The left is expert at complaining about "the system" or "capitalism" or current models of national relations. Lots of complaints, mostly well taken. But their solutions seem lame to me. This is likely an effect of confirmation bias which leads to incisive criticisms of the opposition, and the embracing of lame evidence for what one promotes. The Right is also expert at complaining, but it's mostly complaining about the Left and its solutions. This is also an effect of confirmation bias ("myside bias" following Stanovich, which includes criticism of the opposition as well as confirmation of what one wants to believe) along with a bias against social progress. Their libertarian or conservative solutions are, conveniently, "all purported solutions are bad!" In other words, do nothing, what we have is the best of all possible worlds. You know, if you change white supremacy, you might tip the boat! Stability is best for us all!
Complain, complain, complain. I find myself in agreement with all these complaints of both sides, but they are tiresome, especially because I find myself mostly in disagreement with their solutions, and I'd prefer to hear more talk about solutions, since many, if not most, of the complaints would disappear if any of them actually worked.
There's another difference between Left and Right. The Left is convinced it has the moral high ground. That assumption, even if it is true, is a kind of intellectual crutch. It dulls the mind. Libertarians, who are often aggressively sharp, have no such crutch. Their morality runs against the grain of the morality of the culture. The Golden Rule -- treat others as you'd want them to treat you -- is the essence of our morality. It's where equality comes from, our sense of fairness, justice, politeness, orderliness. The libertarian has to argue against all those with a theory that being selfishness leads to those goods in the long run and even to greater goods. That requires some sharp thinking and knowledge too. I think it makes libertarians smarter. Not nicer. Smarter.
Here's a little dialogue I've heard all too many times:
Left-liberal: The Poor are suffering! We must help them!
Right-libertarian: The intervention you recommend will make everything worse for everyone including The Poor. [There follows a detailed economic explanation of just how bad things will go with the Left solution.]
Left-liberal: But they are suffering. We must help them.
Right-libertarian: Didn't you understand what I just explained to you?
Left-liberal: Yes, I understand: you don't care about the suffering of The Poor.
Right-libertarian: M@#$!@#!@$#!@$!!r!
Debates between Left and Right frequently have this form: the Left, champion of the weak, call for an intervention to help them. The Right complains that, given the nature of the market or of society or of human psychology, the intervention will downstream cause more harm than good and in particular will harm those whom the the intervention is intended to help; the cure is worse than the disease.
In response, the Left reasserts the need for the intervention to remedy the suffering of the moment, viewing the complaints from the Right as callous indifference to the suffering before them.
The Right in turn view this response as willful, biased misinterpretation. The Right has identified a flaw in the Left program, but the Left misunderstands the criticism as Right-wing immoral indifference. That moral judgment against the Right allows the Left to ignore the criticism rather than figure out a cogent rebuttal. Not seeing any rebuttal, the Right not only concludes their criticism is just, but that there must not be any possible rebuttal, since even their sworn enemies, the Left, can't come up with one. They think they've won the debate, and they are justified to think so, since the Left has failed to respond intelligently. The Left has simply stood its ground and attacked the right ad hominem.
[Daniel Stone in his book Undue Hate describes this kind of misunderstanding as naive realism and false consensus on vertical goods, though he is careful and wise not to play into this particular situation. Here the Left assumes that everyone agrees that if we allow the unfortunate to suffer, we are not good people. The Right assumes that everyone will agree that suffering of the unfortunate can only be achieved through effective means. Being good and being effective are "vertical" goods in that everyone agrees that more of each is better. But it is naive to assume that everyone holds these two vertical goods equally. The point of this post is to suggest that the Left is victim of its own righteousness priority: once it identifies its goodness, it stops thinking. It's a kind of confirmation bias: as soon as we find the evidence we're looking for or a prima facie solution to a problem, we stop thinking. We got what we want, why think more? I call it TST "thinking stops there", following Kahneman and Tversky's "what you see is all there is" WYSIATI. On the Right side, effectiveness requires more thought and analysis than merely identifying the sentiment of being good. The interactive result is that the Left concludes that the Right is immoral and the Right concludes that the Left is stupid.]
an example
When I was involved as a Leftist working on the housing crisis in New York, I constantly had to face the Right-wing objection to rent regulations. Every trained economist knows it all to well. Rent regulations are the economist's go-to example of a market distortion that hurts those whom it intends to help. It's Economics 101. Rent regulations drive developers away from the housing market because they can't recoup their investment if the rents are artificially kept low. That leaves a housing crunch -- no new houses means too few houses means overcrowding and eventually homelessness for the most vulnerable, not to mention the increased demand for housing that raises rents and housing prices.
