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3. The Left-Right Political Spectrum is about Class Conflict | What is Politics?

A podcast episode arguing that left and right are not obsolete but are opposites rooted in class conflict and hierarchy, critiquing the 'horseshoe theory' and academic confusion around the terms.

Key Takeaways

  • Left and right are meaningful, incompatible opposites centered on hierarchy and equality, not obsolete labels.
  • The 'horseshoe theory' that extremes converge is popular but incorrect.
  • Much academic and popular writing on left and right fails to define the terms, contributing to widespread confusion.
  • Understanding left and right is necessary before people can decide how to use their political bargaining power.

What the video covers

  • Episode 3 of 'What Is Politics?' argues that the political left and right are misunderstood and misused, and that most people cannot correctly identify far-left from far-right positions.
  • The speaker critiques the 'horseshoe theory' claim that left and right converge at the extremes, arguing that properly defined they are incompatible opposites.
  • Leonard Read's 1956 essay 'Neither Left nor Right' is cited as an early example of the view that the terms are obsolete, with Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR used as examples of supposed convergence.
  • The speaker criticizes academic works, including books by Yuval Levin and Timothy Brennan, for failing to define left and right while writing extensively about them.
  • Kristen Sartre's 2014 Atlantic article 'The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus' is discussed, with its proposed replacement of equality versus hierarchy being mocked.
  • The episode frames political power in terms of cultural status and hierarchy, citing historical examples of religious, gender, and racial rights differences.
  • Left and right are described as relative terms tied to historical context, using the French Revolution-era seating arrangement as an example.
  • Left is associated with challenging hierarchies and pursuing equality, while right is associated with defending existing hierarchies, with economic policy such as progressive taxation used as an illustration.
  • The speaker notes that 'conservative' and 'liberal' are often wrongly used as synonyms for right and left, and that they are mixtures of left and right ideas.
  • The episode is presented as the foundation for later discussion of how ordinary people can increase their bargaining power and decide what to use it for.

Chapters

  1. 00:00Introduction: Empty Political Words
  2. 03:00Critiques of the Left-Right Divide
  3. 06:23Horseshoe Theory and Academic Confusion
  4. 12:00Left, Right, and Cultural Status
  5. 20:00Defining Left and Right on Hierarchy and Equality
  6. 27:00Historical Origins: Left and Right in France
  7. 31:40Economic Hierarchy and Redistribution
  8. 35:00Conclusion and Bargaining Power

Answers

Questions about this video

Why does the speaker reject the horseshoe theory?

The speaker argues that horseshoe theory, which claims left and right converge at the extremes, is incorrect because left and right are properly defined as incompatible opposites. Examples like Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR are used to suggest the similarity is superficial rather than a true convergence of ideas.

What criticism does the video make of academic books on left and right?

The video says that books by Yuval Levin and Timothy Brennan, among others, extensively discuss left and right without defining the terms. The speaker argues that authors expect readers to intuitively understand the concepts, which leaves the confusion unresolved.

How does the video connect left and right to cultural status?

