- very zero-sum (just with respect to immigrants and other minority groups, rather than rich people)
- cruel ("the cruelty is the point")
- dishonest ("post-truth", even)
- loyal to the right-wing culture war over and above actual country (eg turning a blind eye to Putin)
- hardly inclusive (yes, of course they are inclusive in *your* experience, because *you* are one of *them*)
- welcoming of nonsensical coalitions (eg low-paid, uneducated white Americans flocking behind a real-estate scamster multi-millonaire backed by even richer billionaires)
I think the coalitions part is the strongest counter-argument. In my model the right isn’t really a coherent entity, it’s just the label we use for anyone who doesn’t express leftist thinking, but FPTP voting requires the formation of political alliances anyway. However, to your specific example - the idea that someone low paid can’t rationally support someone rich only seems strange to a leftist. With non-tribal thinking there’s no reason a rich person can’t champion the agenda of the poor, as happened with Trump. The idea employees and business owners are always in opposition is tribalist thinking, even. A non-tribalist would just call employment a trade deal that benefits both parties. Trump was by all accounts quite well respected by workers on his construction sites.
The reasons for rejecting mass immigration from the right aren’t because they embrace zero sum thinking. The usual reasons cited are crime, culture, failure to integrate and speed of change (zero sum thinking can be true in a short time frame but untrue over longer time frames). That’s why the right even today is typically pro-immigration that’s restricted to legal highly skilled positions where there is clear market demand, and why they reliably differentiate between immigration and mass immigration, which they see as two separate things.
Classically the jobs based anti-immigration arguments came from the left! If you go back to the 1980s in Britain it was Labour making the immigration/jobs based anti-EU arguments.
“The cruelty is the point” and “post truth” are slogans by leftists about normies. We don’t actually express these sentiments and don’t agree they’re accurate depictions of us.
For some reason the left are sure the right are pro-Russia/Putin, but this isn’t true. The only reason Ukraine is still in the fight is because the American administration keeps sending them weapons, it was Boris Johnson who shipped out the UK’s supply of NLAWs to Ukraine before the war even started, etc. When right wing parties elsewhere have criticized sanctions it’s been consistent with just prioritizing the needs of their voters first over those of other countries (e.g. the AfD because they felt Germany needed the gas) - not because they thought Putin was great.
By non-inclusive I guess you’re thinking of illegal immigrants or maybe trans in bathrooms stuff? I meant it in the context of targeting people for cancellation for political reasons. Can you show examples of the right doing that? The only examples I can think of are reporting teachers who celebrated Kirk’s death and similar, which is a very recent phenomenon and of course completely different (everyone is supposed to agree that political terrorism is bad!).
Alastair, you must realise that here you are describing your own beliefs, which are far more well thought-out than the average person on the political right!
Likewise I think you are correct that the average person on the left has poorly considered opinions, but that's not a fault of the left, that's a general description of humans, with as you note our ape brains unconditioned for modern society. Clearly also the right is capable of falling for similar cognitive failures, as endlessly documented by the likes of Richard Hanania.
Conversely also, the left has its thinkers - thinkers who also prise consistency, empiricism and academic rigour. Is Thomas Piketty just jealous of wealthy people, or has he spent decades studying the data to justify his conclusions?
That's true - I write to try and organize my own beliefs, I'm not claiming any of this is obvious or there won't be lots of exceptions. Talking about society at this scale is like painting with a giant roller rather than a brush.
You raise a good point about leftist intellectuals, who I indeed excluded from the analysis. Actually for many years I tried to understand politics by reading arguments between intellectuals. For example I read some Marx, and Sowell has written some interesting books where he examines the writings of left wing philosophers like Rousseau. But this was limiting. Leftist intellectuals often write things that they genuinely believe and sound somewhat explanatory, but when you try and use them predict the leftists who engage in actual action (politicians, activists, journalists etc) it just breaks down and the accuracy is pretty low.
For example, I do believe Marx was sincere when he predicted that a dictatorship of the proletariat would be a temporary phase. But this wasn't a good prediction of how leftist revolutionaries would behave in reality, and that was called out at the time even by others on the left like Bakunin.
I'm not sure which examples from Hanania you're referring to. I read his blog a bit years ago but I'll take a look later at what he's been posting recently.
N.B. I didn't say leftist dislike of the rich is driven by jealousy. That's a common claim but not one I make here. What I see from the left is typically not jealousy actually but more like a belief that being rich is immoral, or that rich people get that way by cheating. This maps well to tribal beliefs, whereas jealousy doesn't.
