Episode 297: Hyrum Lewis on The Myth of Left and Right (February 19, 2025)

In this episode of The Open Door, panelists Thomas Storck, Andrew Sorokowski, and Christopher Zehnder interview Hyrum Lewis on the Left/Right Binary.

1.  Can you explain the thesis of your book? Why do you speak of the Left and Right as being a myth?
2. How did you come to see through the Left/Right binary?
3.  Given some of the obvious counter-examples to the prevailing narrative, why is it so established and powerful? Intellectual laziness? Vested interests?  cf. p. 64ff.
4. Is part of the problem the fact that political scientists, by and large, do not see themselves as concerned with ideas as such, but with political behavior and data as raw material for scientific analysis, much like chemists studying the reactions of chemical elements?
5. Are you familiar with the Nolan chart? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart   Do you see that as much of an improvement?
6. If we are to make use of any kind of political typologies, how do we deal with the fact that people can hold similar or identical views on the same issue but for very different reasons? Cf. pp. 63, 88ff.
7. Does it make sense, in your opinion, to speak more in terms of broad philosophic-political movements and perhaps with those movements we could speak of left or right? E.g., socialism, fascism, classical liberalism, etc.

As American politics descends into a battle of anger and hostility between two groups called "left" and "right," people increasingly ask: What is the essential difference between these two ideological groups? In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis provide the surprising answer: nothing. As the authors argue, there is no enduring philosophy, disposition, or essence uniting the various positions associated with the liberal and conservative ideologies of today. Far from being an eternal dividing line of American politics, the political spectrum came to the United States in the 1920s and, since then, left and right have evolved in so many unpredictable and even contradictory ways that there is currently nothing other than tribal loyalty holding together the many disparate positions that fly under the banners of "liberal" and "conservative." Powerfully argued and cutting against the grain of most scholarship on polarization in America, this book shows why the idea that the political spectrum measures deeply held worldviews is the central political myth of our time and a major cause of the confusion and vitriol that characterize public discourse.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Left-Right-Verlan-Lewis/dp/0197680623

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to WCAT radio, your home for authentic Catholic programming.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome to the Open Door with the host Thomas Dorreck
and co host ANDREWS. Rokowski and Christopher Zinder. Our guest
today is Professor Hiram Lewis, professor of history at Brigham
Young State University, Idaho campus, who will talk about an
extremely important topic, that is the idea that political positions
can be characterized by left and right. He is the

(00:30):
author of co author writer of the book The Myth
of the Left and the Right. So let's begin, as
we do with our customary prayer. Name and the father
son of the lowis Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit, Fill the
hearts of your faithful and kindle them the fire of
your love. Send forth thro your spirit, and they shall
be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.

(00:50):
Let us pray. Mike, Oops, something is going wrong with
my Christopher. You know, if you know this prayer of
my heart, can you say it? Because I've I hadn't
written out here, but it seems to have disappeared.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
Regard who's the heartstay faithed with the light of the
Holy Spirit. Grants in the same spirit, be truly wise,
every to rejoice is consolation for the same Christ, star
Ward and.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Thank you brothers on Osbury Man. For some reason, the
word file that I set up, which has the questions
has gotten totally garbled up. So I don't know what
happened here.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Let me to start off.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Okay, sorry, So Hiram if I may as I say,
you wrote a book that on the topic that I
regard is extremely important, and can you explain the thesis
of your book? Why do you speak of the left
and the right as being a myth? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (02:06):
So the bottom line is the conceptual frameworks we use
have a major impact on the way we think, and
the way we think has a major impact on the
way we act. And so our argument is that politics
in America especially have gotten so divisive and so dysfunctional
largely because we have a bad conceptual model. And that
model is, of course, the political spectrum. So our thesis

(02:28):
isn't hard to understand. In fact, it's the simplest thing
in the world, and it's very common sensical, and that
is that there's more than one issue in politics, just
like there's more than one issue in recreation, or in
business or in medicine. And if you went into the
doctor and the doctor said I'm going to put you
on a medical spectrum, you would literally run for your life.
That doctor would be a quack. Because we all understand
that there's many many issues in medicine, not just one.

(02:51):
And yet when it comes to politics, we pretend that
there's just one big issue and you can place every person,
every institution, every party on a single dimensional line indicating
how they relate to one issue. And that's clearly not true.
There's lots of issues. Abortion is one issue. Government or
markets versus socialism is another issue. Gun control is a

(03:11):
different issue, drug control is a different issue. A to
Ukraine is a different issue. So there's dozens and dozens,
if not hundreds and hundreds of issues and politics, and
yet we talk about where people are left wing, right wing,
center left, center right, as if there was only one issue,
and that's incredibly damaging to public discourse.

Speaker 5 (03:33):
Could I ask something, I'm just wondering, how are you
actually paying you know in your own career, how you
came to discover this left, well, to find that this
left right binary was not satisfactory. What sort of opened
your eyes to this reality?

Speaker 4 (03:52):
Yeah, well, part of it, you know, you grew up
in my childhood as all of us. You go to
school and your teacher would make a line on the
board and say, okay, we're going to learn about civics.
Here's how government works, Here's how politics works. There's a
left wing and the right wing. The Republicans are on
the center right, and the Democrats are on the center left.
And if you go too far to the left you
become Stalin, and if you go too far to the right,

(04:14):
you become Hitler. So Hitler's here. So that's what I
was taught. And I went home and asked my parents, well,
what political party you guys belonged to. They say, well,
we'll Republicans. And I said, well, gee, that's weird. My
teacher told me you were like Hitler. And it just
didn't make any sense. I mean, what was it that
my parents were doing. Were they these terrible racists. No,
they're the least racist people I know. I'm incredibly loving
and welcoming. They've done missionary service in Africa. The idea

(04:35):
that they hated blacks just absurd. And so from a
young age, I said, something is really wrong here, and
something I'm being taught is incorrect, and then, of course
I'd hear about Stalin's atrocities in the Soviet Union, how
he stifled free speech, and yet I would ask my
Democrat friends, what's what's your guiding light? What guides you?
One of my friends was a journalist who wanted to
grow up to be a reporter, and he was a
hardcore Democrat, considered himself a liberal. I said, what's your

(04:57):
crucial principle? Why are you a liberal? He says, because
I believe free speech. And I thought to myself, well,
that's really weird. So taking free speech to an extreme
makes you an anti free speech authoritarian like Stalin. That
didn't make any sense either. So from the time of
childhood I was unsettled by this. But I came out
in a more theoretical way, in a more systematic way.
When I was in graduate school. My doctoral advisor asked

(05:18):
me to write on the history of conservatism, and so
I said, okay, I've got to define my terms. And
I went down that rabbit hole trying to figure out
what a conservative was, and I realized there is no
definition that as George Nast says, conservatism is as conservatism does.
That is, there is no essence there's simply people called conservatives,
and there's things they do, and they will do different
things at different times, and therefore different things at different

(05:39):
times will be called conservative. One minute, conservatives are in
favor of free trade, believing that that's a crucial to conservatism,
free markets, and so forth. And then ten years later
along comes Donald Trump and says, no, being a conservative
means being posed to free trade. And now the vast
majority of conservatives in our country are opposed to free trade.
So I realized there was no essential principle that these

(06:00):
things simply change, and that they're ultimately connected to tribe,
and what defines conservative and liberal left and right isn't
some fundamental essence like everybody thinks. It's rather simply a
tribal attachment.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Yeah, and then you can see that now with the
as you pointed out, with the Republicans and conservatives are
accepting Trump's ideas, at least many of them are, and
without any sense in many cases that they're making any changes.
But you know, still, as you know, our whole way

(06:36):
of thinking is grounded in this silly dichotomy, which, as
you say, is so easy to see that it's false.
But why is it so powerful. Why is it so prevailing?

