Tangle - INTERVIEW: Hyrum Lewis on the myth of "Right" and "Left".

Episode Date: September 4, 2022

On today's episode, we sit down with Hyrum Lewis to discuss the misconceptions of political polarization. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book "The Myth of Left and Right."  In our chat, Hyrum talks about how the words "left" and "right" have become meaningless in today's political climate, and how what we are really experiencing is people self-sorting into tribes. It's a fascinating chat that will challenge your perception of American politics.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's show, I am thrilled to be joined by Hiram Lewis. Hiram is a professor in the History and Political Science Department at Brigham Young University, Idaho, and he is the co-author of the forthcoming book, The Myth of the Left and Right. Hiram, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me on, Isaac.

It's my pleasure. So I stumbled across your work in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that you co-wrote with your co-author on the book, I believe. And it was really fascinating. It touched on a lot of themes that I kind of struggle with in my work, in my newsletter about the polarization in the country and how to define it and how to define the different sides and the issues it creates. And I'm super curious to hear your thoughts on that and flesh some things out. But I love to kind of give people some space at the beginning of these conversations to

just tell me about how you got here. I mean, I'm so curious what your path has been to writing a book about politics and polarization and, you know, how you landed in this seat right here. And so I just saw some things that didn't sit well with me when I was studying history. Because as you know, history is generally framed by politics. History will touch on cultural matters. It will touch on economic matters. But the framework that guides the narrative is always going to be political. It's going to be about wars. It's going to be about kings, about queens, about presidents. It's going to be about political figures doing political things.

And so I'm an American historian. That's my specialty. And I just, when I was studying the American past, the labels that people were using didn't work. And it was kind of strange to me. They kept calling Jefferson a liberal, and then they would call people like Robert Taft and Ronald Reagan conservative. And they would say they're on the opposite side of the political spectrum. And I said, well, that's kind of silly. Thomas Jefferson's philosophy of government is the exact same as Ronald Reagan's. Jefferson said that government is best, which governs least. Ronald Reagan said in the present crisis, government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem, right? So they had identical policy views. They had identical

philosophical views. And yet we were putting on the opposite side of the spectrum. So I said, something is wrong here. My colleagues are getting something incorrect. And so I started investigating that further and started looking at psychological research and the research on socialization and tribalism. And what I found was that, in fact, the way we are conceptualizing politics in the 21st century is completely wrong. Not just slightly wrong, not just wrong in the margins, but wrong at its very core. And so basically, that's what my work does does is try to get people to see this fundamental error we're making, because I think it literally is destroying the country. It's interesting. I mean, you know, you wrote about this, the meme that Elon Musk shared, which I actually did a whole piece about, you know, which political

side is more extreme and kind of tried to flesh out some of the truth of, I think, Elon's meme that he shared where this person who's saying their views are left of center is now suddenly on the right because the progressive woke mob is pulling everything to the left. And you had this really interesting analysis of it, which is basically that, you know, forget whether people's views have changed. We've just totally redefined what the left and the right means. And that is kind of, that's the heart of the issue about why someone like Elon might feel like being on the left means something different or feels different or places him differently now than it did, you know, 20 years ago. Curious if you could talk a little bit about that. I mean,

did, you know, 20 years ago. Curious if you could talk a little bit about that. I mean, I guess, what are you seeing in terms of the changes about how people are framing left and right? And how are those definitions changing in a way that you think is sort of muddying the waters in this conversation? So that's, that's the central fallacy. That's the myth that we're trying to take on is the idea that there's these fixed poles, there's something essential called left wing and something essential called right wing. And we can place everybody on this magic line between these two sides and you can move further to the left, move further to the right. That's utterly ridiculous. And the reason being is because what the left and right stand for is constantly changing. People in the 1950s who stood for free speech were considered radical left wing and people like Senator McCarthy were considered radical right-wing because they were opposed to free speech. Fast forward here