I admit I haven't read Piketty. From a quick look, his r > g thesis doesn't sound right and it seems he weakened that claim in later works. It sounds like a claim that wealth inequality is driven by inheritances, almost. But that's clearly not true, the richest people today are all self-made and didn't just compound owned assets. I guess it also depends how you define wealth. For example, I'm fairly well off but nothing special and yet in his regular life Bill Gates can afford only a few things I cannot e.g. a giant house, a private yacht, but beyond that his standard of living isn't much different to my own. The quality of his food is the same, the quality of his clothes is the same, he uses the same kind of smartphone as I do, the same kinds of computers, enjoys the same entertainment, has access to the same medical breakthroughs as I do. Contrast this to the difference between a peasant and a king in medieval times: everything the king had was better in massive ways. So if we think of wealth as the standard of living we enjoy, then mass production ("capitalism") flattens inequality. Of course, that statement becomes totally wrong the moment we consider his financial assets - the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is well beyond anything I could ever achieve, astronomically so. If we consider wealth to mean standards of living, we're not so far apart, if we consider wealth to mean assets he can deploy to affect political or social change then indeed the inequality is huge.
This list reads like projection, another leftist habit that comes from self-suffocation in the thick bubble of tribal life. The cruelty is the point? What does that even mean?
It argues that, "President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear" although it starts by talking about historical events. I'm not a subscriber so don't know what the rest of the article says. From the opening paragraphs it sounds like maybe "racists are cruel, Trump is a racist, therefore the right are cruel" which is an incorrect chain of logic at the second step.
Thank you. Figures it would come from the Atlantic. And as long as the left sticks to vague but nasty generalities like this, they can rest assured that no one else will take them seriously.
I can’t agree. Non-leftist thought is conventionally:
Pro-business, pro-wealth/jobs creation i.e. not zero sum thinking. If someone is railing against generic “corporations” you can make a safe bet they’re on the left.
Not cruel. You don’t see the right engaging in random acts of cancellation for trivial or random reasons, you don’t see them beating leftists to death on the street or engaging in acts of terrorism. You don’t see them building walls to stop citizens escaping. Essentially all political violence is leftist.
Honest. I know the left think the right is just as dishonest as them, but it’s just not the case in my experience. This was my original motivation for leaving the left behind - every time I sat down to study a problem the left were highlighting I discovered their framing had been dishonest. The Democrats recently passed a state law that literally legalized daycare fraud. There’s no equivalent of this kind of behavior on the right.
Loyal to family, country and institutions. You don’t see right wing people blow up the companies that employ them just to push unpopular messages in adverts, etc.
Inclusive. Cancellation is primarily a left wing phenomenon.
Hostile to nonsensical coalitions. All politics involves tough coalitions of people who disagree, but there’s no equivalent of the Islam/LGTB alliance outside of the left. And it’s not the first time this has been a problem for the left - the Iranian revolution that installed the mullahs was originally a communist revolution.
A good essay. Explains a lot. Thank you.
The right is:
- very zero-sum (just with respect to immigrants and other minority groups, rather than rich people)
- cruel ("the cruelty is the point")
- dishonest ("post-truth", even)
- loyal to the right-wing culture war over and above actual country (eg turning a blind eye to Putin)
- hardly inclusive (yes, of course they are inclusive in *your* experience, because *you* are one of *them*)
- welcoming of nonsensical coalitions (eg low-paid, uneducated white Americans flocking behind a real-estate scamster multi-millonaire backed by even richer billionaires)
I think the coalitions part is the strongest counter-argument. In my model the right isn’t really a coherent entity, it’s just the label we use for anyone who doesn’t express leftist thinking, but FPTP voting requires the formation of political alliances anyway. However, to your specific example - the idea that someone low paid can’t rationally support someone rich only seems strange to a leftist. With non-tribal thinking there’s no reason a rich person can’t champion the agenda of the poor, as happened with Trump. The idea employees and business owners are always in opposition is tribalist thinking, even. A non-tribalist would just call employment a trade deal that benefits both parties. Trump was by all accounts quite well respected by workers on his construction sites.
The reasons for rejecting mass immigration from the right aren’t because they embrace zero sum thinking. The usual reasons cited are crime, culture, failure to integrate and speed of change (zero sum thinking can be true in a short time frame but untrue over longer time frames). That’s why the right even today is typically pro-immigration that’s restricted to legal highly skilled positions where there is clear market demand, and why they reliably differentiate between immigration and mass immigration, which they see as two separate things.
Classically the jobs based anti-immigration arguments came from the left! If you go back to the 1980s in Britain it was Labour making the immigration/jobs based anti-EU arguments.
“The cruelty is the point” and “post truth” are slogans by leftists about normies. We don’t actually express these sentiments and don’t agree they’re accurate depictions of us.
For some reason the left are sure the right are pro-Russia/Putin, but this isn’t true. The only reason Ukraine is still in the fight is because the American administration keeps sending them weapons, it was Boris Johnson who shipped out the UK’s supply of NLAWs to Ukraine before the war even started, etc. When right wing parties elsewhere have criticized sanctions it’s been consistent with just prioritizing the needs of their voters first over those of other countries (e.g. the AfD because they felt Germany needed the gas) - not because they thought Putin was great.
By non-inclusive I guess you’re thinking of illegal immigrants or maybe trans in bathrooms stuff? I meant it in the context of targeting people for cancellation for political reasons. Can you show examples of the right doing that? The only examples I can think of are reporting teachers who celebrated Kirk’s death and similar, which is a very recent phenomenon and of course completely different (everyone is supposed to agree that political terrorism is bad!).