Speaker 4 (06:51):
Yeah, well, a few reasons. One is simplicity. A lot
of times offer the choice between truth and simplicity, we
humans will take simplicity, and it just makes it. It
makes it so much easier, it's so satisfying. We like
questions to be closed, and so to say no, you
don't have to think about a whole bunch of issues.
You don't have to address the question of abortion and
the complicated issue of you know, the life of the mother.

(07:14):
Excuse me, the life of the child versus the rights
of the mother. You don't have to address that complicated issue.
You don't have to address the complicated issue of tax
rates and getting incentives versus government revenue and trying to
balance those, and can questions of economic freedom versus questions
of economic justice. You don't have to balance these. You
don't have to. You don't have to think. You can
just say, oh, there's a left wing that is in

(07:34):
favor of social justice, and then there is a right
wing that is fascist and evil and opposed to social
justice and racist, all these things, and I just have
to choose the good side of that magic line. That
is so much more comforting than the complex reality. It
gives you not only a sense of omniscience. Now I
know everything. I've chosen the good side. Therefore I know
the answer on every question without even having to think.

(07:55):
I mean, how wonderful is that? But also makes me righteous.
It makes me a good guy. It makes me a
hero in a maniche and tail of heroes versus villains.
Another reason, and a more legitimate reason, that the political
spectrum persists, is that it has explanatory power. And that is,
if I find out that somebody is pro life, for instance,

(08:16):
I can predict with better than fifty to fifty accuracy
what their view on tax cuts is. They're probably they're
more likely than the average person to be in favor
of it. And so people look at that and they say, oh, well,
if your position on tax cuts and your position on
abortion have a correlation, well there must be something there.
There must be some philosophy behind it. The entire contention

(08:37):
of our book is it's not philosophy causing someone's position
on abortion to correlate with their position on taxes. Rather,
it's tribal attachment. So if you are a hardcore pro life,
and that's a legitimate stand, I know people who have
very good reasons for bring pro life. A woman whose
mother was encouraged to abort her who refuse.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
To do it.

Speaker 4 (08:54):
So she says, I owe my life to the anti
abortion cause. So she's very much, very pro life. But
once she becomes pro life, then she starts watching Fox News.
Her social media feeds start to become pro life media feeds,
and those are more likely to be attached to the
Red tribe, and so she'll begin to adopt the other
positions of the Red tribe as a matter of socialization.
So historians and political theorists have misinterpreted the data. They

(09:18):
have looked at that correlation and thought, oh, there must
be some conservative worldview binding someone's views on taxes with
their view on guns, with their view on abortion, with
their view on immigration, with their view on so on
and so on and so on. Must be some philosophy.
We say, no, that's not true. There's simply a tribe.
And we know this by many reasons. There's studies done,
and so on and so on. The last reason is

(09:40):
that we humans are tribal beings. Now, some people think
that our book is kind of a creticour against tribalism,
that we hate tribalism. We're trying to get rid of tribalism.
That's not true. You can't get rid of it. It's
deeply wired into us, and it has positive functions. It
had positive functions in evolutionary history, and it has positive
functions today. Can lead us to do many noble things.

(10:02):
Tribalism led, you know, our ancestors, our forefathers, to defeat
the Nazis, for instance, a tribal attachment to country, tribal
attachment to churches, in my view, is a very good thing,
and having a strong religious identification can be very helpful
and lead one to do many charitable things and bind
us to congregations and give us a sense of meaning
and belonging in these kinds of things. So tribalism is good.

(10:24):
The problem comes is that political tribes are bad. And
what the political spectrum does is it allows us to
disguise our tribalism. So instead of admitting, you know, the
reason I believe the hundred things I do is because
I'm just tribal, Instead we disguise our tribalism and say, no,
I'm a deep philosopher. If I was to go up
to any of my colleagues. I mean ninety nine percent
of them. It really is that lopsided. At the American

(10:46):
Historical Association conference and held up a list of the
hundred things that are currently popular in the Democratic Party
and says, which of these do you agree with or
at least agree with? The Democrats more than the Republicans
with almost every one of them. They're going to say
all of them. And I'd say, is that now They're
not going to say, well, because I can't think for myself,
I'm a lemming. They're not going to say that. I mean,
they're PhDs for crime out loud. They don't think that
that's how they are. They're gonna say it's because I'm

(11:08):
a progressive. I have the progressive worldview. I am a righteous,
good person who believes in social justice, and all of
those hundred issues you put there are progressive things that
grow out of a progressive worldview. That is so much
more comforting to think that than to simply say I'm
a tribal lemming. We don't like to be lemmings. We
like to think of ourselves as philosophers and independent thinkers,

(11:28):
and so the political spectrum gives us cover for our tribalism.
The reality is that people adhere lockstep and conform to
left and right for tribal reasons, but we like to
convince ourselves that we do it for principled reasons. So
Jonathan Heights's metaphor of the elephant and the writer is
very apropos here.

Speaker 5 (11:48):
Do you think I mean that certainly comforts with my experience.
But do you think that part of the problem might
be the fact that political scientists, as they call themselves,
by and large, do not see themselves as concerned with
ideas as such, but with political behavior and data as
raw material for scientific analysis, much as chemists studying the

(12:10):
reactions of chemical elements. And you know, I'm just wondering
whether that might be part of the part of the
problem there.

Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yes, there's no question about it. And the problem is that, again,
they interpret that raw material because you do find putolitical behaviors.
Let me give you one of the strongest counter arguments,
because you bring up political scientists. Let me give you
the strongest comeback that political scientists have to us. And
they point out that you can predict, you know, they
look at political behavior, and they look at twin studies

(12:40):
and twin studies are the best way we have to
try to, you know, separate nurture from nature. You find
identical twins one hundred percent same nature, same DNA, but
raised in different environments. So the variance in their behavior,
you can say that's a result of environment, and then
everything else is the result of nature. And so when
they look at twins raised apart, they find that these

(13:03):
identical twins are much more likely to have political views
that are like each other than they are like the
families that raise them, which is really interesting. So they say,
you know, it's about eighty twenty eighty percent genetics twenty
percent environment. So they say to us, look, mister smarty
pants Lewis, you're saying this is all socially contract socially conditioned.

