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Notes -
What do people really mean when they talk about “left” and “right” politics?
The terms “right” and “left emerged from when in the French revolution, the group that sat on the right side of the Constituent Assembly were aligned with religion and the king, and the group that sat on the left side was aligned with democracy and secularization. The left-right spectrum has since endured, despite how often many of the parties we call “far right” have nothing to do with monarchism, and many of the parties we call “far left” are authoritarian and anti-democratic themselves. Many people have tried to create consistent frameworks to explain why party A is on the left and party B is on the right, but none that I have seen have actually consistently worked. Some people have tried to rectify the errors by adding more dimensions- such as “horseshoe theory” adding a vertical dimension so that the far left and far right loop back to being similar, the political compass that has an authoritarian axis which which separates right-libertarians from right-authoritarians and same with the left, or even the 8-Axis compass which like the name suggests has 8 different dimensions. In Part 1 of this comment I will explain my theory, and in Part 2 I will point out the many failure points of alternate theories.
Part 1
I think none of those theories really properly explain the left-right spectrum, and they all have flaws at capturing what the common person means when they talk about left-right. When trying to determine rules that capture the popular conception of the left-right spectrum, your definition should align with how it’s actually used. If your definition tries to say the Nazis are far left, or that the Democrats are center-right, it automatically fails as a definition of the popular conception. If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition. Your definition is just a map that is trying to capture the territory. Maybe your definition could still be useful as some other type of political spectrum model that identifies some parties as authoritarian vs libertarian, or good vs evil, or whatever, but it doesn’t work for capturing them as left vs right as popularly conceived.
How I think the left-right spectrum works is that it captures which parties are willing to cooperate with each other. For example, say we have this spectrum of parties elected to a parliament: Communists(far left), democratic socialists(left), liberals(center-left), conservatives(center-right), nationalists(right), fascists(far-right). A pretty standard spread going from the far left to far right. But why are the fascists far right while the communists are far left? Both groups have many similarities- they both want to abolish elections, both want to nationalize many or all industries under government control, both want to repress free speech. My thesis is that they make up opposite ends because they are the last parties that would be willing to positively cooperate in the parliament. On any bill that parliament passed, if the fascists and communists both vote yes, I guarantee that every party between them will also have voted yes. The far left and far right may have similarities, but you’ll never actually see them vote together on a bill like “Introduce new corporate taxes to fund the military” unless every party between them also voted yes. Maybe there will be some bill that the entire parliament from far left to far right cooperates on like a bill banning murdering puppies, meaning both the far left and far right vote yes together on it, but always all the more moderate parties will be voting yes too. But that rule only applies to positive cooperation- they might negatively cooperate against a bill from the centrist parties. For example, perhaps all the centrist parties want to pass a bill that will enable the nation to take out a large loan from the World Bank- but both the communists and fascists don’t like that sort of international debt to foreigners, and both vote against the bill. That sort of negative cooperation that is characterized by preventing action is allowed, and is even common, according to my theory.
This does not just apply to the farthest left and farthest right- it applies to every party in the parliament. The liberals and the communists will not cooperate positively on something unless the democratic socialists also cooperate positively. The liberals and democratic socialists cooperating positively does not guarantee the communists will also cooperate positively- it just enables it as a possibility. My theory is not about distance between parties either- for example, it’s not impossible in my theory for there to be a communist, socialist, liberal, conservative coalition, despite the conservatives being far closer to the nationalists and even the fascists than they are to the communists.
In more formal logic, you can express it as, If two parties vote yes together on a motion, Then every party between the two parties on the left-right spectrum will also vote yes on the motion. It can also be worded as “All parties that vote together on a motion form a continuous line of neighbors on the political spectrum”. In the real world, it’s useful to call a party “far left” or “center right” or what have you in order to describe which other parties they’re most likely to cooperate with. And whether a party is left or right is entirely relative- in the early 1800s Prussia, someone calling for a constitutional monarchy might be a radical leftist, but today would be a radical rightists, for example. Also, you can fairly easily predict which parties someone will be more willing to cooperate with even before they're elected- that lets you call a candidate who has never actually been elected far right or far left, by imagining who they'll be more likely to vote with.
Now, I was a bit extreme in my language above- you can probably find some examples of the right and left cooperating without centrists. Whenever I said guarantee, it was an exaggeration. Political science doesn’t have “hard” laws like how physics does after all. But examples of the left and right positively cooperating without centrists also cooperating are extremely rare, far more rare than you’d expect given how some parties on both extremes have seemingly very similar policies. For example, left libertarians and right libertarians both hate police, or nationalists and socialists both want the government to control economic industry. Yet you will not see such parties cooperating to pass bills on those topics at the same time as centrist parties vote against those policies. And on the other side, parties that you might think have relatively little in common like libertarians and conservatives often manage to find a lot of common ground to cooperate on. Also, this only applies to domestic politics. It can have some influence on geopolitics- I think governments generally prefer cooperating with other governments who are on a similar place to them on the political spectrum. But it’s not a requirement for cooperation like how it is domestically. As one example, the far left Soviets and far right Nazis cooperated to partition the relatively centrist Poland between them.
The phrase “It’s impossible to prove a negative” is untrue, it is often possible to prove negatives. But, sometimes it can be extremely hard to prove negatives. To prove that more extreme parties don’t positively cooperate with more moderate parties, I’d have to dig through all the records of voting history and just empirically show it doesn’t happen. I don’t have tools to do that and don’t particularly care to, but I invite everyone to present counter-examples- they probably exist, but I expect they’ll be generally quite rare. The closest I found was in 2015 the Greek far left and far right cooperating against the EU who wanted Greece to repay its debt, but even that from what I read looked more like negative cooperation where they just together refused to cooperate with the EU as opposed to work together to accomplish new things.