70 years and now there's people making the same McCarthyite arguments. They're saying certain ideas are dangerous, certain ideas are totalitarian, certain ideas are we have to stop them because they do harm, they're violent. This is exactly what Senator McCarthy said 70 years ago and yet the side saying this has switched. So what was once considered left wing is now considered right wing. So you just go through the whole range of policy issues, and there's nothing so essential to the right wing tribe today that it wasn't at some point considered part of the left wing tribe and vice versa. So since these things, since what the left and right mean are always changing, you can't move towards something that's constantly evolving in

its meaning. When George W. Bush moved the Republican Party in a big government direction, they said he'd move the party to the right. When Ronald Reagan moved the party in a small government direction, they said he'd move the party to the right. So it's ridiculous. Which is big government? Is it right-wing or left-wing? We have no idea because Adolf Hitler was a socialist and he's considered extreme right-wing. George W. Bush was the most radical expansion government president in my lifetime and he's considered extreme right wing. George W. Bush was the most radical expansion government president in my lifetime, and he's considered right wing. So and then Ronald Reagan, of course, moved the party in a small group. You look at the Iraq war. Well, they said, well, George W. Bush was right wing because he invaded Iraq and invading Iraq is very right wing. Well, then along

comes Donald Trump and says, you know, the invasion of Iraq was a bad thing. We shouldn't have done it. Did people say, well, the Republican Party has moved to the left? No, they said, no, he's moved it even further to the right. So what does right-wing mean? Nothing. It's a completely meaningless designation. We should throw these terms out at least substantively. Now, I think when you use the term, as I understand you, and this is correct, is it does refer to tribes. There is certainly a tribe that calls itself right-wing. There's no question about that. And there's a tribe that calls itself left-wing. No question about that. But what these tribes stand for is constantly evolving. So you can't move rightward or leftward because these things are not static. They're constantly evolving. And they basically

just whatever the political party that is associated with each wing stands for is what right wing and left wing means. So why don't we just throw out the terms right wing and left wing and just call it as it is and say Republican and Democrat. That would clarify so much and get rid of the illusion that there's some kind of philosophical core behind what each party believes because that's simply not true. I guess in my work, I've found it really hard also to define left and right-wing. And it's funny you say that about throwing that out and just calling it Republican and Democrat. When I started my newsletter and this podcast, I used to label the sections what Democrats are saying and what Republicans are saying.

And I actually abandoned that for what the left is saying and what the right is saying, because I was getting a lot of criticism that, you know, you talk about what Republicans are saying and you have this kind of, you know, McConnell-esque, Romney-esque Republican. And then you have sort of the Trump-Tucker Carlson Republican. And these things are so vastly different that we should drop this label because Tucker Carlson and Trump are actually appealing to a lot of Bernie Sanders Democrats, and they're winning the arguments on their sort of, quote unquote, right-wing perspectives. And I was sort of compelled by that, like, you know, I didn't want to just reinforce that Democrats thought this and

Republicans thought that. And I thought there was some core ideology there. And one of the things that sort of pushed me over the edge to making the switch was these definitions of left and right that I ran into from Media Bias Fact Check, which I think is a great website that talks about how companies, how media outlets, you know, express their bias in different ways. So I'm curious to get your reaction to them. I'm going to read them to you really quick. And I guess I'd just love to hear what you think about this framing. The left, they define as this collectivism, community over the individual, equality, environmental protection, expanded educational opportunities, social safety nets for those who need them. And then they define the right as individualism, individual over the community, limited government with individual freedom and personal property rights competition. And when I read them now,

I can see you smiling. It's very clear to me where the kind of contradictions are, but I'd love to get your reaction to that and why you feel like these kinds of definitions that are out there and prominent. I think this is probably a pretty prominent way somebody, most politically informed people would define the left and the right. What do you see about those definitions that sort of drives you mad into writing a whole book about this? Because nonsense, top to bottom. The idea that the right wing is the left wing is more collectivist and the right wing is more individualist. It's just ridiculous. Adolf Hitler was a collectivist. The right wing believes in limited government.

Look, Mussolini said everything in the state, everything for the state, nothing outside the state, state, state, state, state, state. Those are all considered right wing. Militarism is considered right wing. Is militarism not communal? Is militarism not statist? Is militarism not big government? This just doesn't square. Look, when we say things, we ought to be able to test them as propositions. That's what makes something rational. That's what makes something scientific. And when you test this definition, it just comes up against reality and is proven to be falsified. So we have to follow science.

And the scientific method is about hypothesis and falsification. And the hypothesis they put forward there is just easily, easily falsified. But furthermore, I'm interested because you listed a whole bunch of things. So if there is a whole bunch of things in politics, why are we pretending there's just one? Look, a political spectrum can only model one dimension. What's the one issue there? They listed what? You mentioned probably six or seven or eight.