(13:23):
How is it that twins raised in totally different social
environments are winding up with basically the same politics. How
is it that you know, Joe and John raised in
different households, different parts of the country, adopted by two
different families, and yet here they have politics that are
almost exactly identical. So liberal and conservative must be hardwired.
There must be a liberal worldview that you inherit in

(13:44):
your genes that lead you to this set of positions,
and there must be a conservative worldview that to this
point not so fast. What they are not realizing is
they say, these people are raised in totally different social context,
but that isn't true. Fox News is the same in
Ohio as it is in Orange County. MSNBC is the
same in Seattle as it is in Miami. So if
you're raised in opposite side the country, the socio political

(14:06):
cultural context is actually the same, and therefore the adoption,
the anchoring and adoption can lead people to the same
basket of positions even if they're in the even if
they're raised in opposite places. So Keith Stanovich has done
the best work on this. He's a political science well
actually a political psychologist of the University of Toronto has
done excellent work showing that they're misinterpreting this data. What

(14:29):
we have is you are inborn with certain views, but
that is not liberalism and conservatism. So somebody could be
inborn with say a propensity for free markets. Great. Another
person is inborn with a propacity for more government intervention
to help the poor in these kinds of things. Great.
What does that have to do with abortion? The war
in Iraq a, Ukraine. The answer is nothing. However, if

(14:51):
I strongly believe in free markets. We're two twins. We're
both born with the same DNA, so we both have
this inclination of free markets. Well, we're raised differently. We're
more likely to anchor into that red tribe and then
watch Fox News and get our feeds from from from
red media and then adopt the other views as a
matter of socialization. That's so, that's what Stanovich's work has shown. So, yes,

(15:15):
political scientists have good data, but they are misinterpreting that data.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Have you have you confronted people with the idea that,
for example, as you know, the the left, as you
said before, it was militantly in favor of for your speech,
and now that's not really the case anymore in your experience.
Have you confronted people with this change and said, what's
going on in here?

Speaker 4 (15:41):
Yeah, and it's pretty clear, falsifying evidence.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
And I have.

Speaker 4 (15:43):
What people say is they'll they'll they'll do they'll switch route. Right,
So one minute they'll say the essence of liberal is freedom,
freedom of speech, freedom of individuals, freedom, freedom this, and
then you point out how things have changed, and then
they'll they'll switch their essence. They say, actually, the real
essence of the lefe is social justice, and if free
speech is being used to destroy social justice, then a

(16:04):
good left winger will obviously be against free speech. Right,
they'll change their story. Another thing people will do is say, well,
what you can have is you can have the same
philosophy lead to different issues depending upon the circumstance. So
they say liberals in the nineteenth century are in favor
of free markets because free markets in the nineteenth century
were more likely to break down privilege. But in the
twentieth century free markets were abused by the powerful in

(16:27):
the corporations to try to hold the underprivileged down. So
the same view trying to fight against privilege and try
to serve the underprivileged will lead to opposite policies, and
you will simply adjust your worldview to a new situation.
So they say it's the same worldview, but different policies
because the circumstances are different. Now we know that's not
true for a couple of reasons. One is the timing.

(16:47):
Why is it that people who call themselves conservatives jump
ship on free trade exactly when Donald Trump came out
and started speaking against it. The context hadn't changed. It's
not like you know, free trade thing that happened with
China or something like that overnight. It was simply the
tribe had changed and the tribal leader had changed. The
second point of evidence that shows this isn't correct is

(17:09):
because you can make people change their minds in laboratory
by priming them. So, for instance, you have you can
bring in one hundred people who call themselves conservatives and
give them a sheet of paper and at the top
it'll say which is true by the way, Donald Trump
says he supports a higher minimum wage? What do you think?
And overwhelmingly those conservatives will say, I support a higher

(17:30):
minimum wage. Then you bring in another hundred conservatives selected
at random, give them a piece of paper and have
it say at the top, which is true by the way,
because Donald Trump talks out of both sides of his mouth,
that Donald Trump wants to abolish the minimum wage? What
do you think about the minimum wage? And then the
overwhelming majority of them will want to abolish it. The
only difference is what they were primed to do. Or

(17:51):
you can create little, you know, opinion worlds in which
you bring people in and you have somebody who's a
plant pretend to be a first mover and say I'm
a conservative and I think this, and you will see
an opinion cascade of conservatives in the room towards their
conservative leader. So this idea that people are just updating,
you know, one of my colleagues says, it's Aristotilian parnisis
you're just updating, using practical wisdom to apply the same

(18:13):
philosophy to different circumstances. We know that isn't true because
of the timing and because of the laboratory evidence.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
Yeah, I just rodre Or just had a calm about
it conference in London and they pulled the audience and
they were mostly in favor. It was a conservative conference
in favor of Tray, but after one of the speakers spoke,
el switched and they were out protectionists.

Speaker 4 (18:37):
Right, not surprising. Yeah, we again, we are tribal. We
follow tribal leaders, which is fine, but we need to
stop convincing ourselves otherwise the problem is not that we're
tribal in politics. That's inevitable. The problem is we're not
recognizing that tribalism and we don't recognize what tribalism is
doing to us. It prevents us from keeping those tribes

(18:57):
at a distance. So if people recognize the reality that
the Republican Party stood for a whole bunch of issues,
some of them good, some of them bad. The Democratic
Party stood for a whole bunch of issues, some of
them good, some of them bad. It doesn't mean you
couldn't be a Republican and have a tribal attachment to
the Republican Party, but you would say, you know what,
my tribe can be wrong, and I'm going to think
critically about what my tribe believes because not all of
it's correct. But under the left right delusion, we say no, no, no,

(19:18):
the Republican Party is on the right wing. The right
wing is good. Therefore everything that the Republican Party believes
is good. Therefore I don't have to think critically and
keep my party in an arm's length, and so it
intensifies partisanship, which is a negative.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Well, as you know, there have been fringe parties and
fringe movements in American politics, one of them being libertarians, who,
as much as I digest on the omblect pretty much
consistent world view or put up you and are you've
noted with a chart that a libertarian can coct us
back in I think around nineteen seventy called the Nolan chart,

(19:55):
And what do you think of that?

Speaker 4 (19:57):
So are you talking about the one that adds another
demand instead of left right? It's got up down as well,
and you can.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Play yeah, spaces between your views on economics, on foreign policy,
on social policy.

Speaker 4 (20:11):
Yeah. So my view is it's an improvement. But if
you went to the doctor and he said, Okay, we're
not going to use a political spectrum, we're going to
use a two dimensional map and put you there as
a doctor, you would still run for your life. So
is too closer to the right answer of how many
issues in politics there are than one? Yeah, it's moving
us in the right direction. So a two dimensional model
will be better than a one dimensional model, but it

(20:33):
still has the flaw that there's more than two issue
in politics. There's more than one, but there's more than two.
So let's take, for instance, they say, oh, social issues
and economic issues, so we're going to put social issues
on the X axis, economic issues on the y axis,
and then we can you know, place people accurately. That
doesn't work either, because social issues do not cohere. For instance,
if I am deeply opposed to guns, and I say

(20:54):
we had a gun control My reasoning is going to
be that guns kill people, that guz cause viol and
therefore the state has a legitimate interest in reducing gun
violence by stopping the damage that guns do. Okay, well,
what about drug policy? Why is it that people who
are more in favor of gun control are less in
favor of drug control. The reasoning is the exact same.

(21:16):
So we think that, oh, if you are conservative on
social issues, you are in favor of gun control or
excuse me, against gun control, but in favor of drug control,
even though the reasonings for both are totally different. Furthermore,
what about immigration, What does that have to do with
gun control? Why can't somebody believe I'm in favor of
both controlling more control of guns and more control of
the southern border. There's nothing inherently illogical about that. Those

(21:41):
are two totally separate issues, and you can reasonably believe
in more gun control and more border control. So saying, oh, well,
there's social issues and they're all one thing, that's simply
not true. There's dozens and dozens of issues within the
social sphere, and they're all separate from one another, So
trying to model them as if they are all one
thing isn't going to work. Now, I think economics, I
think that does work pretty well. I think that is

(22:03):
useful to say, hey, we're just talking of economics here,
and there's more and less government intervention in the economy.
That is pretty That works pretty well. Unfortunately, there are
more issues than just economics.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Now.

