I think this argument is broadly half-right, in that you lay out the reasons why, ceteris paribus, we should believe that the left is likelier to be correct on a wide variety of issues. However, I think there are absolutely certain circumstances in which we should distrust some or all of the conclusions of a faction or party whether it is on the right or the left, which your argument misses because, I think, there are some issues.
For reference, I'm going to restate your four basic propositions here, in your words:
1. The left has a strong and broad tendency to favour the interests of the relatively powerless, whereas the right has a strong and broad tendency to favour the interests of the relatively powerful.
2. Generally speaking, the unfulfilled desires of the powerless have greater urgency than the unfulfilled desires of the powerful. Part of what it means to be powerful is the capacity to fulfill one’s own desires.
3. So, from a preference utilitarian perspective, we have good prima facie reasons to favour the unfulfilled desires of the weak.
4. Therefore, from a preference utilitarian perspective, there are good prima facie reasons to think that the left is more correct than the right, because, and insofar as it favours the weak.
Arguments (2) and (3) are more-or-less entirely correct for the reasons your outlined, so I'm going to leave them alone. But I think (1) is only half-right and (4) involves a big inferential leap that I don't think is justified and in fact quite problematic.
RE: (1), there are two issues. The first comes about by trying to broadly categorize politics as "left" versus "right." To see the problem with this, we have to go back to how the classical republicans understood political conflict and constitutions. The Greeks generally held that republics could have one of three constitutions: democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. They very clearly distinguished tyranny from both monarchy and oligarchy - during the Peloponnesian War, when the Plataeans lambasted the Thebans for siding with the Persians during their invasion, the Thebans - who were then an oligarchy - defended themselves by claiming that they were, at the time of the Persian War, under a tyranny.
The Greeks had a very cyclical view of the world, and different Greek thinkers had different ideas of how these three forms of government would rotate or develop. If we skip ahead to the Italian Renaissance, we get Machiavelli, who in the Prince says that politics is essentially a struggle between the people (democracy) and the nobles (oligarchy) and that tyranny comes about when one faction, fearing the other's power, rallies behind a strongman/strongmen so they can overwhelm the enemy.
"Horseshoe theory" is very imprecise and unfairly claims that extreme leftists are basically identical to extreme rightists, which is obviously ridiculous, but it does aim at some truth about politics; namely that both the left and the right (democracy and oligarchy) have pro-tyranny and anti-tyranny wings; the claim that revolutionary socialism is the *pro-tyranny wing of the left in the same sense that fascism is the pro-tyranny wing of the right* is very much reflected in the historical record of socialist movements. It's also reflected in psychological research; see Costello et al 2022. Therefore, our schedule of credence towards various political tendencies should be Liberalism/reformist socialism > revolutionary socialism = conservatives > fascists. People who desire power and domination over others can *use popular discontent to establish a tyranny*.
The second issue with (1) is that the world isn't neatly divided between the powerful and the powerless; basically all economic actors in complex capitalist societies are part rentier and part exploited; political factions are therefore coalitions of rentiers. Since rent-seeking produces deadweight loss, it should be theoretically possible for the state to confiscate all monopolies and use the recovered surplus to buy off the rent seekers. But if a party ran on exactly that platform, it would get approximately 0% of the vote - perhaps due to risk aversion, coordination issues, what have you. The left and the right are both necessarily hypocritical - rightists will complain about union rent seeking and then simultaneously support private land tenure. Leftists complain about employer monopsony power, but then DSA chapters all over the US oppose YIMBYism, thereby siding with homeowner cartels.
Proposition (4) is a big inferential leap because it is possible for the powerful to be objectively correct on a given issue, and the powerless afraid to admit it, because it could contribute to a justification. The classical argument for oligarchy is that a wise aristocracy is better at governing than the average illiterate peasant - it's probably not *wrong*, but it's a dangerous thing to admit if you're a peasant whose rights and liberties are always challenged by the nobility.
Another issue with (4) is that elite beliefs have a dual purpose: ideology and governing. Elites want to justify their power, sure, but people who are in power have incentives to actually be correct about social reality. If mainstream economics is completely fake, then businesses and governments who use it to model the economy and make decisions accordingly are costing stockholders & stakeholders a lot of money! But if a Marxist youtuber is wrong about Labor Theory of Value or the Declining Rate of Profit, nothing bad will happen to him.
