http://i.imgur.com/DzVzOnw.jpg

The distinction is between power concentrated in the mass or masses on the left, and power concentrated on individuals or an individual on the right. Polycentrism is a Rightist principle, up until the ideal of Imperium is achieved, and all power is concentrated in a single individual. Yet the way that Empire historically worked was extremely lassaiz-faire and decentralized, culturally, religiously, and even economically as far as the average individual’s daily life was concerned. And so in a way Imperium transcends the spectrum.

Some historical forms, like Stalin’s Socialism in One Country and Napoleon’s Jacobin Empire don’t fit neatly on the graph. Neither does Anarchism which can take both collectivist and radically individualist forms.

Early Modern colonial imperialism of a mercantile bent is not quite the same as Imperium (think Caesar and Shahansah), but would still fall on the right half of the spectrum somewhere. And might the kind of Corporate nationalism advocated at times by Moldbug be considered a type of Aristocratic Oligarchy, or perhaps Aristocratic Democracy?

Here’s one for Factor Analysis (which, for example, goes a long way to supporting the concept of a general intelligence factor g) and Here’s another link that helps to briefly introduce MPE and MAP.

My point was there are only really two ways to try and define right and left. You can make something up that sounds philosophically plausible and try to explain away all the real world inconsistencies. Or you can let the “political market data” – both what people do and how they themselves use the terms – drive the train and accept that there might not actually be any prominent single factor that corresponds to our hunch concerning the divide.

If you’re going to use a data-based approach, there are a variety of clever and dynamically-updatable statistical methods that would be most useful. A cursory glance at voteview’s work seems to indicate that in contemporary American politics, there is indeed a very prominent single factor that divides our political alliance clusters. Each ideological camp has pulled apart (a bimodal political distribution – most acutely in California) and has at the same time drawn closer toward their respective centers of gravity – tending to agree with their allies on more and more things.

What else to call that but “left and right”? If we use other terms that neither match up to the axis of that gap nor are in the language people ordinarily use to describe it (like “verts and zonts”), what the hell good are they? If you’re going to go the prescriptivist route, and especially if you’re trying to have your concept extend meaningfully over large spaces of place, peoples, and time – you’d better be identifying something very deep about human nature and the way we naturally tend to dream our visions of social harmony.

This would probably have a primitive origin in either hunter-gatherer life or early civilization – genetic predispositions towards we all probably contain to different degrees based on our heritage – but which is also perhaps just a “multiple equilibrium” of the human mind. This is Hanson’s “Farmer v Forager” hypothesis. Those two visions seem to be something like universalist hyper-equal communism or particularist hierarchy. Neither one is an inherently better way to organize interaction in all contexts than the other. Both have their place, and while I usually prefer hierarchy there are times I hunger for equality – like when I’m socializing with my friends and have nothing we’re trying to achieve.

The main difference is this – hierarchy scales. And it is ideal for accomplishing goals that require large amounts of authority and coordination that can adapt automatically to “market signals” (like war or business). Equality doesn’t scale, and works better in much looser environments that permit more independence. Trying to scale the equality mode (especially in modern times and in economics) to nation-state and global scope, is asking for trouble because it’s unrealistic – people aren’t actually equal. That’s the trouble we’re in. That’s why I contrast it as: Left is Equality, Right is Reality.

If you dig a little into how the voteview folks defined and divided positions and votes along the “liberal-conservative” axis, then I think what you get is that Left is the Party of Government (except the military) and Right is the party that sometimes tries to cooperate to ineffectively oppose the Left.

Borrowing Moldbug’s point that there are many more people properly described as being “part of the government” than mere civil service rosters would show – I think it’s perfectly accurate to say the the Left is the Party of the Cathedral and the Right is slowly but surely being dragged in that direction, occasionally kicking and screaming and temporarily clawing back an inch or two here and there.

2. I think a decent expression of the issue is the linguistics contrast between Universal Permanent Prescriptivism vs. Particular Dynamic Descriptivism. In other words, the essence of the problem is that different people, in different times and places, have used the same conventions, “Right and Left” to describe different and evolving clusters of preferences regarding social organization and politics that describe a loose network of alliances and affiliations. The further the distance in any factor (time, nation, etc.) between two snapshots of differing political contexts – the less one is able to make a coherent description of social discord that is somehow common to both contexts.

3. However, since such context-dependent descriptivist definitions of “Right and Left” are bound to confusing and contradictory upon comparison (perhaps a weak remedy could be subscripts defining the context – i.e. Left[France, 1788]), the effort naturally turns toward descriptions which illustrate the overall tendency of controversy over all the contexts. The problem resembles one of Belief Propagation as a “Bayesian Most Probable Explanation” of the data set.

