The left-right political spectrum is a myth. No great divide slashes across the electorate, cleanly separating humanity into two political tribes. Neither the “left” and “right,” nor “liberals” and “conservatives,” represent naturally occurring divisions in humanity. Human history isn't a tale of two eternal forces, the armies of the left and the right, clashing from age to age through issues and empires. There were no liberals or conservatives, as we currently define those terms, in the court of Henry IV or the councils of the Chinese Emperors or among the electors of the Holy Roman Empire. The political battles in the ancient Rome Senate weren't the same as the battles we now wage in the modern American Senate, with business suits in place of togas. These two great political identities we frequently portray as though they're natural features of humanity are, in reality, little more than temporary alliances that unite inconsistent principles, holding squabbling groups together around ideologies built to address the questions of a specific time and place. Democracies naturally divide society into two roughly equal coalitions. For convenience, we label one of them the left and the other one the right.

There's no spectrum of policies and positions running left to right in a neat line. In fact, it's impossible to define what makes something “more” left or right other than it's the sort of thing the people we've labeled left or right prefer. Nor is there a “center” between them because no one line exists connecting them as poles. “Left” and “right” are just the arbitrary labels we plaster onto whatever the two coalitions in a democracy at a specific moment happen to say and do. As the values and beliefs of those coalitions change across time and societies, the specific beliefs we label left and right change too. Our New Deal parties, like every system of parties, doesn't represent two great and permanent forces of humanity. They represent an ad hoc collection of principles and issues tossed together to address a specific collection of problems—specifically to debate the industrial-era problems of Depression-era America.

HOW THE FRENCH REVOLUTION CREATED THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT

We all agree that the Democrats are the party of the “left.” The Republicans are the party of the “right.” We all seem to have an innate sense of what these labels mean, since we use them for parties and movements of all kinds across the world. When describing any electoral system, we inevitably describe one party as representing the left—the British Labour Party, the German Social Democrats, the Canadian Liberal Party—and the other as representing the right—the British Conservatives, the German Christian Democrats, or the Canadian Conservatives. We use the same terms to identify political movements and even nondemocratic and authoritarian regimes, attaching to a multitude of groups with varied ideologies labels like “left wing,” “center left,” or “far right.” To this way of thinking, our Fifth Party System Republicans and Democrats—and indeed the parties within every party system—must be merely vehicles for waging this recurring and permanent war between humanity's liberals on its “left” and conservatives on its “right,” with a smattering of “centrists” stuck in the “middle” between them. Except the left and the right aren't ancient concepts of human politics rooted in nature and history. They're a reasonably recent invention that arose by accident to describe an argument that's been irrelevant for a century.

We only talk about a political left and right because King Louis XVI of France ran out of money in the 1780s. France ran up substantial debts helping America beat Great Britain in the Revolutionary War, and the king needed more money to keep the French state functioning—not to mention keep himself in finery and palaces. The king called a traditional French advisory legislature, known as the Estates-General, looking for new taxes.1 Unfortunately for the king, the old feudal order was breaking down, and many commoners elected to the Estates-General arrived in Paris believing it an excellent opportunity to seize additional power from the nobility and the crown to befit their rising status. The Enlightenment was also then at its height in France, and many representatives elected to the Estates-General dreamed of a constitutional monarchy, if not a republic like the new one in America. As the proceedings began, a group of commoners sought to increase their representation at the meeting, but the king rebuffed them.² The commoners declared themselves a National Constituent Assembly and, when the king sought to lock them out of the meeting hall, commandeered a tennis court where they took an oath to bring about a new French constitution. After armed uprisings in Paris and an attack on the royal Bastille prison demonstrated the king was powerless, their legislature became the new French government.³ As it began debating a new constitution for France, those who supported the king and wanted a constitutional monarchy sat together, for no particular reason, on the right side of the meeting room. Those who wanted to overthrow the king and impose a republic sat on the left. People started calling the monarchists “the right” and the republicans “the left.”⁴

As the revolution raged through France, moving the country from an ineffective constitutional monarchy to a republican tyranny to the Napoleonic dictatorship, “right” and “left” became shorthand terms for one's position on the revolution. The Jacobins of the “left” wanted to shatter the old regime to build a new republic, and their cause attracted intellectuals, revolutionaries, rabble-rousing populists, and the poor and working-class “sans culottes,” who believed overthrowing kings would make their lives better. The “right” wanted to preserve the stability of an ordered monarchy and it mainly attracted aristocrats, the clergy, sober upper-middle-class professionals, pragmatists, and the military, who had a lot to lose in the uncertainty of revolution.⁵ People came to associate the “left” with radicalism, the elevation of Enlightenment rationalism over authority and tradition, and deference to the popular will. They associated the “right” with traditionalism, religion, social order, incrementalism, and pragmatism.⁶

