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Let’s dive in…
My goal with this newsletter is to see behind the daily pantamime, WWF kayfabe that is the news cycle. In keeping with that, I’m not going to comment on the horse race aspect of the Presidential election. In my view who wins is only marginally important.
I‘m more interested in understanding what we are actually fighting about in this process. What in the end do the left and right want? How do they ultimately view the world?
The Haidt Theory
The NYU sociologist Jonathan Haidt develop one explanation that has been popular lately called the Moral Foundations Theory. Here is Perplexity.ai’s excellent summary:
“Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory identifies six moral values that differentiate political ideologies, particularly between the left and the right:
1. Care/Harm: This foundation is about empathy and compassion, aiming to protect others from harm. It is more emphasized by liberals, who focus on issues like social justice and welfare.
2. Fairness/Cheating: This concerns justice and reciprocal altruism. Liberals often interpret fairness as equality, while conservatives see it as proportionality, rewarding people based on their contributions.
3. Loyalty/Betrayal: This foundation revolves around allegiance to one's group or nation. Conservatives tend to value loyalty more, while liberals lean towards universalism and may struggle with nationalist sentiments.
4. Authority/Subversion: This involves respect for tradition and legitimate authority. Conservatives generally place more importance on this foundation, whereas liberals often challenge hierarchical structures.
5. Sanctity/Degradation: This foundation is about purity and protecting sacred values. Conservatives frequently emphasize sanctity in contexts like marriage and life, while liberals may focus on environmental purity.
6. Liberty/Oppression: Both sides value liberty but in different ways. Liberals emphasize freedom from oppression for marginalized groups, while conservatives focus on liberty from government overreach.”
AI is doing the job for me here.
Haidt’s research shows that the left emphasizes care and fairness the most and authority and sanctity the least. Conservatives tend to emphasis each value more evenly. The biggest divergence between the extreme left and right is on sanctity with the right valuing it far more than the left followed by authority and loyalty.
I find Haidt’s theory compelling and it does help me frame the issue but it falls short of the real difference. Leftists often express views of Trump that feel like they use the sanctity/degradation axis. Democracy is sacred and Trump is the defiler. Many are also happy to appeal to authority with slogans like “trust the science,” and to grant censorship powers to governments and social media companies.
A quick view of the 20th Century will find many left wing dictators who were perfectly comfortable with authority. We also have countless stories of pile ons and cancellations within progressive circles and organizations designed to enforce loyalty within the group.
Similarly, conservatives express lots of care/harm when traditional values are challenged. They care about burning that flag and the harm done by school closures doing Covid. They also constantly appeal to fairness when it comes to the political skew in journalism.
In the end, I find this framework unsatisfying.
Burke vs Rousseau
The ultimate difference between the left and the right isn’t a new question. We’ve been debating it for centuries. I could have named this section Thomas Hobbes vs Rousseau or Burke vs Karl Marx or you could even make a case for Plato as an authoritarian leftist and Aristotle as a proto-conservative.
These thinkers get closer to the truth. Edmund Burke, who is often called the father of modern conservatism, was a Member of Parliament in the UK in the late 18th Century. In speeches and pamphlets throughout his career, he emphasized the value of tradition, inheritance, and pragmatism over ideology, and gradual versus sudden change.
His most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, laid out his alarm at the radical ideas that were convulsing France and his concern that they might upend England’s system of government that had developed over centuries through various laws and traditions. He seemed to be vindicated three years later by the blood unleashed by the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. I hear his echo in appeals to American or traditional values and maybe even in Make America Great Again.
In contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a pre-Revolutionary French philosopher whose famous quote is, “Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains.” (Of course he wasn’t quite up to our modern feminist standards.)
Rousseau believed that it was those very laws, traditions, and beliefs that Burke prized that robbed people of their freedom. If we could just unleash everyone from their chains then we’d all be happy and equal. You can hear his echo in the words of grievance studies departments on every college campus in the US or in the Black Lives Matter movement targeting “systems of oppression.”
Applying the Burke and Rousseau Dichotomy
It is in these two thinkers, whose lives overlapped during the mid to late 18th Century, that we get to the fundamental difference. At the beginning of this post, I said I wanted to understand how both the left and right view the world and then how that view leads to policy choices.
First the left. I think Rousseau captured the left’s world view accurately with his quote. The left fundamentally believes that all people are a blank slate. They are born equal and not just equal in rights but in almost all aspects. Our societies then either elevate or degrade us based on whatever characteristic (race, class, gender, etc.) that society focuses on.
The basic goal of the left is to remove these chains. Once they are removed we all move into a utopia of equality and freedom. In another sense you can see the left believing in the perfectability of humans. The role of policy is to remove the barriers to that perfectability.
The civil rights struggle in the 1960s in the US is a classic positive example. It was a pretty radical change and you’ll only find the most fringe people on the right who would now say it was a bad thing.
In contrast the right sees humans as flawed and perfection a goal for Heaven and not our earthly realm. People aren’t born a blank slate. They are born into a world of context that has built up over time to restrain our worst impulses and promote our best and you mess with that context at great risk.
As Burke writes: “Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”
There are differing views amongst conservatives on what forms those circumstances or that context take. Generally it is some mix of genetics and culture.
You are born with aptitudes and deficits inherited from your parents and those characteristics are then shaped by your family, peers, traditions, laws, etc. but conservatives differ widely on what weight to put on genetics and culture.
The goal of the right then is mostly just to prevent the left from making big changes. They believe that attempts to change these characteristics often create more harm than good.
Burke was doing this in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. No doubt there were issues and injustices in the former French regime but to suddenly sweep all of it away and make your government and country anew was dangerous. What would remain to restrain the worst among them and keep order in society?
Synthesis
Very few people inhabit the extremes. I could take the most conservative people I know and get them to admit that giving women the right to vote and freeing slaves were great accomplishments. Those actions clearly violate conservative principles in that they were large government driven changes. There were numerous objectors to both who claimed the time wasn’t right.
On the other hand, I can confront my more progressive friends with an accounting of the tens of millions slaughtered at the hands of leftist revolutionaries like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot who all sought to make the word anew. They will admit that the world’s ultimate experiment with chain breaking, communism, was an exercise in nothing but the immiseration of billions of people and ironically more chains.
We all exist in a continuum between these two extremes. We are fighting mostly to determine how much to move along that continuum. In the left’s view, the right is always intransigent in the face of their reasonable demands for more chain removing and in the right’s view, the left is always trying to subvert the foundations that keep our society stable and free.
They’re both right.
Keep growing,
Alan
P.S.
P.P.S.
1 You could argue that extreme versions of MAGA advocate a level of change more similar to revolutionary France than Burkean Britain. Up for debate.
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