"Left" and "right" are valid concepts, but don't forget libertarians
An asterisk to Yglesias's defense of "left" and "right", plus interesting history about the Marquis De Lafayette
Note: This is a very theoretical political philosophy post. It’s a bit different from previous posts.
Matt Yglesias has a good, recent article on the left-right political spectrum. He argues:
Left and right are not, exactly, two distinct sets of coherent ideas, but they are two different poles of thought — one that emphasizes the existence of a God-given hierarchy that must be upheld and entrenched and one that wants to tear it down in the name of equality and reason.
I agree that “left” and “right” are useful concepts, where the “right” is about preserving hierarchy and the left is about egalitarianism. Hierarchy means that there’s a clear rank order, where some people have power and respect, and others not so much. An egalitarian society is the opposite: socially and economically “flat”, where it’s not so clear which people are more powerful or respected.
I think Yglesias incorrectly puts religion and reason in his definition. Those things just happen to align with the “right” or “left” at certain times and contexts, such as during the French revolution, when the terms were created.
Yglesias goes through the precise history of how the terms were created in the 1787 French Assembly that sparked a revolution in France:
As the Assembly began to gather … they sorted into cliques based on their ideas rather than which estate they had formerly belonged to. The Baron de Gauville, a Second Estate deputy who aligned with the right, recalls:
“We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp.”
A random choice of seating still echoes in our language today. The fact that the terms stuck around suggests they are getting at something real.
In this post, I’ll discuss where “small-l” libertarians (aka “classical liberals”)1 fall on this left-right spectrum, which will also reveal things about the “left” and “right” in the process.
Libertarianism is fundamentally different from left and right, but can ally with either
Libertarianism is about an emphasis on individual liberty, which is a very separate concern from caring about either existing hierarchies or egalitarianism.
Because the concerns of Libertarianism are separate, the ideology can find itself allied with either the left or right. Which side changes depending on the time and context. A clear example of how it can change is libertarians’ support for free markets — that’s because free markets are BOTH a force for leveling hierarchies, but also for creating new ones.
The hierarchy created by free markets is the reason that tens of thousands of brilliant people let Elon Musk coordinate their work — whereas under other historical systems, they would instead do the same for King Charles III, or for communal farm director Alexander Lukashenko.
A beautiful thing about market hierarchies is that they are much more fluid and meritocratic than the older aristocratic ones that they replaced. Musk himself is a good example, as he was originally a middle-class, ramen-eating college student who traveled around Canada on busses. (To address a common mis-conception: Musk’s estranged father did own emerald mines at one point, but he lost that money by the time Musk was a teenager. If you previously believed in a simple story that Musk came from wealth, I highly recommend Walter Isaacson’s biography on Musk.)
Market hierarchies are relatively fluid and meritocratic, and the majority of billionaires are self-made, but there are still some Walton and Hilton heirs who didn’t do anything to deserve their wealth. It’ll also take a while for Bezos’s ex-wife to give away her $36 billion.
But even the most merit-based wealth, such as Musk’s, grates on far-leftists. They see that markets have created a new hierarchy, and their egalitarian instincts can’t stand such a steep hierarchy (this is being charitable; the history of socialist countries shows that some leftists, deep down, really just want a hierarchy that they’re on top of. But others are surely true-believers.)
As markets have replaced aristocrats as the primary maker of hierarchies over the last few centuries, leftists have increasingly focused on tearing down market hierarchies, rather than aristocratic ones.
Capitalism and markets are now relatively entrenched in the west, so those of us who think billionaires have a right to their earnings are often seen as “on the right.”
It’s easy to forget that, when markets were new, and monarchs dominated, people with the same libertarian, pro-market values were aligned with the left!
Case Study of a Libertarian in the French Revolution
The street I grew up on, and a street I lived on in college, and the street my PO Box is on, are all named after the Marquis De Lafayette, a French noble who played a critical role in winning the American Revolutionary War.
He was a true believer in the libertarian enlightenment ideals the American founders had, and he hoped to bring them to France. When Lafayette served in the French National Assembly, he sat on the left.2
In particular, a major early decision was whether the clergy, nobles, and commoners should each get one vote as a faction (which would favor the monarchy, because nobles and clergy both supported it) or whether every individual representative should get one vote (in which case, the commoners would have control, due to their higher number of representatives.) Lafayette, although a noble himself, broke ranks, and voted for the more democratic option.
Encyclopedia Britannica describes:
Lafayette supported the maneuvers by which the bourgeois deputies of the Third Estate gained control of the Estates-General and converted it into a revolutionary National Assembly.
With Jefferson’s help, he composed a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which he presented to the Assembly on July 11.
