The Myth Splitting Us Apart

We can do better than dividing us into two buckets

If you’ve ever had to take a Chemistry class, you’ve likely had to memorize some, if not all, of the periodic table’s 118 elements. If you were a more ancient student of chemistry, you would have probably memorized a smaller list, maybe with only 4 elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. We moderns could look down on previous generations, saying they were so ignorant, and we’re so much smarter. Today, we know more, but it took time to discover each new element, and it took humility to say the previous list should be amended to reflect reality. We have the same problem when we describe our political persuasions, using two or three distinctions to describe a plethora of political positions.

Before running for office, I thought that the idea of two ideologies, left and right, was false. This crystalized in my mind while reading the book, “The Myth of Left and Right”. The authors, Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis, tell the story of how we got so “polarized” into baskets of ideas that have become tenets of civic faith and are increasingly dividing us.

Our current partisan system in the United States is along an axis, with a Democratic Party and a Republic Party and independent voters who shift back and forth between both sides. The framers of the Constitution feared the formation of parties, and thought it would be the beginning of tyranny. But parties formed anyway, sorted into Federalist and Anti-federalist factions. James Madison argued factions could be good in a broad republic because they prevent the tyranny of majorities from forming. If we follow the development of the parties, they were operations for getting people elected, instead of ideological purity tests that required leaving reason at the front of the tent. Party conventions would discuss party planks, or ideas that the party supported and rallied around, and which could change. Citizens changed party affiliations as ideas came forward, were debated, factions formed, and factions fractured.

James Madison was a “Federalist” in his support of the constitution, and his authorship of many of the Federalist papers. But when the ideas central to other members of the Federalist Party changed, he moved to become incredibly partisan against the Federalist administration of John Adams. Madison saw the outcome of his labor. He saw the Federalist party’s positions moved in response to the French Revolution and changes in our Country’s standing in the world.

Our current party organizations are no different now, with each one following the wind, adopting and dropping platform planks to suit the members of their groups, and usually trying to attract more members. But what is pernicious, and so well highlighted in the book, is that we now believe there is a philosophy that undergirds all the positions a party takes: that there are only two sides to politics, left and right, and everyone falls along this spectrum.

This idea of left and right comes from the French Republic, where different political persuasions sat on different sides of the room. It was co-opted by the communists to signify their positions within the communist movement, and then it slowly made its way over to the United States from Europe, through the communist news outlets. Over time, the idea morphed into its US meaning of the left in favor of more government intervention, and the right in favor of less government intervention. This was generally used to position those who supported the New Deal policies against those who opposed its policies. But both parties at the time had members who one could say were either right or left along this axis.

Slowly, the parties began to align along this issue, and sort themselves into a more New Deal favoring Democratic Party, and a less New Deal favoring Republican Party. But the New Deal administration is just one policy. As different issues became important, such as intervention in the world, and the government’s role in social issues, more issues were glommed into this binary distinction, leading to the mess we’re in today. For example, Conservative Barry Goldwater favored more taxes, removing new deal policies, allowing abortion, and against civil rights legislation. According to the book, Conservative Ronald Reagan stood on the opposite side of all of these Goldwater prescriptions. Both presidential candidates were on the “right” despite espousing different positions on a myriad of core political issues.

The authors contend that there is no underlying philosophy undergirding each party, and more importantly, no philosophy pushing someone to one side of the left-right or liberal-conservative spectrum. If you consider the source of the left-right distinction in the US, maybe there is a certain ideology that can explain many of the policy positions. Since the communists tried to define themselves along left-right distinctions against other communists, perhaps studying marxism, and its many iterations and evolutions over the past century would help explain some policy positions along this left-right spectrum. Government intervention in the economy isn’t a marxist idea, but the socialists did have designs of complete top-down control. Abortion has always been a discussion in human history, with an early version of the Hippocratic oath mentioning it. But the Communists were strong advocates of abortion, encouraging their members to partake. Whittaker Chambers, a well-known Communist defector, discussed the decision he and his wife made to keep their oldest child when his wife was pregnant, and they were active members of the communist underground. There might be some relationships between ideas that the “left” seems to espouse, and communists in America.

As we incorporate the idea that left and right are the wrong way to frame our political discussion, we will move our politics away from the “us against them” tribalism we see every day. The idea of identifying candidates and leaders based on position preferences, and not lumping different policies together into an imaginary axis, will foster dialogue among everyone. It will help bring society together, not necessarily that everyone will agree on everything, but that everyone will see each other’s diversity of thought and experiences, and we’ll give each other the respect and dignity we’re all due as humans.