An Interview with Hyrum and Verlan Lewis

 

 

 

 

 

 

JMC Resident Historian Elliott Drago sat down with JMC Fellows Hyrum and Verlan Lewis to discuss their new book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America (Oxford University Press). Hyrum Lewis teaches at Brigham Young University-Idaho, and Verlan Lewis teaches at Utah Valley University. 

ED: What inspired you to become a scholar?

HL: I wish I could say I had an idealistic motive like “change the world,” but my inspiration was simpler and more frivolous: scholarship is fun. I was working as a public accountant and detested the hours, the tedium, and the pretenses, so I gave up the money and whatever modicum of “glamor” exists in the corporate world and went into academia. Despite the considerable cut in pay, I’ve never regretted it for a moment. “Fun” is perhaps a frivolous motivation, but maybe a bit nobler than “money,” “status,” or “power” and the joy I find in teaching and researching is irreplaceable.

ED: Briefly tell us the thesis of your book, The Myth of Left and Right.

HVL: Our thesis is simply this: There is more than one issue in politics. While many people would say this is obvious, they act otherwise by employing a political spectrum to describe the political world. A one-dimensional spectrum can, by definition, only model one issue so every time we talk about “center left,” “far right,” “moving to the extreme left,” etc., we are presuming one issue in politics. If there are many political issues—abortion, gay marriage, income tax rates, trade policy, aid to Ukraine, immigration, pandemic mandates, redistribution of wealth, etc.—why are we modeling our politics using a single spectrum? We shouldn’t and this error is having all kinds of negative consequences on our political life.

For instance, if John is extremely in favor of restricting both guns and abortion, John could be considered “far right” for opposing abortion and “far left” for opposing gun ownership (or we could say these two issues “cancel each other out” and put John in the “middle of the spectrum” even though he takes extreme positions). Pretending there is one issue will inevitably give misinformation about John and his political views. Adolf Hitler is considered “far right” for being an anti-semitic militarist socialist while Milton Friedman is considered “far right” for being a Jewish quasi-pacifist advocate of free markets. What does the “far right” label communicate here? Misinformation.

We should stop pretending politics is about one thing the same way we stopped pretending that medicine is about one thing (the balance of humours).

ED: Explain the two theories of ideology that you discuss throughout your work. 

HVL: The first is what we call the “essentialist” or “monist” theory of ideology. This theory says that, despite the appearance of many distinct issues in politics, there is actually just one and we can model this one issue on a spectrum. For most people this one issue is “change”—those who favor change will be on the left while those who oppose change will be on the right. According to essentialism/monism, all positions considered “left wing”—abortion rights, higher taxes on the rich, more immigration, more environmental action, more redistribution of wealth, more aid to Ukraine, more gun control, less drug control—emerge from a “pro-change” worldview. In other words, all of these issues are naturally packaged together so while it may seem there are many issues, there is actually just one issue and our position on this one big issue leads us to one of two bundles of specific policies—the pro-change “left wing” bundle, or the anti-change “right wing” bundle.

 

The second is what we call the “social” or “pluralist” theory of ideology. This theory says that there appear to be many issues in politics because there actually are many issues in politics. Gun control is one issue, drug control is another. Someone can be in favor of more gun control as a way to stop violence and in favor of more drug control as a way to stop violence. If the social/pluralist theory is correct, then a single spectrum can’t accurately model all of the many issues in politics so we should conceive of politics accordingly and discuss politics issue by issue without invoking the misleading labels of “left” “right” “liberal” “conservative.”

Both common sense and the preponderance of scholarly research support the social/pluralist theory.

ED: Why does the “essentialist” notion of ideology continue to persist?

HVL: Because it explains the curious fact that distinct issue positions tend to correlate. It’s a sociological fact that someone who is strongly in favor of gun control is also more likely than the average person to support higher income taxes on the rich (and the rest of the policies currently favored by the Democratic Party). People look at this correlation and draw the understandable conclusion that there must be some underlying “one big issue” tying these seemingly unrelated issues together.

So their conclusion is that humans must 1) start with either a left- or right-wing stance on the one big issue, 2) draw a whole range of policy conclusions from this stance, and then 3) join the political tribe that shares their policy views.

But it turns out that we don’t need to posit a “one big issue” to explain the correlation of distinct issue positions. The human tendency to tribal conformity explains it much better. We humans tend to adopt the views of our social groups as a way to fit in and signal coalitional commitment. This tendency is deep in the human psyche for evolutionary reasons (people belonging to strong coalitions survived and passed on their genes).

Extensive research has shown that the essentialists have it backward. The reality is that people 1) start by anchoring into a tribe, 2) adopt all the policies of that tribe as a matter of socialization, and then 3) create an ex-post facto story to explain how all of those policies grow out of a left or right-wing stance on that one big issue. This self-deception is highly attractive as it allows us to be tribal without feeling tribal. It makes us feel like we have deep, principled reasons for the positions we hold, when, in reality, we hold most of our views for tribal reasons. So we have psychological incentives to perpetuate the monist delusion as well.

ED: Most Americans can place themselves somewhere on the political spectrum. Can you tell us about how the concept of a political spectrum arose in the United States?

HVL: Yes, it first became popular among American intellectuals in the 1920s (they imported it from Europe) and then took off among the public at large in the 1930s. It was highly attractive at the time because, at the national level, there was a single predominant issue—the New Deal—and a spectrum was a useful tool to describe where someone stood on the single issue of more vs. less government intervention in the economy.

