The fiction at the heart of America’s political divide

America’s most impassioned Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much. Ask the inhabitants of Bluesky and Truth Social whether a fetus is a person, or undocumented immigrants are a scourge, or trans women are women, or climate change is a crisis, or Covid vaccines are toxic, or taxes are too high, or welfare spending is too low, or AR-15s should be banned, or the federal bureaucracy should be gutted, or the police discriminate against Black people, or universities discriminate against white men, or Donald Trump is a fascist, or Joe Biden is the reanimated corpse of a man who died in 2020, and each group is liable to provide warring answers.

If staunch Democrats and Republicans agree on anything, however, it’s that their myriad policy disputes all follow from a deeper philosophical conflict — the centuries-long clash between progressive and conservative conceptions of political justice, truth, and human nature. 

But some political scientists, social psychologists, and philosophers say this is, to use a technical term, “bullshit.”

According to such thinkers, there are no coherent principles that bind the left and right’s various positions. No timeless precept compels conservatives to be both anti-abortion and pro-tax cuts — or progressives to be both anti-gun and pro-environment. 

Rather, in this view, it is contingent historical alliances, not age-old moral philosophies, that explain each side’s motley assortment of issue stances: In the mid-20th century, Christian traditionalists happened to form a coalition with libertarian businessmen inside the GOP. Conservatives consequently discovered that banning abortion and cutting taxes were both indispensable for preserving America’s founding values.

Likewise, urban communities wracked by gun violence — and nonprofit organizations alarmed by pollution — happened to align with the Democratic Party in the 1960s. As a result, progressives realized that gun control and decarbonization were both part of the same eternal struggle for social justice.

In other words, as the political scholars (and brothers) Hyrum and Verlan Lewis write, “ideologies do not define tribes, tribes define ideologies.” To the Lewises and likeminded social scientists, “progressivism” and “conservatism” don’t name enduring philosophies of government, so much as ever-shifting rationalizations for the interests of rival alliances.

This might sound like an invitation to nihilism. But in the Lewises’ view, the belief that all of the left and right’s disputes reflect one essential moral conflict — an idea they dub “ideological essentialism” — is even more pernicious. By convincing conservatives and progressives that all of their movement’s positions flow from their most cherished ideals, essentialism discourages ideologues from thinking through discrete issues on the merits. And by telling America’s rival factions that “there are two (and only two) ways to approach politics,” essentialism fuels Manichaean thinking and partisan strife.

This theory of what divides our parties — and ails our politics — has its insights. But it also takes its case too far. The left and right’s policy disputes are not all manifestations of one ageless moral conflict. But it does not follow that progressives and conservatives are divided by nothing more than arbitrary alliances and tribal psychology. 

How the “left” and “right” came to America

The ideological spectrum was born in France about 237 years ago. 

At the revolutionary National Assembly in 1789, radicals sat on the left side of the chamber and monarchists on the right, thereby lending Western politics its defining metaphor: a one-dimensional continuum between egalitarian revolution and hierarchical conservation. The more a faction (or policy) promoted change in service of equality, the farther left its place on this imaginary line; the more it defended existing hierarchies in the name of order, the farther right its spot. 

European politics began organizing itself around this metaphor in the 19th century. But for its first 150 years or so, the American republic mostly made do without it. 

As Hyrum and Verlan Lewis note in their book, The Myth of Left and Right, early American political parties did not define themselves in spatial terms. Nor did they fit neatly into our contemporary ideological binary. The Jeffersonian Republicans were more supportive of the French Revolution than their Hamiltonian counterparts, but also more fanatically committed to free-market economics. Jacksonian Democrats agitated against the Whigs to enfranchise poor white men — but also, to expand slavery, ethnically cleanse Native Americans, and restrict the federal government’s power. 

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that mainstream American intellectuals and politicians began speaking of politics as a struggle between the “progressive” left and “conservative” right — with the former largely defined by its commitment to government intervention in the economy, and the latter by its fondness for laissez-faire.

This ideological conflict initially divided the parties internally. But gradually, beginning with the New Deal, the words “progressive,” “left-wing,” and “Democrat” became synonymous, as did the words “conservative,” “right-wing,” and “Republican.”

In the Lewises’ view, the left-to-right metaphor had some utility in the New Deal era. In that period, partisan conflict was concentrated overwhelmingly on a single fundamental issue: the size and scope of government. And on individual questions, one can coherently plot opinion on a spectrum. If you draw a line with “full communism” at its left pole — and “anarcho-capitalism” at its right one — you can logically place the New Deal’s proponents and adversaries at different points along your continuum. Partly for this reason, the spatial metaphor became entrenched in American political thought by the 1950s.

The case against “progressivism” and “conservatism”

Over the second half of the 20th century, however, the number of salient political issues in the United States steadily multiplied. America’s “progressive” and “conservative” coalitions developed disparate stances on civil rights, abortion, military intervention, environmental protection, immigration, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, gun control, policing, and countless other topics. And as these disagreements mounted, the one-dimensional ideological spectrum — and with it, the very concept of a “left” and “right” — became increasingly incoherent, according to the Lewises.