The video argues that cultural status, such as religion, gender, or race, determines a person's political power, and that left and right are crucial for understanding cultural battles in which people with fewer rights seek more. Historical examples like women's property rights and racial legal rights in the US illustrate this.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
Hello fellow kids, and welcome back to "What Is Politics?" In the first episode of this podcast, we talked about how politics is unique among practical disciplines, and that most of the political terms and concepts we use every day are empty words, words that everyone uses without really knowing what they mean. Words like capitalism, socialism, left-right, government, ideology, democracy, even the word politics itself. We looked at how this makes us easier to manipulate and turns politics into a game of competing identity groups, where people who agree on all sorts of issues are divided into red team versus blue team, instead of working together on common goals and against common enemies.
00:16
Speaker A
everyone uses without really knowing what they mean words like capitalism socialism left-right government ideology democracy even the word politics itself and we looked at how this makes us easier to manipulate and turns politics into a game of competing identity groups where
00:33
Speaker A
In Episode Two, we defined politics as decision-making in groups, and we asked how we, as ordinary people who don't have official decision-making power, might be able to exercise our influence over the people who do have official decision-making power, whether it's our government representatives, our bosses at work, or our landlords at home. We came to the conclusion that the way you get someone to do what you want them to do is by exercising your bargaining power. But before we start looking at how we exercise and increase our bargaining power, we need to figure out what sorts of things we want to use our bargaining power for, and to do that, we need to understand what the political right and left are all about.
00:47
Speaker A
how we as ordinary people who don't have official decision-making power might be able to exercise our influence over the people who do have official decision-making power whether it's our government representatives our bosses at work or our landlords at home and we
01:01
Speaker A
There are no political words more misunderstood and abused than left and right. Since the 1964 publication of "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" until today, you have study after study showing that a large majority of people can't identify a far-left position from a far-right one. People routinely describe themselves as right-wingers while supporting mostly left-wing economic policies, or else they describe themselves as hardcore left-wingers while supporting extreme right-wing political institutions. Meanwhile, people who describe themselves as moderates or centrists typically hold a mishmash of extreme right and left-wing views.
01:13
Speaker A
of things we want to use our bargaining power for and to do that we need to understand what the political right and left are all about there are no political worms more misunderstood and abused than left and right since the
01:26
Speaker A
As a result of the confusion about left and right, more and more people think that these are obsolete terms. By the mid-1950s, you already had certain authors complaining about these terms being outdated. You can find a short piece online called "Neither Left nor Right" by libertarian capitalist Leonard Read from 1956, where he writes about how left and right end up being the same thing at the extremes. He gives the example of Hitler's Nazi Germany on the extreme right and Stalin's Soviet Union on the extreme left, which resembled each other in important ways. Therefore, according to Read, the real divide in politics is not left and right but authoritarianism versus libertarianism, his preferred ideology.
01:40
Speaker A
right-wingers while supporting mostly left-wing economic policies or else they describe themselves as hardcore left wingers while supporting extreme right-wing political institutions while people who describe themselves as moderates or centrists typically hold a mishmash of extreme right and left-wing
01:56
Speaker A
This idea that left and right converge at the extremes, sometimes called horseshoe theory, is very popular but also very incorrect, as we'll see shortly. Because properly defined, left and right are totally incompatible opposites, just like left hand and right hand directions, or cold and hot, up and down, big and small. Never the twain shall meet, at least not at the same time and the same place. As we'll see in a bit, in recent years you have political parties all around the world, from Green Party candidates in Canada to American Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, to fascist parties in Italy, with almost the exact same slogan: "Neither left nor right but forward." And every few years, you get people trying to replace left and right with supposedly more useful concepts like open versus closed, which is like making a super insulting new political spectrum, with open, hip, and cool geniuses on one side and closed, stupid, foolish dum-dums on the other.
02:09
Speaker A
piece online called neither left nor right by libertarian capitalist Leonard Reed from 1956 where he writes about how left and right end up being the same thing at the extremes and he gives the example of Hitler's Nazi Germany on the extreme
02:22
Speaker A
Even though many people identify very strongly as being on the left, or on the right, or in the center, or as being too independent-minded for such foolish worldly classifications, very few people know what these terms actually mean. You can read article after article or book after book discussing left and right and not find a definition of the terms anywhere, and when you do find a definition, more often than not it's the wrong definition. This absence of definitions and incorrect use of the terms is true even of books and articles written by PhD doctor professors specifically about left and right.
02:38
Speaker A
converge at the extremes sometimes called horseshoe theory is very popular but also very incorrect as we'll see shortly because properly defined left and right are totally incompatible opposites just like left hand and right hand directions or cold and hot up and
02:55
Speaker A
For one example, you can read "The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right" by PhD doctor professor Yuval Levin. In three hundred and fifty pages about left and right, he somehow forgets to define what left and right actually mean. Uh, it's like "different directions" or something. Or you can read "Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right" by political science doctor professor Timothy Brennan. This book is about left and right in cultural politics. As I mentioned briefly in the second episode, cultural status is one of the main determinants of a person's level of decision-making or political power. For example, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews had different rights in different European countries in the 16th and 17th centuries. Being a woman meant you couldn't own property until the 19th century in Europe and North America, and you couldn't vote until after World War One. Having black skin or white skin meant that you had different legal rights in the United States until the 1960s. As I'll be explaining shortly, the concepts of left and right are crucial to understanding which side is which in cultural battles, where people with less rights are trying to get more rights. But you wouldn't know this from reading this "Wars of Position" book, where the author manages to fill 300-plus pages without defining the main concepts that he's supposedly writing about. He just expects you to feel what they mean: blue team versus red team, black hats versus white hats, good guys versus bad guys. Another 300-page academic book about basically nothing.
03:06
Speaker A
candidates in Canada to American Democratic presidential candidate Andrew yang to fascist parties in Italy with almost the same exact slogan neither left nor right but forward and every few years you get people trying to replace left and right with supposedly more