Speaker 4 (22:13):
You asked about why the political spectrum is so entrenched.
One of the reasons is is because once upon a time,
during the nineteen thirties and early nineteen forties, eh, very
early nineteen forties, there really was just one national issue
in politics, and that was that one question of markets
versus government. And so that's why the political spectrum became
so popular. It came to America in the nineteen twenties,

(22:34):
but people started using it very commonly in newspapers and
public intellectuals and radio left right, because it was accurate
to tell where you stood on the question of the
new Deal. Do you support the new Deal and you're
on the leftiere against the New Deal on your right,
And since that was the only issue anybody was talking
about at the national level, it worked pretty well. Were
there questions of like race versus racial equality. Yeah, but

(22:56):
those were local issues. Franklin Roosevelt, for strategic reasons, did
not bring those up because most of his quote liberal
friends were also segregationists, or a good chunk of them were,
and so he didn't want to alienate his southern base
by talking about racial issues. For instance, was foreign policy
a thing not really nobody really talked about it. It
wasn't until the bombing of Pearl Harbor that foreign policy,

(23:17):
you know, kind of became a big deal. So the
point being is one of the reasons that got entrenched
is because the left right spectrum, it can model one
issue and politics at the national level it used at
least used to be about one big issue, but that's
no longer true. We now have dozens and dozens of issues.
Politics has taken over and become more and more involved
in ever more parts of our life, and because of that,

(23:37):
a one dimensional model is just completely inadequate. The political
landscape has outgrown our political map, and we need to
adjust our thinking accordingly.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
I don't know if you're familiar with them. The figure
both ecclesiastical and political from the thirties Charles Cogland, Charles Cogland.
Oh yeah, and he was originally a strong supporter of Roosevelt.
In thirty six he supported the third Party candidate William Lemke,
and Coldland's policies were actually I mean, in some ways

(24:10):
people would call him more to the left than Roosevelt
because he went his nationalized banks, for example. And yet
now he's seen as a fascist and ergo automatically in
the right.

Speaker 4 (24:22):
Right, Yeah, and that just you know, that shows the
inadequacy of these these categories. Because again that's one of
the things I came across in my research, right people
saying the old Christian right, and father Copeland was an
example of that. I said, what makes him so right wing?
He thinks the New Deal doesn't go far enough. Doesn't
that put him on the far left? Well, because he
had anti Semitic prejudices, according to many people, and because

(24:46):
he you know, talked favorably about Hitler and so forth,
will that put him on the right. But wait a minute,
anti Semitism is a different issue from economics. What you
believe about Jews has nothing to do with what you
believe about the market. In fact, if Hitler is to
be trusted, a hatred of Jews to go with hatred
of the market because Jewish people historically have been so
successful in market economies. So Hitler hated markets precisely because

(25:07):
he hated Jews. And yet we're saying that somehow, if
you're in favor of free markets, like Milton Friedman, you
somehow have to be anti Semitic too, because those two
things go together. When Milton Freeman himself was in fact
a Jew. It really is ridiculous. It misleads so many people,
and it causes those who believe in free markets to
be called racist, even though racism is a totally different
issue from free markets. We have to debate the merits

(25:28):
of libertarian economics on its own merits and not tie
it up with something which doesn't go together with it,
which is anti Semitism. My friend Brian Kaplan right, he's
Jewish and a big time free market economist. I don't
agree with Brian on everything, but I'm trying to get
this into his head and he can't have his head
around it that. Brian, this model is your worst enemy
because it leads people to think that your free market

(25:51):
views go along with antisemitism, which you know is complete nonsense.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Even when we are talking about one particular issue, let's
say abortion. You could have somebody who like say, I
think I think this was Miscellani's if you correct me
if I'm wrong. We want a prohibit abortion because we
want more people for the army, and other people might
say we want to prohib it abortion because it's taking
of a human life and that's unjust. And yet they

(26:22):
would both be on the same position even on that
one particular issue. Can you differentiate and make because there's
some kind of a model that can differentiate.

Speaker 4 (26:32):
That, Yeah, I think you can. But it requires us
to do what we are asking people to do, which
is exactly what doctors do and exactly what regular people
do when it comes to medicine, which is go granular.
The doctor doesn't place you on a political spectrum saying,
you know, we're gonna have kidney failure and skin rashes
and heart disease over here, and then we're gonna have
cancer and broken legs and and you know hair falling

(26:55):
out over here. We're not gonna lump things together that
aren't the same. So what doctors do, thankfully, and it
took them a while to get there, but in the
late nineteenth century, thankfully they said, Oh, medicine is complicated.
We're going to approach it as the complicated domain it is,
and we're going to look at things individually. So if
somebody comes into my office, I'm simply gonna go granular
and talk about the specific problem they have. Oh, you

(27:17):
have an ear infection, let's treat the ear infection. Somebody
else comes in, Oh, you have cancer of the lungs,
let's treat the cancer of the lungs. Somebody else comes in, Oh,
you have a broken leg, let's treat the cancer of
the broken or excuse me, the broken leg. So you
talk about things individually, we're saying that's what we should
do in politics, instead of placing people on a spectrum, saying, oh,
you're on the center, riot, you're on the far left,
you're on the far right, whatever happens to be, simply say, okay,

(27:38):
what's your view on abortion, and what is your reasoning
behind that view. And by going granularly, we cannot only
talk about abortion as its own issue, but talk about
different reasonings behind opposing abortion. So the granularity helps us
to disaggregate things that don't go together and talk much
more profitably about political issues. And we would all say
there's been a lot of progress in medicine over the

(28:00):
paste hundred fifty years. Ever since they jettisoned the four
human for Humor's theory and went granular and just started
talking specific tons of progress. How many of us can
say we've seen the same progress in politics. We haven't,
because the same time the medical field was giving up
their false model, we were at the precipice of adopting
our own false model in politics, and we are running

(28:20):
into the same problems that doctors had in the early
nineteenth century of aggregating things together that don't go together.
So you'd go into a doctor's office and they would
see your skin was warm and you and your face
was red. They said, oh, you're a ruddy person. You're
a sanguine person. That means you are one of those
people that has a tendency of excess blood. That means
you are somebody who gets fevers easily and is cheerful

(28:42):
and is given to alcoholic drink. They put three things
together that have nothing to do with one another. So
aggregating things together that don't go together is a terrible things.
If you're a religious person, you can even say it's
one of Satan's tools. Piggybacking bad things on good things
is one of the ways the adversary gets us to
believe bad things. A good exam sample of this is
women's rights and the sexual Revolution. You know, in my opinion,

(29:04):
the Sexual Revolution was a major mistake, and yet people think, oh, well,
you're either in favor of women having greater political rights
and greater equality and the sexual revolution, or you're against
both of them and you're an evil right winger.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
No.

Speaker 4 (29:15):
I am in favor of women's rights. I am in
favor of women being treated as equals, and I also
against the sexual revolution, which I think has done so
much damage, especially to poor and minority communities. It has
been an absolute disaster. And yet nobody can say that.
Few people are willing to say the sexual Revolution was
a mistake. Few people are willing to say that because
they don't want to be branded racist, right wing, anti women, patriarchal,

(29:35):
and all these things that have nothing to do with
the sexual ethic of society.

Speaker 5 (29:40):
Would you say that it's possible for or it's easier
for people to hold logically inconsistent views partly because they
lack some kind of overarching philosophy, and you know, we
do have I think, a kind of anti philosophical prejudice
in American culture. We tend to be pragmatists. Would you
know if people actually have some philosophical dimension to their thinking,

(30:02):
would they be less like Peter Holde's inconsistent views.

