Beyond the Left-Right Trap

Every night the news draws the same line. Left or right. Pundits place the parties on it, pollsters place the voters on it, and each of us is quietly asked to find our spot and stand there. We have used this line because it is quick and everyone understands it. But over the years I have come to think that it hides more than it shows. Politics is not a line. The line is a picture of politics, and a very flat one. It helps to remember how the picture was first drawn. In 1789, in the National Assembly of revolutionary France, deputies who wanted to keep the king’s powers sat to the right of the president’s chair, and those who wanted to curb them sat to the left. It was a seating chart. It described where people sat in one room, on one question, at one moment in history. That it became the master vocabulary of modern politics is an accident, not a discovery. Since then we have hung almost everything on that seating chart. Progressive against conservative. Labour against capital. Redistribution against markets. Global against local. Secular against religious. Open borders against closed ones. The establishment against those who want to overturn it. Each of these is a real disagreement. But they are not the same disagreement, and there is no law of nature that says a person’s view on one must predict their view on the others. Think of someone who wants lower taxes and more immigration. Or someone who wants a generous welfare state and a hard line on crime. Or a devout believer who trusts markets, next to a secular activist who distrusts them. The line has no honest place to put any of them. It forces a choice, and then we mistake the forced choice for the person’s real position. The problem, then, is not that the line is false. It is that we have asked one dimension to carry far more information than one dimension can hold. A shadow, not the shape The best way I have found to think about the left–right spectrum is as a shadow. Hold a complicated object under a lamp and it casts a flat outline on the table. The outline is real. It tells you something true about the object. But it throws away almost everything else: depth, texture, the parts hidden behind other parts. Two very different objects can cast the same shadow, and the same object can cast very different shadows depending on where you put the lamp. That is what a spectrum is. It is a projection. And projections are useful. A line makes comparison easy. It lets millions of strangers coordinate around a few labels. It lets a voter make a decision on a Tuesday without writing a dissertation first. I do not want to pretend we can do without simplification. Every map simplifies; that is what makes it a map. One natural move is to add more dimensions. For example, put progressive-versus-traditional values on one axis and collectivist-versus-individualist on the other, and suddenly the picture opens up. People who looked miles apart on the line may turn out to stand close together on the plane. People who looked like allies may turn out to share a label and little else. Other people draw the plane differently, with economic and social axes, or some other pair entirely. Any of these is a clearer picture than the line. I want to be careful here, because it is tempting to replace one master map with another. A two-dimensional chart is still a chart. It is a better shadow, cast from a different angle, but it is still a shadow. The point of drawing a second axis is not to announce the true shape of politics at last. It is to show that the first picture was a picture, and that people can be near each other on one question and far apart on the next. A better map is still a map. It is not the territory. Many circles at once If we keep adding dimensions (language, faith, occupation, property, family, locality, the particular problems people are trying to solve), the plane dissolves into something more like a cloud. Every person is a point in a space with more dimensions than any diagram can draw. A single person can be a market liberal, a churchgoer, a union member and a birdwatcher, all at the same time, and none of those facts is a contradiction. It is just what a human life looks like. Even the cloud, though, is not quite the right picture, because it still describes people as points, as positions. I have come to think the more useful geometry is not coordinates at all but membership. People belong to things. Each of us is a resident of some neighbourhood, a worker in some trade, a parent or a child, a customer, a voter, a speaker of a language, a member of a congregation or a club or an online forum. These are sets. They overlap, they nest inside one another, some are tiny and some are vast. Each person sits at the intersection of dozens of them. Once you see people this way, a different question comes into focus. Not “where do you stand?” but “which of your circles is relevant to this decision?” The answer changes with the question. If the council wants to put a new crossing on your street, the relevant circle is your neighbours. If the government wants to change how your profession is licensed, the relevant circle is your colleagues. If your church is deciding how to spend its roof fund, it is your fellow parishioners. Nobody would think to ask whether the crossing is a left-wing crossing or a right-wing crossing, and yet that is roughly what the line invites us to do with every issue. This also changes what I mean by individuality. Individualism is often caricatured as isolation: the lone figure who owes nothing to anyone and belongs to nothing. That is not what I see. A person is an individual precisely because no single group exhausts them. My identity is not one membership card; it is the particular combination of many, and that combination is mine alone. In that sense, every one of us belongs to some minority, some cross-cutting constituency that no party platform was built for. A society that takes individuality seriously, then, is not one that dissolves groups. It is one that keeps real options open: to join, to leave, and to start something new. Most people will not