***
In sum, you're basically correct that ceteris paribus you should trust people on the left more than people on the right. But it's very easy to take this argument too far are there are plenty of potential "failure modes" for people who stand on the left/for democracy/for the powerless.
> If mainstream economics is completely fake, then businesses and governments who use it to model the economy and make decisions accordingly are costing stockholders & stakeholders a lot of money!
I think this is what happened with tariffs. Trump's self-interest, given that he's probably not running for a third term, doesn't have to align with the well-being of the people anymore (I also think it's unclear that they ever did), and it doesn't really seem like anything is happening to him.
I would also say that there are enough failed authoritarian regimes to prove that "people who are in power have incentives to actually be correct about social reality" generally does not cause them to actually be correct about social reality.
>If mainstream economics is completely fake, then businesses and governments who use it to model the economy and make decisions accordingly are costing stockholders & stakeholders a lot of money!
Do they? Back then when importing cheap crap from China was a fairly new thing, I asked an importer how he figures out prices. "I just look at the prices of the competition." And if it is a new thing? "Four times the purchase price, then we see how it goes." Business almost don't ever model the whole economy.
Governments do, but are they doing a good job? Who predicted 2008? Why is it so cyclical? Back in 2008 an old finance deregulation bill was blamed. It was also mentioned the bill was 800 pages. Is that really DEregulation? Do they even read it before they vote? Can they make sense of it? Is 15 years of zero interest rates any kind of mainstream economics? Monetarists would have a fit, but I think even Keynes would consider it too much.
I’m one of the “ordinary people,” but since you say folk ideas do have a place in political philosophy, I’ll chime in to say that I’ve long had a guess that whenever there are two sides vehemently opposed on an issue, the issue is likely much more complex than either side tends to think. This sounds somewhat in line with Joshi.
BUT this whole cult-of-Trumpism thing has felt like a huge exception to that general principle, and your article here helps me flesh that out in my mind, especially the point about SDO. The mindset of the right these days seems absurdly simplistic.
Coming from my background of fundamentalist Christianity in the Bible belt, I tend to think the Trump cult is rooted in people’s indoctrination in right-wing ideology and tribalism, more than anything else (such as personality or thoughtfully chosen values about protecting the interests of the strong vs. the weak).
But I’m very interested in all your points and arguments, and I’ll be rereading to further absorb them. Thank you for your work!
The idea that all that much of the sociological left/right difference can be explained in terms of differences in underlying principles strikes me as pretty hard to defend.
First, there's a *lot* of variation over time, and from country to country, in which policies end up in which coalition. What's left wing vs right wing in covid policy? There were clear answers in the US, but if you tried to export those answers to Sweden you'd have gotten things all wrong in predicting who'd support what.
Second, plenty of the most distinctively left wing policies are supported more by the powerful on the left than the powerless. Environmentalism is paradigmatically left wing, and within the Democratic party you're much more likely to prioritize climate policy if you're wealthy than not. You may think these examples are cherry picked. I don't, though I admit it's a big and messy question. "The myth of left and right" has lots more like this.
There are a couple of things worth saying here. I think a portion of the variation probably reflects differences in who is weak and strong over time. Another portion reflects alliances- if your overriding goal is to protect the weak or strong, you're going to want to make alliances, and a lot of these will depend on the contingent circumstances of your place and time, and even random luck of the political draw - variations in affiliation and personal relationship between influential figures etc. Also, the prioritization of different elements of the coalition when their interests clash will be important- for example, are union ties or ties with the disabled prioritized re: COVID?
Environmentalism, being a leftwing thing, is a bit more universal, flows from the overwhelming importance of pro/anti-business as a taxonomic line post the advent of capitalism, which is tied to the weak/strong axis in various ways. You're right that because this tie to the weak/strong axis is through a secondary layer phenomenon (position on the needs of business), in practice, it does not always correlate with how personally "oppressed" or "poor" a person is. In places where environmentalism is not exactly left this is often tied to a perception that what the oppressed really need is a developmentalist state- this is common in middle-income countries with strong socialist movements.
Overall, I am astonished by how neatly the left-right split does work, despite its limitations, as a cross-cultural and cross-historical rule. Perhaps my expectations for fit are just very low.
