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I think this has less explanatory power than a combined evolutionary and psychological model of politics. Both the Left and Right have always needed propaganda to recruit believers. Evolutionarily, humans hate the idea of someone having more than them if it seems excessive or unjustly begotten, and even primates form coalitions to overthrow the social order to more equitably distribute goods. Regarding this latter point, Abrahamic theism used to divert this instinct by extolling poverty, shaming the rich, and promising delayed treasure for the poor and delayed recompense against the rich (plus a plethora of other social technologies which prevented unrest — that God has established the social order and fighting it was a sin, that there were more awe-inspiring things to focus on, that you didn’t fight in wars if you were a peasant and had many paid feasts, etc). To me, this seems to perfectly explain the current political landscape and the trajectory of history. The Left hates the rich because it’s in their blood to hate them, not because they are Left or inferior mutants because they are humans and have an ingrained instinct to feel equality. The Right aims to sublimate this instinct through religion or through the Neoconic employing of economics as a quasi-religion. The populist right wants fascism to satisfy the former while turning the state quasi-religious. The Soviets went pure equality and totally ignored religion. So we can make a lot of sense with this model.
"In their blood to hate" sounds like a thought-terminating cliche. It seems to me just as correct to say the Left has an ingrained instinct to feel equality (=sameness). I think your model of the Right is right though.
What I mean is only that “I hate someone who has a more than me” seems to be a built-in instinct, which is exacerbated when there’s a question about the tactics used to acquire wealth, and which was historically answered by religious dogma in the West (preventing unrest) and is today answered by a mixture of religious and economic dogma (the latter being: if we take anything from him, everything will collapse). I don’t have the evidence I would like for this claim, but it does explain why the West became focused on wealth redistribution immediately after it became less religious, and why we see egalitarianism in a lot of primitive societies, and why the very wealthy and powerful in antiquity often justified their gains through divine descent. All humans would have this instinct but not all humans would answer it in the same fashion. But I find this more satisfying than “these people are inferior and lash out at their superiors”; this doesn’t explain why the pedigreed NYC liberal actually wants redistribution despite it hurting their own pocket.
And reasonably so, right? Sustained (as opposed to intermittent, via new inventions) economic growth probably first dates only as far back as the invention of agriculture. Other stores of wealth existed, but quickly capped out at the amount a nomadic hunter-gatherer could personally carry from place to place. For the past ten thousand years or so, if someone wanted a ton of fruit, they've had the option to earn it by planting and maintaining an orchard, or by buying an orchard with wealth accumulated from any number of other productive activities. But for the prior million years or two, if you saw someone with a ton of fruit, it was because that jackass just picked more than his fair share of the wild fruit your tribe had discovered. Screw that guy!
Huh, interesting thought. My intuition is that the evolutionary basis for jealousy is that it's a lot easier to steal someone else's stuff than to make your own, and the richer they are, the better the risk-reward ratio. But yeah, if most wealth disparity in the ancestral environment came down to monopolization of scarce resources, that would do it too.
But I don't think that's the case. It's certainly true that wealth disparities were far more compressed for hunter-gatherers, but there still was such a thing as capital. Fruit isn't capital, but, for example, a quantity of well-made spears or baskets or arrowheads would be. And creating those things takes effort and skill and in no way diminishes your access to them. Would you be more jealous of the guy with a lot of fruit or the guy with the nicest tent and finest weapons and best tools? The latter, I would think. Nomads can't have a lot of stuff, but the stuff they do have is all the more important for that reason.
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