What Makes Us Right?

(Hint: It’s what makes the left wrong.)

Maybe what makes us right is that we know the right answer to the question, “How does society work best? With more government, or with less government?”

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Typically, the people in the government promise to fix problems if given the power to do so, then they make the problems worse, and create new ones. Then the people in the government promise to fix the problems they created, if we give them more power over us. Once given more power, the government regulators don’t give it back.

What 3 great Americans thought about government.

In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau said, “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.”

The motto that Thoreau was referring to was stated by John O’Sullivan in United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1837. Quote: “It is under the word government, that the subtle danger lurks. Understood as a central consolidated power, managing and directing the various general interests of the society, all government is evil, and the parent of evil.”

In 1824, in a letter to William Ludlow, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I think, myself, that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”

In 1926, H.L. Mencken was quoted in the book, The Gist of Mencken: Quotations from America's Critic. “Government has now gone far beyond anything ever dreamed of in Jefferson's day. It has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations with the high dignity and impeccability of a state religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste.”

The science of what people think about the government.

Using a specially designed questionnaire, scientists asked people “How does society work best?” The questionnaire proved to be an amazingly accurate predictor of whether the people questioned were politically left or right. (We look more at the “Society Works Best” phenomenon further in the Substack titled, “The world’s most important question. “How _______?”.)

The first time we employed this scale (in 2007 on a sample of 200 U.S. adults) we did not quite believe the results—the Society Works Best index  predicted issue attitudes, ideological self-placement, and party identification  with astonishing accuracy.

John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (2013)

The true nature of the left-right political spectrum (and whether it even really exists) has long been argued about. What the researchers seem to have found is that:

1. Yes, there is one real difference between the left and right.

2. It is the difference in how the left and right believe society should work.

(The researchers also discovered something else: The left right difference is heritable, at least in part.)

So it turns out that what we call the ‘left-right’ difference is simple. It has existed since the first kings emerged in Mesopotamia about 7,000 years ago. It has never changed. It is nothing more or less than the difference between two kinds of people. One kind, let us call them the leftists, believe that society works best when the government has more control of the people. The other kind of people, the right, believe the opposite: Society works best when the people have more freedom.

Can it really be that simple?

In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams, quote: "...the same political parties which now agitate the US. have existed thro’ all time... as they now schismatize every people whose minds and mouths are not shut up by the gag of a despot. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals."

Conclusion: Why This is Important!

If the right and left are different kinds of people, with innately different beliefs about how society should work, that would explain a lot.

In 1532, Machiavelli wrote about the republic of Venice. He said that their people prospered because they lived in relative freedom, mostly interacting in a system of voluntary exchange, instead of a top-down hierarchy controlled by a dynastic king or other sovereign.

…Venice where without any recognized leader to direct them, they agreed to live together under such laws as they thought to be best suited to maintain them. And by reason of the prolonged tranquility which their position secured… they were able, from the very small beginnings, to attain to that greatness they now enjoy.

Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1532)

Here in the 21^st century, we, the right, are in a struggle against the left, whether we like it or not. And actually we don’t like it. We like ‘live and let live’, but the leftists insist on trying to control us. They won’t leave us alone. They want a bigger, more powerful government. And they want to control that government, and use it to take our wealth and give themselves special privileges. The leftists are the would-be ‘elites’, who want wealth without being productive, and who want high social status, to be above the rest of us (while pretending they want “equality”).

We the right now seem to be losing the struggle to be free. Part of the reason may be that we do not well enough understand the true, complex nature of freedom. What we call the ‘Freedom System’. The leftists have been lying about “democracy” and “freedom”, just as they lie about wanting “equality”. They have been intentionally hiding something: The secret of freedom is spontaneous order.

Leftists hate the idea of spontaneous order. Leftists want control; that is, the opposite of freedom and spontaneous order. Leftists have used their control of the media and the education system to almost completely erase the concept of spontaneous order from the American mind, although once, in the time of Jefferson and Thoreau, most Americans understood it very well.

In the past, most Americans understood exactly what John Sullivan meant in 1837 when he talked about, “…fundamental principles of spontaneous action and self-regulation which produce the beautiful order.” A free America operated by those principles then.

Maybe to take America back from the leftists, we might start by relearning the true nature of freedom.

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