intended to protect minors from sexual bullying and exploitation; so there may be some internal inconsistencies.
[5] In this essay I have ignored one question which others might consider the most important of all: the relative weight placed on the freedom, preferences, and advantage of the individual vs the collective. I think this is actually implicit in questions 1 and 2; it’s also been discussed at far greater length elsewhere (there are many studies, for example, on the more communitarian value system of Japan and other Asian countries as opposed to the US and UK, and what impact this has had on events such as the Covid-19 pandemic).
But I am not sure this question is really as useful as we think in understanding Left and Right divides. While socialist and communist thought (as well as cooperative and volunteer efforts) do place high value on the good of the whole, and expect the individual to make concessions to community welfare, we also find progressives staunchly defending the rights of individuals to be “different” and to define themselves independently from collective strictures of church, family, and tradition.
We find apparently “individualist” rightists saying (for example) that women should be compelled to have more babies to keep “the economy” growing or “save the white race”. Both “the economy” and “the white race” are notional collectives, and the individual woman is being instructed to subjugate her individual freedom to them. So I think this leads us back to Question 2; individualism and individual rights are an aspect of human rights. The conservative is quite happy to sacrifice the individual rights of “lesser” humans (like women, or workers, or gay people) for the “greater good of Western Civilisation” or whatever notional collective is being invoked at the moment.
[all illustrations by Midjourney AI with prompts by author]