After all, whether the US government should mandate a minimum wage and whether it should forbid abortions, or deport the undocumented, or tax carbon emissions, or provide public health insurance are all completely different questions. Believing a fetus is a person does not logically commit one to thinking that Medicaid should be cut.

Progressives and conservatives may believe that some fundamental, moral principle motivates all their movement’s stances. But the Lewises offer at least three reasons for doubting that premise.

First, the ideological valence of a given policy often varies across time and space. 

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, progressives supported free trade, believing that increasing economic interdependence would forestall war and raise living standards. Then, as foreign competition began undermining American industrial unions, the left started gravitating toward protectionism. Now that President Donald Trump has turned tariffs into a conservative cause (and political liability), liberals are inching back toward their erstwhile economic internationalism. 

Similarly, support for free speech, immigration restriction, and American military intervention were all coded as “progressive” at some points in US history and “conservative” at others, in the Lewises’ account. 

Second, they maintain that every attempt to define the essential disagreement between progressivism and conservatism is tendentious and unsustainable. In the context of revolutionary France, the left indisputably stood for egalitarian change, and the right, for the maintenance of traditional hierarchies. But one can’t easily shoehorn all of America’s contemporary policy debates into this binary. 

To see their point, consider gun control. Does restricting firearm sales abet equality, since gun violence disproportionately afflicts disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic groups? Or will doing so reinforce hierarchy, since such rules increase the power imbalance between state and citizen, while boosting the incarceration rates of disadvantaged groups? There is no objective answer. And subjectively, gun rights advocates rarely understand themselves to be fighting for greater inequality.

Of course,“equality versus hierarchy” is just one popular framing of the left and right’s fundamental divide. But the Lewises suggest that all others, such as “big government versus small government or “equality versus liberty,” also collapse under scrutiny. 

Finally, the authors note that most Americans tend to be ideologically heterodox, embracing “conservative” positions on some issues and “progressive” ones on others. It is only highly engaged partisans who discern some clear link between, say, cutting taxes on the rich and banning youth gender medicine (or between the opposite of those positions). 

This could theoretically reflect impassioned partisans’ greater political knowledge — perhaps, the highly engaged have simply paid close enough attention to discern the essential unity of progressive and conservative policy stances. But the more plausible explanation, according to the Lewises, is that there is no connection between these stances — and so people will only arrive at uniformly “left-wing” or “right-wing” answers if they’re exposed to partisan cues instructing them which is which. 

What truly divides progressives and conservatives

There is a good deal of truth in the Lewises’ narrative — but also, quite a bit of overstatement. 

America’s progressive and conservative coalitions surely aren’t bound by first principles, alone. Each camp features some arbitrary alliances, which it reinforces and sanctifies through dubious storytelling: The left and right equate the pursuit of their allies’ disparate (and often petty) interests with the advancement of a timeless ideal, such as social justice, human liberty, or national strength.

But the Lewises are not satisfied with these observations. Their argument isn’t that the contents of “progressive” and “conservative” ideology are partly arbitrary and historically contingent, but that they are entirely so. In their view, coherent moral principles might justify the left and right’s respective positions on any single issue. But no philosophical assumption, or even psychological disposition, ties together any meaningful number of progressive and conservative policies. 

Polarization over particularism plausibly imbues today’s partisan rift with some deeper moral substance. 

Yet this theory sits uneasily with a basic fact: While some right-wing and left-wing positions vary between eras and countries, most do not. 

For the past six decades, throughout the Western world, certain policy stances have clustered together with striking regularity. In the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia and elsewhere, parties of the left have consistently been more supportive of income redistribution, minority rights, collective bargaining, and feminism than those of the right. 

If progressivism and conservatism have no essential substance — but merely reflect the propagandistic myths of two contingent coalitions — then one would expect wild variation in each ideology’s contents across national contexts. Instead, certain alliances and policy bundles recur again and again. 

In an interview, Hyrum Lewis attributed this merely to the modern media environment: In the digital age, foreign ideologues can import America’s culture wars. “As the globe has become more unified with globalization,” Lewis told me, “we’ve seen the correlations between these different issue positions become tighter.”

But there are reasons to doubt that this fully explains the phenomenon. 

For one thing, the philosophical webbing between many of the left and right’s most common positions is thicker than the Lewises suggest. Progressives may not hold a monopoly on concern for equality in every sense of that term. But relative to conservatives, the left is plainly more committed to reducing the disadvantages of historically subordinated groups. And this moral commitment plausibly explains why progressives — across borders and time periods — have tended to be more supportive of income redistribution (which mitigates class inequality), equal pay legislation (which mitigates gender inequality), and anti-discrimination laws (which mitigate racial inequality) than the right has been. 

Conservatives, for their part, readily agree that they are less concerned with class, race, and gender inequality than their left-wing counterparts. The mainstream right does not justify this position by celebrating “hierarchy” per se. But it does insist that progressive proposals for combating inequality put too little weight on liberty, stability, respect for earned distinctions, or other important goods. 