03:22
Speaker A
Then there's a 2014 article in The Atlantic Monthly called "The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus" by doctor professor Kristen Sartre. Well, Sartre throws up his hands and says that you just can't define left and right, because they're ultimately meaningless terms. All the common definitions, like the state versus the market, or equality versus liberty, or collectivism versus individualism, can't possibly be right if you go over what and whom these terms have been used to describe over the years. Again, he points to Hitler and Stalin: how can they be so similar yet at opposite ends of the spectrum? Therefore, he says it's time to throw these categories out the window entirely and replace them with a new political spectrum based on equality versus hierarchy, which is pretty hilarious, as you'll see in a few minutes.
03:35
Speaker A
strongly as being on the left or on the right or in the centre or as being two independent minded for such foolish worldly classifications very few people know what these terms actually mean you can read article after article or book
03:48
Speaker A
All this confusion and irritation with these terms begs the question: why do we even need left and right anymore? Don't we want people thinking for themselves instead of according to some prepackaged ideological script? You'll often hear politicians say things like, "We need to abandon tired old ideas like left and right and just find solutions that work." This resonates with a lot of people who want politicians to work together for the common good, instead of the red team versus blue team mentality of political parties who prioritize getting elected over finding solutions to our problems. But the problem is that there's no such thing as a solution that works for everyone. You always have to ask: works for whom? Because even when something improves the lives of the vast majority of people, there are always some people who are better off when everyone else was worse off. Imagine if you could set up a magical fairy dust health care system that would have all of the top technology, where you could choose whatever doctor you wanted, there's a high number of doctors per person, and everyone is enrolled automatically, and it's absolutely free. And I don't mean free as in paid for by taxes. I mean free as in crazy Gumby gold free, like it's paid for by rubbing a magic
04:00
Speaker A
terms is true even if books and articles written by PhD doctor professors specifically about left and right so for one example you can read the great debate Edmund Burke Thomas Paine and the birth of left and right by PhD doctor
04:14
Speaker A
professor Yuval Levin in three hundred and fifty pages about left and right he somehow forgets to define what left and right actually mean uh it's like different directions or something or you can read Wars of position the cultural politics of left and right by
04:35
Speaker A
political science dr. professor Timothy Brennan so this book is about left and right in cultural politics as I mentioned briefly in the second episode cultural status is one of the main determinants of a person's level of decision-making or political power so
04:51
Speaker A
for example Protestants Catholics and Jews had different rights in different European countries in the 16th and 17th centuries being a woman meant you couldn't own property until the 19th century in Europe and North America and you couldn't vote until after World War
05:05
Speaker A
one having black skin or white skin meant that you had different legal rights in the United States until the 1960s as I'll be explaining shortly the concepts of left and right are crucial to understanding which side is which in
05:17
Speaker A
cultural battles where people with less rights are trying to get more rights but you wouldn't know this from reading this Wars of position book where the author manages to fill 300 plus pages without defining the main concepts that he's
05:29
Speaker A
supposedly writing about he just expects you to feel what they mean blue team vs.
05:34
Speaker A
red team black hats versus white hats good guys versus bad guys another 300 page academic book about basically nothing then there's a 2014 article in The Atlantic Monthly called the left-right political spectrum is bogus by dr. professor Kristen Sartre
05:50
Speaker A
well Sartre will throws up his hands and says that you just can't define left and right because they're ultimately meaningless terms all the common definitions like the state versus the market or equality versus Liberty or collectivism versus individualism they
06:04
Speaker A
can't possibly be right if you go over what and whom these terms have been used to describe over the years again he points to Hitler and Stalin how can they be so similar yet at opposite ends of the spectrum therefore he says it's time
06:18
Speaker A
to throw these categories out the window entirely and replace them with a new political spectrum based on equality versus hierarchy which is pretty hilarious as you'll see in a few minutes all this confusion and irritation with these terms begs the question why do we
06:34
Speaker A
even need left and right anymore don't we want people thinking for themselves instead of according to some prepackaged ideological script you'll often hear politicians say things like we need to abandon tired old ideas like left and right and just find
06:48
Speaker A
solutions that work and this resonates with a lot of people who want politicians to work together for the common good instead of the red team versus blue team mentality of political parties who prioritize getting elected over finding solutions to our problems
07:02
Speaker A
that work for everyone but the problem is that there's no such thing as a solution that works for everyone you always have to ask works for whom because even when something improves the lives of the vast majority of people
07:16
Speaker A
there are always some people who are better off when everyone else was worse off like imagine if you could set up a magical fairy dust health care system that would have all of the top technology and you could choose whatever
07:28
Speaker A
doctor you wanted and there's a high number of doctors per person and everyone is enrolled automatically and it's absolutely free and I don't mean free as in paid for by taxes I mean free as in crazy Gumby gold free
07:40
Speaker A
like it's paid for by rubbing a magic Genie lamp the only caveat is that everyone has to use this same system you can't buy private health care well this would undoubtedly improve the lives and health care quality of 99.999% of the
07:55
Speaker A
world's population and it would also end doubtedly be the greatest health care system ever in the history of the world for 99.999% of the population but there would be the other point zero zero zero one percent of the population a handful
08:10
Speaker A
of super ultra wealthy people who currently whenever they scraped their knee can afford to have dr. Phil flown in by helicopter to come in and kiss their boo-boo well those people wouldn't have exclusive access to dr. Phil anymore
08:22
Speaker A
because everyone else would also have the same access to dr. Phil as they do which means that dr. Phil might be out there kissing some poor person's booboo and not be available for their boo-boos every single time they want him so even
08:35
Speaker A
though this is the greatest health care system ever devised this tiny group of people would be at a relative disadvantage also this new system would wipe out existing health care insurance companies they would become obsolete so some shareholders would lose out as
08:49
Speaker A
would employees of these insurance companies so even in the best most fantastic imaginary drug-induced hallucination scenarios solutions to problems don't just work they work for some people but not for others and with a left-right political spectrum does and why it's so
09:06
Speaker A
important is that it helps us identify who any given policy or politician or political party or ideology works for and who it works against there's an idea that's very common though a bit less of today and our increasingly polarized
09:20
Speaker A