As a leftish person reading this, I think this assumes a very conflict-theorist point of view and makes the hasty assumption that policy outcomes are reducable to which groups are vs aren’t favored, when it’s not obvious that all or most political issues work that way. Just because those preferences are present in the psychology of each side doesn’t necessarily mean those preferences are straightforwardly reflected in policy outcomes. You could argue that policy also works that way, but you have to make the argument instead of just assuming it.
For instance, many strands of economic right wing thought would hold that the economic growth they promote would be better for everyone, including workers, than the left wing alternative. You can dispute that, but you have to do so directly.
An argument for cynicism. Conserving things obviously means conserving existing power structures, because someone has to run the system. Changing things obviously requires grabbing power, because otherwise nothing can be changed. So we have one group of people who hoard the power they have, and we have one group of people who are hungry for more power they have. Why any of them should be seen as trustworthy? Just as conservative "practicality" can be an excuse for hoarding power, leftist "change for justice" can be an excuse for grabbing it.
SDO obviously depends on whether they think they are a dominant group or not! Don't you think Stalinists had plenty of SDO?
People's views to a large extent depend on whether they feel they are in the power hierarchy. For example it is always the underdog who demands freedom of speech, because it is the overdog who can limit it. So when the underdog says "dissent is patriotic", if they become the overdog it changes to "combating misinformation".
Yes, this is cynical but there are reasons for that.
The solution is to support those leftist causes that do not look like power grabs, that are more grassroots. High taxes are not such a good idea, do you really trust the elites to spend them visely? But higher minimum wages and eliminating taxes for the poor are a good idea. That just puts money directly in the pockets of the poor, without first people with lots of power deciding how to spend it, what can go wrong? I recommend thinking like that. UBI. Higher taxes only in the case if there is a mechanism that ensures it goes to UBI and not whatever the higher-ups like to spend on.
There are roughly two camps - fear based and empathy based. One of the two clearly comes closer to the veil of ignorance reciprocity which is a prerequisite for civilization and the peace and stability it enables
I think this argument is broadly half-right, in that you lay out the reasons why, ceteris paribus, we should believe that the left is likelier to be correct on a wide variety of issues. However, I think there are absolutely certain circumstances in which we should distrust some or all of the conclusions of a faction or party whether it is on the right or the left, which your argument misses because, I think, there are some issues.
For reference, I'm going to restate your four basic propositions here, in your words:
1. The left has a strong and broad tendency to favour the interests of the relatively powerless, whereas the right has a strong and broad tendency to favour the interests of the relatively powerful.
2. Generally speaking, the unfulfilled desires of the powerless have greater urgency than the unfulfilled desires of the powerful. Part of what it means to be powerful is the capacity to fulfill one’s own desires.
3. So, from a preference utilitarian perspective, we have good prima facie reasons to favour the unfulfilled desires of the weak.
4. Therefore, from a preference utilitarian perspective, there are good prima facie reasons to think that the left is more correct than the right, because, and insofar as it favours the weak.
Arguments (2) and (3) are more-or-less entirely correct for the reasons your outlined, so I'm going to leave them alone. But I think (1) is only half-right and (4) involves a big inferential leap that I don't think is justified and in fact quite problematic.
RE: (1), there are two issues. The first comes about by trying to broadly categorize politics as "left" versus "right." To see the problem with this, we have to go back to how the classical republicans understood political conflict and constitutions. The Greeks generally held that republics could have one of three constitutions: democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. They very clearly distinguished tyranny from both monarchy and oligarchy - during the Peloponnesian War, when the Plataeans lambasted the Thebans for siding with the Persians during their invasion, the Thebans - who were then an oligarchy - defended themselves by claiming that they were, at the time of the Persian War, under a tyranny.
The Greeks had a very cyclical view of the world, and different Greek thinkers had different ideas of how these three forms of government would rotate or develop. If we skip ahead to the Italian Renaissance, we get Machiavelli, who in the Prince says that politics is essentially a struggle between the people (democracy) and the nobles (oligarchy) and that tyranny comes about when one faction, fearing the other's power, rallies behind a strongman/strongmen so they can overwhelm the enemy.