The terms “liberal” and “conservative” originally grew out of related events. The label “liberal” rose to popularity during the Enlightenment to describe the philosophers and statesmen wanting to replace traditional authority with institutions based in reason—“liberal” having the same root as the word “liberty.”7 “Liberals” were Enlightenment heroes like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, and nearly every leading light of the American Revolution who wanted reason to replace traditional authority as the basis for government, wanted republics to replace monarchies, wanted citizens to replace subjects, and wanted markets to replace state monopolies. The original “liberals” and “the left” therefore mainly overlapped. During the troubled reign of King Louis XVIII, who had reclaimed the French throne from Napoleon, the royalist Vicomte de Chateaubriand is said to have coined the term “conservative” for those who, like him, defended the monarchy against republicanism.⁸ These “conservatives” hoped to “conserve” the traditional social order—monarchy, aristocracy, and traditional church authority against what they saw as republican radicalism. The concept of “conservatives” thus grew out of and overlapped with the original idea of the right.

As Enlightenment ideas spread during the nineteenth century, this clash between republicanism and aristocracy dominated politics in the West. France flip-flopped between monarchy and republicanism several times. The British parliament continued fighting over the supremacy of parliament or the king. Most important, Europe rose up in mass revolts in 1848 in support of more democracy—revolts the monarchs ultimately put down. During those revolts, while educated liberals in the cities demanded liberal concessions to the monarchs' absolute rule, like freedom of speech and representative parliaments, the struggling and discontented peasants and workers in the provinces who eagerly joined in made different demands, like the end of peasant abuse from landlords, economic security, and better working conditions. In the popular mind, the interests of workers and labor naturally blended into the interests of these liberals of the left.⁹

As republicanism and monarchy fought it out over the years, the people kept agitating for democracy, and the monarchs ultimately made concessions to the idea of constitutional restraints on their rule.10 The people gradually chipped away at absolutism, and parliaments with parties and real power became the norm. The new democratic political systems that emerged tended to divide society into two broad coalitions, as majority-rule systems are naturally inclined to do. The most powerful issue dividing those coalitions was the fight between monarchy and republicanism.¹¹ Since the two political coalitions of society were divided over the same issues as the coalitions first formed in the French assembly hall, the same labels designed to describe one's position on republicanism during the French Revolution—the “left” and “right”—got repurposed into labels for the naturally occurring coalitions of democratic politics.

That's why democracies talk about the left and right. The birth of democratic politics coincided with the left-right debate over aristocracy and republicanism. Since the sorts of people who we thought of as “the right” during the revolutionary era tended to work together in early democratic politics, we continued to think of them as “the right.” Since the sorts of people we thought of as “the left” during the revolutionary era tended to work together in early democratic politics, we continued to think of them as “the left.” The idea of “left” and “right” as positions on the dispute over republics or kings bled into the overlapping idea of “left” and “right” as convenient labels for the two grand coalitions that inevitably emerged under democratic political systems. What began as a matter of convenience became one of custom.

It's absolutely bizarre, however, that modern democracies continue to talk about the left and right at all. By the early twentieth century, the idea of the traditional left and right declined into irrelevance. In the aftermath of the First World War, the kings, emperors, and czars of Europe got swept away or else were rendered figureheads. Around the same time, new models for organizing society arose. Socialism took off as a new idea for government. A revolution in Russia led to the Bolsheviks seizing power, committing a powerful state to worldwide Marxist revolution. The Germans elected Hitler their nation's chancellor, and he transformed the German state into a fascist dictatorship, joining the dictatorships of Italy and Spain. The western world broke into three competing spheres advancing three philosophies of government—liberal-democratic capitalism, state communism, and fascism. The world's dominant political question had moved away from the now archaic question of republics and kings to one of communists and fascists and democracies. Yet people accustomed to thinking of politics in terms of the political left and right found the notion impossible to let go. In democracies, people continued to think about politics in terms of two coalitions of the left and the right. People therefore puzzled over how best to fit these three ideas into the still prevailing left-right spectrum.