times that left and right are just different ways of achieving the same basic goals it's true that most people whether we see ourselves as being on the left or on the right do share many of the same goals but left and right are not
09:33
Speaker A
primarily about different means to attain similar ends they are very much about opposing and incompatible ends opposing and incompatible visions about what the ideal world should look like and about who should get what and why and who should be in charge and why and
09:48
Speaker A
who shouldn't be in charge and why not who gets to make decisions and who has to put up with and follow those decisions to understand left and right first we need to understand that on an issue-by-issue basis there are all sorts
10:02
Speaker A
of situations where people simply have opposing and incompatible interests tenants normally want to have an affordable rent and landlords normally want to charge the highest possible rent employees usually prefer a job that's interesting and pays well but employers
10:17
Speaker A
generally just want you to work as much as possible for as little as possible and they want to be able to control what you do as much as possible citizens want their governments to be as transparent and accountable as possible
10:28
Speaker A
but government's usually want to be able to do their work without people watching over their every move sometimes the interest of these parties align temporarily and maybe you love your boss in your landlord but at least some of
10:40
Speaker A
your basic interests are always opposed like if your rent goes down then you're better off and your landlord is worse off and vice versa what the left-right political spectrum does is it helps understand who's who in conflicts between people and groups of people who
10:55
Speaker A
have these types of opposing interests so what do left and right actually mean a little earlier I mentioned the article the left-right political spectrum is bogus where the author tells us we should get rid of left and right and
11:07
Speaker A
replace them with equality versus hierarchy for this I want to award the author of that article the idiot savant prize for politics because that is exactly what left and right already mean for the past twelve thousand years or so
11:21
Speaker A
depending on which anthropologist you talk to you there have been societies where some people have had more power more rights and more wealth than others and since that time there have been those people who think that these inequalities are
11:32
Speaker A
morally justified necessary and good and there have been those people who think that these inequalities are morally unjustified unnecessary and bad those people who think that these inequalities are just or necessary are on the right and those who think that they should be
11:46
Speaker A
reduced or eliminated are on the left how do we know that left and right mean equality versus hierarchy and serve other popular definitions like the market for the state or the individual versus the collective or big government versus small government we know what
12:02
Speaker A
left and right actually mean because of the circumstances that gave birth to left and right as political terms and because of how these terms were used from that time up until the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United
12:12
Speaker A
States that mixed everything up and created the confusion about left and right that were mired in today the terms left and right enter our political vocabulary with the French Revolution which kicks off in 1789 the king of France had lost much of his authority as
12:27
Speaker A
a result of a succession of bungled crises Wars and famines and eventually delegates from all three of the traditional feudal era social orders the nobility the clergy and the common people gathered independently of the king in what they called the National
12:40
Speaker A
Assembly to make decisions about the present and future of France two major orientations emerged from the various delegates those who wanted to maintain the monarchy and the traditional social order as much as possible and those who wanted to move away from the traditional
12:55
Speaker A
social order towards liberal Enlightenment principles at first moving away from the traditional order meant a bit more political and cultural equality but then as events progressed this meant more and more radical forms of equality including economic equality and because
13:09
Speaker A
birds of a feather flock together this split was reflected in the physical positioning of the delegates in the room on the right side of the room you had the pro monarchy delegates and on the left side of the room
13:20
Speaker A
you had the Pro Revolution delegates and voila the political left and right are born we'll talk a bit more in the future about the French Revolution and the history of the terms left and right to make it clear to all of you people who
13:32
Speaker A
insist that left and right mean a bunch of other things besides hierarchy and equality why those other definitions can't be right but in this episode I want to focus on why hierarchy and equality are such fundamental concepts when it comes to
13:45
Speaker A
politics so what do hierarchy and equality mean and what do they have to do with politics we all know what equality means the condition of being the same and because we're talking about politics we're not talking about equality in terms of height or strength
13:58
Speaker A
or ability or intelligence like in some Harrison Bergeron story we're talking about equality in terms of decision-making power and remember from episode two we talked about four categories of politics meaning four main determinants of decision-making power political institutions economics culture
14:17
Speaker A
and Inter polity relations or politics economics culture and international for short so when we talk about political equality we're thinking about political institutions that give everyone an equal say like democracy or direct democracy further to the left we're thinking about
14:34
Speaker A
equality of rights between different cultural groups we're thinking about economic equality because usually the more wealth that you have the more decision-making power that you have like the power to hire people and tell them what to do all day or the power to hire
14:47
Speaker A
lobbyists or give donations to influence political parties that make decisions for everyone or the power to get people to give you things you want by throwing money at them and we're thinking about equality between different polities polities meaning political units like
15:00
Speaker A
nation-states or tribes cities provinces etc meanwhile hierarchy means inequality but inequality ranked according to some value so an apple and a banana and a watermelon are unequal but they're just randomly unequal there's no hierarchy but if you start ranking your fruits
15:18
Speaker A
according to which one has the most sugar or which one is bigger or which one you like more then you end up with a hierarchy of fruits ranked according to sweetness or size like fruits humans have all sorts of differences in terms
15:32
Speaker A
of body type personality ability geography religion but when it comes to politics what we're interested in is hierarchies of decision making power who gets to decide and who doesn't who has rights and who doesn't who gets to give
15:45
Speaker A
orders and who has to obey orders who gets to do what they want and who has to do what someone else wants all day so we're not interested in hierarchies of height or hierarchies of competence as doctor professor Jordan Peterson likes
15:57
Speaker A
to talk about unless they have some relationship to inequality of decision-making power like if having white skin gives you more rights than having black skin then that becomes political if being better at math gives you more money than someone who isn't
16:09
Speaker A
good at math then that becomes political and again we're looking at the four categories or axes of politics so we're looking at hierarchies and political institutions culture economics and Inter polity relations hierarchical political institutions are things like monarchies or dictatorships
16:26
Speaker A