Each side therefore can coherently argue that its stances on multiple issues flow from one overarching principle (its sense of equality’s importance relative to other ideals). And this philosophical unity may help explain the recurrence of certain policy bundles across eras and nations.

Moreover, even some logically unrelated left-wing and right-wing policies may nonetheless reflect a common ethical intuition. For example, there is some evidence that the left and right’s disagreements on the seemingly distinct issues of immigration, foreign aid, and social welfare spending are all rooted in each side’s degree of moral universalism — which is to say, the extent to which its members are more trusting and altruistic toward their inner circles than toward strangers. 

There is no reason in principle why a person who supports increasing immigration must also back higher spending on foreign aid and social welfare. Yet a voter’s views on all three could theoretically be influenced by how much trust and concern they have for socially distant people: If you have little faith or interest in strangers, then you may be less inclined to fund food stamps with your tax dollars or allow foreigners into your country. 

And more morally universalistic voters are indeed more likely to hold left-wing views on immigration, income redistribution, and foreign aid, according to a 2022 study from researchers at Harvard and the University of Bonn. Critically, the paper emphasizes that moral universalists aren’t necessarily more empathetic than moral particularists are; it is just that the former’s social concern is spread more evenly than the latter’s between their family, friends, countrymen, and humans in general. In other words, universalists might be less generous to their neighbors than particularists, but more compassionate to people they don’t know.  

Put in these terms, many conservatives self-identify as moral particularists, arguing that progressives do not adequately prioritize their families over strangers, nor their fellow Americans over foreigners. 

This split over universalism might not define the left-right divide in all eras and places; progressivism has at times been nationalistic and conservatism, cosmopolitan. But polarization over particularism plausibly imbues today’s partisan rift with some deeper moral substance. 

To uphold your principles, question your policies

All this casts doubt on the Lewises’ most hopeful idea: that if progressives and conservatives only recognized the true nature of their ideologies, then America’s partisan conflicts would no longer be explosive and destabilizing. 

Ideologues surely overestimate the philosophical unity of their commitments. Rid the Earth of such confusion, however, and much of the enmity between America’s left and right would remain. The devotees of Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have genuinely different worldviews. Progressives aren’t wrong to perceive this White House as a threat to their conceptions of both democracy and social justice. And conservatives aren’t mistaken in thinking that the Democratic Party is hostile to their convictions about the nature of gender, economic liberty, and the metaphysical status of the unborn.

In an alternate dimension — where the terms “left” and “right” never entered America’s vocabulary — these conflicts would be sufficient to inspire bitter partisan divisions. Indeed, the Lewises’ own historical observations tell us that ideological essentialism is no precondition for political strife; Americans were largely unacquainted with “progressivism” and “conservatism” in the 19th century, yet still developed a partisan conflict incendiary enough to provoke a civil war.

This said, ideological essentialism is nonetheless a pernicious force in American politics. But this is less because it causes animosity between the parties than because it undermines sound policymaking within them. 

The left and right hold some distinct principles. But neither can derive answers to all of today’s governance challenges from their broad moral precepts. You cannot discern whether zoning restrictions reduce housing affordability — or whether gifted programs harm disadvantaged students — merely by deciding that you care a lot about inequality. Nor can you determine whether tariffs or mass deportation will raise American living standards, simply by deciding that the government must put “America first.” 

Yet ideological essentialism invites the opposite impression by casting all policy debates, even the most technical, as referenda on bedrock moral principles. This framework is attractive to partisans, as it reduces the cognitive burdens of political advocacy: It is much easier to decide how you feel about one philosophical premise than to carefully adjudicate dozens of technocratic claims. Further, when a policy argument is understood as a gauge of moral character — rather than a test of empirical propositions — it becomes a better vehicle for partisans’ self-expression and communal bonding. 

Meanwhile, ideological essentialism also aids party-aligned interest groups, as it effectively equates their agendas with justice itself, thereby deterring intra-party dissent. If slashing taxes on business owners is tantamount to defending liberty, then one needn’t worry about whether working-class conservatives will end up paying the price. Likewise, if banning self-driving vehicles is synonymous with standing against class inequality, then one can more comfortably ignore human drivers’ greater propensity to get people killed.

In this respect, the Lewises’ book is edifying. If some of the left and right’s positions reflect contingent alliances — rather than timeless truths — then neither side has a basis for presuming the uniform righteousness of its current stances. 

Given this reality, any political community that wishes for its policy positions to be genuinely principled — which is to say, conducive to its avowed objectives in both theory and practice — will need to encourage heterodoxy within its ranks. If progressives and conservatives feel that they can contest their faction’s orthodoxies without risking excommunication, then each camp will be more likely to detect its own errors and hypocrisies. If intellectual conformity is the price of factional belonging, then the left and right are bound to unwittingly undermine their own values.

In other words, for progressives or conservatives to develop anything resembling a perfectly principled platform, they must first recognize that none exists.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.