use most of those options most of the time. The value lies in their being there, including the options nobody has thought of yet. What the Internet changed It is fashionable to blame the Internet for making politics fragmented and strange. I think that gets the causation backwards. The Internet did not invent the many dimensions of social life. They were always there. What it changed was the cost of finding one another. Before digital networks, if you cared intensely about some specific cause, language, hobby or grievance, you depended on intermediaries to connect you with others who shared it: a party branch, a union, a church, a local paper, a professional body. Those intermediaries bundled people into broad coalitions, and in doing so they also filtered and moderated what those coalitions said. Now a few clicks will connect you with thousands of people who share your exact combination of concerns, wherever they live. The bundles have come apart. This disintermediation has made many real groups visible for the first time. People who once felt they were alone discovered they were not. That is a genuine gain. But the same forces that let small, sincere communities find each other also let grievance find grievance. The systems that route our attention reward what provokes us, and they tend to amplify the most emotional voice in any room. The crying baby gets the most attention. So the Internet has not replaced the line with a richer picture of society. It has done two things at once. It has exposed the complexity that the line was hiding, and it has handed the loudest fragments of that complexity a megaphone. The result feels like polarization, and often it is. But underneath the noise is a more varied landscape than the old parties ever represented. Why the line keeps winning If society is this varied, why does the line keep its grip? Part of the answer is that our political institutions need it. Where two parties dominate, as they do under first-past-the-post, dozens of distinct conflicts have to be squeezed into one contest. Each party becomes a coalition of groups that may have little in common except a shared opponent. Inside those coalitions, the best-organized and best-funded factions compete to define what the party stands for, and sometimes they capture it. A voter who agrees with one party on trade, the other on schools, and neither on housing still gets one ballot and two realistic choices. Multiparty systems soften this, but they do not escape it. The compression simply happens later: in coalition talks, confidence votes, and the final yes-or-no of a bill. At some point, collective decisions have to be made, and a decision is a narrowing. I call this political compression, and I do not think it is merely a mistake of thinking. It is a recurring feature of how groups of people decide anything together. So I hold two things at once. Elections often require simplified choices. And society is not adequately described by those choices. The danger comes when we forget the second point because we live so much inside the first. That danger is real because political categories are not just descriptions. They shape what they describe. If people are told, year after year, that politics is a war between two camps, they begin to think, talk, organize and vote as if it were. They look for their camp’s position on questions that have nothing to do with the camp. They treat neighbours with whom they share nine interests as enemies because of the tenth. The map starts to redraw the territory. This is also how the loudest voices at both ends of the line come to resemble each other more than either would admit. What they often share is not a policy but a posture: the conviction that one group should settle for everyone what many groups could settle for themselves. Seen on the line, they are opposites. Seen from another angle, they are neighbours. That is why I care about the map. A picture that was once merely too simple becomes harmful when it governs which alliances we can imagine, which interests we treat as legitimate, and which solutions we are willing to consider. The space in between If politics is not a war of two camps, where does the rest of social life happen? Most of it happens in the space between the isolated individual and the state. We usually call that space civil society. I do not think of civil society only as a list of formal organizations, though it includes charities, associations, clubs, mutual-aid groups and professional bodies. I think of it first as a habit of mind. It starts with a simple question: what can I do, with others, to make things better for myself and for the people and things I care about? Asking that question, rather than waiting for a government or a movement to answer it, is where civil society begins. Its forms evolve the way businesses do in a market. New associations appear when people discover a shared problem. Old ones fade when they stop being useful. Some experiments fail, and the failures teach something. As freedom of choice and association widen, this space becomes a place where people find common interests they did not know they had, cooperate without being ordered to, and solve problems without first having to win a national election. None of this happens in a vacuum. Freedom is not only the absence of constraint. It depends on a scaffolding of institutions: property that can be owned, contracts that are kept, rights that can be enforced, rules that are predictable, and courts or other forums where disputes can be settled. These are what let strangers trade, cooperate and compete with one another even when they share no ideology or identity. Take them away and the space between the individual and the state collapses, leaving only the two. Institutions can also fail in a particular way that I think deserves more attention. In a complex society, detailed rules are hard to write well. Make a rule precise enough to cover every case and it becomes fragile, easy to game, and quick to go out of date. Make it broad enough to be robust and its side effects spread widely. Either way, the costs often land on