Speaker 4 (30:07):
Yes, yeah, I could. I agree with you. And let
me explain another misconception about our book. Some people think
that what we're saying is that nobody is philosophical, that
everybody is only tribal. That isn't true. People can be
philosophical and people should be philosophical, like you're saying, people
should be more thoughtful. And the problem is people think
that the political spectrum makes them thoughtful. By adopting everything

(30:28):
considered left wing, they've become philosophers and are progressives and
have this progressive philosophy. That is not true. They're diluting themselves.
We want people to be logically consistent and philosophical, and
you can have a philosophical view. So for instance, somebody
who has let's say somebody is a strong Muslim and
they believe in the Koran and that is their personal
philosophy and they apply that to politics. Again, that is

(30:49):
they can find logical consistency there. Somebody else might be
a socialist, somebody else might be a libertarian, somebody else
might be a realist, somebody else might be somebody who
believes in change for change sake, whatever happens to be.
We can have philosophies, but there's many, many philosophies we
can have, not just one. And yet the political spectrum
tells us you are either on the left side and

(31:10):
have one philosophy, or on the right side, So pick
one of two philosophies. We don't have that same binary
nature in any other realm. There are hundreds and hundreds
of philosophies of business. There are hundreds and hundreds of
philosophies of metaphysics, there are hundreds and hundreds of philosophies
of econd You know, all these different worlds, and yet
when it comes to politics, we say no, no, no.
You're either on the left and have a philosophy of change,

(31:30):
or you're under the right and have a philosophy of preservation.
Which of those two do you have? Furthermore, to get
back to something, Thomas was saying a moment ago, when
it comes to say libertarian, okay, so you have a
principal libertarian. I can have a libertarian philosophy but have
different policies than another libertarian because you can apply the
libertarian philosophy a little differently. So, for instance, the question

(31:52):
of abortion, I know libertarians who are pro choice, but
I also know libertarians who are pro life. Some libertarians say,
heyve in liberty. The freedom of the mother to choose
what she wants to do with her own body is
paramount for me as a libertarian, but another libertarian can say,
wait a minute, I believe in freedom for all people
and that unborn child has rights. And as a libertarian

(32:13):
who believes in freedom and rights for all, I have
to believe in freedom and rights for that unborn child.
So the point being is people think politics is simple,
that you either have one of two philosophies, and there's
only two, and whichever philosophy you pick has given you
prepackaged all the positions you believe. That's what our world
is telling us. But the reality is there are hundreds
and hundreds of philosophies, and even after you've chosen a philosophy,

(32:33):
politics is so complex that people with the same political
philosophy can wind up with different political views. So it
is absolutely incumbent upon us, as children of God, as thinkers,
as human beings, as decent citizens, to get into the
complexity of politics and talk about it in more adequate
and complex ways, rather than brushing everything off and assuming

(32:54):
it is as simple as left and right.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
Yeah, well, I'm sorry, go ahead, I might have low bandwidth,
So let me know if I'm not coming through clearly enough.
I think you might be saying this, and let me
see if it's true. It's that is the problem of
the tribalism of left and right a problem within the

(33:23):
American context. And I would say because fundamentally all Americans
seem to have a sense of the purpose of society,
the nature of government, and that is basically ordered to
that the highest good, that which government's order is is
the protection of human freedom. Now, if you contrast that
with something like, oh, I don't know, you can contrast

(33:45):
with fascism, or you could contrast it as you might
have in the time of the French Revolution between the
supporters of the alien regime and the liberal revolutionaries. You
do have a real contrast between two basic fundamental positions
which will tend to come to certain conclusions For instance,

(34:06):
if you're defender of the Answer regime, you might be
opposed to freedom of speech freedom of the press. If
you're a supposed if you're a supporter of the liberal side,
you would be all for freedom of the speech and
freedom of the press. So that there are certain fundamental
ideas tend to have certain tendencies which will lead to

(34:27):
certain conclusions, not infallibly, but that tends to be the
way they go. So in that case, it would seem
that to maybe play the devil's advocate here, one can
talk about more than just tribes in terms of these things.
We could talk about whole philosophical positions which are in
great contrast with each other, so that the problem of it,

(34:49):
So it's not simply a matter of that politics is
not simply a gathering of different positions. Also it has
a fundamental unity to it as well. So I wonder
we might call those things like in the Time and
Trench Revolution, the support of the Answer magime might be
called the right, or they might or they might be
called the reactionaries, called the conservatives, and the other side

(35:09):
of the liberals. So those distinctions make sense. The distinctions
between say that Gerondas and the jacobint on the left
don't make as much sense.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
Yeah, let me address that. So that's where the political
spectrum ultimately comes from, is the French Revolution. We Americans
were wise enough not to adopt it for about one
hundred and fifty years. Afterwards, it kind of percolated and
spread mildly in Europe for the nexte hundred fifty years.
But we Americans, a lot of these we saw that
as a European thing. If you look, you know, if
you look at newspapers, for instance, from the nineteen zeros

(35:39):
or nineteen tens, there there is no political use of
the terms left wing and right wing. If you google
the term left wing or go to Lexus nexus or whatever,
it'll be talking about military formations, it'll be talking about architecture,
and we'll be talking about sports, right the left wing
of the football team or whatever it has to be.
But it's never used in a political context. That all
changed about the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the

(36:01):
earliest Americans who reported on it made sure they talked
in terms of quotes and so called because they said, hey,
this is not our model, this is a Soviet model.
The Soviets adopted this from the French Revolution and now
they're talking left wing, right wing, but that's over there.
But in the nineteen twenties you get people like Senator
Robert Lafollett adopting it and applying it to the American context. Okay,
so the French Revolution is where this abomination begins. Now,

(36:23):
was it a problem in the French Revolution? Again, don't
misunderstand what we're saying. We do believe that you can
use a spectrum to model something that is just one thing.
So when we're talking about temperature colder and hotter, absolutely
you can use a spectrum to measure that it works.
But notice weather has more dimensions than just hot. Cold.
Weather can also be wind velocity, it can also be humidity.

(36:47):
There's other things. And if we tried to lump those
all together and said a climate is either windy and
cold and wet or dry and not windy and hot,
that's not going to work because the Jungles of Brazil
clearly don't fit model.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
Right.

Speaker 4 (37:00):
You can't place all places in the world on a
spectrum like that. We're dealing with more than one thing.
So with the French Revolution, talking about support for the
king versus opposition to the king. That's one issue. Absolutely,
you can model that using a spectrum. You can say
more support for the king far right, less support for
the king, or opposition to the king far left. That
one thing. But you mentioned free speech. Isn't that interesting

(37:24):
that the Jacobins after the revolution turned against free speech.
They would cut people's head off for exercise their free speech.
Lafayette for krown out, Lot had to flee to I
think it was what Vienna or something to try to
get away from those who are trying to take away
his right to the point being, you can be somebody
who opposes the king and opposes free speech, or you
can be somebody who opposes the king and supports free speech.