"Horseshoe theory" is very imprecise and unfairly claims that extreme leftists are basically identical to extreme rightists, which is obviously ridiculous, but it does aim at some truth about politics; namely that both the left and the right (democracy and oligarchy) have pro-tyranny and anti-tyranny wings; the claim that revolutionary socialism is the *pro-tyranny wing of the left in the same sense that fascism is the pro-tyranny wing of the right* is very much reflected in the historical record of socialist movements. It's also reflected in psychological research; see Costello et al 2022. Therefore, our schedule of credence towards various political tendencies should be Liberalism/reformist socialism > revolutionary socialism = conservatives > fascists. People who desire power and domination over others can *use popular discontent to establish a tyranny*.
The second issue with (1) is that the world isn't neatly divided between the powerful and the powerless; basically all economic actors in complex capitalist societies are part rentier and part exploited; political factions are therefore coalitions of rentiers. Since rent-seeking produces deadweight loss, it should be theoretically possible for the state to confiscate all monopolies and use the recovered surplus to buy off the rent seekers. But if a party ran on exactly that platform, it would get approximately 0% of the vote - perhaps due to risk aversion, coordination issues, what have you. The left and the right are both necessarily hypocritical - rightists will complain about union rent seeking and then simultaneously support private land tenure. Leftists complain about employer monopsony power, but then DSA chapters all over the US oppose YIMBYism, thereby siding with homeowner cartels.
Proposition (4) is a big inferential leap because it is possible for the powerful to be objectively correct on a given issue, and the powerless afraid to admit it, because it could contribute to a justification. The classical argument for oligarchy is that a wise aristocracy is better at governing than the average illiterate peasant - it's probably not *wrong*, but it's a dangerous thing to admit if you're a peasant whose rights and liberties are always challenged by the nobility.
Another issue with (4) is that elite beliefs have a dual purpose: ideology and governing. Elites want to justify their power, sure, but people who are in power have incentives to actually be correct about social reality. If mainstream economics is completely fake, then businesses and governments who use it to model the economy and make decisions accordingly are costing stockholders & stakeholders a lot of money! But if a Marxist youtuber is wrong about Labor Theory of Value or the Declining Rate of Profit, nothing bad will happen to him.
***
In sum, you're basically correct that ceteris paribus you should trust people on the left more than people on the right. But it's very easy to take this argument too far are there are plenty of potential "failure modes" for people who stand on the left/for democracy/for the powerless.
> If mainstream economics is completely fake, then businesses and governments who use it to model the economy and make decisions accordingly are costing stockholders & stakeholders a lot of money!
I think this is what happened with tariffs. Trump's self-interest, given that he's probably not running for a third term, doesn't have to align with the well-being of the people anymore (I also think it's unclear that they ever did), and it doesn't really seem like anything is happening to him.
I would also say that there are enough failed authoritarian regimes to prove that "people who are in power have incentives to actually be correct about social reality" generally does not cause them to actually be correct about social reality.
Yes, tyrannies often fail. They tend to have degraded information environments and weakened internal and external controls.
>If mainstream economics is completely fake, then businesses and governments who use it to model the economy and make decisions accordingly are costing stockholders & stakeholders a lot of money!
Do they? Back then when importing cheap crap from China was a fairly new thing, I asked an importer how he figures out prices. "I just look at the prices of the competition." And if it is a new thing? "Four times the purchase price, then we see how it goes." Business almost don't ever model the whole economy.
Governments do, but are they doing a good job? Who predicted 2008? Why is it so cyclical? Back in 2008 an old finance deregulation bill was blamed. It was also mentioned the bill was 800 pages. Is that really DEregulation? Do they even read it before they vote? Can they make sense of it? Is 15 years of zero interest rates any kind of mainstream economics? Monetarists would have a fit, but I think even Keynes would consider it too much.
I’m one of the “ordinary people,” but since you say folk ideas do have a place in political philosophy, I’ll chime in to say that I’ve long had a guess that whenever there are two sides vehemently opposed on an issue, the issue is likely much more complex than either side tends to think. This sounds somewhat in line with Joshi.
BUT this whole cult-of-Trumpism thing has felt like a huge exception to that general principle, and your article here helps me flesh that out in my mind, especially the point about SDO. The mindset of the right these days seems absurdly simplistic.
Coming from my background of fundamentalist Christianity in the Bible belt, I tend to think the Trump cult is rooted in people’s indoctrination in right-wing ideology and tribalism, more than anything else (such as personality or thoughtfully chosen values about protecting the interests of the strong vs. the weak).