Except the economists are all wrong when you actually look at NYC's regulations. Rent regulations in New York were imposed only on existing housing, not on new development. As I pointed out in a comment box in the NYTimes around 2010 or so, rent regulations in New York, far from driving developers away, were one of the few incentives for developers to build new housing, since new housing was the only housing that was unregulated, and the only solution to a housing crunch is developing more housing. Rent regulations are not a problem, they're part of the long-term as well as short-term solution.
This comment found some traction despite being economic heresy. Someone I'd never met before cited this exact comment of mine to me in a random conversation on the street about rents in the city. And a few months later an attorney wrote an op-ed in the Times explaining this regulation incentive. It seemed that at last the curse of Economics 101 was being dispelled.
But no such luck. At the next State Assembly election cycle, a progressive candidate made rent regulation his platform as always on the grounds that ending rent regulation would evict many residents. No mention that rent regulations were the great incentive for developers to build new housing that might bring more housing to the market.
[Now, some study found that rent regulations also incentivize landlords to convert rentals to condo/coops, rather than investing in development. But a law preventing such conversions solves the problem, and political campaign would be the ideal moment to promote and debate such a measure. There's also the empty-nester inefficiency argument -- that empty nesters remain in their now too-large apartment because it's cheaper than market-rate apartments, and this is inefficient. I find this argument amusing, since it is never used to complain about the rich who occupy more space than they need, including multiple units, which does in fact reduce supply and raise rents. The complaint that landlords of rent regulated units are less willing to repair or upgrade the property, but the habitability laws require the basics of repair. The only serious downside to rent regulations is the unfairness of first-come, first served. That's no argument against rent regulations: it's true that impoverishing everyone equally is fair, but it's not good. We should also build more public housing for everyone, not eliminate rent regulations.]
I don't know whether this candidate understood the incentive or felt it was too complex for the public or was afraid to appear to be developer-friendly. Whatever the reason, he chose the Left's low hanging fruit of "I'm on the side of the weak and against the rich developer. Vote for me!" And the Right are fully justified in saying, no, your solutions will create a worse housing crunch in which everyone will suffer and in the end, as usual, the most vulnerable will suffer the most. Because the Left didn't bother to present the counterargument.
Of course the Right is mistaken. But the Left candidate fails to educate the Right as to why the Right is mistaken. This is the weakness of the Left. It's solutions are as short-sighted as the market itself, but whereas the market wants returns fast now, the Left wants to do good now. Neither one looks ahead, neither one thinks complexly.
The accusation of immorality is not drawn out of the air. The concerns of the Left are motivated by moral virtue, or, more accurately, the desire to appear to be moral. The Left, remember, is populated and led by coastal elites, educated and over-educated, well-served by their polity, privileged and prestigious. As I've written at length in "the sociology of false beliefs" and "the fool's errand attachment; a cognitive bias", this professional class which benefits so much from its society, has an investment in its social structure and its government as well as conscience-driven desire to appear to others, to each other and to themselves to be working towards the betterment of society as a whole. It's at once conscience-cleansing and a pragmatic support for a society that they would lose the most from should it fall as a result of chaos at its foundational bottom.
The Left, the professional class, in other words, is the virtue-signaling class. The virtue it signals is taken from the standards of the culture: helping others selflessly. It's a kind of appeal to approval, like the fallacy of appeal to authority, but here the authority is the Judeo-Christian values inscribed in its scriptures all the way from Genesis, where the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil distinguishes humanity from the innocent animals inhabiting the garden, to the prescriptions of the son of the deity loving one's neighbor as oneself. These virtues are the low-hanging fruit that require no public justification, no complex technical contortions of reason. "We're helping the weak. What could be wrong with that?!?" You don't need to be very bright, or bright at all, to understand the sentiment of being kind to the weak.
For the conservative, and especially the libertarian Right, no such fruit hang low. It took seventeen centuries past the new dispensation of the eleventh commandment for a scientist to come up with arguably the first science of emergence, economics, explaining that the selfishness of the baker plus the selfishness of the butcher added together made a win-win for them both. To be a libertarian is to militate against the most sacred cultural religious value, the notion of personal goodness: selflessness. The defense of selfishness can't rely on religion or even on philosophical morality. It's defence comes to us from a science, a cold empirical analysis where facts are hard and incontrovertible, where feelings play no role. The defense of selfishness requires intelligence, insight, and a capacity for complex thinking beyond the simple sentiments of "being nice". It's the reason that libertarians so often seem so much smarter and more incisive than Left liberals. It's the reason for the lameness of that frequent debate.
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