(37:46):
Those are two different issues. So again we have to
unbundle those two things. And the French Revolution unfortunately gave
us a model that doesn't allow that kind of unbundling.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
Yeah, but then that also the revolutionary model. Although you
had an assembly in France, those who supported the king
and those who opposed the kingship like the Girondins, all
the Girondins but I forget named. Anyway, you had those
who went to the republic with the king and the
republic without a king. I guess what I was talking

(38:20):
more about was those who wanted the regime that existed
before the revolution as opposed to the revolution, and that
those two things would have a certain unifying prints, They
would have certain unifying characters that would tend to lead
to certain conclusions. Free speeches maybe not the best example
on the left, but I think it's probably because even
people who support free speech never support complete and absolute

(38:43):
free speech. So free speech within parameters, That's what I guess.
My point was that there are not necessarily they call
them left or right, but you might call them conservative.
You might call the support of the answer regime conservative,
and the other side radicals something like maybe not Thomas
Jefferson's Party and the Early Republic were considered radicals. They're

(39:05):
also called chaptermins and I can't remember. But the other
the other party would have a certain characteristic of itself.
They might come most Federalists or something of that sort.
So I guess that was my basic point comment on that.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
Yeah, So Jefferson's a really illustrative example, right, because you
have people like historian Arthur Slessinger Junior. I mean, he
and he's just exemplary of my colleagues in history and
the way they look at the past. For them, there's
always been a left, there's always been a right. For
the most part, they believe, almost all my colleagues believe
the left wing is the good guys. The right wing
is the bad guys. So they've written history accordingly. It's

(39:43):
a very simplistic. Man can tell of heroes and villains,
a righteous left wing squaring off against an evil right wing.
That's the way they view the past. This is how
Arthur Schlessinger viewed it. So he went back to Jefferson
and said, oh, we got to put Jefferson on this
magic line. Where is he? He's on the far left.
Jefferson a believer in the common man. So people who
believe in the common man and the rights of the
common man are on the far left. And therefore Jefferson

(40:04):
was on the left like me. He was one of
the good people. But wait a minute, Hamilton, who was
on the so called right wing, he was the anti
slavery guy. How does that fit in there? Furthermore, Jefferson
and Jackson. You know, Schlessinger made his name writing a
book called The Age of Jackson. That want to pull
the surprise It's an excellent book, but it fundamentally is
just framed by this bad model because he says Jackson

(40:25):
is just like FDR because we both were concerned with
the common people. But Jackson wanted to reduce the size
of the federal government. He said that government is best,
which governors least. He totally agreed with Jefferson on that point.
You need to get the government out of the way,
let free enterprise flourish, Let free individuals with their natural
rights flourish. That was exactly, exactly one hundred percent, without exception,

(40:45):
the exact rhetoric that people like Albert J. Knock and
Einrand And and Rose Wilder Lane and other libertarians were
using in the nineteen thirties to oppose the New Deal.
So again it's multi dimensional. And saying that well, Jackson
was on my side because he was on the left
and he cared about the common man, just reduces and
flattens things in ways that they can't be reduced and

(41:06):
flattened because size of government is a different issue from slavery,
is a different issue from free speech is a different
issue from this, and Slester's attempt to reduce it all. No, no, no,
left wing. There's just one issue when they were on
the same side. The good side is me on that
issue is incredibly misleading in the present, but it's also
incredibly misleading in the past. And when we try to
place historical figures on this line, it simplifies and perverts things.

(41:29):
So I'm much more a fan of Daniel Walker Howe,
who wrote a book called what haf god Rod, basically
revisiting Slessinger's thesis in that same period and saying, wait
a minute, it is much more complicated than you think,
mister Slesznger, and we can't just simply place people on
a left right spectrum. Unfortunately, people have not listened to
how he won a politic prize for that book. But
my colleagues in history have just bought into this model,
hook line and sinker again, because it is just so

(41:49):
self flattering. The idea that we the intellectuals are on
the vanguard of history, we're the good guys on the
left and everything we believe advance as social justice. That
is such a self flattering view. I understand why that
by to it, because the temptation to buy into something
that pats you on the back so extremely and tells
you you are just doing the same project as Martin, Luther,
King Junior, Elizabeth, Katy Stan, Abraham Lincoln, all the heroes

(42:10):
of history. You are continuing in that project fight dear
brother in the cause of righteousness and social justice. That
is such a flattering view. I don't blame my colleagues
for having it. Doesn't mean it's right though.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yeah, as I recall, Jackson wasn't very very kind of
the Indians either, Absolutely not, and I should disqualify him.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the idea that social justice is
just one thing, again, that is not true. And social justice,
even if you are a huge believer in social justice,
he can be applied in so many different ways. I
know strong believers in social justice who believe in the
free market because they believe the free market gives more
opportunity and more growth so that the poor can rise.
I know people who believe in social justice who are
pro choice, most of them. But I know a lot
of people in favor of social justice who are pro

(42:54):
life because they believe justice demands that we preserve the
life of on board children.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
One idea that's a courd to maybe I've offered before
imprinted is the idea that if someone says he's a conservative,
he says, say, what do you want to conserve? Yes,
And if someone says you're I'm aggressive, or what are
you progressing toward?

Speaker 3 (43:14):
Right?

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (43:15):
Yeah, yeah, And that's a great point. And again, you
know that is the million dollar question, right because we say,
oh no, there's just one issue, progress and conservation. But
there's so many things that progressives today don't want to change.
My goodness, when the Roe v. Wade decision was up
to overturn, they said, you cannot change this, Please do
not change, keep things the same. We don't want to change.

(43:37):
And it was it was people who called themselves conservative
that said, no, we want to change. When it comes
to the environment, it's people who call us progressives who
are saying, please don't change the environment. We need to
conserve the environment. They're adamant that we have to conserve
the environment. So again, it is totally context dependent saying
that I'm a conservative and therefore I have a thousand
positions and anyone else who likes conserving things agrees with me.

(43:58):
And the only issue in politics is whether you want
a conserver change. That is just not the way the
world works. There are more issues than just change in conservation.
There's freedom, there's a galitarianism, there's realism, there's pragmatism, so
hundreds of philosophies. It's not just change versus preservation. And furthermore,
as you point out, it all depends on what you
want to change. To say that Trump is this guy
who just wants to keep the status quo and therefore

(44:20):
he's an extreme conservative is just not true. You only
have to look out your window to say that, Oh,
if you're on the right, you want to conserve, and
therefore Hitler was really really conservative and he didn't change
a thing. That just is a mind blowingly silly thing
to say. He tried to change Europe in the most
fundamental and radical way. He was an extreme revolutionary. And
yet here we are saying, if you like to conserve things,

(44:42):
then you're a little bit like Hitler, and then if
you really really like to conserve things, then you really
like Hitler. Because Hitler hated change. Nothing could be further
from the truth. He was one of the most revolutionary
figures in the history.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Of the world. Yeah, that's a plaint about revolution is
very good because there are all kinds of revolution, right
and many ways they have a revolution. Now, politicians, as
we all know, are usually not usually not terribly thoughtful people,
it seems to me. And so what do you think

(45:14):
of the idea that well is for them, especially not
being intellectuals or academics, they're gonna latch onto these kinds
of things because this is how to get support. If
you went into Congress, for example, as a multant defender
of the unborn, but at the same time a great
critic of the free market, you might not be able

(45:37):
to get anywhere. So it's a tendency you can latch
on to the people who with whom you think you
might make some cm an alliance.

