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.

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.

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 t