the top-down command structure of the army or the opt-out dictatorship of the owner in a capitalist workplace cultural hierarchies are when people of one cultural category like a religion or gender or taste or race have more rights than people from another cultural
16:41
Speaker A
category economic hierarchy means when there are rich people and there are poor people resulting in different levels of decision-making power and we're also looking at hierarchy between polities usually Nations so we're looking at situations of empire or colonialism
16:54
Speaker A
where the decision-making power of people in one nation is impeded or determined by people of a stronger nation but it can also be power relationships between tribes or off the hierarchy between a city and a state and a federal or national government for
17:08
Speaker A
practical examples of left-right dynamics in our everyday lives we can look at those situations that I mentioned earlier when there's an inherent conflict of interest between people in a hierarchical situation so let's take the capitalist workplace you have a political hierarchy
17:22
Speaker A
meaning a decision-making hierarchy with owners on top they have all the decision-making power and they delegate some power down to management or in the middle who use that power to control the workers who are on the bottom and each
17:34
Speaker A
one of those general ranks in a decision-making hierarchy is called a class which just means a category but since we're talking about politics we're talking about decision-making category the owner or the capitalist classes on top the management classes in the middle
17:49
Speaker A
and the working class is on the bottom and if we were talking about the army we'd be looking at the officer class versus the enlisted class when it comes to conflicts between workers and owners the left-wing position is the one that
18:01
Speaker A
flattens out or equalizes the hierarchy the most in other words the one that favors the workers usually in a sense of giving more money or more power or more rights to workers well the right wing position is the one that favors the
18:13
Speaker A
existing hierarchy in other words the owners gives more money or power or rights to owners and managers or if we're talking about cultural hierarchies like in the United States before the Civil Rights Act when black people had less rights than white people the left
18:27
Speaker A
wing position was that they should have equal rights and the right wing position was that discriminatory laws should be allowed to remain in force in terms of economics which means anything to do with the resources and groups if we look
18:40
Speaker A
at health care in the United States in the year 2020 an entirely tax-funded universal health care plan like what Bernie Sanders advocates is a left-wing plan compared to the status quo in a number of ways first of all it
18:52
Speaker A
eliminates private insurance so that everyone has the exact same health care plan as a right regardless of income this eliminates one of the benefits of being on top of the wealth hierarchy and that you couldn't buy better health care
19:04
Speaker A
than everyone else has it also flattens out decision-making hierarchies taking away decision-making power from insurance companies and putting it in the hands of doctors and patients and a government which theoretically at least is supposed to represent the people and it reduces
19:19
Speaker A
wealth hierarchy in general in that it forces wealthier people to pay more taxes into the system than poor people have to pay thus reducing their overall pile of wealth we can see left and right in the different responses to the corona
19:32
Speaker A
virus pandemic as of late March 2020 when I'm recording this we can see a lot of the government's rushing in to throw money at big business banks and landowners while measures to help workers and unemployed people only cover
19:45
Speaker A
narrow slivers the people who are affected lots of people don't qualify for these measures and to get help you have to deal with complicated means testing requirements confusing paperwork and other obstacles landlords get mortgages suspended but tenants have to keep paying rent or else
20:00
Speaker A
evictions get suspended but tenants debts keep accumulating ensuring that they're all just be evicted when the pandemic is over and breaking as I edit this United States President Donald J Trump just announced that he thinks it's worth it to let
20:13
Speaker A
millions of people die rather than halting the economy for a few months to slow the progression of the disease to manageable levels Texas lieutenant governor Don Patrick quickly went on Fox News to tell Tucker Carlson that his quote heart was lifted unquote by the
20:27
Speaker A
president's announcement and he went on to joyfully explain to viewers that the grandparents of America will be happy to sacrifice themselves to help keep the economy going uninterrupted for their grandchildren meanwhile Vanity Fair reports that the u.s. president refuses
20:43
Speaker A
to use his legal power to order private companies to produce the medical supplies like masks and ventilators which his country desperately lacks because the CEOs of various corporations told him that it would harm their profits in future episodes we'll look
20:57
Speaker A
into how things like big businesses organized lobbying efforts combined with ideology culture social networks and ordinary people's lack of organized lobbying efforts leads to these sorts of results but for now what's relevant is that when you help the big guy instead
21:13
Speaker A
of the little guy like when you sacrifice millions of a week people so that the rich don't have to pay any taxes or lose any profits that's right-wing politics and when you help the little guy at the expense of the big
21:23
Speaker A
guy like by suspending rents and mortgages and sending out a universal food allowance that can be reclaimed from people who didn't need it at tax time and by making banks and the wealthiest taxpayers absorb the brunt of it
21:35
Speaker A
that's left-wing politics now some of you are listening to this thinking what is this crap I'm on the right because I support the little guy I think renters deserve a break and that banks shouldn't be bailed out and I hate
21:48
Speaker A
dictatorship it's those leftist communist governments that crush the little guy and that are the authoritarian dictatorships it's that leftist Obama that bailed out the banks and let the home owners go under and lose their homes so to make
22:00
Speaker A
sense of this there are a few things to understand first you need to understand that you might like to think of yourself as being on the right and you might be politically conservative but if you support democracy over Authority
22:12
Speaker A
arian ISM you're not actually on the right at least not when it comes to political institutions you are on the Left democracy is a form of political equality everyone gets an equal say equality is on the left it's important
22:26
Speaker A
to note here that while conservative and liberal are often used synonymously with right and left that is just a mistake liberalism and conservatism are a mix of left-wing and right-wing ideas which we'll look at in another episode and
22:39
Speaker A
FoxNews might find it convenient to call Obama a leftist but when you bail out banks while adding homeowners go under and when most of your cabinet are Wall Street hacks that's right wing politics left-wing politics would be bailing out
22:54
Speaker A
homeowners and then confiscating the bank's another thing to understand particularly for people who identifies being on the Left is that those authoritarian communist governments like the Soviet Union or Cuba they might be on the left when it comes to things like
23:08
Speaker A
economic distribution or male-female equality but they're actually on the right when it comes to political organization so-called communist regimes are extremely hierarchical and therefore right-wing in terms of political organization we'll look at communism socialism and communist countries in
23:24
Speaker A
another episode but one thing that causes confusion about left and right is that you can be on the right in one area but on the left in another another very common example is someone who thinks that we need to be very strict about