Speaker 4 (45:47):
Yes, let me just say a couple of things. Because
the political spectrum is terrible for America, but it's great
for our political parties. Okay, So this idea that you know,
you can't go in and have a more complex view
and agree with one party on one thing and another
party in another. In the American past, you found that
all the time, you found people who agreed with Lincoln
on slavery but disagreed with him on tariffs. Right, there

(46:09):
was diversity. You go back to the nineteen fifties and
you had people who agreed with President Eisenhower one thing
but disagreed with him on another. Right, you had party,
You had diversity within the parties, so we know it
can't happen. In my view, that was very good because
that diversity created pluralism, It created challenges, It opened up dialogue,
and it made people more likely to listen and compromise.
We don't have that as much anymore because we were

(46:30):
convinced they're just one issue in politics. You neither on
the good side. You're the good worldviewer on the bad
side of the bad worldview. Why would you talk to
anybody on the right when we know that they're all
like Hitler? Right, That's what people have told themselves who
consider themselves to be on the left. Okay, So we
talked about why people hold this, the simplicity, how it
disguises our tribalism, and so forth. But the reason politicians
love this model is because it is very very good

(46:52):
for their parties. Think about it for a moment. If
you got a letter from the Republican Party and it said, Thomas,
I'm here the Republican National Committee. We're trying to raise money.
Our party stands for a whole bunch of different issues,
and some of them are good and some of them
are bad. But Thomas, we hope you agree with enough
of them to donate to our party. You're much less
likely to donate than if you get a letter that says, Thomas,

(47:14):
the forces of left wing extremism and communism are on
the move. Help us fight these evil left wing forces.
Send money today to help us stop the radical left
wing progressive That language associated with the political spectrum is
so much more motivating. It says the lie that the
Republican Party stands for a righteous worldview. That lie is

(47:36):
more likely to fill your coffers. It's more likely to
get you supporters. It's more likely people to get people
riled up and knocking on doors and trying to trying
to advance the party's cause. The reality that our two
parties are just baskets, baskets of random things that do
not go together. Being in favor of vaccination has nothing
to do with the abortion question. I am very much

(47:57):
in favor of vaccines. I believe in the efficacy of vaccines.
I also believe that we should have some restrictions on abortion.
They have nothing to do with one another, and yet
we have told ourselves this lie that they do, and
that lie is very useful for our political parties because
by telling people it's just about one issue and one worldview,
and there's the good worldview that the Republicans embrace and

(48:18):
the bad ones that the Democrats embrace. That is more
likely to get a motivated, passionate and donating base.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
You, I'm sure you're familiar with what happened in the
nineteen fifties when the so called fusionist conservative movement was created,
which was kind of a times uneasy alliance between free
marketers and what we would call now social conservatives. And

(48:50):
yet it was very predominant, very popular, and Reagan renewed
it in a way and kind of falling apart inelo
some ways. But do you see that as as a
prime example of this kind of group thinking.

Speaker 4 (49:11):
Yeah, yeah, I think it's one of the most devastating
things that happened to our country. Is so you had
people who supported Franklin Roosevelt, like Arthur Schlessinger saying, ah,
it all goes together. So everything in the past that
was good, you know, anti slavery, Jackson's agenda, fighting for democracy. Historically,
the Magna carta. It all goes together with Franklin Roosevelt.

(49:33):
It's all one thing, and you're there on the left
of right, and they convince themselves that all the good
people in history had been liberals, and there always been
an easy and evil right wing. Now, initially opponents of
the New Deal fought against that. They said, we're not
right wing, we are not like Hitler. We believe individual freedom.
Hitler didn't like individual freedom. But along came Russell Kirk,
who was a great intellect and a great man in
many ways, but did one of the most destructive things

(49:56):
in the twentieth century, and that was he wrote a
bok called The Conservative Mind. He says, you know what, liberals,
you're right. We are on the right wing. We do
everything we believe does want to conserve, and yes, had
we lived in the past, we would have tried to
stop women getting the right to vote, and we would
have tried to stop the expansion of the suffrage. And yes,
we would have stood with the king against against the

(50:18):
barons who wanted the Magna Carta. Because we are conservatives.
You're right, we are the villains. Essentially. Now, Kirk obviously
didn't say it was villainous, but he says, there is
this important tradition of stopping change, and so politics really
is just about one thing. So people like William at
Buckley early on, if you read, for instance, his first book,
God and Man at Yale, he did not call himself
a conservative. He said, I'm not out to conserve things.

(50:40):
I'm an individualist. He said. There's the New Deal, which
is bad, and communism, which is really bad because it
takes that status, that idea to an extreme and tries
to collectimize everything. And I'm an individualist who believes in
individual rights. So the entirety of God and Man at
Yale is framed around this idea of individualism versus collectivism.
But then he meets Russell Kirk and gets to know
Whittaker Chambers and the other people, and he's persuaded by

(51:01):
this idea that every good thing is united by the
idea of conserving and that indeed he doesn't habit the
right wing. He just doesn't take it as far as
Adolf Hitler did. And in my view that was a
disaster because Buckley was a good man and an intelligent man,
but he adopted bad things. He supported segregation. For instance,
one of the worst causes of our time, and he
supported it because he had been convinced, Oh, there's those

(51:22):
people who want to conserve, and I am a conservative,
therefore I have to support this. So fusionism is the
attempt to do what ideologues have always done, which is
to justify their positions ex post with a story. What
does the question of abortion have to do with free markets? Nothing?
But Buckley and other people at National Review tried to
create a story that united them all together and said,

(51:44):
we fuse these things. And ultimately, said Frank Meyer, the
great fusionist conservative theorist, he said, ultimately conservation is in
favor of free markets, and ultimately conservation is in favor
of stopping abortion. And these other you know, socially conservative issues,
they all are of one, they all go together. This
is expost storytelling. It's not true, but we can. The
bottom line is we can cook up a story to

(52:07):
fit any set of random positions. You really can. I
could today. I know people are Democrats cook up a
story of social justice to fit their basket of issues,
But I could just as easily cook up a conservative story.
I could say, for instance, traditional values. The Democratic Party
is all about traditional values. The foremost and most important
traditional value of all times, taught from Jesus to Moses

(52:27):
to every great moral teacher in history, is care and
concern for the poor. So therefore, we democrats are conservatives
because we believe in stopping the ravages of the free
market and believe in a vigorous government to help the poor.
It is a conservative Judeo Christian thing. We are conservatives
because we believe in conserving the environment. We are conservative

(52:48):
because we believe in conserving a woman's right to choose.
So you can use the conservative story to fit together
any bundle of positions. But this is expost storytelling. You're
not starting with the philosophy and then thinking yourself to
the issue. Instead, you're finding what your tribe believes, and
then you're concocting a story to justify those things. That, incidentally,
is why intellectuals are so much more infected by the

(53:09):
myth of left and right than is the common person
in the street. The common person in the street is
no more likely to have a correlated view on abortion
and tax cuts than random They really are all over
the place. You go to a random person, they'll say, hey,
I'm in favor of tax cuts, and I'm in favorab
woman's right to choose, or I'm against the tax cuts,
but I'm also against abortion right. They're all over the place,

(53:29):
but intellectuals aren't. Because intellectuals are very very good at
concocting stories that gives the illusion of coherence to things
that don't naturally coher. This is incidentally, why doctors were
so destructive in the eighteenth century, because they were so
smart they could create stories to concoct a view of
the world in which all illnesses cohered behind the fore

(53:50):
Humor's theory. So you look at like midwives and stuff.
They did much more medical good than did the learned
doctors of the time, like Benjamin Rush. Benjamin Rush one
of the smartest people in the world in the eighteenth century.
I firmly believe that it's a signer of the declaration
of Ndeftagies is a great man. But he was so
smart that he talked himself into this for Humoor's theory model.
Whereas a midwife, you know documented by Martha Ballard Laura

(54:12):
Ulrichport this book called midwiest Tale who wasn't educated in
all the great universities and so forth, hadn't been indoctrinated
in this four humors model. So she did much more
medical good than a learned doctor did at the time
because she hadn't been brainwashed into a false model that
led her to think that somehow a fever goes with
the amount of blood in your system. Therefore the cure
of fever you have to slice people open to get
them better. And it's the same thing today. Our universities

(54:33):
perpetuate this model, and so intellectuals are much more likely
to believe in the political spectrum than is the average
person on the street, because intellectuals are very good at
concocting x post stories. But notice, you can concoct an
ex post story to make any basket of policies conservative.
You can concoct an ex post story to make any
basket of policies appear progressive, and so on and so forth.
So it is ex post storytelling. It is not philosophical principle.

