No model of the political spectrum will ever be satisfying, the Lewis brothers argue, because "left" and "right" are not actually ideologies-they are "bundles of unrelated political positions connected by nothing other than a group." An American in 2004 who wanted low taxes, a vigorous war on terror, and a constitutional amendment against gay marriage was taking "right-wing" positions, but what linked such disparate opinions? Nothing but sociology, say the Lewises: "A conservative or liberal is not someone who has a conservative or liberal philosophy, but someone who belongs to the conservative or liberal tribe."Īnd those tribes' outlooks evolve over time, as their positions on the issues (and the importance they grant to different issues) gradually change. Even if the authors got their example slightly wrong, their underlying point about Hitler and Friedman is basically right. But the most notable war that he supported was World War II, otherwise known as the war against Hitler. The Lewises are sometimes prone to overstatement, and one of those overstatements is in that passage: While Friedman did tend to be anti-war, he was not a pacifist. Placing both Hitler and Friedman on the same side of a spectrum as if they shared some fundamental essence is both misleading and destructive." "Why do we refer to both Milton Friedman (a Jewish, pro-capitalist pacifist) and Adolf Hitler (an anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist militarist) as 'right wing' when they had opposite policy views on every point?" ask the historian Hyrum Lewis and his political scientist brother Verlan in The Myth of Left and Right, a new book that sets dynamite charges around the very concept of the political spectrum. Hess, meanwhile, conceded that his configuration puts the average liberal Democrat "to the right of many conservatives." Charming as it is for Goldwater's ex-speechwriter to conclude that his old boss was to the left of Lyndon Johnson, this idea would be a hard sell to most Americans.īut then, every left-right model starts to look strange if you peer closely enough. When the Bircher duo put anarchy on the far right, they didn't merely mean free market anarchists of the Murray Rothbard sort: The only anarchist their book mentioned by name was the old-school anarcho-collectivist Mikhail Bakunin, who most people would call a radical leftist. They just couldn't agree on that minor little matter of which way is left and which is right.Įach of those maps has its quirks. But both books defined the spectrum in essentially the same terms. When Hess discussed late Maoist China, for example, he made refinements that the Birchers might discard, distinguishing the party bureaucracy ("much more to the right") from the rambunctious countryside ("very far to the left"). Oh, you'll find little differences if you probe the details. "If you have total government it makes little difference whether you call it Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Caesarism or Pharaohism." And if "total government (by any of its pseudonyms) stands on the far Left, then by logic the far Right should represent anarchy, or no government." On the right side of the spectrum, but not as far right as anarchism, was their preferred system: "a Constitutional Republic with a very limited government."Īs you no doubt noticed, these two maps are basically mirror images. "Communism is, by definition, total government," Gary Allen and Larry Abraham declared in None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Here is an alternate spectrum, presented four years earlier by two members of the John Birch Society. The left, conversely, favored "the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands." And the "farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism-the total opposition to any institutionalized power." The far right, Karl Hess wrote in Dear America, was the realm of "monarchy, absolute dictatorships, and other forms of absolutely authoritarian rule," be they fascist or Stalinist or anything else. Here is one version of the left-right spectrum, as described in 1975 by a former Barry Goldwater speechwriter who had left the conservative movement to break bread with Black Panthers and Wobblies.
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