Asymmetric Reality
The division in America starts with two different views of objective truth
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
Abraham Lincoln
When Lincoln said these famous words at the 1858 Illinois Republican State Convention, the country was obviously headed toward civil war. Today, there are many Americans who fear that is where the country is headed yet again. Whether or not this is true, there is little doubt by almost anyone that the country is bitterly divided in a way not completely dissimilar to when Lincoln gave his speech.
Central to this division are two very different perceptions of reality. There is, obviously, only one reality, but there are a myriad of ways that it can be perceived. The political right and the political left today in America do not only disagree on issues of policy and opinion. They have radically different concepts of the milieu that they exist in. This is complicated by the fact that they use the same basic terminology, but they use the terms in very different and incompatible ways.
First of all, it is important to understand that the terms “left” and “right” are themselves problematic. They are used here because they provide a distinction between two opposing political perspectives. Their meanings and what they ultimately represent have changed over time, and they don’t necessarily mean the same thing today that they did twenty, fifty, or a hundred years or more ago. They do represent, however, a throughline that can be traced from their antecedents to their current characteristics.
Both the right and the left start by using the same basic terminology. They each concern themselves with the same five basic concepts. These are democracy, free speech, elite power, normalcy, and aggression. The difficulty comes from the fact that these concepts are not used in symmetric ways. Therefore, they cannot be compared and contrasted directly in the ways that they are used in each of the opposing ideologies. This is the source of the disconnect that creates the division and makes meaningful dialogue difficult, if not impossible.
This manifests itself into five specific perceptual asymmetries. These are the five disconnects that currently prevent proper deliberation between right and left. They define the issues important to each constituency and the inability of the other side to recognize and address those issues in a way that is meaningful and bridge-building to the other side. They are the reason that most of the political deliberation between left and right is not productive. When two sides in a deliberation are not talking about the same thing, the result is talking past each other rather than to each other.
The first of these perceptual asymmetries is about defining blame. This is foundational because it establishes credibility for one’s ideology. In the American Revolution, one of the strongest galvanizing events that led colonists to revolt against the king was the Boston Massacre. The story told of shots fired, and that news quickly rippled throughout the colonies. This might have been the first perceptual asymmetry of import in America. While the colonists did not have firearms, they did have weapons and were acting in ways equivalent to a mob. The question becomes whether that first British infantryman was acting out of self-defense or aggression. Tories felt one way, and Patriots (as they would be called) thought otherwise.
This asymmetry asks who is the aggressor. Put in modern terms, the current right sees the left as firing the first shots. They see this within the context of enforcing new cultural norms through DEI mandates, the ideological capture of institutions of science and academia, and the suppression of any dissent to the orthodoxy that these initiatives and institutions enforce. Importantly, it is not the ideas that the right challenges most strongly, but the dogmatic enforcement of those truths and the subsequent costs to even question them.
This much is well documented. While Social Justice Theory has created great new avenues of thought to explore the difficult questions of oppression in society, there are some aspects of it that have become dogmatized to the point of coercion. Dissent has not been tolerated the way that it should be. Liberality is based on tolerance. The fact that this comes from a liberal heritage is ironic, because this kind of pathologizing of a good idea defies the very nature of liberalism. It is not the idea I object to, because I mainly agree with it. It is the enforcement.
The blame from the left runs deeper into history. It goes back to the Powell memo of 1971 and the concerted effort of the oligarchy to once again assert itself as it had in America’s past. It also goes back to Paul Weyrich who took up the mantle from Powell and established the Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute to try to influence culture and politics and ensure prosperity for the wealthy class. Weyrich discovered that he could change the voting habits of Christians by mobilizing them against abortion. Before that, even the Southern Baptist Convention was not against abortion. From the left perspective, this is the start of the modern culture war.
The second question to ask is what constitutes as normal. Normal is the state of things that everyone wants to attain. It is equilibrium. Anything less is abnormal and therefore a problem to be resolved. Our current circumstance is one of those times when the right/left dichotomy fails us. There are those on the right that adamantly disagree with others on the right. There are those on the left that adamantly disagree with others on the left. It becomes an atomization of politics. This presents a difficulty to understand normal. There is no equilibrium.