Here’s what was in the declaration, again per Britannica:
The basic principle of the Declaration was that all “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” (Article 1), which were specified as the rights of liberty, private property, the inviolability of the person, and resistance to oppression (Article 2). All citizens were equal before the law and were to have the right to participate in legislation directly or indirectly (Article 6); no one was to be arrested without a judicial order (Article 7). Freedom of religion (Article 10) and freedom of speech (Article 11) were safeguarded within the bounds of public “order” and “law.” The document reflects the interests of the elites who wrote it: property was given the status of an inviolable right, which could be taken by the state only if an indemnity were given (Article 17); offices and position were opened to all citizens (Article 6).
I italicized the editorializing by some anonymous Britannica editor, who thought it worth opining that property rights reflect “the interests of the elites.” That just tells me that the editor is more sensitive to hierarchies than to the pro-liberty enlightenment principles that Lafayette and the founders cared about.
Unfortunately for Lafayette, the population of Paris had values more like those of the Britannica editor:
… the day after a mob stormed the Bastille, Lafayette had been elected commander of the newly formed national guard of Paris. His troops saved Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette from the fury of a crowd that invaded Versailles on October 6, and he then escorted the royal family to Paris, where they became hostages of the revolution.
For the next year, Lafayette’s popularity and influence were at their height. He supported measures that transferred power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, but he feared that further democratization would encourage the lower classes to attack property rights. When a crowd of petitioners gathered on the Champ de Mars in Paris (July 17, 1791) to demand the abdication of the king, Lafayette’s guards opened fire, killing or wounding about 50 demonstrators. The incident greatly damaged his popularity, and in October he resigned from the guard.
When lunatics like Robespierre and the Jacobins started to get control and began mass-murdering people, Lafayette called for volunteers to put them down by force. When only a few supporters came forward, Lafayette tried to flee to the Netherlands, from where he planned to escape to the US.
However, he was arrested on his way by Prussian troops for his role in bringing down the French Monarchy. Wikipedia describes:
Frederick William II of Prussia … had once received Lafayette [as a fellow noble], but that was before the French Revolution—the king now saw him as a dangerous fomenter of rebellion, to be interned [imprisoned] to prevent him from overthrowing other monarchies.
The response of officials in the 5-year-old United States of America is kind of fascinating3 but in the end, Lafayette spent 5 years in various jails.
While Lafayette and his immediate family survived the Reign of Terror, members of his wife’s family did not. He then retired from public life, partially to protest the dictatorial regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, and settled down as a gentleman farmer.
One might be tempted to think of Lafayette as a “centrist” — and that’s true, if one only looks at the right-left (hierarchy-egalitarian) dimension.
But it’s more accurate to see that Lafayette (and the American founders) were not “centrists” but rather what would today be seen as small-l libertarians, or classical liberals, who saw that individual freedom, markets, and private property were the keys to a new, better, freer, system.
The left-right binary leaves libertarians out
The right-left (hierarchy-egalitarian) dimension is useful, and the primary axis of modern politics, and I think Yglesias does us a service by spelling it out in clear terms. But the libertarian dimension is also real and relevant.
How to define the core of the libertarian dimension?
It’s something like: individual liberty vs collective control. In other words, does society tend to trust individuals, or the collective will, via government?
We can imagine one axis that’s hierarchy vs egalitarianism, and another axis which is individualism vs collectivism.
Those sound a bit similar, but they’re different: The first is about how “flat” or “steep” the society is, while the second is about whether society trusts individuals, or whether it holds them to the judgement of a broader collective, as expressed via government.
All societies have some regulations that prioritize the collective will over individual will, for example, regulations on medicines, on gambling, on starting a business, etc. The “will of the people” currently determines whether you can start a business offering to sell a new kind of medicine. It determines whether you can pave over a swamp and build a housing complex instead.
All libertarians want less regulation than we have, and the most radical want to end all regulation — they are purists on the individualism vs collectivism spectrum.
Other ideologies are the opposite, often seeing everything through the lens of collectives. Socialists like to talk about “the workers” vs “the millionaires and billionaires” (Bernie’s favorite phrase, though he started saying just “billionaires” after he himself became a millionaire.) Woke people like to focus on racial and gender groups. Nationalists focus on countrymen vs foreigners.
Libertarians, in contrast, are generally baffled (I am, for the record) by the idea of feeling guilty for being rich, or being a certain race or gender. Libertarians tend to distinguish less between nationalities. The important thing is being a free individual.
So a leftist looks at Elon Musk as sees “a billionaire” who needs some leveling, and a French-Revolution-era rightist would look at Musk and see a boorish, uppity peasant. They’re both seeing people as representatives of groups. In contrast, an individualist (libertarian) looks at Musk and considers him on those terms.