23:35
Speaker A
immigration so right wing on a cultural issue immigration status is a culturally determined hierarchy between citizens and immigrants and that same person also thinks that there should be more economic equality and that rich people should pay higher taxes so this person
23:49
Speaker A
is right-wing on immigration but left-wing on economics even if they think of themselves as a big right winger nationalists Trump fan so it causes confusion that a lot of people are really attached to left and right wing labels without really knowing what
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Speaker A
they mean but another thing that causes confusion is that some people straight up a lie about where they are in the spectrum for cynical PR purposes so given the way that Fox News has turned the word leftist into an insult you'll
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Speaker A
never hear someone like Tucker Carlson admit that as critiques of the Republicans and Democrats on economic issues are frequently coming from the left even though he probably knows enough to understand that this is the case or if you take Stalin who is the
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Speaker A
dictator of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until 1953 back in Stalin's day the meaning of left and right was much more clearly understood than it is today and Stalin's surely understood that as authoritarianism represented a dramatic shift to the right but because
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Speaker A
his entire legitimacy depended on his status as the leader of the world's socialist movement which was the global movement of the left there's no way he would ever allow himself to be described that way and in fact Stalin is one of
24:55
Speaker A
the big reasons that the terms left and right have become so mixed up today as we'll see in another episode another thing that can sometimes be confusing is that since left and right our relative terms like hot and cold or up and down
25:07
Speaker A
something that's considered a left-wing position today might be considered a right-wing position a hundred years later or in a different place so early on in the French Revolution the delegates on the left of the National Assembly were pushing for things like a
25:21
Speaker A
constitutional monarchy with elections and equal representation for everyone regardless of their noble clerical or common or status and they advocated things like protection of private property and for freedom to trade without government interference but a hundred years later during the Third
25:36
Speaker A
Republic those were the positions of right-wing parties in France why because the left and right are relative and by that time you no longer had a monarchy and the monarchist movement itself was dying out and now you had socialist parties on the
25:49
Speaker A
Left demanding economic equality on top of the representational and civil rights equality which had already been achieved okay so now let's talk a little bit more about hierarchy because hierarchies are a fundamental part of politics in any large complex society political
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Speaker A
hierarchies develop in social animals like humans for three main purposes and you'll hear people on the right pointing to the first and sometimes second reasons and people on the Left focusing on the third reason number one is that
26:18
Speaker A
political hierarchies increase efficiency so that a group of people can act like a unit and accomplish tasks without everyone constantly arguing about what should be done and who should do it two familiar examples are in an army or
26:31
Speaker A
in a capitalist workplace like I described earlier and the idea is that even though it's more fun to give orders than to take orders everyone even the people at the bottom taking the orders are theoretically better off working
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Speaker A
together and accomplishing things as a unit instead of arguing over everything and accomplishing very little number two is that hierarchies reduce the amount of conflicts that people have by deciding in advance who wins and who loses in situations of potential conflict and
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Speaker A
theoretically even though people on the lower ranks have to give way to the needs and choices of those in high ranks the lower ranks still get more than they would have gotten if everyone had to fight about everything all the time so
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Speaker A
in two chimpanzees see a pile of bananas the high ranking chimpanzee takes what he wants and leave some for the lower ranking chimpanzee so that they don't have to fight and kill each other each time they see a pile of bananas
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Speaker A
similarly when a fast food company rakes in a bunch of profits the CEO gets zillions of dollars while the service employees get minimum wage and have trouble paying their bills but theoretically the service employees are still better off and they would be if
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Speaker A
they were just killing each other and fighting over who gets how much instead of collaborating to generate more wealth for everyone and number three and this is foundational to the left is that hierarchies allow some people to hog
27:46
Speaker A
power wealth and freedom at the expense of other people so even when a particular hierarchy is totally detrimental to society even if there are more efficient and more egalitarian ways of organizing things it is usually still beneficial to the
27:58
Speaker A
people at the top of a hierarchy to maintain that hierarchy so they'll try to keep it going as much as possible so they can keep hogging as much power rights and wealth for themselves as they can get away with so maybe a McDonald's
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Speaker A
worker would make a lot more money if McDonald's were a worker owned and controlled cooperative and maybe the worker would also have more decision-making power more job security and more job satisfaction and maybe the company would offer cheaper prices to
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Speaker A
consumers as is usually the case with cooperatives and maybe they would just make choices that respect the environment and local communities more than they do now and maybe it would be just so much better for society as a
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Speaker A
whole if corporations were all cooperatives but if that happened shareholders and directors wouldn't be swimming in buckets of profit and power so they will never ever let that happen now because hierarchies always put some people out of this advantage hierarchies
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Speaker A
are always at risk of being challenged for this reason hierarchies always come with some sort of justification like even if it's a 100 percent number 3 exploitation hierarchy like slavery there is always some kind of reasoning for it an efficiency
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Speaker A
justification a necessity justification a religious justification a moral justification a natural scientific justification or a combination of all these and sometimes it's just pretending that there is no hierarchy at all like in a couple of episodes when we look at
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Speaker A
the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union we'll see how both sides would offer all sorts of justifications for their political or economic hierarchies but sometimes they would also argue that there was no real fixed hierarchy sure
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Speaker A
you have rich bosses and poor workers but any poor person with talent and gumption could become a zillionaire business owner in the United States just like John Rockefeller did and sure you have dirt poor peasants and comfortable Communist Party bureaucrats with summer
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Speaker A