(54:57):
And so that's how people can support Donald Trump, who
believe totally different things than Reagan, who believed totally different
things than Taft, and you can call them all conservative
because after the fact you can say, well, gee, here's
three different bundles of positions totally different. Let me make
up a story to show how they all conserved. It's
a very interesting and entertaining exercise, but it's ultimately in
the service of a bad model.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
Christopher Andrew, do you haven't any final questions? I guess
it's one more thing and that I want to be
labor this point. But but there are philosophical models, aren't
there of government? Philosophical positions about the nature of government,
the nature of society which we all seem to hold.

(55:40):
I mean, I would argue that the reason why it
makes no sense left and right makes some sense the
United States is because we effectively were all American and
we have a basic pilot. We have basic understanding of
the nature of government, of the nature of human society.
So that and that would be a different sense of
the nature and government of nature of society, and say

(56:03):
somebody from the Middle Ages would have or what the
answer in regime has really for another point, So there
is a kind of unity, though it's not a false
narrative like I think you're talking about. But yet there
is something unifying that tends towards certain conclusions. Wouldn't that
be the case?

Speaker 4 (56:25):
Yeah, So again, let me just disabuse this notion that
I think that nobody is being philosophical. I've talked about
the expo storytelling that's just in the service of the
left right model. So your point being that people are
philosophical and there is philosophical coherence, and the philosophy behind
the American Founding is different than say, behind the Sider regime.
I would totally agree with you, there is a philosophy
behind the American Founding. My only point is that there's

(56:46):
more than two philosophies. And we conceive of the world
in terms of left wing right wing. It's saying no, no, no,
there's just two philosophies, two world views, and you are
on a spectrum between those two worlds, which world views
or which are diametrically opposed, you know, the change worldview
versus the conservation world So, yes, people can be philosophical,
but there are dozens and dozens and dozens of potential
political philosophies, not just too. And people can be coherent.

(57:08):
They can shut out the tribal noise and say, okay,
here's my philosophy. So for instance, somebody's a libertarian, they say, okay,
my philosophy is individual liberty. What do I believe then, Well,
I believe that people should be free to trade with
people in other countries, and people should be free to
keep more of their own money in this country. So
I believe in in lower tariffs and lower income tax rates.
That's consistent. But does that fit what our current day

(57:28):
right wing believes. No, So our current day right wing
is not philosophically coherent, even if a libertarian would be,
and that libertarian might conclude philosophically that a woman's right
to choose is important, and they might conclude philosophically that
free speech is a very important value. My point is
is that they will have a basket of issues that
does not align with either our two tribes. The two
tribes are telling us, if you're philosophical, you'll support us

(57:50):
because you're either a progressive philosophical or a conservative philosophical.
You're conservative philosophically, you believe the bad things is progressive
philosophical good things. My point is that's not true. If
you truly are phil as you are Christopher, you're not
going to believe everything that are one of our two
tribes believes because they are not being philosophical, and if
you are, you will necessarily disagree with those philosophical people

(58:12):
and an unphilosophical basket of positions. That's my point. So yes,
I agree with you. I want Americans to be more philosophical,
but being philosophical will require them to break with their
parties because our parties are just random bundles of positions.
They are not philosophically coherent. And yet we have people
in our two tribes telling us, no, if you are
a true conservative, you will support everything Donald Trump does
because he is on the right. That is the falsehood

(58:32):
we're fighting against, not philosophy. I agree with you. I
like philosophy. I want people to be more philosophical, and yes,
you're right, people who are philosophical can find philosophical coherence
in the views they have, but that's not going to
line up with our two parties, and that's certainly not
going to be just one of two baskets.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Andrew, do you have any concluding questions or thoughts?

Speaker 5 (58:56):
I guess one quick question. I flowd this idea left right,
you know, by a friend of mine, and she said, well,
of course there's no you know, these are not real categories.
But It's really all about power. It's all about groups
of people buying for power, and that's all that American

(59:16):
politics is about.

Speaker 3 (59:17):
It.

Speaker 5 (59:17):
I'm just wondering what you would say to that. Not
only is there no philosophy, but they're not even any ideas.

Speaker 4 (59:24):
Really, well, again, I think people can be philosophical, but
I don't think we Americans are being philosophical, because I
think your friend is exactly right. I think it is
about power. Like I said, the political parties are about
achieving power. And what makes us free as Americans is
checking power. That's what the founding fathers understood. That's why
our regime is defined by checks and balances. It's all

(59:44):
about checking power. But notice how little checking power goes
on within our two tribes. Nobody has wanted to check
Trump's power. Now why is that? Part of it is
because they are all convinced that Trump shares their fundamental philosophy,
So why would they try to check somebody who's being righteous,
somebody who's advancing the conservative philosophy. If we look at
it rather in terms of power, as we should, that

(01:00:05):
our two political parties are not philosophical vehicles, but vehicles
to achieve and maintain power, then we will be much
more likely to push back against the power grabs of
those parties. And yet we don't see people doing that
because they're wrapped up in the myth of left and right.
So well, of course I'm going to support everything Joe
Biden does. Of course i am. He's a progressive. I'm
a progressive. So you don't check Biden's power because you're

(01:00:26):
under the delusion that everything he does is good. Trump
does bad things. Well, of course I'm not going to
check him because everything he does is good. He's on
the right wing. I'm on the right ring. There's only
one issue in politics. He's got the right idea about
that one issues. Of course, I'm going to support everything
he does. So all the power grabs by our party
are going less checked than they should be, precisely because
people buy into the myth of left and right. So
I completely agree with your friend Andrew.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Well, thank you very much, Professor Lewis for being our
guest today. Will I thought it was a very eliminating conversation.
Let's conclude, if we may, with a commending everything to
our ladys. You're marry full of grace. The Lord is
with thee. Blessed are the home women, and blessed is
the fruit of their womb. Jesus Boy, Mary, Mother of God,

(01:01:09):
pray for us sinners now at the all of our death.

Speaker 4 (01:01:11):
And then, thank you very much, thank you, it's been
my pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Hello, God's beloved. I'm Annabel Moseley, author, professor of theology
and host of then Sings My Soul and Destination Sainthood
on w c AT Radio. I invite you to listen
in and find inspiration along this sacred journey. We're traveling
together to make our lives a masterpiece and with God's grace,

(01:01:41):
become saints. Join me Annabel Moseley for then Sings My
Soul and Destination Sainthood on w c AT Radio. God
bless you. Remember you are never alone. God is always
with you.

Speaker 4 (01:02:01):
Thank you for listening to a production of w c
AT Radio. Please join us in our mission of evangelization,
and don't forget Love lifts up where knowledge takes flight.