What is Left? What is Right? Does it Matter?

James Pinkerton

The late Stephen Jay Gould quipped that the intellectual world could be divided between two camps, the “lumpers” and the “splitters.” Lumpers see commonalities, splitters see differences. Can things be sorted into a few broad categories, or do they need to be assigned to more specific and nuanced cubbyholes? Gould was mostly concerned with paleontology, but the same lumpers-splitters argument can be applied to politics: should we collapse all the variations of American thought into just two categories, liberal and conservative, or should we insist that, say, libertarian conservatives be held separate and distinct from conservative libertarians?

So long as there are just two political parties of consequence in America, it makes sense to use the familiar “lumping” terminology, which would have us aggregating lots of unlike folk into just two categories. And so liberals become synonymous with Democrats and conservatives, Republicans. Admittedly, there are exceptions, such as the effort of many self-proclaimed conservatives to save the political hide of Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is 17 out of a possible 100 -- wars do make for strange neo-bedfellows.

However, since the “splitters” make good points, too, we might note some key splits within the lumps:

Although it is true, lumpily speaking, that Republicans are the conservative party and Democrats the liberal party, it is also true that the two parties are split, top against bottom. Elite Republicans tend to be libertarian, as do elite Democrats. Conversely, Republican regulars tend to be populist and conservative, and the same holds true for Democratic regulars.

Not that many elite Republicans, in other words, are passionately pro-life or pro-flag-burning amendment or anti-gay marriage. Indeed, the levels of cynicism and opportunism on such issues inside the Republican Beltway can only be called Nixonian. The real passions of top Republicans are reserved for such causes as tax cuts, free trade, and maybe a foreign war or two. And if the GOP elites are truly ahead of the curve, they embrace avant-garde ideas for Republicanizing immigrants.

Meanwhile, rank-and-file Republicans are far different. The folks closer to the base really are social conservatives, and yet at the same time they are suspicious, even hostile, toward imports and immigrants. And while grassroots GOPers still mostly support the Iraq War, they support it because it’s a war in which our boys -- strictly speaking, their boys -- are fighting and dying, not because they dream of democratizing Kirkuk. It’s their patriotic Jacksonian blood that’s been fired up, not their world-historical Krauthammerian vision.

If the Republicans are divided between intellectual libertarians and instinctive traditionalists, so, too, are the Democrats.

Top Democrats believe in higher taxes -- even if there’s a chance that they, personally, will pay more -- as well as national health insurance, more spending for infrastructure, and other Big Governmentisms. But it’s the rare elite Democrat who will admit to being a socialist, or even a social democrat; most want to see the economy shift a little to the left, although not so much that the World Trade Organization is jeopardized. But what top Dems really believe in is personal freedom -- freedom of reproductive choice, freedom to marry someone of either gender, freedom to print government secrets.

Meanwhile, in the lower depths of the Democratic Party, lots of lefty -- but also illiberal -- ideas flourish. There are plenty of unionists who would not only support a Smoot-Hawleyish crackdown on trade but also support even a complete government takeover of their company in order to save their jobs. And the millions of downscale blacks, browns, and seniors who yearn for an unlimited expansion of the welfare state can count on the enthusiastic support of more millions of government employees. Yet at the same time, many of these Democrats, including minorities, are pro-life and pro-traditional morality. Not a lot of gay-marriage advocates in Flint or Brownsville.

So that’s how the two big lumps are subdivided. Mostly libertarian Republicans preside over a populist-conservative base on the Right, while on the Left, mostly libertarian Democrats preside over a motley crew -- everyone from Luddite socialist Greens to what Europeans would call “right-wing social democrats,” a teeming mass united by little except, paradoxically, anti-libertarianism.

It should come as no surprise that many Americans feel out of place in this partisan-ideological typology. In recent decades, millions of white collars, especially in the North, have drifted into the Democratic Party, while tens of millions of blue collars have become Republican. Which is to say, the GOP has been the net winner in this shuffle. So no Republican should complain about the terminological status quo -- at least not too much.