So shouldn't we be using seven or eight? Why are they just using one line to model a whole bunch of issues? So either there's a whole bunch of issues, in which case we ought to stop talking about left wing,, right-wing, moving right, moving left, and trying to model things on a single spectrum, or there is just one issue and that works. But if there is just one issue, which one is it? And then that's when we get into the big fallacy. People say, well, the one issue is change versus permanence. Liberals and progressives and the left, they like change, and conservatives like to preserve and this kind of thing. It's just simply not true. Who was it that wanted to change the Roe v. Wade decision? I mean, come on. Who was it that wants to change tax rates to make them lower? Who was it that wanted to change Europe to create a

thousand-year German Reich? These are all people who are considered right-wing. So this idea that the right-wing doesn't want to change things, it's just simply not true. It doesn't square with the facts. But people need this. The reason that people like this idea, there's only one issue in politics, and there's a line, because they like to convince themselves that they're being philosophical. Nobody wants to be a tribal lemming. That is now good. So if you went up to a politician, a Republican politician at any level, and you made a list of all the things Republicans currently believe, and you showed it to them and said, you agree with all these things? They say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You say, well, why? Now they're not going to say because

I'm a tribal lemming and I just conform to whatever my tribe does because I can't think for myself. I guarantee you they're not going to say that. What they will say instead is because I am a conservative, that's my philosophy and all those positions grow out of conservatism. So they have deluded themselves into thinking they have a philosophy and that philosophy leads to all these different positions. And then once they have those positions, they join the tribe that agrees with them in those positions. That is exactly the opposite of what reality is according to all the studies. The reality is that people begin with the tribe, they anchor it into it because of a single issue or because of family or peer groups or whatever. Once they've anchored it into the tribe, then

they adopt all the tribe's different views. And then after they have all the tribe's different views, they believe all these different things. Then ex post, they make up a philosophy that tries to tie it all together. Let me explain to you. Let me make up a story. Let me invent a fairy tale showing how all the things the Republican Party believes are conservative and conserving things. It's just it's ex post storytelling.

It's not scientific and it's not rational. So that's that's the myth's the myth of left and right in a nutshell. So you're scratching at this, which ties nicely into my next question. You wrote this segment, I'm going to read a paragraph from the piece you wrote in the Wall Street Journal, which I really loved. And at the end of it, you ask a question, and then I'm going to give you an answer, an opportunity to answer your own question, because I think you're sort of just starting to touch on it right now. You wrote that it's true that many Americans hold their views and packages that we call liberal and conservative.

Those who currently support abortion rights, for instance, are also more likely to support vaccinations, income tax increases, free trade and military intervention in Ukraine. But the question is why? Why is there a strong correlation between these seemingly unrelated issues? And why do we find them clustering in patterns that are predictable and binary instead of completely random and pluralistic? So Hiram, why is this happening? So they cluster into patterns because of what I just mentioned, the socialization. So let's take, for instance, so again, you talked about, you know,

everyone thinks that there's one issue in politics. There's a single dimension. And a few years back, John Bargatt Yale said, I've got it. I figured out what it is that divides liberal conservatives. All conservative positions are about fear. If you're afraid, you're a conservative. See, that's why conservatives went to the war in Iraq. They were so scared of terrorists. That's why they created the Department of Homeland Security. They were scared. They were afraid. And they would say, you know, giving up a little bit of our freedom is a small price to pay for security because we're scared. Ha, got it, says John Barg. I figured it out. That's what a conservative is. He's a fraidy cat. He's scared. Liberals, on the other hand, are more courageous.

We don't need the government to, we shouldn't sacrifice our freedom. We're okay with a little more risk. Well, then, of course, COVID-19 comes along and it's exactly reversed. Why? It's tribal. It's completely tribal. If Donald Trump would have ordered lockdowns and said the entire country can't leave their homes, I guarantee you, and everybody knows it's true,

that it would have been liberals, not conservatives saying how dare he, our reaction to the coronavirus is worse than the coronavirus itself. So why was it otherwise? Because Trump took a more lax approach to COVID. So it's completely tribal. So the reason there is a correlation, and there is a slight one, it's not as big as people think, right? Just let me digress here for a moment. Abortion and tax cuts. If you ask the public at large, what do you think about abortion? What do you think about tax