Since the days of the 1848 revolutions, people had associated the cause of workers and labor—peasants, workers, and the common people, resentful of their lords and masters and demanding status, wealth, and better conditions in the harsh world of early industrialization—with the “left.” Demands for labor reforms, social welfare laws, and worker protections blended into liberal demands for parliaments and free speech. Communist support, moreover, tended to come from intellectuals, workers, utopian reformers, and populists—the sorts of people who traditionally made up the “left.”12 In fascist nations, the dictators drew much support from those pining for the stability of a monarch after the chaos and economic devastation of democracy during the Depression—mainly the sorts of people we were in the habit of calling the “right.”¹³ As fascists sparred with communists, the communists—who considered themselves the “left”—also made great efforts to distinguish these philosophical and political opponents as part of the hated “right.”¹⁴ In the popular mind, communists became a modern interpretation of the “left,” while fascists became a modern take on the “right,” with liberal-democratic capitalists placed somewhere in the “middle” between them.

It was true, of course, that socialists and communists, forced to pick between the two parties in a democracy, tended to prefer the party we generally labeled as the left. Fascists preferred to pick the party of the right. Except the fascist and communist regimes had more in common with each other than with any of the major parties of any liberal-democratic state.¹⁵ Both favored heavily militarized totalitarian states with no real democratic participation. They involved mostly state-directed economic systems and they gave very little personal freedom to their citizens, employing the apparatus of a police state. Fascists and communists even historically competed for the same space in the public square—angry people, mostly poor and working class, seeking to topple their governments. Most importantly, both fascism and communism rejected liberal-capitalist democracy and the entire Enlightenment value system on which it's based. The Nazi and Soviet regimes both had far more in common with each other than they did with Republicans or Democrats. Democrats and Republicans, on the other hand, as liberal parties in a democratic republic, have, then and now, far more in common with each other than either have with Nazis or Soviets. They both favor a completely different political system, completely different economic system, and completely different social system—liberal democracy—which both communists and fascists reject.

Calling fascism an ideology of the right and communism an ideology of the left was superficially appealing but logically incoherent. What “far right” fascists believe isn't a more “extreme” version of what modern Republicans believe, nor are the things “far left” communists believe a more “extreme” version of what modern Democrats believe. Communists might bear a shallow similarity with liberals in their rhetoric about workers and their wariness of the excesses of wealth, but otherwise reject liberal values. Studies of fascism almost inevitably note that fascist ideology bears little relationship with historical or philosophical conservatism or the historic political right, while the fascists themselves considered themselves neither left nor right but something completely new and different.16 Neither ideology has any relationship to any mainstream political belief in liberal capitalist republics. At best, when communists and fascists have to fit themselves into one of two unsatisfying choices in a liberal democracy, they pick the party they hate least—while advocating for the abolishment of the entire liberal system in favor of something radically different. Despite our insistence on continuing to use the labels left and right, the left-right spectrum no longer made much sense in the context of twentieth-century politics. Nor is it coherent to suggest the left-right spectrum is actually a “circle” in which, if you go too far in one direction, you wind up at the other end. Either something is a stark division of ideas or it's not.

It has now been over a century since the political labels left and right had any real meaning. They're labels meant to describe the two sides in the fight over republics and kings, yet we continue to apply them to increasingly unrelated ideological battles long after their original purpose has passed into the obscurity of history, even when the labels obviously no longer fit. Few serious people still favor a hereditary monarch. It simply became a matter of habit and convenience. Democratic political systems always trend toward two big political coalitions. We arbitrarily stick the best name we can on each, labeling their whole agenda as right or left. As we move into new eras, with new issues, we keep the same old boxes out of habit, whether or not it still makes sense to do so at all. The “left” and the “right” aren't descriptions of where political parties fall on a spectrum of ideas. Unlike in that French assembly hall, it's hard to even know what we mean when we classify something as left or right, other than that it's something the sorts of people we're accustomed to labeling the left or right tend to think. They're just names we stick on after the fact to whatever ideas our parties come up with in building winning electoral coalitions.

LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES ARE TEMPORARY AND ARBITRARY COALITIONS

Many smart people have worked diligently to identify how the left and right might represent not just arbitrary ad hoc coalitions but rival basic dispositions of humanity.17 It's our common intuition that certain personality traits usually correspond to certain political views. It's said that liberals on the left are creative, open to experience, and eager to improve things—but also sometimes imprudent and blind to risk. Conservatives on the right are said to be more practical, reliable, and stable—but sometimes hidebound and resistant to necessary change. This roughly corresponds to how we use the words “liberal” and “conservative” in ordinary speech. If we ask a colleague to be conservative in estimating figures for us, we mean a cautious forecast. If we ask a friend to spoon out a “liberal” portion of ice cream, we mean a heaping scoop overflowing the dish. These stereotypes of liberal and conservative personalities seem to support the incorrect notion that our political coalitions must be driven by our nature.