dachas but any dirt poor peasant with talent could rise to the top of the Soviet Union like comrade Nikita Khrushchev did too classless societies fighting for world supremacy Marx's wet dream so in left-right political debates you'll see people who are on the right
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Speaker A
on any given issue even if they're pretending to be on the left making practical and moral justifications for a particular hierarchy or pretending that it doesn't exist and people on the left on any given issue regardless of what
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Speaker A
they call themselves are reminding us that a particular hierarchy does exist and arguing that is unjustified and making moral and practical arguments for why things should be more equal for example in a pure capitalist workplace there is a hierarchy of power rights
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Speaker A
wealth and working conditions based on bargaining power normally the boss has overwhelming bargaining power because he owns the means of production and therefore he has dictatorship Authority and the workers only option if he doesn't like something is to give up his
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Speaker A
salary and leave and if a worker produces ten thousand dollars a month in value if he has a lot of bargaining power maybe he can keep seven or eight thousand of that a month but if he has low bargaining power he only gets to
30:52
Speaker A
keep a thousand dollars a month or even less and high bargaining power workers don't just get more of a share of the value that they produced but they also get better working conditions while very low bargaining power worker
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Speaker A
have to harm their bodies and pee in diapers like at Amazon warehouses or Purdue chicken processing plants or in third-world sweatshops and they get to die from lack of healthcare is this fair is it necessary is it the best way of
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Speaker A
organising economic production the right wing position will be that yes it is fair the boss puts in the risk and the work and the investment to start up the workplace so he morally has earned the right to have the authority and the
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Speaker A
surplus over wages paid and yes it's necessary because if there's no potential to earn more profit then no one would take those risks or start any businesses at all and if workers want more pay then it's their responsibility
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Speaker A
to increase their bargaining power by making themselves more useful to employers by getting more education and skills or else is their responsibility to start their own businesses and become business owners themselves also it's fair because everyone has an equal
31:54
Speaker A
opportunity to succeed there are no laws and pure capitalism to prohibit a poor person or a black person or a woman or a Jew from becoming an owner or getting an education and therefore it's fair and it's not really a hierarchy in the first
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Speaker A
place people are choosing to be workers instead of owners because that's what they prefer and the left-wing position would be no it's not fair why should some people spend their entire lives taking orders from other people just because the owner inherited the money
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Speaker A
that he started his business with from his dad or because he inherited the whole business from his dad and why should a person have 90% of the value of their work sucked away just because they're weak and the other person is
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Speaker A
strong and just because there are no loss preventing someone from being an owner doesn't mean that there aren't a million other obstacles that make it functionally impossible for most people and why should people who are good at business deserve so much wealth and
32:43
Speaker A
power while people who aren't good at business deserve to die from lack of healthcare and furthermore it's not necessary it's just legalized hogging where people who have more wealth gain more wealth there are other successful ways of organizing work places like
32:57
Speaker A
cooperatives where the workers are the owners and get to have democracy at work instead of dictatorship or like socialism where the whole community that's affected by an enterprise from workers to the local neighborhood to the consumers gets to have a say and you can
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Speaker A
also have an intermediate centrist position which is a compromise between the left and right positions so in this case centrist position would be to keep capitalist power relations but you create laws to give low bargaining power workers a little more bargaining power
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Speaker A
like minimum wage laws or overtime pay laws or laws that say that you have to give workers bathroom breaks and remember left and right are relative to whatever you're comparing to like if you're comparing to the status quo or
33:37
Speaker A
relative to what your question is in this case the question of is capitalism fair now justified or not people who support existing hierarchies meaning people on the right particularly those people who benefit from those hierarchies don't usually like it when
33:52
Speaker A
people are running around asking questions about whether the hierarchies that they benefit from are legitimate or not they usually want you to take it for granted that they're legitimate that these hierarchies are not only justified and necessary but that they're part of
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Speaker A
nature and this is why the left-right political spectrum is inherently a left-wing concept by making you look at politics in terms of hierarchy versus equality it implicitly invites you to notice the existence of hierarchies and the fact that some people think that
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Speaker A
these hierarchies are not legitimate or justified that's why the right has always been uncomfortable with the left-right political spectrum from the very beginning of the use of those terms in the National Assembly in France right up until the Cold War when the right
34:30
Speaker A
changed the meaning of those terms to mean market versus state or collective versus individual or Liberty versus equality concepts which frame politics in right-wing terms as we'll see in a future episode so if we look at the book
34:44
Speaker A
that I mentioned earlier by self-identified conservative author Yuval Levin the great debate Edmund Burke Thomas Paine and the birth of left and right although he doesn't define left and right you can infer that he thinks that left and right are about
34:57
Speaker A
one's attitude towards change not about hierarchy versus equality even though almost every quote that he cites from Edmund Burke is about justifying hierarchy and almost every quote that he cites from Thomas Paine is about the morality of equality
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Speaker A
according to Levin would make someone a right-winger is that they want slow cautious evolutionary change like admin Burke did well what makes someone a left-winger is that they want fast thoughtless revolutionary change that throws away the wisdom of the ages
35:24
Speaker A
compare this to socialist writer Corey Robin author of the reactionary mind a book about the nature of right-wing thought Robin doesn't define left and right either but his book takes for granted that the left seeks equality and the main thesis of his book is that
35:39
Speaker A
the rights primary mo is inventing new justifications for hierarchy and new ways to preserve hierarchy in a reaction to equalizing challenges from the left and like you when I first asserted that left and right refer to a quality versus
35:53
Speaker A
hierarchy if you're someone who's really into politics and hierarchy versus equality made immediate sense to you you're probably someone whose politics are generally on the left and if you're really into politics and you think that hierarchy versus equality is irrelevant