Alastair, you must realise that here you are describing your own beliefs, which are far more well thought-out than the average person on the political right!
Likewise I think you are correct that the average person on the left has poorly considered opinions, but that's not a fault of the left, that's a general description of humans, with as you note our ape brains unconditioned for modern society. Clearly also the right is capable of falling for similar cognitive failures, as endlessly documented by the likes of Richard Hanania.
Conversely also, the left has its thinkers - thinkers who also prise consistency, empiricism and academic rigour. Is Thomas Piketty just jealous of wealthy people, or has he spent decades studying the data to justify his conclusions?
That's true - I write to try and organize my own beliefs, I'm not claiming any of this is obvious or there won't be lots of exceptions. Talking about society at this scale is like painting with a giant roller rather than a brush.
You raise a good point about leftist intellectuals, who I indeed excluded from the analysis. Actually for many years I tried to understand politics by reading arguments between intellectuals. For example I read some Marx, and Sowell has written some interesting books where he examines the writings of left wing philosophers like Rousseau. But this was limiting. Leftist intellectuals often write things that they genuinely believe and sound somewhat explanatory, but when you try and use them predict the leftists who engage in actual action (politicians, activists, journalists etc) it just breaks down and the accuracy is pretty low.
For example, I do believe Marx was sincere when he predicted that a dictatorship of the proletariat would be a temporary phase. But this wasn't a good prediction of how leftist revolutionaries would behave in reality, and that was called out at the time even by others on the left like Bakunin.
I'm not sure which examples from Hanania you're referring to. I read his blog a bit years ago but I'll take a look later at what he's been posting recently.
N.B. I didn't say leftist dislike of the rich is driven by jealousy. That's a common claim but not one I make here. What I see from the left is typically not jealousy actually but more like a belief that being rich is immoral, or that rich people get that way by cheating. This maps well to tribal beliefs, whereas jealousy doesn't.
I admit I haven't read Piketty. From a quick look, his r > g thesis doesn't sound right and it seems he weakened that claim in later works. It sounds like a claim that wealth inequality is driven by inheritances, almost. But that's clearly not true, the richest people today are all self-made and didn't just compound owned assets. I guess it also depends how you define wealth. For example, I'm fairly well off but nothing special and yet in his regular life Bill Gates can afford only a few things I cannot e.g. a giant house, a private yacht, but beyond that his standard of living isn't much different to my own. The quality of his food is the same, the quality of his clothes is the same, he uses the same kind of smartphone as I do, the same kinds of computers, enjoys the same entertainment, has access to the same medical breakthroughs as I do. Contrast this to the difference between a peasant and a king in medieval times: everything the king had was better in massive ways. So if we think of wealth as the standard of living we enjoy, then mass production ("capitalism") flattens inequality. Of course, that statement becomes totally wrong the moment we consider his financial assets - the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is well beyond anything I could ever achieve, astronomically so. If we consider wealth to mean standards of living, we're not so far apart, if we consider wealth to mean assets he can deploy to affect political or social change then indeed the inequality is huge.
This list reads like projection, another leftist habit that comes from self-suffocation in the thick bubble of tribal life. The cruelty is the point? What does that even mean?
It's a reference to an article with that title, I think (and later turned into a book):
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
It argues that, "President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear" although it starts by talking about historical events. I'm not a subscriber so don't know what the rest of the article says. From the opening paragraphs it sounds like maybe "racists are cruel, Trump is a racist, therefore the right are cruel" which is an incorrect chain of logic at the second step.
Thank you. Figures it would come from the Atlantic. And as long as the left sticks to vague but nasty generalities like this, they can rest assured that no one else will take them seriously.
Let's be honest, these are just generic features of most political engagement. There is nothing specifically "leftist" about any of this.
I can’t agree. Non-leftist thought is conventionally:
Pro-business, pro-wealth/jobs creation i.e. not zero sum thinking. If someone is railing against generic “corporations” you can make a safe bet they’re on the left.
Not cruel. You don’t see the right engaging in random acts of cancellation for trivial or random reasons, you don’t see them beating leftists to death on the street or engaging in acts of terrorism. You don’t see them building walls to stop citizens escaping. Essentially all political violence is leftist.
Honest. I know the left think the right is just as dishonest as them, but it’s just not the case in my experience. This was my original motivation for leaving the left behind - every time I sat down to study a problem the left were highlighting I discovered their framing had been dishonest. The Democrats recently passed a state law that literally legalized daycare fraud. There’s no equivalent of this kind of behavior on the right.
Loyal to family, country and institutions. You don’t see right wing people blow up the companies that employ them just to push unpopular messages in adverts, etc.
Inclusive. Cancellation is primarily a left wing phenomenon.
Hostile to nonsensical coalitions. All politics involves tough coalitions of people who disagree, but there’s no equivalent of the Islam/LGTB alliance outside of the left. And it’s not the first time this has been a problem for the left - the Iranian revolution that installed the mullahs was originally a communist revolution.