The problem of what constitutes as normal requires agreement on a starting point. Each side points to different timelines in terms of what is normal. For many on the left, normal represents everything that was constructed in the aftermath of World War II. It is the development of NATO and the United Nations and cultural changes brought about by the sexual revolution and civil rights movement. These things are seen by the left as progress and natural. Therefore, any attempt to dismantle this progress is seen as destructive and backward.
The right has always seen these changes as an imposition and power grab by an elite intelligentsia. They point to globalization and its effective hollowing out of the working class. They see the revolutionary cultural changes not as the liberation and corrections for historical wrongs that the left sees them as but as an abandonment of traditional ideals and the replacement of one set of ideals for another. The fact that questioning these new values as norms brings social sanction further exacerbates the offense. What the left sees as a win for society, the right sees as a loss in the battle of ideas.
The third question is to ask who is pulling the strings. The real question is who is our society designed for. Most Americans believe in an elite, but they might not agree on who it is. On the left, it is the oligarchy who has captured the wheels of power through it’s control of government through a corrupt political system. On the right, it is an intellectual elite that has permeated institutions throughout academia, media, entertainment and the bureaucracy. The real question is, is it an or, or an and?
The fourth question is possibly the most important for both sides. It is the question of free speech. Free speech has long been the bastion of the left. For many on the right, however, this seems to no longer be true. The right points to a hardening of tolerance for speech on the left. In truth, there is a well-documented recent history of policing of speech on the left both for opponents and some dissenters within the group that has created a number of victims. They are the victims of a purity spiral that occurs when ideologies become pathologized.
For the left, the right has a different problem with free speech. It is seen by the left as having a problem with objective truth. Traditionally right is expected to be the side most averse to postmodernism and its relativistic truth, but it is seen today by the left as being the source of misinformation and disinformation that is often seen as attempts at manipulation. This is laid bare by terms such as “alternate facts” offered by even some on the right which are seen as evidence of this dishonesty.
What this really shows is two very different approaches to the idea of free speech. This is especially true in the way each side tries to address free speech and its potential effects on society. The right employs a classical liberal approach that can be called the scarcity model of epistemic harm. The problem for the right is that too few voices are heard. The remedy is simply more speech and less censorship, suppression, or gatekeeping. The focus is on allowing all speech whether it’s true or not, because the danger of restricting that speech is greater than the harms of incorrect information.
The modern left takes the opposite approach. It employs what could be called the pollution model of epistemic harm. The danger to the left is that the signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed and contaminated the public conversation. The remedy is curation, filtering, and accountability for bad-faith actors. These two models generate opposite intuitions about almost every specific case whether that is the moderation of social media, the role of fact-checkers, and whether the media should always present all sides of every issue.
The final asymmetry it perceptual reality is something that is more psychological that physical. This relates to how each side evaluates the government and its performance, as well as its role in society. For the right, this is seen through the lens of crisis management. The government is effective when it addresses issues such as crime, illegal immigration, and protecting American sovereignty and cultural traditions. The focus is primarily on cultural and civilizational evaluative metrics.
The left’s evaluative lens focuses more on competence within the system. It holds government accountable to its processes and procedures. It is concerned with whether the government is playing by the established rules, whether the different branches are properly checking each other, and whether the press is fully allowed to hold the government fully accountable for its actions.
These aren’t just different opinions about the same things. They are fundamentally different ways of evaluating democratic government. They have different metrics and therefore come up with very different measurements that don’t directly relate to one another symmetrically. The left’s view holds that democracy is primarily a set of procedures. Violating those procedures is the cardinal sin, regardless of outcomes.
The right’s view holds that democracy is fundamentally about representing the will and interests of the people. Procedures are instrumental to that goal, but they are not held as intrinsically sacred. When procedures have been used to insulate elite preferences from popular accountability, defending those procedures looks less like defending democracy and more like defending a rigged game.
When we look at these five asymmetries from outside of either group, it is not hard to see why both sides seem to talk past each other. They are simply not seeing the same political realities. This is actually more destabilizing than outright disagreement. It's a semantic problem masquerading as a factual dispute, and it's one reason why the standard approach of "let's just look at the facts together" tends to fail.
The only way to combat this is for each side to fully understand the evaluative metrics and fears of the other side. This might provide a way to align the metrics into something that both sides can agree on and that take into account the concerns each side holds. This is just the first step, but it is arguably the most difficult step, because it requires each side to take off their ideological lenses and challenge the very nature of reality itself.