Michael Lind

The meanings of the terms “conservative” and “liberal” (and its synonym “progressive”) have been altered by two long-term trends in American politics. The first is the replacement of ideology by partisanship; the second is the alignment of partisanship and identity.

In living memory conservatism and liberalism referred to ideological movements, not political parties. The conservative movement was not identical with the Republican Party, nor was the liberal movement identical with the Democratic Party. This is no longer the case. Today conservative means partisan Republican and liberal means partisan Democrat. Ideological liberals who deviate from the Democratic party line of a given moment are ignored or vilified, as are ideological conservatives who deviate from the Republican party line.

Without ideological movements, there is no place for ideologues. Most of those who pass for prominent conservative and liberal intellectuals today are actually engaged in public relations. It is the job of these apparatchiks to sell a party line to the public, after the party line has already been determined in private by negotiations among donors, special-interest spokesmen, pollsters, and politicians.

The replacement of ideology by partisanship has been accompanied by the alignment of partisanship and ethnicity. The major divide between American politics is not geographic. Maps of how counties vote show that there are no red states and blue states, only red states and blue cities. But the city-suburb divide itself is merely a surrogate for an ethnic and religious divide.

Today the Republican Party is the party of the ethnic and religious majority, white Christians, and the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic and religious minorities -- non-whites (blacks and Latinos) and non-Christians (Jews and post-Christian secularists). The fact that the Republicans get some non-white and Jewish and secularist votes, while the Democrats get a minority of white Christian votes, does not alter this pattern. The big cities are Democratic because that is where blacks, Latinos, Jews, and post-Christian secularists are concentrated, and the suburbs and small towns are Republican because that is where most white Christians live.

The emergence of a pan-white, pan-Christian majority party, the Republicans, shows that the melting pot worked for whites. The ethnic divisions among Anglo-Americans and European-Americans have been effaced by assimilation and intermarriage. The once deep theological divide between Protestants and Catholics in the U.S. has been replaced by an alliance of conservative Christians against moral liberalism in both its secular and religious varieties.

By contrast, the core of the Democratic Party is a coalition of ethnic and religious minorities that have little in common other than suspicion of the white Christian majority. Blacks fear white racism; Latinos fear Anglo nativism; and Jews and post-Christian secularists fear Christian triumphalism. A traditional big-city patronage machine, the Democratic Party offers each minority what it wants: affirmative action (blacks and Latinos), mass immigration from Latin America (Latinos), and strict separation of church and state and moral liberalism (Jews and secularists).

The party of the majority and the party of minorities naturally look at government in different ways. Because it represents the white Christian majority, the Republican Party of today is nationalist, identifying the majority with the state; communitarian, thinking that the values of the majority should be enforced by the state; and majoritarian, trusting in elected representatives. As a coalition of minorities, the Democratic Party, with equal consistency, is anti-nationalist, insisting on the difference between the majority and the state; multicultural, rejecting the idea that majority values should be enforced by the state; and anti-majoritarian, trusting in unelected judges to protect ethnic minorities and maverick individuals against the national majority.

Identity politics lives and dies by demography. Democrats hope that mass immigration from Latin America will permit a growing Latino population, allied with the urban minority coalition, to dominate the government. The Republican Party, as the nation-state party, cannot incorporate Latinos as a distinct voting bloc with distinct group privileges the way that the group-based Democratic ethnic machine hopes to do. The white Christian majority, however, might absorb most second- and third-generation Latinos into a mixed-race Christian majority, a task that would be easier if fewer Latinos were foreign-born.

And what of ideologues in this ethnically-based political system? There will still be libertarians, social democrats, greens, populists, and others. If they have any strategic sense, they will not try to take over one of the two parties. Instead, they will organize themselves as non-partisan movements that seek to influence both of our identity-based national parties.

These ideological movements should call themselves by their proper names. Libertarians and populists who argue that they are the true conservatives are wasting their breath. So are social democrats and greens who argue that they are the true liberals or progressives. For the foreseeable future, the term conservative will be a synonym for Republican and liberal or progressive will be a synonym for Democrat. As labels for genuine public philosophies, those terms are gone for good. Good riddance.