Scholars have indeed found that one's political beliefs often correspond to certain personality traits, with conscientiousness linked to conservative beliefs and openness linked to liberal ones.18 Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example, suggests five distinct foundations of moral reasoning in which political liberals chiefly care about two, care for others and fairness, while political conservatives also highly value authority, loyalty, and sanctity.¹⁹ Theorists like Haidt raise important insights about why different people looking at the two major political parties on offer in a democracy ultimately choose the party they do. They explain why certain people might choose to become liberals or conservatives as we presently define those terms. They describe how the two parties that presently exist fit into the moral universe. They might even provide reasons for how, when presented with two parties, we choose to label one as right or left. What these theories don't do—nor are they meant to do—is explain why the left or right party in a society stakes out the specific mix of ideas and policies they do. If you had to construct the agendas of America's two major political parties from scratch using just these differences, you wouldn't arrive at the agendas of the modern Republican and Democratic Parties.

Political conservatives are cautious about some change—they oppose “liberal” policy proposals requiring new regulations or increased spending, as well as those that encourage the culture to move in a more “liberal” direction. They also happily support experimental economic policies, new government intervention into cultural matters, constitutional amendments, and more, which would together not only unwind some of the most significant parts of the modern American state but also implement new programs untested anywhere before. Political liberals favor some changes, such as new programs that further advance their policy priorities, while instinctively resisting any effort to reform or adjust any of the half-century-old programs of the New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. They also favor caution when political conservatives propose reforms in public schooling, such as charter schools and testing regimes; they resist liberalizing national labor practices, wanting to keep in place the conservative workplace regimes encoded in labor union agreements; and they generally oppose experimenting with vouchers to overhaul the Medicare and Social Security programs.

Conservatives and liberals take a more “conservative” or “liberal” position depending on whether a proposal moves the country toward their policy preferences. Why don't conservatives, said to value authority and loyalty, favor a stronger government with a highly regulatory state? Shouldn't conservatives dislike the chaos of free and unregulated markets and the disruptive changes of capitalism? Shouldn't they like the order labor unions create? Shouldn't the value they place on loyalty lead to more support for generous Social Security and Medicare programs, even if it means higher taxes—sacrificing some fairness for loyalty to and respect for elders? Why do liberals, said not to value highly the morality of the sacred, embrace an environmental politics rooted in a sacred value, the purity of nature? Whatever created the distinct mixture of issues and ideas that we group together as “liberal” and “conservative,” differences in personality or moral intuition don't account for them.

No one has ever adequately explained with any neutral principle why “liberals” support the specific mix of positions they do or why “conservatives” support the issues they do.20 In an alternative political alignment, it's perfectly plausible that people who believe in tax cuts could be on the same side of public debate as people who believe in free immigration and restricted off-shore drilling. It's plausible that, in that universe, people who believe in stronger environmental regulation might find themselves on the same side of public debate as people believing in charter schools and banning stem-cell research. A belief in free trade might not go with opposition to same-sex marriage. Support for labor unions might not go with support for affirmative action policies. In fact, there's no reason the issues we group together as “liberal” or “conservative” have to go together at all. Few people in the real world even agree with everything their political “team” is supposed to believe. People believe some of it, and not all of them agree with the same parts as others. The country is full of people who describe themselves in political terms that demonstrate only partial adherence to their “team”—they're libertarians, or “economically conservative and socially liberal,” or Blue Dog Democrats, or “sort of progressive,” or some other common formulation that communicates only partial agreement with what we call “conservatism” or “liberalism.”

While most liberal-democratic governments facing most of the same problems as America have parties we identify as “left” and “right,” they don't perfectly mirror the American left and right. The British Tories, on the “right” in the UK, adore a government-run healthcare system that would terrorize the American right as dangerous socialism. Many worldwide parties of the “left” are honest-to-goodness socialists advancing unabashedly socialist agendas that make America's Democrats look like conservatives. The German Christian Democrats, the mainstream party of the “right” in Germany, support a highly regulated economy that the American right would detest on principle. Outside Western liberal democracies, the labels break down further. Who's truly on the “right” and the “left” in China, an officially communist state with limited political freedom, carrying out a market-oriented economic program? How do you classify elected authoritarians like Russia's Vladimir Putin or Turkey's Tayyip Erdoğan, who in practice reject the entire premise of liberal-democratic capitalism itself?

