 So, we live in a world where everything is categorized from a political perspective into left and right. And many people who maybe don't feel comfortable with the way, let's say, the right has moved further out to, as they call the hoshu theory, towards greater and greater, maybe, status and view themselves somehow as center, and then you've got people on the left who don't associate themselves, definitely, necessarily with identity politics and with woke and all that, who again identify themselves as kind of center, center-left, center-right. But the idea is, of the hoshu theory, is if you take the ideas of the right and you take them to their extreme, you get some form of status, fascism. And the idea is if you take the ideas of the left and you take them to the extreme, you get some form of communism, egalitarianism. So the idea is, and this is the hoshu theory, right, that the left and the right converge, converge, get very similar to one another. Then you take their ideas to the extreme. So let's think about that. What are the ideas typically associated with the right, historically, right? And right or left are concepts that are really European concepts. They originated after the French Revolution by where people sat in the French Parliament. Really the left and the right in Europe during the 19th century really forms of statism. There was left statism, right statism. And it was, you know, in what ways should the state impose itself on you by whom? Left and right really came to America in the early part of the 20th century, really in the 1920s and 30s. The concept of left and right was brought here by the communists. The left, indeed communists thought in terms of left socialist, right socialists. Those were the terms that they used. Those were the ways that they thought about the political spectrum. And they brought that conception left and right and it kind of got well-established in the United States, this idea of left and right, basically associating the Republican Party with the right and the Democratic Party with the left. And so let's take some basic, let's deal with Osho theory first and then maybe let's think about the whole concept of left and right and whether it makes any sense and how does it fit into any of this and should we still think in terms of left and right? Is there any use to think in terms of left and right? So right, for example, is typically associated in the minds of some, particularly if you go back a few decades. Maybe with founding fathers, maybe with economic freedom, with the idea of freedom and liberty. Maybe some with religion, but a big emphasis I think on the right particularly if you go back to the Goldwater era, but even Reagan associated the right with limited government, economic liberty, founding principles. Now if you, and then the left, the left was thought of as socialist, as state involvement in the economy, no real economic liberties. You know, to some extent, some social freedoms, strong emphasis on the left in the past on free speech, for example. Free speech was a positive value for the left, you know, at least as they claimed. I mean, this is again, common perception, common view. If you take free markets to the extreme, to the end of the Osho, does that lead you to fascism, statism, control, authoritarianism? No, extreme free markets lead you to more liberty, not statism. It doesn't lead you down that Osho. If you take the idea of free speech, and you take it and become a free speech absolutist, does that lead you down the Osho? That take you towards authoritarianism? No. I mean, one could argue that certain ideas of left and right when taken to those extremes do lead into the Osho, religion, certainly of the right, wanting to control people's sex lives, certainly on the right, on the left, the socialism, if you take it to the extreme, that's communism, yeah, that's statism, if you take the religion and they're wanting to control people's sexual habits to the extreme, yeah, that's statism, that's part of the Osho, but does not every part of what we consider part of the right, if taken to extreme leads to fascism, and not everything in what we used to consider parts of the left, take the extreme leads to communism. Now it's true fascism and communism are very similar, but they are extremes of what? They are both extremes of something, but are they extremes of the good parts that belong to the right and the good parts that belong to the left? No. So the whole concept of left and right, I think the Osho theory illustrates quite well, is that the whole concept of left and right is a package deal. There really is no such thing as left and right, and indeed one of the things that categorizes left and right is just how fluid the ideas that people on the left and people on the right actually have held through history, they're very inconsistent, particularly when you think about the left and the right today. The left used to be a bastion of free speech, today it's some of the most strongest voices that anti free speech on the left. The right used to be a bastion of free markets, today some of the strongest voices are against on the right are against free market. The left, the right used to be, at least for the most part, the right used to be opposed to authoritarian regimes in the world and viewed America in some important way as exceptional, as different. The right today admires dictators around the world and views America, particularly America today is dramatically unexceptional. Left and right have become, and I think always were, completely fluid concepts, today and maybe always, but certainly today we can see it today because I think social media gives us visibility to the way people think that we really never had before. Today people associate themselves with the right and the left as tribes, not as ideas, not as ideology, not as a set of principles to guide their political agenda. Today left and right are tribes and the ideas that people hold