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I admitted in\xa0my last post on Reaction\xa0that I devoted insufficient space to the question of why society does seem to be drifting gradually leftward. And I now realize that in order to critique the Reactionary worldview effectively we\u2019re going to have to go there.

The easiest answer would be \u201cbecause we retroactively define leftism as the direction that society went\u201d. But this is not true. Communism is very leftist, but society eventually decided not to go that way. It seems fair to say that there are certain areas where society did\xa0not\xa0go to the left, like in the growth of free trade and the gradual lowering of tax rates, but upon realizing this we don\u2019t feel the slightest urge to redefine \u201clow tax rates\u201d as leftist.

So what\xa0is\xa0leftism? For that matter, what is rightism?

Any theory of these two ideas would have to explain at least the following data points:

1)\xa0Why do both ideologies combine seemingly unrelated political ideas? For example, why do people who want laissez-faire free trade empirically also prefer a strong military and oppose gay marriage? Why do people who want to help the environment also support feminism and dislike school vouchers?

2)\xa0Why do the two ideologies seem\xa0broadly\xa0stable across different times and cultures, such that it\u2019s relatively easy to point out the Tories as further right than the Whigs, or ancient Athens as further left than ancient Sparta? For that matter, why do they seem to correspond to certain neural patterns in the brain, such that\xa0neurologists can determine your political beliefs with 83% accuracy by examining brain structure alone?

Link:\xa0https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/