As the political scholars (and brothers) Hyrum and Verlan Lewis write, “ideologies do not define tribes, tribes define ideologies.” To the Lewises and likeminded social scientists, “progressivism” and “conservatism” don’t name enduring philosophies of government, so much as ever-shifting rationalizations for the interests of rival alliances.
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But in the Lewises’ view, the belief that all of the left and right’s disputes reflect one essential moral conflict — an idea they dub “ideological essentialism” — is even more pernicious. By convincing conservatives and progressives that all of their movement’s positions flow from their most cherished ideals, essentialism discourages ideologues from thinking through discrete issues on the merits. And by telling America’s rival factions that “there are two (and only two) ways to approach politics,” essentialism fuels Manichaean thinking and partisan strife.
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The ideological spectrum was born in France about 237 years ago.
At the revolutionary National Assembly in 1789, radicals sat on the left side of the chamber and monarchists on the right, thereby lending Western politics its defining metaphor: a one-dimensional continuum between egalitarian revolution and hierarchical conservation. The more a faction (or policy) promoted change in service of equality, the farther left its place on this imaginary line; the more it defended existing hierarchies in the name of order, the farther right its spot.
European politics began organizing itself around this metaphor in the 19th century. But for its first 150 years or so, the American republic mostly made do without it.
As Hyrum and Verlan Lewis note in their book, The Myth of Left and Right, early American political parties did not define themselves in spatial terms. Nor did they fit neatly into our contemporary ideological binary.
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It wasn’t until the early 20th century that mainstream American intellectuals and politicians began speaking of politics as a struggle between the “progressive” left and “conservative” right — with the former largely defined by its commitment to government intervention in the economy, and the latter by its fondness for laissez-faire.
This ideological conflict initially divided the parties internally. But gradually, beginning with the New Deal, the words “progressive,” “left-wing,” and “Democrat” became synonymous, as did the words “conservative,” “right-wing,” and “Republican.”
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Over the second half of the 20th century, however, the number of salient political issues in the United States steadily multiplied. America’s “progressive” and “conservative” coalitions developed disparate stances on civil rights, abortion, military intervention, environmental protection, immigration, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, gun control, policing, and countless other topics. And as these disagreements mounted, the one-dimensional ideological spectrum — and with it, the very concept of a “left” and “right” — became increasingly incoherent, according to the Lewises.
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Of course, “equality versus hierarchy” is just one popular framing of the left and right’s fundamental divide. But the Lewises suggest that all others, such as “big government versus small government or “equality versus liberty,” also collapse under scrutiny.
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Their argument isn’t that the contents of “progressive” and “conservative” ideology are partly arbitrary and historically contingent, but that they are entirely so. In their view, coherent moral principles might justify the left and right’s respective positions on any single issue. But no philosophical assumption, or even psychological disposition, ties together any meaningful number of progressive and conservative policies.
Yet this theory sits uneasily with a basic fact: While some right-wing and left-wing positions vary between eras and countries, most do not.
For the past six decades, throughout the Western world, certain policy stances have clustered together with striking regularity. In the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia and elsewhere, parties of the left have consistently been more supportive of income redistribution, minority rights, collective bargaining, and feminism than those of the right.
If progressivism and conservatism have no essential substance — but merely reflect the propagandistic myths of two contingent coalitions — then one would expect wild variation in each ideology’s contents across national contexts. Instead, certain alliances and policy bundles recur again and again.
In an interview, Hyrum Lewis attributed this merely to the modern media environment: In the digital age, foreign ideologues can import America’s culture wars. “As the globe has become more unified with globalization,” Lewis told me, “we’ve seen the correlations between these different issue positions become tighter.”
But there are reasons to doubt that this fully explains the phenomenon.
Progressives may not hold a monopoly on concern for equality in every sense of that term. But relative to conservatives, the left is plainly more committed to reducing the disadvantages of historically subordinated groups. And this moral commitment plausibly explains why progressives — across borders and time periods — have tended to be more supportive of income redistribution (which mitigates class inequality), equal pay legislation (which mitigates gender inequality), and anti-discrimination laws (which mitigate racial inequality) than the right has been.
Conservatives, for their part, readily agree that they are less concerned with class, race, and gender inequality than their left-wing counterparts. The mainstream right does not justify this position by celebrating “hierarchy” per se. But it does insist that progressive proposals for combating inequality put too little weight on liberty, stability, respect for earned distinctions, or other important goods.
Each side therefore can coherently argue that its stances on multiple issues flow from one overarching principle (its sense of equality’s importance relative to other ideals). And this philosophical unity may help explain the recurrence of certain policy bundles across eras and nations.
Moreover, even some logically unrelated left-wing and right-wing policies may nonetheless reflect a common ethical intuition. For example, there is some evidence that the left and right’s disagreements on the seemingly distinct issues of immigration, foreign aid, and social welfare spending are all rooted in each side’s degree of moral universalism — which is to say, the extent to which its members are more trusting and altruistic toward their inner circles than toward strangers.
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…moral universalists aren’t necessarily more empathetic than moral particularists are; it is just that the former’s social concern is spread more evenly than the latter’s between their family, friends, countrymen, and humans in general. In other words, universalists might be less generous to their neighbors than particularists, but more compassionate to people they don’t know.
Put in these terms, many conservatives self-identify as moral particularists, arguing that progressives do not adequately prioritize their families over strangers, nor their fellow Americans over foreigners.
This split over universalism might not define the left-right divide in all eras and places; progressivism has at times been nationalistic and conservatism, cosmopolitan. But polarization over particularism plausibly imbues today’s partisan rift with some deeper moral substance.
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Yet ideological essentialism … [casts] all policy debates, even the most technical, as referenda on bedrock moral principles. This framework is attractive to partisans, as it reduces the cognitive burdens of political advocacy: It is much easier to decide how you feel about one philosophical premise than to carefully adjudicate dozens of technocratic claims. Further, when a policy argument is understood as a gauge of moral character — rather than a test of empirical propositions — it becomes a better vehicle for partisans’ self-expression and communal bonding.
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