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CAN YOU RECOGNIZE LEFT-WINGERS FROM RIGHT-WINGERS FROM FACE ALONE?
I've seen numerous people on Twitter etc. claim that they can indeed do this, so I've created a quiz to test this claim. This quiz has 20 Finnish MP's essentially selected randomly (I took their photos from the Parliament's webpage, organized them alphabetically using medium icons and then just removed the middle part of this collage, leaving a bit over 20 photos: after removing the Swedish People's Party members for not fitting the ideological scale that well and taking one out for wearing a party pin, I was left with exactly 20 photos). Note: pics are displayed in randomized order.
The MP's represent six parties, but all you have to do here is select: Left or Right? Those representing the parties Social Democrats, Greens and Left Alliance are Left, those representing the parties Centre, National Coalition and The Finns are Right.
I will offer one hint: you cannot use tie color/dress color (ie. politicians wearing party-color dresses and ties) to make consistently correct guesses.
Missed opportunity for "Finnish" button.
10/20. (Tried to look only at the facial features). At that, I had near 100% mistake ratio in the beginning, and since your quiz provides instant feedback (IMO it shouldn't), I seem to have calibrated on the go for whatever signal there is in this data, instead of using any priors.
How extreme is your set, policy-wise? It is plausible that physiognomy doesn't work in reasonable (boring centrist) political systems. It can only work in principle when politics follow from some biological ground truth, and that implies divergence that begins far below the level of intelligent analysis and personal experience, the stuff of gut feelings, moral foundations and broad outlook – the product of gender, and hormones, and norms of reaction, crudely bundling together propositions that can well diverge under scrutiny. (Moreover, the absence of party choice crushes nuance and disincentivizes people with nuanced opinions from rising through the ranks).
In the US, a «left-winger» politician who can be robustly identified even without tribal dress or markings (to the extent that can be isolated) is someone like Lori Lightfoot or Scott Wiener; archetypal right-wingers are abundant in team Trump. Those are people far from the center of the Overton window, approaching street and campus combatants and appealing to the sentiment of such crowds. And in general, I think, American politics is more identitarian, racial, hormonal, biological than it should be in normal human societies.
Your set, meanwhile, looks like normie bureaucrats with some policy or platform differences, sorted into that line of work by common mechanisms that make white-collar people want to bother with governance.
For example, let's take your right-most party:
Those folks are, dare I say, National Socialists. Americans do not have National Socialists outside of jails and obscure extremist forums – they have high-T red-faced boors who advocate for generalized Pride In Our Team, and tax cuts for the rich (because Screw Them Parasites), and Religion, and generalized distrust of weirdoes and aliens and loquacious eggheads, and who like Strong Masculine Leaders Who Tell It Like It Is.
Biological methods work best in the realm of biological phenomena. Nothing new here.
...But I would like to test this hypothesis with American politicians. Can someone assemble, say, 40 of the less-known ones?
If this guy was a German, I would peg him as an FDP politician, a market liberal.
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Seconded, it's downstream of tribal identifications and the theory only applies as written to white Americans. Efforts to identify left and right with cosmic ideals and determine if the Reformation was left or right wing fail because it's all downstream of tribal identifications, then good for my tribe versus bad for my tribe. I suspect that is somewhat genetic.
So inasmuch as D=antiwhite and R=prowhite, white people who are pro tribe identify one way and white people who are anti tribe identify the other. But black people with the pro tribe gene are going to vote D, as are most Mexicans, gays, Jews, and Asians although less clearly than whites and blacks. Class is another confounder, and in societies without similar racial politics probably ruins the project.
I don't think this is accurate at all, though though I can see how such a claim would be convenient for those wishing to push identity politics.
As much as the terms get abused both in general and on theMotte in particular, I still think that the terms "right" and "left" point to important differences in philosophy and political approach. Allowing the pro-IdPol crowd to redefine Left and Right along tribal lines requires us to com up with a new name for the existing split, and seeing as IdPol seems to be particular to one side of that split I'd rather just push back against the redefinition.
Having read a lot of history, and not just history but old history, IE stuff from when a lot of the events described were still within living memory. It seems obvious to me that there are two distinct intellectual traditions/schools of thought that arose in the aftermath of the 30 years war, with the followers of guys like Calvin, Hobbes, and Montesquieu forming one and the followers of Locke, Kant, and Rousseau the other. While these two schools of thought might correlate to tribal affiliation with different groups showing an affinity for one or the other. However the match is far from 1 to 1. What they do match almost 1 for 1 though which side someone finds themselves on during the French Revolution, or English Civil war.
So in short, I reject your framing.
Democrats are not anti-white so much as they are pro-identity politics. Ditto Republicans are not so much pro-white so much as the are unabashedly "Nationalist/Pro-America". That "the only valid form of Nationalism is Ethnonationalism" and that "America = White supremacy" is a load of bullshit pushed upon us by woke propogandists and their allies on the alt-right who both dream of overturning the existing constitutional order in favor of a system of racial spoils.
