- Eric Levitz at Vox on the “fiction” of the Left/Right divide, and how core principles nevertheless do divide the parties;
- Brief items about ICE recruiting and the right presuming the worst about everyone;
- Noting the death of Erich von Däniken, and what Carl Sagan said about him.
Long piece I saw yesterday.
Vox, Eric Levitz, 12 Jan 2026: The fiction at the heart of America’s political divide, subtitled “The uncomfortable truth about ‘the left’ and ‘the right.'”
I’ll quote some of this piece’s thesis…
America’s most impassioned Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much. Ask the inhabitants of Bluesky and Truth Social whether a fetus is a person, or undocumented immigrants are a scourge, or trans women are women, or climate change is a crisis, or Covid vaccines are toxic, or taxes are too high, or welfare spending is too low, or AR-15s should be banned, or the federal bureaucracy should be gutted, or the police discriminate against Black people, or universities discriminate against white men, or Donald Trump is a fascist, or Joe Biden is the reanimated corpse of a man who died in 2020, and each group is liable to provide warring answers.
If staunch Democrats and Republicans agree on anything, however, it’s that their myriad policy disputes all follow from a deeper philosophical conflict — the centuries-long clash between progressive and conservative conceptions of political justice, truth, and human nature.
But some political scientists, social psychologists, and philosophers say this is, to use a technical term, “bullshit.”
According to such thinkers, there are no coherent principles that bind the left and right’s various positions. No timeless precept compels conservatives to be both anti-abortion and pro-tax cuts — or progressives to be both anti-gun and pro-environment.
Rather, in this view, it is contingent historical alliances, not age-old moral philosophies, that explain each side’s motley assortment of issue stances: In the mid-20th century, Christian traditionalists happened to form a coalition with libertarian businessmen inside the GOP. Conservatives consequently discovered that banning abortion and cutting taxes were both indispensable for preserving America’s founding values.
It goes on with further examples. OK, sure, some elements of each coalition came into alignment by happenstance — think of the great conservative switch (from Democrat to Republican) in the ’60s, driven both by racism (the civil rights movement) and big business resentment of regulations. But surely there’s something fundamental at the heart of each ideology that differs on matters of human nature and truth (distinguished largely by religion); that’s what I’ve been tracking here in this blog for years.
This theory of what divides our parties — and ails our politics — has its insights. But it also takes its case too far. The left and right’s policy disputes are not all manifestations of one ageless moral conflict. But it does not follow that progressives and conservatives are divided by nothing more than arbitrary alliances and tribal psychology.
Long piece, as I said; it goes back to how the ideological spectrum was born in France in 1789. But I’m going to skip to the end. There *are* differences of worldview.
Ideologues surely overestimate the philosophical unity of their commitments. Rid the Earth of such confusion, however, and much of the enmity between America’s left and right would remain. The devotees of Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have genuinely different worldviews. Progressives aren’t wrong to perceive this White House as a threat to their conceptions of both democracy and social justice. And conservatives aren’t mistaken in thinking that the Democratic Party is hostile to their convictions about the nature of gender, economic liberty, and the metaphysical status of the unborn.
…
The left and right hold some distinct principles. But neither can derive answers to all of today’s governance challenges from their broad moral precepts. You cannot discern whether zoning restrictions reduce housing affordability — or whether gifted programs harm disadvantaged students — merely by deciding that you care a lot about inequality. Nor can you determine whether tariffs or mass deportation will raise American living standards, simply by deciding that the government must put “America first.”
Yet ideological essentialism invites the opposite impression by casting all policy debates, even the most technical, as referenda on bedrock moral principles. This framework is attractive to partisans, as it reduces the cognitive burdens of political advocacy: It is much easier to decide how you feel about one philosophical premise than to carefully adjudicate dozens of technocratic claims. Further, when a policy argument is understood as a gauge of moral character — rather than a test of empirical propositions — it becomes a better vehicle for partisans’ self-expression and communal bonding.
OK, that’s not the end, but it’s enough. This is a sort of perfect-enemy-of-the-good argument. OK, here’s the very end:
In other words, for progressives or conservatives to develop anything resembling a perfectly principled platform, they must first recognize that none exists.
Maybe no perfectly principled platform exists. But core principles do differ between the two camps. It’s right there — “empirical principles” vs “bedrock moral principles” which for conservatives means things that cannot be challenged. Progressives learn; conservatives reject anything that would challenge the so-called wisdom of their ancestors. That’s the principle divide.
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For example, today. Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 12 Jan 2026: Christian Nationalist Pastor Dale Partridge Says Freedom Of Religion Is ‘A Really Bad Idea’
Because, obviously, *his* religion is the only true one. Never mind the principles of the American government; he knows better.
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More short takes for today.
Slate, Laura Jedeed, 13 Jan 2026: You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof., subtitled “What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We’re all finding out.”
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Another example of conservatives automatically thinking the worst about everyone.
Comic Sands, 9 Jan 2026 (via George Takei on Facebook): Newsmax Host Epically Fact-Checked After Assuming Stickers On Murdered Minneapolis Woman’s Car Are For ‘Wack Job Groups’
They were National Park stickers.
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Perhaps I’ll note the death of Erich von Däniken, a popularizer of alien visitation conspiracy theories back in the 1960s and ’70s, by quoting Carl Sagan.
NY Times, 11 Jan 2026: Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90, subtitled “His 1968 book, ‘Chariots of the Gods,’ sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but one critic called it a ‘warped parody of reasoning.'”
Von Däniken was one of those writers I read in that era, my early teens, along with Frank Edwards, until my contemporaneous reading of Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan disabused me of their thinking. Here’s Carl Sagan, quoted in this piece:
The astrophysicist Carl Sagan said of Mr. von Däniken: “Every time he sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet.”
And this principle, I think, goes to many conspiracy theorists. They don’t understand the complexity of the world, and so presume that someone must be behind it all.