people who had no say in writing it. Those who decide are not always those who pay. A good test of any institution, then, is whether it keeps authority, knowledge, responsibility and cost together, and whether the people who bear the consequences can hold the decision-makers to account. Who decides? Here is where I think the change of picture pays off. If people are not points on a line but members of many overlapping circles, then the most important political question changes. It is no longer “which side should win?” It becomes “who should decide this, and at what level?” The principle I find most useful here is subsidiarity. The idea is simple to state: a decision should be made by the smallest unit that is capable of resolving it. Take a broken footbridge over a village stream. The people best placed to decide how to fix it are the neighbours who cross it every day. They know where it is weak, how much they use it, and what they can afford. They will live with the result. Sending that decision to a national ministry adds distance, delay and ignorance, and takes responsibility away from the people who have both the knowledge and the stake. Subsidiarity is often misread as “local good, central bad.” That is not what it says. It is a method, not a slogan. For each decision it asks: which unit has the knowledge, the capacity, the legitimacy and the right scope to handle this? Sometimes the answer is a household. Sometimes it is a city. Sometimes it is a nation or an international body. The principle does not decide the answer in advance. It disciplines the question. The right unit is also not always a place. We tend to think of levels of government as a ladder of geography: street, town, region, country. But many of the circles people belong to are not geographic at all. A profession may be better placed than any government to set standards for its members. A congregation may be better placed to govern its own affairs. A network of firms, an open-source community or an online association may be the natural home for decisions that concern only them. Because these circles overlap, subsidiarity is not a mechanical formula. It is a way of thinking that looks for the smallest competent circle, whatever shape that circle happens to be. What I find liberating about this shift is that it moves attention away from classifying people and toward allocating decisions. Instead of arguing endlessly about which camp you belong to, we can argue productively about where a particular choice should sit. That second argument has answers. The first mostly has enemies. When consequences cross the fence Subsidiarity is easy when a decision’s effects stay inside the group that makes it. It gets hard when they do not. Imagine a mill on a river. The owners decide, on their own, to dump their dye into the water because it is cheaper than treating it. Inside the mill’s fence, the decision is rational. But the river runs downstream to a village that never had a say, and the village pays: in dirty water, dead fish, sick children. The mill decided alone, and someone else carried the cost. Economists call this an externality. I think of it more simply as a consequence that has crossed a boundary. This is exactly where wider coordination earns its place. When a decision harms, benefits, constrains or exposes people outside the deciding group, those people acquire a legitimate interest in it. At that point the smallest unit is no longer the right unit, because it is not the unit that bears the consequences. A higher level of authority is justified, not to erase the smaller groups, but to settle fairly what flows between them. This is why I think boundaries deserve far more attention in political argument than they usually get. A boundary is not just a line on a map. It defines who may decide, who bears the risks and costs, who may claim the benefits, and how conflicts are to be resolved. Where private choice ends and public consequence begins is itself a boundary. So is the edge of a municipality’s jurisdiction, a profession’s self-regulation, or a nation’s law. A well-kept park raises the value of the houses around it. A good school benefits employers who never paid for it. A generous open-source project helps companies all over the world. Sound institutions should make it easier for these positive spillovers to multiply, and should give people fair, effective ways to seek redress when the spillovers are negative. The aim is not to seal every group inside its own walls. It is to keep authority and consequence matched, so that those who decide also answer for what their decisions do to others. Keep the line, but make it small The left–right line away is a shadow, and it does carry some real information. For certain decisions, above all the blunt, periodic choice of who governs, it may be the most practical tool we have. What I am asking is that we see it for what it is: one flat projection of a shape with far more dimensions. Put it back on the table among the other projections, and make it small. Then look at the object itself. People who belong to many circles at once. Decisions that belong at different levels. Consequences that sometimes stay home and sometimes cross the fence. The kind of liberty I care about is not a single value that crowds out every other. It is a framework within which many values, associations and ways of life can live side by side, create value together, and settle their disagreements without anyone needing to conquer anyone else. Seen this way, liberal politics has two jobs. The first is to help people and groups create more value through exchange, cooperation, competition and free association. The second is to resolve the conflicts that remain efficiently, fairly and legitimately. Neither job is well served by forcing everyone to pick one of two sides and fight. So the next time the news draws its line and asks you where you stand, I hope you will pause before answering. The question is not only left or right. It is who decides what, for whom, and within which boundary. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unsubject.substack.com/subscribe