Left, Right, etc.

   The current political climate in both the US and Europe is straining the standard conceptions of political ideology.  Traditional terminology like left, right, and center haven’t been adequate to characterize Trump, Brexit supporters, or the Greek governing coalition.  To address this ambiguity, I’ve been trying to examine two relevant issues.  First off, I’ve tried to understand what the left/right ideological spectrum really describes.  On top of that, I’ve tried to understand what additional ideological descriptors we need to use to give more complete description of what ideologies underlie the movements that affect the world right now.  I’ve decided to write a bit about my unauthoritative thoughts on these two issues.  Hopefully, we can start a conversation that will help me (and maybe the rest of you) clarify the meaning of these political philosophies.  I'm particularly sketchy on what terminology I should use to label each of the seven factors that I'm going to discribe, so if some of them seem wrong or inadequate, just share your thoughts and I'll try to replace it with something better.

     So, I’m going to start by sharing my thoughts on what left and right mean in terms of political ideology.  I’ve often heard people refer to the supposed dichotomy between fiscal/economic ideology and “social” ideology by saying that someone is, for example, “socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”  In my opinion, however, the “social” dimension should be separated into two parts, which leaves us with three components that combine to produce a leftist or rightist political orientation.  For lack of better names, I would call the components economic, social, and cultural.

     The economic component is probably the most salient, although that may be changing.  I would define economic leftism as the belief that the government is better than markets at guiding the economy, that positive liberty is more important than negative liberty, and that redistribution is more important than wealth creation.  The economic right would likewise favor markets, negative liberty, and wealth creation.  Of course, there are many more possible combinations of beliefs and many subtleties that may underlie them, but I think the sum of those three tendencies is a decent representation of left/right ideology regarding the economy.

     I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard anyone distinguish between what I call social ideology and cultural ideology, but I think the two concepts are independent enough to be worth separating.  On the one hand, I would define social ideology as a relative preference between “outgroup” and “ingroup” interests, which I think correspond to what people might call “social justice” and “group interest”.  Opinions regarding immigration and nationalism would likely fit into this dimension, as might those on race and gender.  The cultural dimension would then measure positions between modernism and cultural flexibility on the left and traditionalism and cultural rigidity on the right.  Distinguishing between the social and cultural components of rightism makes it easier to describe the divisions that occurred in the 2016 Republican Primaries, when Trump was clearly the farthest to the right on the issue of group interest, but several other candidates were much farther to the right on cultural issues.  This distinction also helps make sense of movements, particularly in Western Europe, that seek to stop immigration from Muslim nations in order to protect liberal values.  I would call those movements socially rightist, but culturally leftist.

     Ok, so I’ve described three ways of categorizing political orientations.  But, how do they fit together?  The best answer I’ve been able to give myself is that all three components deal with some distinction between insiders and outsiders, although those terms are defined differently in each case.  Obviously, the social component represents beliefs about social groups that are more or less included in the general population.  Less literally, the cultural dimension deals with insiders and outsiders relative to traditional cultural norms and the economic dimension deals with insiders and outsiders relative to economic position.  So, leftism would be a general tendency to oppose undue influence by “insiders” and rightism would be a general tendency to oppose undue influence by “outsiders.”  Or something like that….

     In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the ideological orientations that I see as independent of left/right classification.  Whatever your thoughts are on this issue, please share them below.

Low-Information Voters, Elitism, and Responsible Voting

I recently came across an interesting piece by Claire Lehmann on Quillette criticizing the trendy phrase "low-information voters" and I felt compelled to write a brief reply. Lehmann's piece also cites some other really thought-provoking pieces and, in particular, takes on the serendipitously-timed book Against Democracy by Jason Brennan.


Brennan also gave his own rebuttal of Lehmann's critique on Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

My first thoughts after reading Lehmann's piece:

I want to start out by saying that I'm not trying to silence anyone or any point of view. My opinion is that of one person and should be judged as such.

There are numerous points in Ms. Lehmann's piece that deserve further discussion and dissemination. We should definitely talk about cognitive biases and systematically unobserved types of information that give typical Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic individuals like myself a skewed view of the world. The truth is that every demographic group has substantial room for improvement in this regard.

In particular, I feel extremely frustrated at how the protesters at US Berkeley responded to the potential presence of Milo Yiannopoulos on campus. Honestly, it enraged me. I felt like it damaged what I love about this country. More generally, I feel profoundly dissatisfied with the way my fellow US liberals conduct themselves and I devote a fair amount of thought to it. In that, I identify with Ms. Lehmann's point of view.

However, I think she's too fast to dismiss the concept of low-information voters. I think it would be more sensible to broaden the term because it's not about left-right ideology. Just as I feel that the anti-Yiannopoulos protesters at Berkeley used their rights in an irresponsible way, I think many people use their voting rights in an irresponsible way. I'm not saying that we should take away those rights, but I do think that we should have social norms that encourage people to make socially beneficial decisions. I think that includes voting behavior.

To me, this line of argument isn't anti-conservative or anti-liberal, it's anti-ignorance. There's lots of ignorance to go around at the moment. In fact, we're all ignorant about most things. Each of us knows a fair amount about some things and very little about a huge number of other things. A person with knowledge of sociology or physics isn't necessarily less ignorant than a person who knows about fishing or fixing cars. I value what my doctor knows and also what the man who picks up my garbage knows. Their knowledge affects my life and the lives of other people and if they don't inform themselves then they're being irresponsible. Voting affects people's lives too. If we use our voting rights without informing ourselves about the relevant issues and considering them in a thoughtful manner, then we're being irresponsible. But, that's just my opinion.