within these tribes depend on all kinds of factors that many of them independent of ideology and have much more to do with the dynamics within the tribe and dynamics between the two tribes, the conflict between the two tribes. Indeed you see this particularly with somebody like Trump where the tribe, the right, will change its views on a particular issue as Trump changes its views on a particular issue. I mean there being some polling studies done asking people on the right a question and then they give an answer and then they're told the Trump thinks the answer is a B and then everybody switches to B because what's really important to them is the tribal affiliation not any particular view or any particular idea and in that sense, I think left and right are empty concepts, there's nothing there, there's nothing of interest, there's nothing, concepts are supposed to help us. Concepts are supposed to integrate around principles, around key ideas. But what are the key ideas, what unifies the right today, what would you say identifies the right in any particular formulation and is that the same or is that even similar to how you would have identified the right in 1964 and I'm sure there's certain things that are similar and you can even show how certain ideas that the right had in 1964 led to where we are today. But in terms of a deep ideology and in terms of the application of that ideology, it is very little that is similar between a Barry Goldwater and a Donald Trump and yet both the figures of the right. There's a new book out, maybe it's not so new, but there's a book out that I just discovered whether it's new or not, I do not know, I can click on it and find out and tell you whether it's new or not, but it's a book called, let me just first see if it's new or not, all right, it's old, it's a year old, it was published by Oxford University Press in January 2023, but it is a book called the myth of the left and right, how the political spectrum misleads and harms America and I think there's a lot of truth to the ideas presented in the book, at least as summarized by a variety of different articles that I've read about in the book. The idea that left and right are these baskets of policies or political views that are completely flexible, that are completely move around, that are not static and are not unified by any ideological principle. It used to be, I talked about the right as protecting individual rights, protecting rights with regard to economic rights, generally fighting for those, but violating rights when it comes to our freedom of speech and women's rights and abortion and homosexuals, sexual behavior and the left, so social kind of issues and the left was good on the social issues or had a particular view on the social issues, but then rights violated when it comes to economics issues. And that, okay, I can kind of see a left and a right, I would still want to ask where do I belong, right, somebody who believes in liberty and individual rights both in the social and on economic issues, where does one belong if this is a spectrum where you get more and more freedom in economics but more and more repression when it comes to, as you go out to the extremes, I mean none of these, it just doesn't fit, none of it integrates. And this is the thing about left and right. It doesn't integrate, there's no concept there. The left doesn't integrate into a concept, okay, these are the ideas that make the left, that unify the left and make it understandable what the left is. They're the ideas that make it and we can see that you can move from moderate to more consistent to radical positions because the problems of both left and right is they're a complete mishmash of ideas. There is no unifying factor, there's no integrating factor, it is a complete disintegration. By the way, Jonah Goldberg interviewed the author of this book recently and he reviewed on his podcast and he reviewed the book on one of his dispatch blog posts and that's where I found, I discovered it, I'd never heard of the book. It turns out that the authors are both affiliated with a Miller Center or the Miller Center who funded this book, the Jack Miller Center, Jack is a friend, I'm actually gonna see Jack on Thursday so Jack's a good guy and the Jack Miller funded this book, the Jack Miller Center. They sound like, I mean they're self-identified, the author self-identifies classical liberals and they say, where do we belong? If there's the spectrum, what's the spectrum of rights, well that doesn't fit because they each violate rights in different ways and they respect rights in different ways and those don't go together and what they argue, and I think this is right, is what this causes is conceptual muddling and conceptual laziness or political laziness, thinking laziness on the part of American political participants. Oh, I'm of the right because I agree with X, oh then I must agree with YZ, BA, X, you know all these other ideas and as they shift, well I'll shift my views as well because now I'm of the right and it creates a certain laziness, well what do I think of A and B and C and D and is in my own thought, is there a unifying principle? Is there something that puts it all together, well when I start breaking it down like that, I think for many people if they start really breaking it down, really thinking about the issues and really thinking about it from the perspective of principles, they suddenly discover, well wait a minute, I don't agree with half the things that they believe. So if I'm not on the right, where am I, I'm not on the left because I disagree with them on pretty much everything, so where am I, well this is too hard, I'll just be on the right. The label itself, there is no concept there because it doesn't integrate anything unifying, there's no unifying principle, the concept itself is, it's just useless, it actually I think distorts thinking, it actually represses ability to think clearly about the issues involved