Looking back at history, you don't find people in societies beyond the last few centuries debating the same issues and value choices conservatives and liberals debate today. None of what triggered passionate debate in these societies, not to mention political assassinations, armed rebellions, and wars, had anything to do with our debates between Democrats and Republicans. If you analyze old conflicts, you can always find the side that people of modern democracies would consider more enlightened and then label them the “liberals” of the situation. You can also always find people demanding change and people favoring stability and order. What you can't find in the places humans came together to debate politics—the ancient Roman Senate, the councils of medieval European kings, or the halls of the Doge of the Venetian Republic—are debates over the same issues over which modern democratic societies obsess. The kings of medieval Europe weren't debating how best to create jobs. The Maharajahs of India weren't considering how best to implement a social welfare state. Members of the pre-modern English parliament weren't chosen based on pledges to fight unfair racial discrimination. People then fought over different issues that don't easily break down as left or right, such as which family would rule, the balance of power between nobles and the king, the dictates of the church, and other disputes over inheritance, family, religion, and power. Indeed, for most of the world's history, the principles and agendas of both “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans would be seen as indistinguishable radicalism.

Free markets and free trade? In a world of peasants, or one controlled by guilds, the very notion is absurd. Environmental protection? In a preindustrial world, protection from what? Education? Why do we want peasants to read? Labor unions? Workers do what they're told or they lose their heads. Voting rights? Kings are divinely ordained to rule. Gender politics? Women were essentially property. Everyone who matters in politics in every modern democracy would back then be a radical outside all bounds of political debate. Modern conservatives and liberals all want to live in a dynamic society of growth, innovation, and commerce—not a static world of stable landed hereditary estates. Modern liberals and conservatives all agree citizens should rule through representative democracy. They all agree we should form policy through rational debate based on evidence, not deference to ancient authority earned by birthright or bestowed by divine power. Unless you abstract the complex ideologies we call liberal and conservative down to some simplistic notion like who you think is most fair, which ruler is less tyrannous, or which historical figure you find the least cruel, then nobody in the world before the modern era is a conservative or a liberal.

Put plainly, no one has ever succeeded in identifying a value or universal principle we can take as a starting point, plug it into our political situation, and reliably spit out the two actual political parties that now exist. Since we can't even agree on what it means for something to be left or right in the first place, we certainly have no coherent way to decide whether something is “more” or “further” to the left or right than something else. That means we have no coherent way to line up every issue in politics into some spectrum moving left to right, much less to call anything a “middle” or “center” between them. The only method by which we know to reliably identify whether something is left or right is to observe what the people labeling themselves as liberals or conservatives currently support. The left-right spectrum is nothing more than a byproduct of a metaphor run amok. We talk about political factions using directions like “left” and “right” and then start actually thinking the world has ordered politics into some neat line. The metaphor wasn't even originally about ideology. It's was about seating arrangements.

THE TRUE IDEOLOGICAL COALITIONS OF AMERICA

Liberalism and conservatism, and the left and right identities we associate with them, are just labels for the current agendas of the Democratic and Republican Parties. At different times and places, these agendas can and do change. When they do, whatever we consider the liberal or conservative position changes too. It's unfair to call them completely arbitrary because some issues naturally “go together,” in the sense that they flow from the same basic principles and premises. The people who tend to share a common value naturally tend to support a cluster of related issues springing from that value. One coalition will always attract more of certain groups in society, whether intellectuals, artists, the poor, professionals, or business leaders. One party will always want more change and another will inevitable want to preserve more of the status quo. We can use those and similar markers to label one coalition more to the “left” or “right” based on our prior associations. Yet in critical ways every coalition we label left or right is always going to look somewhat different. They will all support a seemingly strange mixture of issues and contain somewhat different alliances. Changing the axis of evaluation from one policy to another, like economics and labor to social culture, the party that looks more liberal or conservative can even flip.

