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"For [Silvan] Tomkins (1987: 173), the left-right conflict was a fundamental, age-old one that is “a sublimated derivative of social stratification and exploitation.” This is because social systems based on stratification and exploitation—as most societies throughout human history have been—always have both defenders and challengers. According to Tomkins, normative, right-wing ideologies are “defensive ideologies [that] vary as a function of the nature of the society they defend” and “place the blame for [problems in society] squarely upon those who suffer and complain,” like “the welfare ‘cheats’ who are to blame for their own problems” (176). By contrast, humanistic, left-wing ideologies “place the blame for the problematic on the established normative authority, which must then change itself or be changed by those who suffer” (177). Left-right differences, from this perspective, may be understood in part as divergent motives to maintain and justify (vs. challenge and improve upon) the societal status quo (Jost, 2020)."
"At some point, and I cannot remember how or why, I stumbled upon an English translation of Norberto Bobbio’s (1996) little book, Left & Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, which sold over 200,000 copies in Italy in its first year of publication. I found the book so inspiring that I shifted my entire research agenda for several years. Its influence is apparent even in the title of this book.
When people say that academics live an ideologically monastic existence—and that people like me have never met a real conservative—I have to laugh. It is true that my grandfather, who worked as a draughtsman for Kodak and Xerox, was a member of the left-leaning Catholic Worker’s Movement and a pro-Black civil rights activist in Rochester, New York. It is also the case that my parents met at a civil rights meeting in 1963 and that one of the only things they shared deeply was liberal-leftist ideology. But in my family I also have prudent, upstanding moderates who vote Republican sometimes—as well as anti-abortion activists and conspiracy-minded right-wing nut jobs addicted to Fox News and Daily Wire. After all, we are Americans.
In Cincinnati; Durham; New Haven; Washington, DC; Santa Barbara; Palo Alto; San Francisco; Boston; New York; Easton, PA; and many other places, I have encountered and befriended leftists and rightists and a lot of people who seem not to care much about politics, although they always have opinions in the end. The same is true of people I have met in London, Bologna, Zurich, Paris, and Budapest, among other places. Of course, I would not say that the leftists in all those places are the same, nor are the rightists. But I do see some important family resemblances, in Wittgenstein’s sense of the term. This book reflects my sustained attempt over the past 20 years to understand and describe the language games and forms of life that help to flesh out the nature of those ideological categories."
" [1. A psychological approach to the study of Political Ideology]
"The left-right dimension, which is ubiquitous in Western political life, has ancient origins pertaining to Indo-European concepts of handedness. Right-handedness has long been associated with dominance and the powerful normative influence of the majority, whereas left-handedness has been associated with the vulnerability of minority deviance (McManus, 2002). More than a century ago Robert Hertz (1909: 89) noted that “the right hand is the symbol and model of all aristocracy, the left hand of all common people.”
According to the French Canadian political scientist Jean Antoine Laponce (1981: 10), the right in Medieval Europe was considered the “side of God,” and it was “universally associated with the notion of privilege, dominance, and sacredness” as well as “liking for or acceptance of social and religious hierarchies.” By contrast, the “gauche,” “sinister” left was associated with the “equalization of conditions through the challenge of God and prince.” People who root for the underdog are, at least temperamentally speaking, on the left. Those who admire the powerful and wish that longstanding cultural traditions were more universally accepted and respected are generally on the right. If you can ask only one question about a person’s politics, the one you should ask, in one way or another, is whether their sympathies are with the left or the right.
Strangely, however, sociologists and political scientists often resist or avoid the most important orienting concept in all of Western politics. Edward A. Shils (1954: 27–28), for instance, mocked the left-right distinction as “rickety,” “spurious,” and “obsolete.” Decades later, Christopher Lasch (1991: 21) declared that “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action.” Shils and Lasch are by no means the only skeptics when it comes to the left-right dimension of ideology, as we will see in the next chapter.