and more importantly the principles involved, the principles should guide your actions. Are the founding fathers left or right? Well by some measures you could argue that on certain issues, I don't know, you could categorize some of them as right, others as left, but again it's confusing because on other issues they're very similar and they very much agree. Does that mean they're centrists? There's no, you draw a line, left, right, but what is the characteristic, what are we moving along? What is the line represent? What are we moving across? Because they're baskets of goods, there's baskets of opinions, not good, baskets of opinions, combinations of opinions across the line, but what is unifying them to create a line? Nothing, it's not liberty because both directions both enhance certain liberties and repress other liberties and to various degrees and depending on where you are. So, Ken for example writes, Hamilton would be considered far right if not for his belief in a central bank, but no, it was because of his belief in a central bank that he was considered far right because far right was considered more statist and Thomas Jefferson was considered far left, less status, less government, and everything, well I guess except education, the one thing Jefferson was definitely flawed about. So it's not useful. What is useful is to think about, because there is a spectrum of ideas, it's to think about what is the fundamental, foundational principle, principle in politics? What is fundamentally politics about? What are they about? What are we talking about when we're talking about different laws and we're talking about different political programs, different political controls or the dismantling of controls, what is the fundamental principle on which you could take any political issue and say this is somewhere along this, what is the unifying principle on which you can put all the issues in politics? And I think the fundamental principle is individual rights. Is a particular policy for individual rights or is a particular policy anti-individual rights? Is it for limited government that protects individual rights? Does it move in that direction? Or does it move us in the direction of statism, collectivism? That is a coherent political line. On the one side, you have at the extreme, at the very extreme, at the extreme of what people associate with the horseshoe, at the extreme, you have a limited government that only does one thing, protect individual rights that has a military, a police, and a judiciary and nothing else and is dedicated to the preservation and protection of individual rights, the life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, that's it. Minimal government in terms of its, you know, minimal government in terms of its reach, in terms of what it does and as big as it needs to be in order to do it well. And as you move away from that, government is more intrusive, does more, tells you more about how to live your life, tells you more about how to run your business, maybe on different dimensions, maybe in some areas, you know, some people might be for more economic liberty, but fewer social liberties, okay, but it's all somewhere along the spectrum. We know what the extreme is, we know what the, what I would consider the ideal, but fine for other people to think about, oh, that's the radical, the radical extreme. And then on the other side, you have a different radical extreme. The other side is some form of totalitarianism, a totalitarianism where the government is telling you everything about how you should live your life. It's guiding every decision, who you have sex with, who you marry, like Plato's Republic, right? You know, in every business decision, everything is guided by government. That's the other extreme. And on this other extreme, you can imagine that there are a lot of variations of it. You could imagine a communist variation. You can imagine a fascist variation. You can imagine Stalin, and you can imagine Mao, and you can imagine Popat, slightly different variation, and you can imagine Hitler, all of them, on this extreme, far end of that other side. And now you've got a coherent line. And I can pretty much plot every politician along this line. It's not always easy, because they might be further along in one dimension, further back in another dimension. But generally, there'll be somewhere, not at this extreme, maybe not at that extreme, somewhere in between. Some politicians are more inclined to freedom, and some politicians are less inclined to freedom. And that's basically what individual rights means. The spectrum is a spectrum of freedom, maximal freedom here, minimal, zero freedom here. Or another way to think about it is a political system dedicated to individualism, dedicated to the sovereignty of the individual. Over here, a political system dedicated to collectivism, and the collective as the primary in every political, every issue. And that's the spectrum. And again, that gives, that's a coherent spectrum. It's drawn along an axis of a principle, an idea. And then you can take every other year out there that people hold, and you can plot it along this, and you can say, okay, if people hold this, this, this, this somewhere over here, on this axis. And you could argue, you know, what do you call it? Classical liberals are not quite where I would be. They're not quite as radical maybe as I am, but they're close. They're not far. They're on this, generally on this axis. And then you've got, I don't know, Goldwater conservatives pretty close to the classical liberals, somewhere in the direction of individual rights. And then you've got, I don't know, modern right, Trumpists, which are going to be on the other side, going towards the more authoritarian, the violation of rights in pretty much every dimension that you plot. Women's right to abortion, business's right to determine where they set up their factory. You know, a bunch of different issues, you know, what