cuts? And then you plot it, you find a correlation that is teeny tiny. It's effectively zero, except among college educated whites. That's the only group that correlates them. So if you believe, hey, I'm against abortion, I think we'd have less abortion, you're no more likely to believe in tax increases than you are tax cuts. It's just, they're unrelated issues, obviously. The only reason they correlate is because certain people join the right-wing tribe and say, ah, I'm in the right-wing tribe. The right-wing tribe believes in tax cuts. The right-wing tribe is also opposed to abortion. So therefore, I'm going to believe both those things because my tribe believes it. But once you step outside of socialization, once you look at

people independent of socialization, people who don't watch Fox News all the time, people who aren't constantly indoctrinated into this left-wing, right-wing way of looking at things, there's no correlation at all between those issues. They're completely separate. Our intuition tells us that's true. I mean, if a Martian was to come here, if we were just to step out of our skin for a moment and say, should your belief in abortion have anything to do with your belief in tax cuts? People say, of course not. They're just two completely different things, as different as buying yogurt and tortillas at the store. They're just two completely different products. The idea that we have to buy them together is a silly fiction that we've sold ourselves. So the answer to your question is, why do they cluster in patterns that are predictable and binary?

The answer is because of socialization, because people join tribes and conform to their tribes. So why don't people admit that? Because people don't want to appear conformist. They want to appear principled. They want to appear philosophical. And saying, yeah, I just go along with my team. I don't like to think for myself. I just like to outsource my thinking to one of our two parties. That doesn't sound very good. But to say I'm a principled conservative who stands for conservative principles, that sounds much, much better. I guess I'm curious. I mean, in all your reading and writing about this and digesting the research, how do you see us breaking out of this? I mean, what kinds of, I mean, do you think we need to change how we talk about this? Do you think we need to abandon these labels? Are you seeing people or places, you know, parties, things that are sort of bucking this trend? Because I mean, maybe I'm inferring something here, but my sense from talking to you is that you feel like this dynamic is not good.

I certainly don't feel like it's good. You haven't said that explicitly, but from your tone, I kind of gather it. So I'm wondering, you know, what you think about solving this? Sure. And sorry about the tone. It's a bad habit. I'm working on it. But yeah, I mean, so let me be explicit about it. It is terrible. And all the evidence says that, you know, that's a constant refrain when I talk to people. And I mentioned, hey, these issues don't naturally correlate, that there is no such thing as left wing and right wing, that these packages of positions are not natural, they're socially constructed. People say, well, maybe, but it's a useful tool. It's useful.

It's helpful. It helps us organize political thinking. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu

season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. People say that with zero evidence. I've never seen a single study. I've never even heard any anecdotal evidence to suggest that that's true. And there are thousands of studies that show otherwise. People who think in terms of left-wing and right-wing are far more

filled with animosity, are less fact-based, are less able to make accurate predictions, are less cognitively able. I mean, there's hundreds and hundreds of studies that show that when people are bound by ideology and thinking in terms of the left-right framework, they are, let's put it as blunt as we can, it makes them stupid and evil. That doesn't mean they're all stupid and evil people. It just means they're less cognitively able and less morally appropriate than they would be in the absence of these. So I know a lot of very good people who consider themselves left-wing. I know a lot of very good people who consider themselves left wing. I know a lot of very good people who consider themselves right wing. I'm just saying

those people would be better and smarter and be more accurate in their political analysis if they drop the nonsense. So what can we do about it? You hit the nail on the head. I mean, let's stop using a false paradigm. It's as if I lived in the 19th century and I was a doctor, and doctors were cutting their patients open and bleeding them in order to balance their four humors. And I was saying, you know, stop the four humors, stop bleeding your patients, you're killing them. And they're saying, well, you know, we need an overriding framework. No, you don't. The overriding framework of four humors is doing way more harm than good. And the framework that there's only two issues in politics is obviously nonsensical. So let's just dispense of it. Instead of talking about a political spectrum, let's just talk about

issues. Why is it so much to ask that instead of saying he's left wing and then like going huh i wonder what that means just to say he believes in abortion rights that's pretty simple instead of saying he she's right wing just say hey she believed in the iraq war uh he's moving to the left well what does that mean i don't know why don't you just say well he no longer believes in the iraq war but these are really simple instead of saying Trump is an extreme right winger, just say Trump is a nationalist. Well, there you go. That wasn't too hard, was it? Instead of saying Trump is an extreme right winger, why not say Trump believes in bigger government than the Ronald Reagan people? Does it take a few more words? Sure.

