Left vs right

In my index Understanding American Politics I offer links to various folks offering ways of thinking about the difference between the broad left and the broad right. I’d like to offer a little framework of my own. [I have refined this post since I originally published it, but only to clarify it, not to change its content.]

Equality

Crude as they are, I believe that the political terms left and right are not merely useful — not merely meaningful — but actually reflect the most fundamental political question.

Are people equal, or not?

A great many other questions depend upon this one. Debate over them is inevitable, because the implications of one’s answer to that first question produce countless other questions. What forms should society take, what norms and institutions? How best should we pursue that order? How shall we understand our current order? What precisely do we mean by “equality” in the first place? And so forth.

But that root question of equality admits no debate, if by “debate” we mean effort to persuade through reason. Jefferson calls equality “self-evident” because it is logically prior to the argument he is about to build in the Declaration. He will not argue about equality itself. Argument cannot avail us. Equality is a deep moral question, axiomatic, deeper than persuasion can reach. The answer opposed to one’s own is unthinkable; to try to consider the alternative brings only bafflement and disgust.

The left says yes, people are equal in rights and dignity, full stop. The right finds equality morally disgusting … but that is complicated in these United States, where our political language calls for an affirmation of “equality”. The American right usuallly obscure their distaste for equality, often even from themselves. Sure, the right say, people are equal but …

• … “choices must have consequences”
• … using the heavy hand of government to facilitate equality is “tyranny”
• … the most “productive” people deserve to hoard the fruit or their efforts
• property rights are sacred, and some people just happen to have more property
• we must never sacrifice “liberty” for it
• the pursuit of equality inevitably leads to the horrors of Stalinism

If you say people are equal but, you are saying no, people are not equal and cannot be equal. This always turns up if you dig.

A good society

Thus the left & right do not differ over how to achieve goals we all share. We have radically incommensurate goals.

For the left, a good society equally ensures all people’s needs and personal freedom. Left conceptions of personal freedom include both negative liberty (freedom from constraints) and positive liberty (resources which enable one to act), and believe that without equity we cannot truly have liberty.

Further, the left generally take it that there is no “natural” form of society. Any social order is a deliberate artifice, created by people making choices about what values they want society to express.

For the right, a good society ensures that people who are moral & responsible prosper, while people who are immoral & irresponsible suffer for their failings. Reward virtue; punish vice.

Further, the right generally take it that there is an obvious, natural, traditional form of society which produces this, if imperfectly. One might say that what “conservatives” seek to conserve is the social order of their moral intuition.

To the left, the right’s dream is wrong because its system of rewards & punishments cultivates inequality; the right’s naturalization of their vision of the correct social order is just a rationalization of their preferred heirarchy.

To the right, the left’s dream is wrong because its cultivation of supposed equality is a disgusting imposition which corrupts its natural heirarchical form, inevitably producing catastrophe.

“Natural”

A conservative friend sharpened the point about “the obvious, natural, traditional form of society” in a discussion on Facebook:

Conservatives do understand the artifice of constructed civilization — we argue for Natural Law but not the State of Nature

Fair enough.

To the right, the correct social order is paradoxically natural yet not effortless — we must vigorously enforce the “natural” social order of heirarchical roles & relationships, or civilization inevitably collapses into “barbarism”, because that is just How The World Works.