I, in turn, reject your framing. I, too, have read a lot of history, including plenty of contemporary historiography. I agree with you that
And that works for upper class educated white Christian men during those times in those relevant places. A hypothetical neutrally situated free man who reads Hobbes and reads Locke and decides which he likes better, that might well predict
But of course, most people aren't neutrally situated, most people find themselves on one side or the other of the Revolution because their family or their friends or the other men in their town joined that side and they followed along. You might later take up the ideology associated with that side, but you were a Cavalier or a Roundhead before you knew why. I'm going to cite some historical fiction, because it's a fun scene in a classic movie. In Master and Commander where Jack Aubrey is getting his crew hyped up for battle against the French ship.
It is blindingly obvious that nobody on that ship besides Aubrey and the Doctor has serious opinions on Rousseau and Calvin. Maybe some of the other officers are aware, at a sixth grade level, of the ideology involved but it is highly doubtful they'd have seriously read about it. But there all the men are, shouting about the guillotine and Napoleon, as though it all means something to them. Their position on those questions is more tribal than intellectual.
So on a spectrum between our hypothetical neutral educated man, and the illiterate cheering crew on Jack Aubrey's ship, where do we put everyone else?
If we're going to argue that political ideology has any kind of genetic or heritable aspect, which I'm not sure I agree on, it can only work when examined fully in context. It makes zero sense to say that one has an inherent genetic predisposition towards Marxism, or an inherent genetic predisposition towards Milton Friedman, without considering how those economic ideologies are going to impact your actual life. A rich man who is a Marxist would probably be exercising a different genetic pathway than a working man who is a Marxist. That's the point, if we're going to talk about a gene or a set of genes that impacts both your facial/physical structure and your ideology, it's a different set of genes depending how you are situated.
Consider this quote from a South African radical:
As you say, the alt-right and the woke left have a lot in common, they know their side. But more than that, your white Proud Boy and your Black NFAC have a lot in common. And your white guilt wokies and your Republican Stepin Fetchits have a lot in common. If there's anything genetic to politics, I'd look at that similarity before I'd look at how people read Hobbes and Rousseau.
Which, to come back to the question of the Finnish MPs, is the point: you can't translate "Oh, dudes who become leftists will be like ____" to other countries and other contexts without thinking about race, religion, class, history, regionality. Those all determine whether High T or low sociability men will be rightists or leftists.
Sure, I would even go so far as to suggest that it is unlikely that anyone on the ship other Doctor Maturin has more than a vague idea of who Rousseau and Calvin were, much less what they were about. On the flip side I think it is equally blindingly obvious that most of the named characters have very strong feelings about loyalty, discipline, personal responsibility, the natural state of man, the fundamental role Government, the burdens of Command, etc... And that there the real substance of what I'm talking about. It's not about whether one identifies as a Hobbesian, Rousseauan or whatever, it's about where your priorities lie are when the chips are down.
Amusingly your own comment illustrates a lot of those differences.
Your assumption that "what works for upper class educated white Christian men during those times" is going to be fundamentally different from what works for any man in any time is perhaps one of the first and most obvious.
You say "I'd look at that similarity before I'd look at how people read Hobbes and Rousseau." and that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm observing that the ideological distance between the white guilt liberals, woke progressives, alt-rights ethnonationalits, and Landian-accelerationists is tiny compared to the differences between any of them and the median Republican. Furthermore I'm making the observation that one's assumptions about loyalty, discipline, personal responsibility, the natural state of man, the fundamental role Government, the burdens of Command, etc... is a major component of that distance.
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Pro-identity politics for everyone except for white males (especially heterosexual white males), who are expected to be universalist.
No it's pro-identity politics all around. Have you not noticed that the most vocal "white-nationalists" (Spencer, Yiannopoulos, Fuentes, Yarvin, Et Al) always seem to be former marxists from schools like Berkeley and University of Chicago? This is not a coincidence.
They're now heretics, though, not Democrats. They learned the lesson without the appropriate exceptions.
Heretics they may be, but they till have more in common with their fellow democrats than they do anyone outside the party.
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Many of these guys are admittedly boring centrists, people who join parties that have existed for 100+ years and have spent that duration swapping the governance of Finland between them. It's politicians precisely from those parties who tend to have 50/50 correct/wrong guess results, for the most parts. I'll give a more exact breakdown tomorrow.
An American version would probably work best with a collection of state representatives or state senators. One would probably have to be rather an extreme a political autist to confidently recognize state senators or representatives from a state you haven't lived in from pictures.
We could try with, say, Alaska- statistically few people live there, and their politics spreads out across the whole spectrum(albeit weirdly and republicans win the big ticket races).
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