 

Since national politics at the time was about one big thing, the spectrum took hold as a way to describe where someone stood on this one issue. Unfortunately, intellectuals attached stories about “change” and “conservation” to justify their positions and then, when new political issues emerged in later decades to complicate the political landscape (anti-communism, abortion, crime policy, drug policy, Vietnam War), political actors just folded these new issues into the same old change vs. preserve story.

After the 1940s, American politics became ever-more pluralistic and a one-dimensional map could no longer adequately describe the multi-dimensional landscape, but instead of confronting this fact, we all started deceiving ourselves with fanciful stories about how all Democrat policies promote “change” and all Republican policies promote “conservation.” It’s not true (as extensive political, psychological, historical, and sociological studies have shown), but the essentialist theory of party consistency was just too attractive as a way for the public to feel politically consistent and as a way for parties to create zealotry among their membership.

ED: What are the consequences of perpetuating the left-right myth?

HVL: The consequences are uniformly negative. The myth of left and right makes us confused, hostile, and cognitively impaired. Studies have shown that those who think in terms of political monism are far less charitable, far less able to think accurately about politics, and even far less principled in the policies they support.

The only thing that can be said in favor of political monism is that it’s “simple,” but a monist theory of medicine, food, chemistry, or recreation would also be “simple,” and yet we don’t pretend that those realms are about just one thing. Imagine if doctors started placing patients on a “medical spectrum”—with fractures, cancer, and bruises “on the left,” and infections, organ failure, and malnutrition “on the right.” Doctors would diagnose a patient as “left wing” and then treat a fractured tibia with chemotherapy. They would be doing a great deal of damage, and yet that’s exactly the kind of damage done in politics today under the same monist delusion.

 

For instance, Americans “diagnosed” George W. Bush as “right wing” (because of the Iraq War), and then “prescribed” extensive government intervention in the economy to fix the damage done by his “right wing” policies, even though Bush was, by all objective measures, the most socialist president since at least FDR. Bone fractures and cancer are separate issues just as the Iraq War and social welfare spending are separate issues. Political monism blinds us to this reality.

ED: You argue that “social ties, not philosophical ties, hold together the dominant ideologies in America today.” How might Americans avoid or even work to abandon ideological tribalism?

HVL: Tribalism is inevitable, but there are healthy and unhealthy tribes. So we recommend strengthening our attachments to healthy tribes—such as families, associations, and congregations—and reducing our attachment to unhealthy ideological tribes by jettisoning the fiction that all of the policies of each tribe are bound by some deep principle of philosophy. The delusion of ideological coherence is exacerbating unhealthy political tribalism.

ED: What has your scholarship taught you about America’s founding principles and history?

HL: The more I research, the more I appreciate the wisdom of the Founders. First of all, they foresaw the dangers of tribalism (“the divisive party spirit” in Washington’s Farewell Address) and saw that politics works much better when rooted in principle rather than tribe.

Second, they found that the best way to unify a diverse nation was behind a creed—a commitment to equality, rights, and consent. They established a liberal system that allows both pluralism and order. Throughout history, leaders saw disagreement as a source of disorder and fragmentation and therefore sought to quash disagreements as a threat to domestic peace. The Constitution both empowered government to establish order / prevent anarchy (“ensure domestic tranquility”), but then restrained that power to allow pluralistic freedom. That balance was a remarkable achievement and we are all the inheritors of quite a legacy.

ED: What is your next project?

HL: I’m deeply interested in the question of societal decline. Our current public discourse is saturated with the idea that progress is somehow necessarily baked into the process of history (thinkers like Francis Fukuyama gave intellectual respectability to this essentially theological idea). Notice that the common charge, “You are on the wrong side of history” assumes that, 1) history has a direction, 2) we know that direction, and 3) the direction is good. All three of these assumptions are, I believe, unfounded, and there is extensive evidence of decline in America.

Our elites are often blinded to the reality of decline because they confuse technological / economic progress with societal progress more generally. I’m currently looking at the various dimensions of American life and charting, with as much data as possible, the upward or downward trend in each. It turns out that the upward trends in the realms of technology, economics, and social justice are counterbalanced or even outweighed by downward trends in social cohesion, ethical restraint, agency, meaning, and, most importantly, overall happiness.

 

America, it appears from the best evidence available, is in decline and has been for two generations. The progressive narrative, it turns out, is simply false when it comes to the United States in recent decades.

ED: What’s one thing you wish everyone knew about the American political tradition?

HVL: The Founders said they were working to establish “a more perfect union” and we have the privilege of continuing that project. Too many people today are afflicted by the nirvana fallacy—the idea that if something isn’t perfect, then it’s terrible. And, of course, since America isn’t perfect people jump to the unjustified conclusion that America must therefore be irredeemably evil (“racist,” “oppressive,” “white supremacist,” “patriarchal” etc.). But the rational response to America’s shortcomings isn’t America hatred, but America improvement—continuing the project of helping create “a more perfect union.”

Elliott Drago serves as the JMC’s Resident Historian and Editorial Manager. He is a historian of American history and the author of Street Diplomacy: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom in Philadelphia, 1820-1850 (Johns-Hopkins University Press, 2022).

Banner image: Charles Le Brun, Les Quatre complexions de l’homme (trans. “The Four Temperaments”), 1674

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