36:06
Speaker A
to politics or it's archaic or childishly oversimplified or that it just doesn't speak to you then your politics probably lean right even if you see yourself as a liberal or a centrist and that's because you're not thinking about hierarchies or inequalities you're
36:21
Speaker A
taking hierarchies for granted and instead you're thinking about things like collectivism versus individualism and Liberty or you're thinking about common sense win-win solutions to our problems that work for everyone in our democratic age people tend to think of
36:35
Speaker A
equality as a sort of moral baseline and a hierarchy needs an excuse or a justification so you'll tend to see more moral arguments for equality and more efficiency arguments for hierarchy but just because something is more equal doesn't necessarily mean that it's any
36:48
Speaker A
good even morally there's a book by philosopher dr. professor Harry Frankfurt called on equality where he argues that no one should care about economic inequality and that we shouldn't worry about the fact that some people have enormous unimaginable
37:03
Speaker A
mountains of wealth we should only focus on whether the poorest have enough now this is a really naive third grade argument for reasons that I discussed briefly in a short video that you can find on the wettest politics YouTube
37:15
Speaker A
channel called why inequality matters even when the poorest have enough but dr. Frankfurt's book does have one useful passage where he clearly illustrates how equality can sometimes be a bad thing he says imagine if you have eight people with the potentially
37:30
Speaker A
fatal disease and there are only seven doses of the cure if you don't get a full dose the Cure doesn't work so if you divide the doses equally everyone dies so even if sharing equally might be your moral ideal sometimes there just
37:43
Speaker A
isn't enough to go around if you want a functioning society and you have to figure something else out maybe you'll draw straws at random or you'll have to establish some kind of hierarchy of importance maybe the oldest person or sickest person should die so
37:56
Speaker A
the rest can live furthermore while human beings can and have organized in very egalitarian societies and in the future we'll take a look at perfectly functional hunter-gatherer societies where men and women are equal and there are no fixed Authority positions in
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Speaker A
society at all any large organization of people doing complex coordinated tasks needs some kind of structure or organization and it's really difficult to organize anything complex without some kind of hierarchy like if you've ever worked at a badly organized health
38:25
Speaker A
food co-op or an anarchist bookstore you've experienced what it's like to have an egalitarian organization with no structure it sucks people droning on about nothing at endless meetings endless arguments about every my new issue it kind of feels like a human body
38:39
Speaker A
with five arms and no head and no feet the more people that are involved the more it sucks organizations need structure they need delegation of duties and division of labor for larger organizations usually needs some kind of hierarchy but hierarchies can be more
38:55
Speaker A
authoritarian or they can be more democratic in other words they can be more right-wing or more left-wing on the right you have your regular autocratic or top-down hierarchies where Authority flows from the top to the bottom but on
39:07
Speaker A
the left you have democratic bottom-up hierarchies where all members have an equal say in choosing who gets to have temporary Authority in terms of workplaces an example of a Democratic hierarchy is a cooperative where workers elect their managers and their CEO and
39:22
Speaker A
they can even be involved in decisions about how much people get paid you can look up the Mondragon cooperative which runs supermarkets gas stations banks and all sorts of other businesses in Europe for an example of a large successful
39:33
Speaker A
cooperative and this political equality translates into economic equality Mondragon enterprises have an average of 5 to 1 pay ratio between the top executive position and the lowest wage worker compared to an average 278 to 1 pay ratio between CEOs and median
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Speaker A
workers in American corporations a co-operative is - an ordinary corporation as a representative democracy is - a dictatorship the might look the same if you're just visiting and walking around but they're very different if you live and work
40:03
Speaker A
there okay so that's enough new information for now since this podcast is basically a political literacy course we'll be building on these concepts in every episode for now keep everything you've learned in mind as you go about your day in your Corona bunker or as you
40:18
Speaker A
encounter political media and as you navigate through the various hierarchies in your life and in this pandemic that'll probably be your landlord your government and your employer if you still have one hopefully the world will make a little bit more sense than it did
40:30
Speaker A
before you listen to this if so please share this podcast and rate and review it on iTunes and subscribe on patreon so I can keep it going if you have any questions comments or criticisms about anything please send them to worldwide
40:45
Speaker A
scrotes at gmail.com and I'll make special response episodes to address them or also address them in future episodes before we go today I want to leave you with a quote that captures some of the spirit of left and right in
40:58
Speaker A
today's politics in Alexandria Acacio Cortez's endorsement video of Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign she talked about when she used to work as a waitress and says quote I had been working 12-hour days I didn't have health insurance I was being paid less
41:15
Speaker A
than a living wage and I didn't think that I deserved any of those things I thought that's just how life was unquote that's the right-wing view of the world there are these big hierarchies of wealth hierarchies of power hierarchies
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Speaker A
of access to important resources like health care and that's just how the world works if you're at the bottom of those hierarchies it's because that's where you deserve to be you're not working hard enough or you didn't go out
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Speaker A
and get the type of skills that one needs to be successful or you didn't inherit enough money because your parents were irresponsible and a right-wing thinker would go further these hierarchies aren't just how the world works they're good they
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Speaker A
incentivize people to make the right choices which benefit themselves and society as a whole and these hierarchies are necessary for society to function and the only way to avoid them would be a massive government tyranny which is an
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Speaker A
even worse hierarchy aoc continues quote it wasn't until I heard of a man by the name of Bernice Anders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care housing and a living wage unquote
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Speaker A
and that's the left-wing view of the world every person inherently deserves the benefit of what society has to offer and for that to happen people need to fight the established hierarchies of the day political economic cultural and international like big corporations who
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Speaker A
dominate the government or like racism in the criminal justice system and these hierarchies are not only unfair and immoral but they're unnecessary and counterproductive and now you understand left and right you're welcome until next time see ya
Topics:left-right spectrumpolitical ideologyhorseshoe theoryclass conflicthierarchyequalitypolitical scienceconservatismliberalismWhat Is Politics podcast

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