But does it take a few more words to a doctor for a doctor to talk about lymphatic cancer or whatever it happens to be instead of saying left-wing illness and right-wing illness? Yeah, but a few words is a small price to pay for much more accuracy. If our medical profession said all diseases are either type A diseases or type B diseases, we would say that's ridiculous. Please stop the nonsense. I mean, I guess I'm asking back to you, Isaac. What would you do if all the medical professions said there's only two kinds of illnesses out there? There's type A illness and type B illness and both lung cancer and a fractured tibia are both type A illness. And so if you come into my office with a fractured tibia, I label you type A and assign chemotherapy. I mean, what would you say to that? You'd probably be really animated like I am

and say, you're being crazy. Please stop the craziness. And you would probably say, why not just say what they have instead of saying type A illness, just say lung cancer. That's not too hard. So it's not too hard for us as a society to stop thinking in terms of a political spectrum as if there was only one issue, because there's most obviously not. And instead just talk about whatever issue it is we're mentioning. If we're talking about affirmative action, just mention affirmative action. If we're talking about income tax rates, talk about income tax rates. Not too hard, not too difficult. That's a great place to start. Yeah, I mean, that totally resonates with me. I'm curious. I mean, in my work, I've found that my politics have undergone a great deal of change and I've embraced a lot more nuance and

started to see so many flaws with people on both sides of the political spectrum that we're talking about, this kind of left versus right tribe that we're defining. I guess a more accurate way to say given this conversation, is I've seen flaws with people in both the left and right tribes in a really deep way and a clear way that I didn't beforehand. And I'm curious what your research and writing, what kind of impact it's had on you personally. I mean, have you changed the way or tried to change the way you react to news stories or your initial, you know, knee jerk tribal reaction? Because, you know, I've read Jonathan Haidt and, you know, a lot of the social science around some of the stuff we're talking

about. And the point to me seems to be like, you know, we're all liable to do this. And I'm wondering, like, how it's made you sort of reflect in a personal way. And, you know, I'm sure you get asked what your personal politics are all the time. But I'm just curious, like, what that kind of process has been like for you going through realizing how broken this all is. Sure. Well, if somebody asked me, are you on the left or on the right? Are you conservative or liberal?

I say I reject the premise of your question. Your premise is that there's just one issue in politics and that's not true. So you're going to have to specify. If you want to know what I think about affirmative action, let's talk about it. If you want to know what I think about the income tax, let's talk about it. But that's a false framing. So that's one thing I do. But you mentioned change, how you've changed a lot of your positions. I'm just going to flatter you a little bit here. That is a sign of an open mind. Sir Karl Popper, who I consider the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, he said that's the essence of rationality. What we are tempted to do naturally and what our lower brain wants us to do is to cling to a certain belief, grab onto a belief,

and then defend it at all costs. You may have heard of the scout mindset versus the soldier mindset, Julia Gallup's book, which is terrific. I recommend everybody. But the soldier mindset is more primal. And we like to grab onto a belief and then defend it at all costs. Rational people, on the other hand, are scouts. And they live with ambiguity. And they live with the idea that, well, the evidence isn't in and I'm willing to change my mind.

So falsification, the ability to change one's mind in the face of new evidence is the essence of rationality. So you know you're a rational person if you find yourself changing your mind in the face of new evidence. So that's a compliment to you. Am I as open-minded as you? Maybe not. I try to change my mind in the face of new evidence. Maybe I'm not as good at it. But just keeping that in mind, that neither of these two tribes has a monopoly on truth because they are just bundles of unrelated political positions makes us far more likely to look at them in a more objective way. I'm not saying anybody can be objective, right? It's a big debate in my profession. Objectivity, objectivity, and it's just tiresome because, of course, nobody can be completely objective any more than anybody

can be completely honest, but that's not an excuse to lie, and we have a moral responsibility to try to be honest and to try to be objective. So it's as if we went to the grocery store and they were sitting out in the front with two carts of groceries for us and said, which do you want, cart A or cart B? Now, you'd probably pick the cart that had more of the products you like. Naturally, we all would. We'd say, okay, this probably has a little bit more of what I like. That's how it is when I go into the voting booth. I pick Republicans sometimes, pick Democrats other times. Sometimes I'm just trying to balance power between the two. But what I try not to do is to pick the cart of groceries. And then after the fact, delude myself, all of these groceries are related. They all share an essential characteristic