should be produced in the United States versus what should not. On all of these, they would be towards a statism, they would be towards, and then if you take the modern Democratic Party, there would be a nice spectrum, they would be at the same place basically as Trump, just slight variations in terms of the particular issues and how they view them. But they would both be on the status side of the spectrum. And indeed, there would be nobody representing the individualist, pro-individual rights, pro-liberty, pro-freedom side of the spectrum. Nobody there, completely empty. And there isn't anybody there today in our political world. So to properly think about politics is not to think about left and right and have this instinct, well, it's left, therefore it must be bad and we have to kill it. Or it's the right and therefore it must be good, or the right must be left, bad, or whatever. It's to think about, is this pro-individual rights or is this against them? Is this moving us towards more freedom or is it moving us towards more statism? Where are we? Where's this politician? Is this particular politician moving us, moving us towards freedom? Is he an incremental step towards freedom? Or is he an incremental step towards authoritarianism? I mean, the sad things is, the sad thing is about American politics today is everybody is a step towards authoritarianism. There is nobody on the political spectrum today a step towards freedom. And in that sense, in that sense, you know, I don't care if they're left or right. They're all bad, all of them, every single one of them. And it's not by the standard of perfection. It's not even by the standard of the funny fathers. It's just by the standard of a simple principle, more or less freedom. Every single candidate running for president is probably, and certainly the two main candidates, are definitely moving us towards less freedom. And it doesn't matter if it's left or it's right. What matters is it's violating our rights. Now, it might matter which one of the candidates, because which one of them leaves the most room for renewal of a political movement towards freedom might be important. Which one of them is likely to institute an authoritarian regime that lasts longer might be very relevant. So it doesn't mean you're indifferent between the two. But it does mean that they're not that different in terms of freedom, not freedom. On the political spectrum, they're not that different. Freedom or slavery, individualism, collectivism, individual rights, statism, capitalism, statism. That is the spectrum. That is the spectrum. And left, right today have become just basically variations, variations on statism. You've got status of the left, status of the right. That's all you have today. You have nobody who breaks out of that mold. To be, you know, going towards individualism, towards capitalism, towards liberty, towards even what we'd call classical liberalism. And that's really, you know, and it's getting, it gets worse every cycle, right? So with Ronald Reagan, you can say at least there were hints of a kind of a classical liberal agenda somewhere hidden there. They were mired by his appeal to religion, but it was there. Certainly it was Barry Goldwater. You got a lot more than hints, but you got a definite classical liberal trend, wasn't it? And in that sense, again, drop the whole idea of right, but you know, he's in the direction of more liberty, of more freedom, of more individual rights. So what we need today is a rejection of left and right and a proposal of something new. What we need is the capitalist party. What we need is the individual rights party. What we need is an alternative to the existing model to recognize that at least in the United States and to a large extent, I think this applies, I think it applies less to different pieces in Europe. I think the left-right model, I mean, I don't know that, you know, how strong, I mean, the left in some ways is strong in Europe, right? And suddenly in the economic left, kind of a Marxist left, a regulatory left is strong in Europe. Regulations are big in Europe. Control is big in Europe. But that's not exclusive. The left in Europe anymore is Orban more for economic liberty or less for economic liberty than the social Democrats who are left of center in Germany. Well, he's more control. The real challenge in Europe is, well, it's not a challenge. The reality in Europe is they don't seem to have, well, I hesitate to say this because it's probably not true. They don't seem to have the wacky left that we do. Well, maybe they do. They have it in the form of environmentalism. That's where it manifests itself. Whereas in the U.S., it manifests itself in woke and identity politics. In England, it manifests itself in maybe the biggest issue for the left in the U.K., the wacky left is transgender rights, the way they view transgender and how they politicize transgender. But they're much more traditional socialist rather than woke. And in mainland Europe, I don't think woke has much currency. I don't think identitarian politics of the left have much currency. It's much more traditional Marxism, traditional leftism, existentialism, soft egalitarianism, not the kind of egalitarianism that identitarianism requires. Maybe some of the Europeans will correct me. And the right in Europe is even more explicitly statist than it is in the United States. The United States, the right tends to give lip service to liberty and freedom less so today than five years ago even. I mean, the rising stars on the right, Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, those are the young rising stars on the right. They don't give lip service to liberty and freedom. And they're the statists through and through. And indeed, they have much more in common economically with Elizabeth Warren than they do with the Barry Goldwater or even with the Rand Paul from an economic perspective. So in Europe as well, you have a right that is statist