Many take inspiration from Philip Converse’s (1964) conclusion—based on an analysis of US public opinion data from the 1950s—that most people are woefully innocent (or ignorant) of political ideology. For instance, political scientists Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe (2017) insist that most Americans are “neither liberal nor conservative” and that, when it comes to politics, they are “little more than casual spectators.” Their characterization is condescending, but more important than that, I think it is wrong, or at least exaggerated to the point of unhelpfulness:
Parochial in interest, modest in intellect, and burdened by the demands and obligations of everyday life, most citizens lack the wherewithal and motivation to grasp political matters in a deep way. People are busy with more pressing things; politics is complicated and far away. Ideology is not for them. (Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017: 3)
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (2016: 12) draw on the same body of research to arrive at a similarly bleak assessment of the ideological “capacity” of ordinary citizens:
Most democratic citizens are uninterested in politics, poorly informed, and unwilling or unable to convey coherent policy preferences. . . . Converse’s argument is, if anything, even better supported a half century later than it was when he wrote. A vast amount of supporting evidence has been added to his dispiriting comparison of actual human political cognition with the expectations derived from the folk theory of democracy. Well-informed citizens, too, have come in for their share of criticism, since their well-organized “ideological” thinking often turns out to be just a rather mechanical reflection of what their favorite group and party leaders have instructed them to think.
And yet, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the left-right ideological distinction simply will not die. This is because it continues to operate as “a powerful summary tool” (Campbell et al., 1960) that offers “an economical mode of discourse” (Tedin, 1987) and reflects the “core currency of political exchange” (Noël & Thérien, 2008).
There are some social scientists—such as Cochrane (2015), Freire (2015), and Hibbing et al. (2014)—who share Mair’s (2007) sense that the left-right distinction remains “a powerful device in both national and cross-national explanations of political behavior, both at mass and elite levels,” and is “unchallenged by any potentially competing set of referents” (217–218). I agree with them. Ronald Inglehart (1990: 292–293), who sought to develop a potential alternative to the left-right conception in terms of materialist vs. post-materialist values, likewise felt compelled to acknowledge that:
the Left-Right dimension, as a political concept, is a higher-level abstraction used to summarize one’s stand on the important political issues of the day. It serves the function of organizing and simplifying a complex political reality, providing an overall orientation toward a potentially limitless number of issues, political parties, and social groups. The pervasiveness of the Left-Right concept through the years in Western political discourse testifies to its usefulness.
I would go even further: if the left-right distinction did not exist, scholars of ideology would need to invent its equivalent.
This is because ideological worldviews help citizens to integrate a very wide range of direct and indirect reactions to the social world, some of which are manifestly political and others of which are not, into patterns that mesh with their own personalities—broadly construed to include cognitive, affective, and motivational structures—as well as lifestyles. In this sense, ideology reflects and contributes to relatively stable, but by no means perfectly stable or consistent, preferences that may be either dormant or highly active. This is not to say that the structural-organizational effects of ideology are socially desirable or even logically coherent. Ideology leads many people astray. It often courts confusion and misunderstanding, as theorists in the Marxian tradition would be quick to point out (e.g., Larrain, 1983), rather than sophistication and knowledge.
On this issue, the ambidextrous conclusion reached by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality remains apt: “on one hand, liberalism and conservatism are relatively organized and measurable patterns of current politico-economic thought; and on the other hand, within each of these broad patterns there is considerable subpatterning, inconsistency, and simple ignorance.” Their bottom line strikes me as right: “To ignore either the relative generality, or the relative inconsistency would . . . lead to serious misunderstanding of the problem” (Adorno et al., 1950: 175–176). For too long, it seems to me that prominent social scientists have committed the former infraction. Focusing on psychological rather than logical consistency may help to restore some balance—and to foster a more realistic sense of ordinary citizens’ strengths and weaknesses in the political domain, recognizing that ideology contributes to both.
In psychology, there has been a virtual explosion of research on political ideology over the last 15 years or so. Table 1.1 displays the results of a PsycInfo search on the keywords “political ideology.” Of the 1,318 books, articles, and dissertations on the topic that have appeared since 1935, 72% of them came out between 2005 and 2019. These works show that leftists and rightists diverge from one another in terms of (a) personality characteristics, (b) cognitive processing styles, (c) motivational interests and concerns, (d) the prioritization of personal values, and (e) neurological structures and physiological functions. This book summarizes and integrates these and related areas of research and underscores the major conclusions that have emerged from recent studies in political psychology."
-John T. Jost, Left and Right. The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction, Oxford University Press, 2021.