But I’m very interested in all your points and arguments, and I’ll be rereading to further absorb them. Thank you for your work!
The idea that all that much of the sociological left/right difference can be explained in terms of differences in underlying principles strikes me as pretty hard to defend.
First, there's a *lot* of variation over time, and from country to country, in which policies end up in which coalition. What's left wing vs right wing in covid policy? There were clear answers in the US, but if you tried to export those answers to Sweden you'd have gotten things all wrong in predicting who'd support what.
Second, plenty of the most distinctively left wing policies are supported more by the powerful on the left than the powerless. Environmentalism is paradigmatically left wing, and within the Democratic party you're much more likely to prioritize climate policy if you're wealthy than not. You may think these examples are cherry picked. I don't, though I admit it's a big and messy question. "The myth of left and right" has lots more like this.
There are a couple of things worth saying here. I think a portion of the variation probably reflects differences in who is weak and strong over time. Another portion reflects alliances- if your overriding goal is to protect the weak or strong, you're going to want to make alliances, and a lot of these will depend on the contingent circumstances of your place and time, and even random luck of the political draw - variations in affiliation and personal relationship between influential figures etc. Also, the prioritization of different elements of the coalition when their interests clash will be important- for example, are union ties or ties with the disabled prioritized re: COVID?
Environmentalism, being a leftwing thing, is a bit more universal, flows from the overwhelming importance of pro/anti-business as a taxonomic line post the advent of capitalism, which is tied to the weak/strong axis in various ways. You're right that because this tie to the weak/strong axis is through a secondary layer phenomenon (position on the needs of business), in practice, it does not always correlate with how personally "oppressed" or "poor" a person is. In places where environmentalism is not exactly left this is often tied to a perception that what the oppressed really need is a developmentalist state- this is common in middle-income countries with strong socialist movements.
Overall, I am astonished by how neatly the left-right split does work, despite its limitations, as a cross-cultural and cross-historical rule. Perhaps my expectations for fit are just very low.
Easiest counterargument is to simply not accept utilitarian or moral realist principles.
As a leftish person reading this, I think this assumes a very conflict-theorist point of view and makes the hasty assumption that policy outcomes are reducable to which groups are vs aren’t favored, when it’s not obvious that all or most political issues work that way. Just because those preferences are present in the psychology of each side doesn’t necessarily mean those preferences are straightforwardly reflected in policy outcomes. You could argue that policy also works that way, but you have to make the argument instead of just assuming it.
For instance, many strands of economic right wing thought would hold that the economic growth they promote would be better for everyone, including workers, than the left wing alternative. You can dispute that, but you have to do so directly.
An argument for cynicism. Conserving things obviously means conserving existing power structures, because someone has to run the system. Changing things obviously requires grabbing power, because otherwise nothing can be changed. So we have one group of people who hoard the power they have, and we have one group of people who are hungry for more power they have. Why any of them should be seen as trustworthy? Just as conservative "practicality" can be an excuse for hoarding power, leftist "change for justice" can be an excuse for grabbing it.
SDO obviously depends on whether they think they are a dominant group or not! Don't you think Stalinists had plenty of SDO?
People's views to a large extent depend on whether they feel they are in the power hierarchy. For example it is always the underdog who demands freedom of speech, because it is the overdog who can limit it. So when the underdog says "dissent is patriotic", if they become the overdog it changes to "combating misinformation".
Yes, this is cynical but there are reasons for that.
The solution is to support those leftist causes that do not look like power grabs, that are more grassroots. High taxes are not such a good idea, do you really trust the elites to spend them visely? But higher minimum wages and eliminating taxes for the poor are a good idea. That just puts money directly in the pockets of the poor, without first people with lots of power deciding how to spend it, what can go wrong? I recommend thinking like that. UBI. Higher taxes only in the case if there is a mechanism that ensures it goes to UBI and not whatever the higher-ups like to spend on.
There are roughly two camps - fear based and empathy based. One of the two clearly comes closer to the veil of ignorance reciprocity which is a prerequisite for civilization and the peace and stability it enables
TLDR: liberalism is closer to the veil of ignorance which is an ethical minimum.
This seems over-reliant on the assumption that utilitarianism is a good moral framework.
Nice essay; you left an editor's comment in the second paragraph of the proposition 1 section.