The One Book that Explains the Trump vs Clinton Divide isn’t About Politics

People are angry and divided. A large chunk of the US population is passionately protesting that the “experts” are rigging the system to get rich at the benefit of the people. Others disagree and see the protesters as willfully ignorant and shamefully stupid people without a basic understanding of how the world actually works. All media feature the protesters prominently before mentioning that everyone who has any real background on the subject thinks the protest movement is simply dangerous hysteria that will only harm the American people. The leaders of the protest movement are reviled by intellectuals, who see them as unprepared outsiders with no real authority to say anything.


Of course, I’m talking about vaccines. In recent decades, numerous parents have shared stories of deep suffering after their children developed symptoms of autism and have explained how they believe this affliction came into their lives. Celebrities, some of whom have autistic children of their own, have amplified these voices and helped sew them together into a movement. A large number of doctors have responded that the whole movement is hopelessly misguided and that parents just need to listen to, accept, and follow the learned words of their trained medical professionals.


At the same time, my introductory summary of events seems to describe the current US presidential election pretty well. Just replace doctors with politicians and childhood autism with blue-collar unemployment. With that in mind, we can see that Donald Trump is just the new Jenny McCarthy. This is starting to sound like a joke, but this is where things get really serious. Why? Because this same analogy provides the opportunity to understand the true foundations of the brutal political divide threatening to damage the American people. How? By letting us apply the lessons of an exceptional book about the recent vaccine debates to the political crisis. The lessons of this work may help many of us move forward constructively after the votes are counted and competition gives way to resentment.







The book is The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin, which he published in 2011. The book gives a summary of the recent debates about vaccines and autism, along with an explanation of why so many parents have come to oppose vaccines and an outline of how we, as a society, can resolve the crisis. Even more importantly, Seth Mnookin characterizes the basic psychological and sociological factors that have gotten people into so much trouble regarding vaccines, as well as many other issues. The author explicitly generalizes his arguments to all medical and scientific journalism, but I think we could go much farther and generalize many of his assessments to other areas of social discourse, such as politics. The careful analysis of this one instance of social conflict gives a template for much wider understanding of how people come to hold (so very passionately) such disparate beliefs about issues that appear to have been resolved. One of the factors that contributed to his success is that the author himself had no noteworthy medical knowledge before beginning the book. Starting from an uninformed state and gradually building his understanding of the available data, Mnookin draws together disparate points of view, seeing both sensible and inadequate aspects of each. As is generally the case in the real world, each of the warring social factions has valid arguments as well as inadequate ones.


In The Panic Virus, Mnookin carefully dissects the roots of the profound mistrust between anti-vaccine parents and the pro-vaccine establishment. By allowing himself to feel both the terror of a man preparing to start a family and the careful commitment to evidence of a journalist, the author is able to find the enlightened middle ground that so many of us have been unable to see. On the one hand, doctors and their defenders haven’t, in many cases, accepted the responsibility for presenting the scientific consensus to parents in a clear and respectful way. Whenever a vaccine advocate presents Jenny McCarthy as an idiot (as I think almost all vaccine advocates do), many who doubt vaccines get the impression that the medical establishment is arrogant, elitist, and perhaps sexist. That isn’t productive, and Jenny McCarthy uses that perception masterfully, as Mnookin notes. On the other hand, vaccine doubters need to rein in their intuition and emotional thinking, which very often lead people to irrational judgments and decisions. Data tend not to provoke strong emotional convictions in the way that personal anecdotes often do, but data are more often correct in describing large-scale phenomena than are personal anecdotes. That’s a major cognitive bias, one that can potentially lead us to highly destructive decisions and one that generalizes for beyond questions about vaccinations.


The same dynamic of the educated elite against the common people is playing a central role in our current presidential election. Just as vaccine advocates laugh at Jenny McCarthy and her supporters, Hillary Clinton’s fans very often laugh at Donald Trump and his supporters. That tone of ridicule can lead those who prefer Clinton to minimize anything that Trump or his followers say, which could potentially lead Democrats to ignore the real suffering that makes many people open to Trump’s arguments. At the same time, some of those who support Trump take the widespread criticism he receives from the media and political establishment as confirmation that the world is rigged against them and that Clinton is at the center of some sort of malevolent Illuminati conspiracy that controls the nation’s institutions. Reality is rarely that straightforward. Just as many people have different reasons for supporting Trump (that aren’t racism or ignorance or being evil), many people have different reasons for supporting Clinton (that aren’t corruption or elitism or being evil). There are people who have spent time in high places and have learned how the system works on a large scale. There are people who have spent time in not so high places and have seen what’s happening in their neighborhoods. Both sides possess distinct knowledge that we need to combine in order to discover how to progress as a nation and both sides need to take turns speaking respectfully and listening respectfully. Otherwise, things are only going to get worse after November 8th. We need to heal the festering wounds opened and reopened during the last year and I hope that Seth Mnookin’s book helps us to realize the need to reconcile and empathize with those who haven’t voted for our favored candidate. Perhaps that would make America greater than ever.

Note: This is the same post that I shared on LinkedIn on November 2nd, before the election.