My simplistic theory of the left and right
And my relationship to power
Bryan Caplan has a simplistic theory of the left and right: “The left hates markets and the right hates the left.” Personally, I think this is kind of overfit to Caplan’s particular interests as a libertarian economist, and I doubt many people on either side would see themselves in it. It also feels overfit to our time and place — back in the age of feudalism, many of the people we’d recognize as the left-wing radicals of their day championed freer markets because they disrupted the power of landowning lords and kings.1
My simplistic theory is: “The left hates power and the right hates weakness.” If you have a strong political worldview, my hope is you can see yourself somewhere in this slogan.
In terms of my actual policy positions, I am your standard-issue tedious center-left moderate with a strong libertarian streak and all the right niche gray tribe positions on the niche gray tribe issues du jour. I am against detracking math and defunding the police and levying random giant wealth taxes.
In the core of my being though, I am extremely left wing. I find the gap between have and have-nots — rich and poor, smart and dumb,2 beautiful and ugly — unacceptably tragic. I am viscerally enraged when someone exercises arbitrary power over someone else. I’ve always felt this particularly keenly with children’s rights. I absolutely hate how much unaccountable power adults have over kids. I realize there are some pretty fundamental structural challenges that make this difficult, but I badly want the rules of the game to be rewritten so children can have true authorship over their lives.3
I want all the rules of every game to be rewritten so every being, no matter how small or weak, can be durably sheltered from the ravages of competition in its many forms: physical contests, status games, and yes, market competition. I want everyone to be free to blossom into whoever they would be without the pressure to fight to survive, with no one to make them afraid.
But the leftist instinct is often detrimental to its moral vision. The left finds power gross, and as many people have noted, it seems far more at home critiquing and deconstructing it than building and wielding it. Yet realizing the grand dream of the left, the rewriting of the rules, requires a staggeringly ambitious project to build and wield vast power.
If you’re one of those thermodynamic destiny guys, you don’t have to do much to further your vision of the good. As water flows downhill, the universe will realize it for you, because you simply defined it to be the natural outcome of the dog-eat-dog churn. But if you want a world where the weak are enduringly safe and free and equal, you have to constantly be pumping water to places that would naturally be high and dry. Men are stronger and more aggressive than women, adults are much smarter and stronger than children, humans are overwhelmingly more powerful than animals. Enduring safety and freedom and equality for women and children and animals requires a greater force stemming the natural tide.
The grand leftist project seems like it basically requires building a Leviathan.4 And in a more mundane near-term sense, it requires winning elections. Or running activist organizations that manage to avoid eating themselves from the inside endlessly “problematizing” their own leadership.5 To change the rules you have to first win the game. And it feels like the very act of winning makes you less left-wing. It seems like you have to absorb some of the best virtues of the right: cutting out deadweight, doing what it takes, playing for real money. As you shape yourself into the kind of creature that wins, you might cultivate a bit of disgust for your own weakness, or weakness writ large.
As a leftist in my heart, I share the left's foibles. Building and wielding power has always felt boring, stressful, and crass. This made working for a multi-billion-dollar foundation a bit of an odd fit. In fall 2024, after eight years at Open Phil, I burned out and took four months off. A big reason for this was struggling to have a positive and healthy relationship to the fact that Open Phil was a place where so much power had pooled. It was like the government of AI safety. Everyone wants something from you, everyone's watching you, everyone has opinions and no one's happy. It's a position that breeds tightness and conservatism. I came to find it tough to talk to my community and move through the world the way I wanted to.
I decided I wanted to be powerless and free. I drafted a whole dramatic coming-out post about how I was quitting and I was going to let my freak flag fly and I was entering a whole new era where I wasn’t even really trying to maximize impact anymore, only Truth.
Around then I got a drink with one of my oldest friends, a product manager at Apple. He said I sounded like the engineers he knew at Apple who just couldn’t handle the corporate politics of getting Apple to do things differently. Maybe they tried to make good things happen for a while, but eventually burned out and quit. And his attitude toward them was basically: “Sure, you can leave if you need to. But it’s not noble that you couldn’t handle the work of gaining and wielding power. It doesn’t make you a better person.”
I didn’t end up leaving Open Phil in 2024. I got a new opportunity to be helpful and influential there, and I took it because Open Phil is a really powerful institution working toward important goals I share, and it’s important to shape it and accelerate it. I did leave a year later, to join an organization that’s a much better fit for my natural drive to just understand the truth and explain it as best I can. I may never be as ruthless and disciplined about maximizing impact as my colleagues who most thrive at Open Phil. But I am staying in the game, because it matters to win.
I have this sense from a general memory of high school European history, but also here’s ChatGPT and Claude on some of the relevant history, though note that my prompt to them was leading: “Right now the left is stereotypically against markets and capitalism. But I feel like there was a time in the past, when monarchs and feudalism were dominant, when markets were more left-wing. Am I off-base? Can you analyze the validity of this hypothesis with specific citations to historical moments?” I was too lazy to come up with a more neutral prompt or do any other investigation for the purpose of this blog post.
One of my favorite posts on old LessWrong is Why are individual IQ differences ok? It captured something about my moral worldview I had not seen crystallized anywhere else.
One way this could be achieved is if kids had extremely advanced AI advisors that were deeply aligned to supporting the decisions this child will eventually make as it grows, with none of the pride and ego and preconceived notions that human parents bring to the matter. This may sound impossible (How is it well-defined “what the kid will eventually decide”, and what do you do about all the decisions you're forced to make in the meantime?), but I think it's an only slightly more extreme version of the problem of aligning superintelligent AI advisors to support adults — we are as infants compared to our distant future selves. (This idea might also sound creepy and deeply wrong-headed, and it might be.)
Which, yes, is in itself extremely scary. Meditating on that, especially in the context of superintelligent AI, has made me less left-wing. It might be better to tolerate a huge amount of inequality and distributed brutality doled out by many chieftains locked in a state of anarchic competition than to pool enough power into a single authority that it can actually stem the tides of competition. But not all Leviathans are created equal, and I remain optimistic about designing a trustworthy Leviathan. I think the existence of liberal democratic states that combine vast capacity for violence with internal immune systems that help limit its use, is a reason for hope. That…would have been more comfortable to say twenty or thirty years ago, but I think the point still stands. We haven't explored the structure of governments very much as a species, and I think we can build on the best of liberalism, and superhuman AI could bring technology to both negotiate and enforce much more elaborate and subtle contracts much more effectively.
This SNL sketch about the phenomenon is one of my favorites, and has a right-wing ethos. It throws in some liberal shibboleths (e.g. a comment about the annoying employees being rich white kids), but fundamentally it’s making fun of the pathetic weak new recruits whose hysterics and insubordination threaten to weaken the greater organism of the ship at a time when it has to hold fast against an external threat.
This is a great post. I resonated strongly with many of these sentiments, particularly the bits about how winning power makes you less left-wing (although this is perhaps a matter of reverse causality, or maybe bidirectional causality) and I will be thinking about it for a while.
One quibble:
> My simplistic theory is: “The left hates power and the right hates weakness.”
I dunno if leftists will see themselves in this either. I think we/they would instead say that we hate the *powerful*.
In practice, this tends to mean hating power (as you noted), but I don't think it feels that way from the inside.
I think this framework fails at the extremes in a way Caplan's does not. For example, Maoists really hated markets but they certainly did not hate power (I mean, they hated when *other people* had power but so did far-right authoritarian movements). When I read Marx for example, I see his hatred of market power but his love of state power -- there are of course anarchist leftists who hate both types of power but they are generally a minority of what we consider to be influential leftist radicals.