Conclusion — “left” and “right” are valid concepts, but other dimensions are important too
Politics could be described using just the right-left axis. Or that, plus the individual liberty - collective control axis. There are surely many more spectrums one could add; the more you add, the more precisely you can describe someone’s political philosophy, but the longer your description.
Using just the two axes above, we’d get the following 4 quadrants:4
Individualist, pro-existing-hierarchy — Think of Elon Musk and Ayn Rand fans.
Individualist, egalitarian — Think of center-right people in Nordic countries, and moderate libertarians in the US.
Collectivist, egalitarian — Democratic Party loyalists, socialists, etc.
Collectivist, pro-existing-hierarchy — Republican Party loyalists, conservative religious people, etc.
Practically, most people are focused on hierarchy-vs-egalitarian battles, which is why discussion focuses on right-vs-left. But several percent of people are more focused on individual liberty, and it’s a bit relevant for political parties who they ally with, if anyone. If the state of the Libertarian Party is any indication, libertarians may be aligning more with the right (they’re also getting labeled as “right-wing” by the left more and more over time.)
Anyway, I think Yglesias’s write-up is great. I just also want to remind people of the axis that libertarians (and I, myself) care more about. I suspect it is a better way to understand various influential people, whether that’s historical influencers like Lafayette, Adam Smith, and Milton Friedman — or modern day players like Sen. Rand Paul and the George Mason University economics department. At least a couple percent of the population are better explained by this axis than the standard right left one!
Although the terms “libertarian” and “classical liberal” have somewhat different connotations, I believe they are really just different brandings of the same thing, namely a focus on individual liberty, which can be either relatively moderate (Adam Smith, Milton Friedman) or more radical (Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand.)
Source: Fontana, B. (2016). Germaine de Stael: A Political Portrait. Princeton University Press. Page 58: "... the [La]Fayettistes and the Girondins--the two groups on the left of the Legislative Assembly who advocated military intervention ..." Page 24 also notes that Germaine de Stael, an influential French woman at the time, actually drew a map of the assembly and the locations of the different factions, so I believe that is the ultimate source here. It would be cool to see the map itself, though I didn’t find it online.
Wikipedia notes:
Lafayette, when captured, had tried to use the American citizenship he had been granted to secure his release, and contacted William Short, United States minister in The Hague.[148] Although Short and other U.S. envoys very much wanted to [support] Lafayette for his services to their country, they knew that his status as a French officer took precedence … the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations with either Prussia or Austria … Secretary of State Jefferson found a loophole allowing Lafayette to be paid, with interest, for his services as a major general from 1777 to 1783. An act was rushed through Congress and signed by President Washington. These funds allowed both Lafayettes [himself and his wife] privileges in their captivity.
These labels are relative. If one were to consider at all societies across the world, the two major US parties might be towards the individualist side of things. But within the Overton Window of US intellectual debate, they’re towards the collectivist side.
Good essay! Food for thought. There are so many ways that people can be compartmentalized, it makes me skeptical about a fracturing of the USA into red and blue states. I don't see that as a real possibility, but I do foresee states becoming economically detached from the federal govt, which is maybe for the best. The way the feds bribe states with Monopoly money is detrimental to both the federal and state fiscal health. And it seems that left & right populism are threatening the viability of our top-down governance. The Swiss have a better system, I think.
Another approach I think about often is libertarian vs authoritarian, rather than left or right; which is what I was referring to when I used the word populism above. Yglesias seems biased when he uses the terms "God-given hierarchy" which sounds authoritarian, vs "equality and reason" which sound libertarian. But that's a red herring for the left, isn't it?
Here's how I would describe it: The right, broadly, sees society as a hierarchy of moral discipline, not necessarily religious, but often. Authority flows from serious-minded militants, whose mandate is to ensure law & order for the safety of the citizenry. If God is at the apex of the pyramid, it happens to be a God with traditional values. The left, broadly, favors expansive freedom of expression, but really for their own kind these days. They profess concern with equality and justice, but don't seem to be interested in property rights, except for their own and those of the lower caste. Note that both left and right are wary of free speech for their opponents, and both fall for populist rhetoric: On the left, populism looks like Marxist redistribution and class warfare; on the right it looks like Judeo-Christian nationalism.
The main thing that concerns me these days [besides the leftist insanity on college campuses and the curious aversion to seeing the rising threat from radical Islam, which is violently opposed to all the Enlightenment values of western democracies] is the mockery of libertarians from both left and right politicians and pundits, and the constant criticism of capitalism trotted out by its chief beneficiaries. I feel like we are witnessing a historic tidal wave of the sort that causes nations to "sleepwalk" into war. Of course, it only seems like sleepwalking from a distant vantage point; when you're caught up in the tidal wave, it seems inevitable.