and make up a fairy tale about how they all are essentially philosophically bound. That's what our ideologues and pundits in America today are doing. They're inventing fairy tales after the fact to try to explain why all these unrelated positions are related when in fact they are not. Just buy the cart of groceries because you have to. We have a two-party system. There's party A and party B, Republican, Democrat. Buy whichever cart you think is better, but please don't delude yourself into thinking that everything one cart has or everything one party believes is part of some righteous philosophy. That is self-delusion of the first order and it's tearing our country apart. You know, it's interesting. I mean, I feel like for people who are closely

following politics, processing this kind of idea is going to require a lot of, you know, idea is going to require a lot of unlearning of what's out there and what we're used to. And I'm wondering, as people sort of approach that journey and try to see more clearly these tribes that we're talking about, what advice you have for people sort of confronting the reality that their gut reaction is going to be to go associate with their tribe. I mean, I certainly see that all the time. I think the product of what you're discussing is that it's really easy for both sides to point out the hypocrisy of the other side, which we see a ton of, and nobody really wants to take responsibility for. So, you know, you're talking to a party line Democrat or Republican voter who wants to have an

open mind, who wants to break free of, you know, this trap of seeing everything in left versus right terms. What's some practical advice on how to do that? I mean, it seems like a really big challenge to sort of override the soldier, I guess I should say. Yeah, I think you're already doing it. I'd say go to your website. Because you said, you know, pick, I try to pick things from both sides of the political spectrum, I would just change the language there. I'd just say pick, pick things from both political tribes, because there is no political spectrum. There's no one issue that's distributed, you know, that's not true. But there are two political tribes.

So read things on both sides of any given issue. So let's say you are strongly in favor of tax cuts. I would seek out the strongest possible argument for tax increases and what those might be. Maybe that'll persuade you. Maybe it won't. But at the very least, you'll open your mind up a little bit more. Maybe you're strongly pro-choice and you strongly believe abortion rights are paramount. Maybe read the strongest arguments you possibly can from the

pro-life side. And then instead of strawmanning, steel man, or pass the ideological Turing test. If I was that person, I'm going to put into words such, I'm going to explain their position in ways that if they were sitting right in front of me, they would nod and say, you got it exactly right. So if you can't do that, then you're being tribal. You're being a lemming. You aren't being rational. If you can do that, then you have thought through both sides. You have the best possible argument for both.

And your position is much more justified. And you can say, yes, I'm not being tribal. I'm being appropriate. So your website and your podcast and these things, which try to provide multiple perspectives on issues are a great way to do that. What I hope they will do more and more, Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania is one of my heroes. He has created this adversarial collaboration project where instead of currently, it's kind of crazy when you stop and think about it. Currently, we just have scholars

doing research without any checks and balances. That's kind of like going into a courtroom and having two defendants, but one lawyer that's representing both of them. And that would be kind of nuts because the lawyer would, you know, be trying to get a guilty verdict, but then at the same time, you know, serving as the defense attorney, that wouldn't work. So in the courtroom, what we have is we have pro and con attorneys. We have an attorney for the defendant. We have an attorney for the prosecutor. And they're both working as hard as they can. They're literally invested, right? Their livelihood, they want to win. They're literally invested in presenting the strongest possible case. Well, what if we brought that to academic research? That's what Philip Tetlock's trying to do.

Instead of just having people who are already tribally committed to the idea of minimum wage, raise the minimum wage, raise the minimum wage. It's my tribal commitment because I'm a good left winger, like all professors are. Well, what if you brought in somebody who said, you know what? I believe in the minimum wage, but in order to make my research more careful and to find my blise plots, I'm going to bring in somebody to help me design the study to set out the falsification parameters and so forth, who is against the minimum wage. And then we're going to work together and we're going to establish ahead of time what it will look like, what the research program is going to be and so forth. And then we're going to conduct the research accordingly. The quality

of research would increase many, many, many fold. My field especially would be benefited. My field of history has gotten so ideological and so monomaniacal that I think much of the research that's coming out of the history profession is largely worthless. So adversarial collaboration, talk to people who don't agree with you, find out what they think, repeat back to them what they think in as clear terms as you can until they're saying, yes, that's exactly what it is. I would say that's the best thing you can do is incorporate adversarial collaboration into your life. So we're coming up on time here, but I have, I guess one last question. That's sort of a up on time here, but I have, I guess, one last question. That's sort of a two-part question, which I know, I guess I'm preempting a lot of the listener and reader