Part 2- Other theories
This section is less important but I want to elaborate on how I disagree with other positions.
I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right. For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police. Or how leftists want a strong(hierarchical) government that will control speech to ban hatred. The hierarchy theory of left vs right fails to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
Next, horse shoe theory. This theory states that along the extremes, the parties become more similar to each other, becoming increasingly authoritarian. Again, it doesn’t adequately explain libertarians, such as Milei in Argentina. He’s in many ways extreme and farther right than most politicians, but he’s farther right in a economic way, where he supports liberalization of markets, not in a way where he wants to consolidate all government power in his personal hands. He’s not far right in the sense that he’s a nationalist he promotes chauvinistic Argentinian superiority either- in fact he’s talked about how he’s considered converting to Judaism and has a lot of respect for Israel, something very different from the anti-Jewish stance many others on the far right take. Horseshoe theory fails to explain to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
The Political Compass. Probably the best known way to plot parties relative to each other after the standard linear model and horseshoe theory. It was original created by leftists and was extremely badly calibrated to try to trick people into thinking they were on the left- placing Obama in authoritarian right but if you actually put Obama’s positions into the compass you’re placed solidly libertarian left, for example. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden is even more far right and even more authoritarian, further demonstrating their bias since by their measures Biden would almost certainly be farther left than Obama. But, ignoring its creators bias, could the actual model be useful if you just recalibrated it? Maybe for some purposes, but not as an objectively accurate model for placing parties. It misses too many axis. What’s more economically left, a Republican party that wants to enact higher tariffs or a Democrat party that wants to enact higher corporate taxes? Is a government that’s a dictatorship but operates with a very light hand more or less authoritarian than an extremely democratic government that controls everything its people does? Do ISIS, the Nazis, and Bismarck really all belong together in a similar space despite their obvious extreme differences?
The 8 Axis test. Similar issues to the political compass, although it’s a bit more fine tuned, at the expense of being more unwieldy. It still doesn’t solve where a party really falls if it falls at opposite extremes within the same axis- e.g an autocratic government that doesn’t get involved in people’s personal lives, or a Georgist government that wants an extreme 100% land value tax, but that’s the only tax. You would have to add even more axis to address every nuance, but then it becomes even more unwieldy, and it becomes entirely divorced from what people actually mean when they say “right” or “left”.
My theory solely describes parties as well. I think ideologies are something separate. Ideologies have a lot of connections to parties, but I think cannot be actually properly mapped to the left or right. For one, as I said earlier, the degree of left-right depends on context- an ideologies position in early 1800s Prussia is completely different than the same ideology’s position today. When people try to extend the left-right spectrum out of domestic politics, they usually do it by kind of guessing at “If that ideology/foreign party did have a member elected to my legislature, which domestic party would they be most closely aligned with?”, but that method breaks down in manner ways. Also, where a party falls on a left-right spectrum in many ways in practice is determined by the personal relationships of party members to the members of the other parties, and the sorts of aesthetics the party likes to use. For example, do they invoke protecting the working class or do they invoke protecting Christianity to justify shutting down immigration- the same policy, with merely different aesthetics, can put them at opposite ends of the left-right.
To measure how likely parties are to cooperate in absolute terms, not just relative terms, you need a different model than mine. I think Nate Silver’s triangle model of Socialism, Conservatism, and Leftism has a good ratio of simplicity to explanatory power. I think to be more accurate too, you could change it to a triangle where the corners are wanting Equality of Opportunity(liberalism), Equality of Outcome(socialism), and openly desiring Hierarchy(conservatism). But that’s getting into an entirely different discussion that I’m much less confident on than my core theory.
Do You think I’m Wrong? Prove it with one easy test!
Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it. You do not need many examples at all- obviously by any theory they should have little in common. But most theories do posit they do have a little common and therefore should cooperate a little- I assert they do not cooperate at all on positive actions.
I think it can; libertarians are pro hierarchies, but natural hierarchies. They consider police to be an intrusion on natural hierarchies of force. Those who are stronger or better armed, or can afford the loyalty of stronger or better armed people to defend them deserve the better protection/law enforcement. To them, the police is like a communist state trying to make the protection/law enforcement market egalitarian.
That seems like a bit of a reach to me. Leftists don't usually want to abolish literally every hierarchy either. And it doesn't explain why authoritarian communists are on the left side of the political spectrum, since those states involve a very strict hierarchy.
Authoritarian communists will never get there(because it's pie in the sky ridiculosity), but they'll happily tell you that the increasing power to the state is about abolishing the hierarchy between men.
And Christians will tell you we'll be all equal in Heaven. Many democratic socialists who don't want a revolutions, just socialized control of industry, want a very hierarchical burearacracy that must be obeyed. Organized crime tends to be extremely hierarchical- are they all farther right than the Nazis? There are examples of parties all over the spectrum that don't fit the pattern of "less hierarchy = more left, more hierarchy = more right". Especially when you play fast and loose about artificial hierarchies vs natural hierarchies mean.
There are plenty of Christians who will tell you that, no, we will not all be equal in heaven, and some will be closer to God than others. In fact, angels, who are by definition normally in heaven, are in Christian thought held to exist in a particularly strict hierarchy.
That's without even addressing the elephant in the living room that heaven is inherently unequal because God(duh) and also some don't get in.
Maybe Christians have to sadly stay in the far right category then. But would a type of Theist that believes in something nearly identical to Christian theocracy, with the tweak that they think God is just the spiritual union of all humanity's souls and that we are all equal in Heaven(and that everyone goes to Heaven), get to be called far leftist? Again, in the material world, their actual policies are identical to something like Byzantine Rome.
Many Christians do believe this. Interestingly, they also tend to be on the left politically. Make of that what you will.
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