It's no coincidence that the French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror, nor that Orwell saw the left as the greater danger--despite being a socialist at heart his entire life. His experience in the Spanish Civil War soured him on the reality of human nature to a great degree; at least that's what I got from reading Animal Farm. After the events of the past four years, the leftist claim on "equality & reason" is looking rather dubious. Hard to say where things went wrong...was it Bernie becoming a millionaire by publishing a best-selling book on the evils of capitalism? Was it when progressives decreed that Asians no longer deserve "oppressed minority" status in school admissions? Or when they decided that antisemitism can only be condemned in some elaborate, unspecified context?
It seems we are at a point where the right in America [and hopefully Europe] needs to reassert their position, and I hope they don't take it too far. But freedom--and acceptance of libertarians like you and me--is conditional upon some degree of public order. When I read a critique of Javier Milei by a Latin American journalist in Reason Magazine, I was glad that she told the truth: Nobody can waltz into a cronyist bureaucracy like that and start flipping tables like Jesus in the temple. Not that you'd even have enough insider support to get elected if you were really as libertarian as Milei claims to be. But at least he's heading in the right direction, which is a major step for the subcontinent. I was a bit disappointed with her rebuke of Bukele in El Salvador. He has, in fact, taken over the government in an illiberal fashion--but compared to the days when gangsters could do whatever they wanted to any hapless citizen, it's paradise now. I sure hope that Milei doesn't become a cynical caricature of a Ted Nugent faux libertarian, and I hope Bukele doesn't turn into Pinochet. But what was the alternative in either case? Corrupt oligarchs drove Argentina into the ground, and the gangs that took over from the revolutionaries of past wars destroyed El Salvador. Latin America tends to lean socialist, but I'm not sure whether that's cultural [like the misguided ramblings of popes], or whether it's a reaction to all the bad behavior of American corporations [more mercantilist than capitalist] in the 20th century.
But I think a new day is dawning in Latin America, in which they see free-market capitalism as their path to progress. I really hope so, and as a libertarian I hope that Americans can realize that the drug war we have been pursuing since Nixon has undermined Latin America's potential for prosperity, and has driven millions of migrants across our border--including unknown numbers of gang members. I don't agree with many of today's libertarian purists, either; I think it's naive to cling to principles when they become untenable.
I think America's libertarian ethos of unrestricted immigration and military isolationism are reliant on having vast open territories where ethnic enclaves have plenty of breathing room, an economy that needed massive amounts of unskilled labor for a long time, and the good fortune of having secure borders due to geographical fortune--as well as fantastically abundant natural resources. Now that all of those underlying assumptions have changed dramatically, it might be time to update our ideals for the future. Unfortunately, too many people [including libertarians] confuse border security with opposition to immigration, and our history of colonial exploits with intelligent defense strategy. And by defense, I mean not only within US territory, but forming cooperative alliances with our ideological partners and behaving responsibly.
As Kissinger famously said, "To be an enemy of the US can be dangerous, but to be a friend can be fatal." Yet we don't need to continue our errors of the past, which damaged our reputation for the benefit of the power brokers. Nor do we need to be isolationists, as we can no longer afford to do. The most immediate threat from China is not Taiwan, but control over the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. It was not only nuclear detente that resulted in peace between the world powers since 1945, it was also the globalization of commerce--which relied indisputably on the US Navy as the thin blue line standing against state-sponsored piracy. We've seen what that looks like when Somalia is the sponsoring state; I'm not keen to see what it looks like when the CCP controls the waves. Their incursions on foreign fishing rights are a mild harbinger of things to come, if we lose our hegemony.
Sorry, I guess I should be writing my own blog, not blowing up yours with my brain farts...
Another way to look at this would be in terms of Emmanuel Tod's ideas about family structure as a model for politics. In exogamic societies (endogamic societies like much of the Arab world are a different case), you have the son either remaining under the father's control or setting up separately; and you have one son preeminent or all sons equal. Call the first two A, a and the second two B, b. Then you have four cases: AB (which Tod says is found in Germany and Japan), Ab (Russia and China), aB (the Anglosphere), and ab (France). (Tod actually has a much more detailed map of regional patterns.) Tod started out by noting that the countries that have adopted communism by internal processes, rather than having it imposed on them at gunpoint, are all Ab: their model of a family is that all the sons are equal and all subject to authority. He draws out political implications for the other three also. It seems as if the "right" would fit AB, and the "left" would fit ab.