4. But first it is necessary to quantify the data. So, a primary question from a descriptivist point of view is whether political conversation and behavior is even reducible to a single dimension even in a single context. Obviously this can never be entirely accurate, but if we can say that, say, over 80% of such activity is describable along a sole axis then it’s sufficient pragmatically as a description of the basic structure of political disagreement in the context. Everyone always thinks they’re a special snowflake and part of the 20%, 10% or 5% whose opinions can’t be easily predicted merely by placing them on this axis, but of course that’s almost never an accurate self-assessment.

5. To extract the context-dependent definitions, one can do a factor analysis of election results, surveys, polls, and for politicians “party affiliation” and “roll call votes” and pay close attention to issues that generate significant controversy. Such a study could tell us the degree of political polarization as well as whether political behavior is indeed reducible to preferential tendencies that lie along a single dimension. For the recent US context, the answer is a definite “Yes, though there once used to be more a regional (and racial-politics dependent) influence as well.

6. When you examine those clusters, gaps, and dimensions (especially if you have state-by-state granularity – California, I’m looking at you for the future), one can draw a line between the cluster midpoints, and the axis derived from the factor analysis can be extended and extrapolated out in both directions. One extreme can be called “Left” and the other “Right”. My hunch is that the endpoints have been stable for several centuries. This is an empirical way to turn actual behaviors into accurate descriptions of the Left-Right-Split phenomenon in any particular context. And, what Poole, McCarty, and Rosenthal seem to be saying is that over 90% of American thought and behavior can be described by one dimension they call “liberal-conservative” which they define as being primarily about one’s views on the proper role of government – which we can probably fairly simplify and say “Wants a Bigger or Smaller USG”.

7. But that’s only half the picture, because as Foseti, Dreher, MacIntyre, etc. point out, both clusters, distinct and separated as they may be, remain in strongly progressive territory and closer to the left extreme than the right end point. I characterized this in terms of different understandings of the individual vs. collective interest. Whatever subordinations of the collective in favor of the individual can always be portrayed as a structure of “selfishness”, and in modern times, “Left” has been “Material Selfishness” where “Right” has been “Ego Selfishness”.

8. Perhaps we should perform a similar exercise for the DEC. And maybe that’s an acceptable description of what’s been happening lately – trying to look for the right end of the axis as potential cynosure – James Goulding’s Schelling point principle – around we can organize and coordinate.

9. This is all opposed to the hypothetical “Universal Permanent Prescriptivist” definition which we want to both meaningfully and adequately map the political territory over all the realms and ages, and which has proven so elusive for us here. It would also give us a basis to validate or criticize descriptions, i.e. “You are misusing the term ‘right’.” My sense is one must restrict this to huge abstractions like “Universalism vs. Particularism” or “Equality vs. Reality” (both of which I favor) or even Hanson’s semi-socio-biological “Forager vs Farmer” (Which Spandrel has described as which pre-modern social-harmony vision one happens to prefer). Otherwise, one is looking for a Unicorn or questing for El Dorado – something that doesn’t exist. Peter A. Taylor’s “Chaos”.

10. Prior to the modern and Progressive eras, there were banal and much more salient material interests that correlated with socio-geography or socio-economics and found political expressions that were more profane and material instead of sacred and ideological. Urban vs Rural, Rich vs. Poor, etc. My impression is that in the last century, and especially since WWII, the great game has become increasingly reducible to single-axis ideological descriptions.

11. Personally, I think it’s more important to focus on the current context, and, while there still remains a certain degree of regional difference internationally, the forces of globalization and Cathedral influence have acted to go well in the direction of homogenizing the structure of the intellectual contest throughout the Empire of Democracy.

12. And the best description of our current cluster-separation axis is that the difference between Blue and Red is this: “The Left” is the party of, by, and for the Cathedral. The Right is a semi-coordinated, loose and mutually suspicious confederation (very much like the Axis in WWII), and a fissiparous combination of a bunch of strange bedfellows who each respectively have some strong objection to some particular feature of Cathedral governance or some item on the Cathedral agenda. They are so far away from the Rightist end-point that coherence beyond alliance for resistance is all but impossible.

13. And as I said before at Nydwracu’s, the essence of the Left as Party of the Cathedral is implementing the implications of the Illusions of Equality by whatever means necessary. That is “pretty lies”. The right doesn’t like this set of illusions. Sometimes it has what a secular person would refer to as alternative and conflicting governance-informing myth narrative (like traditional religious belief) that nevertheless yields results more consistent with the reality of human nature. And sometimes it is purely critical and about the opposite of “pretty lies”, which is “ugly truth”.

14. The split on the right is largely between those who advocate alternative myth-structures to “Equality” and those who prefer the shadowy and sometimes tragically dismal null hypotheses of the Dark Enlightenment. But, fundamentally, here and now, what can we say about this pro vs contra-Cathedral split? This: The Left is the party of Illusion, and the Right the party of Disillusion.