moving towards fascism. So the model is Orban, who has basically dismantled the media and put it under the control of the government. He's basically dismantled an independent judiciary and put it under the boot of the government where the government controls pretty much everything. And where the government is fairly in its economic policy is statist. That is, it's regulatory and redistributionist and very regulatory. It's very difficult to be an entrepreneur in Hungary. And Hungary's economy basically survives on subsidies it gets from the EU. That's the new right. And the talking point, the thing that seems to rally them is a rejection of freedom when it comes to immigration. But nobody wants to immigrate to Hungary. I mean, Orban built a wall to prevent Muslim migration, not to protect Hungary, because nobody wanted to stay in Hungary. There's no economic activity in Hungary. There's no, the welfare checks are too small in Hungary. Nobody wants to stay there. They were all going to Germany and Sweden. So what he really built the wall was to protect Germany and Sweden. But by building that wall, he gained creds as the anti immigration guy, even though it had nothing to do with Hungary itself. It's so bizarre how people relate to politics anywhere. But you know, in parts of Europe, it's amazingly strange. In the United States, Donald Trump is a statist. Joe Biden is a statist. There might be small variations in how that state is a manifests more associated with the kind of people they surround themselves than with their own views. I don't think there's that much difference in their own views when it comes to, for example, economic policy between Trump and Biden. I think they both basically have the same kind of instincts. Trump generally surrounds himself with at least in the first administration with better people than less status people than Biden. Not sure that will happen in the second administration. But again, what's the difference, the fundamental difference, the philosophical, political, fundamental difference between the two? There is none. What we need is something different. What we need in America is something new, is something radical, is something extreme, radical and extreme for liberty, for freedom. What we need is capitalism, which would be an alternative to both left and right and wouldn't be a center. That's the problem. If you have just one line left and right, where do the capitalists belong? They're in a third dimension. They don't belong in that line. But if you draw a line of individual rights pro against, then you can put people along that line. Everybody fits. Everybody fits. Some are mixed, but they all fit. Unless we do that, this country is doomed to continue to drift towards greater and greater authoritarianism, greater and greater statism, greater and greater economic and cultural stagnation, greater and greater bitterness between the tribes, because all we have are tribes. Again, we don't have deep fundamental philosophical, political differences. We have tribalism, and they will kill each other, not over liberty and freedom, but over which one of the tribes gets to control our lives, just like the Communists and the Nazis, right, killed each other, and they consider themselves huge enemies, but in terms of policies, in terms of the things they actually did, about the same, about the same. Main differences, Nazis focused on your ethnic origins and the Communists focused on your class, your economic class. Other than that, same thing. That's why people wonder, how did Stalin and Hitler get along enough to launch World War II, because Stalin and Hitler were very much the same, very much the same. And this is why people who were rabid leftists, landed up supporting Hitler in Germany, and people who were rabid right wing, if you will, statists, landed up supporting the Communists, because they all do the same thing. They all place the state above the individual and sacrifice the individual to the state in mass. There's no difference between the Communists and the fascists. Not at any important point. It's more who the victims are, slight variation in who the victims are, so you better know whether you're in a socialist or fascist place, so you know whether you need to run away or not, but you should run either way, because if you're an independent thinker, they're both coming after you. So I agree with the myth of left and right. I think the whole conception of left and right hoods our ability to think politically. It eliminates the need, well, it doesn't eliminate the need, but it eliminates the will, the need in individuals to define political principles and deal with political principles and deal with specific political positions that they have based on those principles. It encourages people just to join tribal groups, and that's the state of American politics today. It's a state of tribalism, and it really is probably the ugliest it's ever been in American history. I think this is worse than before the Civil War, because at least the dispute during the Civil War was over something real. Dispute during the Civil War was over principle, and over a principle of individual rights. Today, they don't disagree about principles, they're going to kill each other. They're talking about a civil war. They're going to kill each other over what? What exactly? What do they disagree about? Who should control us? Not over whether they should be controlled or not, and that's the real question, the fundamental political question, the foundational question in politics. Should we be controlled or not? As individuals, should the state control us? What comes first? What is the purpose of the state? What is the purpose of government? So, yeah, let's drop this left-right or at least recognize that both left and right are just variations in collectivism. They're both variations on bad guys, and we do not belong to either one of those. We're not on that spectrum. We're neither left nor right.