My journey from the Left to the Center-Left

The ideology series, part 1

This is part 1 in the ideology series, read part 2 here.

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In the spirit of people talking about their political development, I’ll briefly explain my political journey towards the center-left.

I’m young enough that my first exposure to political ideas was during the 2016 election. I preferred Hillary to Trump mostly on the basis that

1. Trump seemed unqualified and unpresidential.

2. I agreed with much of the Democratic platform.

Many people share these 2 combinations of opinions and I suspect the Pro-Trump/Anti-Trump axis is a real and useful indicator of someone’s broad placement on the political spectrum. This version of the political spectrum looks like this:

Obviously not exhaustive, but two things stand out:

1. There are more groups in general in the blue and red - basically a product of polarization. The Democratic leaning-pro Trump and Republican leaning-anti Trump combinations are simply rarer than the others.

2. There are more names in the blue area period. This reflects the broadly anti-Trump establishment many rightists talk about.

I think it also shows how circumstantial political opinions are. If you went to college, read The Times, and respect scientific and expert opinion - you are on the left. I can say that with a high degree of confidence. There are of course some people for that is not true but it’s a small number. Point being that you can end up on the left or right without thinking much and just having the same opinions as those in your social context. And of what sports teams you like or what sports you watch. And basically every opinion you have.

You’ll have some default starting position determined in part by social conditioning, a bit of randomness, and of course personality type.

The Lottery of Fascinations

A pillar of my thought is Epistemic Cynicism. Not to be confused with Epistemic Nihilism. The difference is that I believe that hard science is valuable and provides real information reliably, but that when it comes to complex questions about the human sciences, it’s much harder to get good information because while the laws of physics are predictable and don’t change, people do. This means that assumptions about human behaviour play a larger role in your opinion about questions of public policy in a way they don’t if you were studying Astrophysics or Chemistry for example.

But where do those assumptions come from? In part they are circular and socially contingent - you get them from the people around you. In part they are genetic and due to your disposition and unique combination of intrinsically motivated fixations. If we're talking about a policy question, a historian may point to past failures. An investment banker may point to future potential. A shaman might suggest we solve it by doing ayahuasca. To an extent this is people invoking their expertise to help the best they can and to an extent they are simply replicating themselves by justifying their personal fixation as being relevant to complex policy questions.

For one, I can not care about inequality qua inequality. No matter how many socialists I read, I have found that I am actually literally incapable of understanding why they care about this. I can’t even steelman it. Now, we can say that this is because I have thought hard about it and come to that conclusion which would be flattering, but I am skeptical.¹

Growing up I was never really jealous. Even when I lived in a trailer park, I had neighbors who had a lake house mansion. Any time I would look out and see what they had I would always be reminded of how fortunate I was. I was in college. I was blessed with some level of verbal talent. I made decent money. I couldn’t imagine coveting when I already had so much. Life could have been much worse.

This, I think, is the source of most political opinions: not rational thought, but your instinctive reaction to them based largely on the randomness of your personality and personal circumstances. If I was predisposed to caring about the things other people had or if I was poorer, I might would care about the concept of inequality more.

In his post, The Lottery of Fascinations, Scott Alexander predicts what would happen if he came out as gay to his friends:

I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that.

But even more than that, I think they would understand and accept the decision. There would be a lot of not-so-obvious failure modes they could fall into, but wouldn’t.

…

No, there are a lot of things my friends are far too sophisticated to ever even think about saying if I were to announce something as prosaic and socially acceptable as being gay.

But announce that I don’t like math, and suddenly the knives come out.

…

I don’t know if it’s that I’m bad at math, or that I just don’t enjoy math enough to be intrinsically motivated to pursue it. I do know that I have never become good at something – good good, not “scrape together an A in a mid-level college class on it good” – without having intrinsic motivation to pursue it. And my attempts to hack intrinsic motivation, which would be like a instant win condition for everything if I could achieve it, have been mostly unsuccessful and left me with severe doubt it is even possible. So I have pretty much given up on math.

When I try to explain this to people, the responses are eerily similar to the ones they would never give if I said I was gay.

“Oh, obviously you just haven’t learned the right kind of math. I know this really cute proof of the Pythagorean Theorem in my sister’s textbook. I’ll show it to you the next time we have pencil and paper.”

This mirrors my experience when thinking about political opinions associated broadly with the blue tribe, like inequality or identitarianism for example. So forgive me for being a bit cynical about politics.

What I’ve changed my mind on

In any case, I have changed my mind on some things mostly by actually considering their counterarguments. Broadly I’ve moved to the right on economics. When I was younger I made the classic mistake of thinking that something like minimum wage was an unalloyed good. With that topic and many others like it, I’ve moved to the right or lowered my confidence such that I basically copy paste my opinions from Clark Center Forum polls. Very generally I interpret this as placing me on the center right economically speaking.

While I have lowered confidence in general of the findings from the human sciences, economics is something I have higher confidence in because I personally consume less of something as it gets more expensive and more of it as it gets cheaper, so I have a high prior of econ-101 style thinking basically being correct. Most of the time when I see libs praising some regulation or price control I’ll investigate the issue further and end up siding against them. I’ve been mostly unimpressed with Liberals on their economic thinking, which they seem to apply intelligently when it comes to important issues like housing and stupidly when it comes to everything else. The lack of a consistent thought process on their part indicates to me that they are using their rational thinking only sometimes.

But with respect to everything else, I’ve decreased my confidence on most policy questions over time. I don’t have strong opinions on most issues because of the aforementioned epistemic cynicism.

“The Left”

While our parties are undergoing a bit of a party switch, I view the left and right as not representing much in the way of consistent rational opinion and more a collection of traits. Two of these traits would be intelligence and a general belief in our institutions.

The main thrust of MAGA is that our institutions need to be destroyed because they are bad and that we need to go back to how it used to be in some general sense. But do they want to return to the status quo of 2019 or 1890? Going back to 2019 would undo many negative recent evolutions on the left which sounds fine. Going back further to say, the cultural environment of the 2000s seems the most appealing to me, but that again is probably because I was a child then and view that part of my life positively. Going back to the 1800s means the end of our knowledge producing institutions and the collapse of any sort of America-led world order.

And that seems bad.

This I think goes without saying. Since I see most right-wing critiques about our institutions as rooted in personal affect, I distrust them. I also went to college, send emails for a living, read The Economist and The Times, and don’t have many socially conservative views—that alone puts me somewhere on the left by default. It doesn’t mean I agree with everyone on the left, it just means I am broadly on the left as a function of my personality. Being Center-Right on economics pulls me closer to the center, but not enough, so I still endorsed Kamala.

And if you place yourself on the right, don’t hate me. Understand that I ended up here because I had to.

1. Not only do we think we have the correct opinions, we believe we arrived at them in ways that speak to our intelligence and objectivity. Big if true.