Ever heard the saying “if you are not a Liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a Conservative at 35 you have no brain”?
I always thought this was mildly amusing, but lately I have had a bug in my brain about the nature of leftist politics so I have put some more thought into it. A few things just don’t seem to add up. So let me toss out a few threads and then try to bring them all together.
First Thread: in The Third Pillar, economist Raghuram Rajan argues that the State, the Market and the Community are the three primary social institutions of society, and the the State and the Market can fail without a strong community. Fellow economist Arnold Kling has this to say about the three pillars:
“One can think of each of the three pillars as having an ideological base. The strongest support for the market comes from libertarian ideology. The strongest support for the state comes from progressive ideology. And I would argue that the strongest support for community comes from (socially) conservative ideology.”
Second Thread: in Pedagogy of Freedom, Brazilian teacher and author Paulo Freire makes the case for an explicitly progressive approach to education. One key component here is that progressive education is student centered, and constructivist. That is, instead of molding the student to the will of the teacher (who represents societies authority over them), a progressive teacher will try to facilitate an environment where both student and teacher can learn together.
Third Thread: In The Goodness Paradox, primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that humanity has a long history of ganging together to take down those at the top. This tendency favors those who can collaborate over the strong. However, Wrangham argues that this movement toward collaboration enables even greater evil (i.e., mass genocide as opposed to impulsive violence).
So here are three propositions that correspond very roughly to the three threads above.
- The left prefers state intervention, while the right prefers free markets
- The left focuses on individual expression, while the right promotes hierarchy
- The left is concerned with inequality, while the right prefers to reward merit
People often focus on the first issue when making distinctions about left and right. For example, the typical two-dimensional breakdown of party affiliation looks something like this:
Others prefer to add other dimensions, but the key variable is still a preference for more or less government:
For me this just leaves a big question mark. Why would the left prefer state intervention when it comes to economics, and less intervention when it comes to social issues (i.e., individual expression)? To me this indicates that it really isn’t about the state at all…there is something deeper.
I propose that deeper thing is personality. Political orientation is driven by emotional experience. I have previously focused a lot on two dimensions of personality (growth vs. risk orientation and people vs. idea orientation). But I don’t think these map particular well to the left/right divide.
But there are two personality traits that don’t map quite as well into these dimensions: conscientiousness and agreeableness. I think these are really the key to understanding political differences. In fact, I would go even a bit deeper and focus on the sub-component of conscientiousness called orderliness and the sub-component of agreeableness called sympathy.
So, conservatives want things to be in their proper order, and liberals want to eliminate inequality. The emotional experience associated with wanting things to be ordered is something like disgust, and sympathy is an emotional expression of discomfort with inequality.
Perhaps these personality traits dominate politics in part because they are inherently more political. Both the desire for order and equality in social relations are ways of enforcing social cohesion, but they are clearly in tension. Whenever you build a machine, some cogs get crushed (or people get crushed into cogs).
The ideas in The Goodness Paradox really helped me realize just how strong this tendency to avoid inequality really is. It’s fascinating that a society that has a mechanism for tossing down its strongest individuals actually has a competitive advantage. In fact, you could say this is one of the key defining elements of humanity. Humans are social animals, and those humans that are better socialized are more effective at, well, just about everything.
So I want to talk a little bit more about making machines, because I think both progressive and conservative tendencies are essential for building effective social machines. The conservative tendency is to make sure that everyone has a well defined role, characterized by predictable behaviors. Thus, conservatives are threatened when people misbehave or act outside their role. The dispute over gay marriage is a good example of this. Conservatives see the well defined roles of mother and father, husband and wife as essential to a well functioning society. Mess with the roles, and the whole thing falls apart. Progressives see that some people are being treated unequally, and ask what harm is there in letting people express their individualism?
I hope it is obvious why having well defined roles is essential to a functioning machine. But what about equality? Why is that essential? I think there are two parts to it. First, if inequality becomes too great, some people will revolt. So tossing out the strongman is a way of preempting total social meltdown. But tossing out the strongman requires a great deal of cooperation, so perhaps there is some deep evolutionary connection between those who have a desire to collaborate and those who are moved by inequality.
In other words, sympathy is connected to a desire to break down inequality, which is connected to the tendency to cooperate. And cooperation is essential to a well functioning machine.
So basically, role differentiation and cooperation are both essential to a functioning society, but they are in tension. People are born with an innate tendency both to enforce social norms and roles, and to cooperate in order to bring down tyrants. Where you fit politically depends largely on which tendency is stronger.
Ok, so what about the title of my post? One of the things that has previously confused me is why progressives would be more comfortable with state intervention. Isn’t the state just a giant machine that forces everyone to comply?
I think the answer is that liberals see the state largely as an apparatus for checking the true power in society: money. The market is the machine, and the state is the revolution.
In a country like the US, this may largely be true. Sure there are a few political dynasties, but the wealthy have the real power. Where things get interesting is in a country like the Soviet Union (or China, Cuba, Venezuela or any other communist regime), i.e., where the state takes over the economy. Then the leaders of the party are no longer checking the power of the rich. They are the power.
In other words, if a communist party takes power, it necessarily becomes conservative because in order to survive it has to set up an economic apparatus that is mainly concerned with retaining that power. A communist government assigns everyone a role and makes sure everyone complies with the expectations of that role. It creates a hierarchy.
Some leftists have this tendency to deny that pure progressivism has failed by arguing that it has never really been implemented. They are right. As soon as the state takes over the means of production it assumes the task of setting up a social machine, and then necessarily ceases to be progressive. True leftists are always revolutionary. Their role in society is to bring down the powerful, and if they become powerful they become conservative.
