“No model of the political spectrum will ever be satisfying, the Lewis brothers argue, because ‘left’ and ‘right’ are not actually ideologies—they are ‘bundles of unrelated political positions connected by nothing other than a group.’ An American in 2004 who wanted low taxes, a vigorous war on terror, and a constitutional amendment against gay marriage was taking ‘right-wing’ positions, but what linked such disparate opinions? Nothing but sociology, say the Lewises: ‘A conservative or liberal is not someone who has a conservative or liberal philosophy, but someone who belongs to the conservative or liberal tribe.’”

#JesseWalker reviews Lewis and Lewis’ The Myth of Left and Right, and Zwolinski and Tomasi’s The Individualists.

#BookReview #libertarianism #politics #history

https://reason.com/2023/05/21/the-left-right-spectrum-is-mostly-meaningless/