feedback, which I expect I'm going to get. But I'm curious from your perspective and based on your research, two things. One, if there is sort of a subset of issues that animate this tribalistic response far more than others. I mean, I assume abortion is probably one of them. And two, if your research indicates that one tribe is more tribalistic than the other, which I know both tribes accused the other tribe of being all the time. But I'd be very interested in like, you know, if there's any science behind that and what we understand about it. Yeah, so I haven't done a lot of that research on polarization. But the scholars who have say that the right wing tribe is more polarized. But people misread that. Again, it's the fallacy of the political spectrum. They say, oh, the Republican Party has moved further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. People misinterpret that. They think it means that there's this fixed philosophy called right wing and the Republican Party has moved towards that fixed philosophy. Complete nonsense. Or that there's this fixed philosophy called left wing and the Democrats have moved slightly toward that fixed philosophy. Complete nonsense.

what the tribal of polarization what the polarization literature shows is not that anybody's moving right wing or left wing on a spectrum it simply says that they are more lock step that's all it means they use a tool called dw nominate in the political science literature and what it does is just simply uses an anchor person and then sees how people vote with that person of which party is more um unified and it turns out the Republicans are more unified. They vote together more often, but that doesn't mean they've moved to the right. If the Republicans vote for a big spending bill for big government and they vote for it in larger numbers than the Democrats, then that's considered right wing. Is that because big government is a right wing principle? No, it just means that this is a Republican issue and the Republicans are more unified on that particular issue. So to answer your second question, there is more unified, the right-wing tribe is more unified, but that doesn't

mean that they've shifted philosophically, or that moved towards a set, a set, fixed set of principles. That's the fallacy. About your first one, so are there issues that animate one side or the other more? The answer to that is that it's historically contingent. It will depend on time. If you go back to the 1940s, what was considered right wing was nothing more or less than size of government. It really was. There was just one big issue at the national level. And that's why the political spectrum is so entrenched. People might be wondering, gee, if there's all these issues, there's literally hundreds of issues, there's abortion, there's affirmative action, there's taxes, there's the war in Iraq, there's aid to

the Ukrainians, there's diplomacy in China, there's hundreds of issues. Why do we just use a one-dimensional spectrum? What's wrong with us? And the answer is because once upon a time, the spectrum worked. And starting around the turn of the century, people started modeling politics in terms of more government, less government, and modeled it on a spectrum. And up until the late 1940s, that worked pretty well. The New Deal was the one big issue. And you were either left-winging in favor of the New Deal or right-winging against the New Deal. Small government, big government. That was the one issue. What did you think about race? Didn't matter. In fact, there was a Ku Klux, there was a lot of Ku Klux Klan supporters who were considered left-wing because they supported

the New Deal. And people who attacked their racism were considered right-wing because they were against New Dealers. You can go back and look at the historical record. It's really, really fascinating. So there was just one issue. So you could model it on a spectrum. Well, over time, of course, that changed and we brought in more issues. It started in the McCarthyite era. With McCarthyism, then in the 60s, we started to get social issues, civil rights, all these other things. And as those came online, then politics got more complicated than just bigger, small government. But the problem is we kept the same model. Politics had become multidimensional, but we started pretending it was still unidimensional. We outgrew the political, you know, the landscape had changed, but our map stayed the same. And that's the problem of where we are now. So what issue animates both sides,

it's going to depend on the time and place. Once upon a time, it was big versus small government. But obviously, in the age of Bush and Trump, that has nothing to do with right-wing ideology anymore. So it's going to be different issues animating than now. I think the anti-woke thing is the most animating on the right-wing tribe right now. And race seems to be the most animating on the left-wing tribe right now. Hiram Lewis, I love it. You've given me a lot to think about I'm going to have to rework my entire company now or something thank you so much for the time if people want to keep up with your work

read your stuff, what's the best way to do it what are you promoting right now where can they find you, all that good stuff yeah, I've published a lot of stuff in the past, I'm not on social media for a number of reasons but I'm happy to correspond with people directly if they want to email me or, but yeah,

read our books coming out in a few months and I hope they'll read that and hopefully that'll answer a lot of their questions. I love it. Hiram, thank you so much for the time. Let's keep in touch. Keep preaching the good word. I think it's really,

really important and yeah, look forward to having you back on sometime. I'd love it. Thank you, Isaac. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter

or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu.

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