Previous American party systems don't neatly conform to our current definitions of liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives often claim Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, but the Federalists supported a powerful federal government driving economic progress at the expense of state authority—seemingly liberal. Liberals claim Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans, but Jefferson was a slave-owning rich aristocrat who thought the elite should rule, distrusted strong federal power, and wanted strong states that could defend themselves against the federal government. Each was liberal in some ways under our present definition but conservative in others. Andrew Jackson was a populist who hated banks and corporations and wanted to break the power of elites for the benefit of ordinary working people—seemingly liberal—who also was militarily aggressive and despised fancy cultural elites in a way that sounded like a Tea Party conservative. Most people call the Civil War Republicans the liberal party—they ended slavery, sought to expand national civil rights, were aggressive in the use of federal power for reform, and favored investing in national projects—unless you're talking about business policies and keeping state power out of commercial matters, in which case the Democrats suddenly seem to be taking liberal positions. William Jennings Bryan, the most important Democrat at the turn of the twentieth century, was a strong populist fighting for the interests of poor farmers and laborers, promoting economic policies benefiting these groups against the “big money” of the East. His politics centered around his evangelical Christianity and belief in personal morality. He was a strong anti-elitist, raging against the Eastern elites he despised and terrifying the establishment of both major parties; he wanted to ban alcohol for religious reasons; and he fought to allow schools to fire teachers who taught evolution. Was he a conservative or a liberal? Theodore Roosevelt, the most important Republican around the same time, was strongly pro-business and the nation's leading progressive championing regulatory reforms to stop bad business actors, civil service reforms to stop patronage, and antitrust laws to break up monopoly corporations. He was agreeable to unions, created agencies like the FDA, and, as an avid hunter and outdoorsman, became the first great environmentalist creating the national park system. Was he a conservative or a liberal?

Just like the party ideologies of previous American party systems, the two major party ideologies we now call liberalism and conservatism are in fact big messy coalitions binding millions of very different people around two big visions addressing the problems of their age. They don't represent places on an everlasting political spectrum. They represent temporary coalitions of people united around party ideologies built out of sometimes clashing principles to engage in a specific debate about a unique time and place in history, the mid-twentieth-century industrial world. We constructed these ideologies we too often wrongly take for granted as eternal—New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism—fairly recently to debate Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Democratic Party's New Deal liberalism, which holds we should enlist expertise to design a better society that serves working people and the least well off, is not one universal principle. Its ideology combines two broad principles, populism and progressivism, to unite very different groups of people. Progressivism believes careful study, elite knowledge, and the application of social science can design rules to improve America to create a more just, fair, and prosperous society. It's the principle behind Democratic activism for environmental protection, financial reform, education reform, social justice activism, and social programs that help at-need children. Populism seeks to empower people who feel locked out by the elite. It's what's behind Democratic talk of working for the “little guy,” or “working Americans,” or “the common man” against “the rich” or “the corporations,” and it's why Democrats champion the interests of the struggling and the poor, support progressive taxation, support labor unions that empower workers at the expense of corporate brass, and support regulatory schemes that seek to hold corporations to account. Since the 1930s, nearly everything the Democratic Party has said and done it has justified on one of these two principles, defending the people versus the powerful (defending entitlements, supporting labor unions, regulating powerful industries, progressive taxation) or promoting justice and progress (women's issues, pro-choice policies, support for same-sex marriage, gun control, environmental protection, and green energy). When Democrats rage that Republicans are in the pocket of the rich, that's an argument based in populism. When they complain that Republicans are selfish individualists standing in the way of social progress, that's an argument based in progressivism.

The Republican conservative ideology, which opposes New Deal liberalism as dangerous “big government,” also merges two broad principles, liberty and virtue. It's rare to listen to a Republican politician for any length of time without hearing either an invocation of liberty (or freedom) or virtue (or values, morality, or family). Liberty is the belief that democratic majorities should be wary about wielding democratic power carelessly over weaker political minorities to avoid a tyranny of the majority. Republicans thus advocate small government, reducing regulation, reducing taxes, and free-market solutions, so people can make choices without state interference. Virtue is the worry that a republic like America, in which citizens choose and control the government, must foster a specific culture in its people for the nation to survive and thrive. Republicans thus seek to promote cultural traits to encourage virtues like national community, family, tradition, faith, the value of work, and love of country. Since the 1930s, the Republican Party has justified nearly every major issue either as the defense of political liberty (lower taxes, reduced regulation, “smaller government,” school choice, a strong Second Amendment, a more active foreign policy) or national virtue (pro-life policies, per-child tax credits, opposition to same-sex marriage, flag-burning amendments, keeping “In God We Trust” on currency). When Republicans thunder that Democrats champion a “big government” “nanny state” agenda, that's an argument based in liberty. When they accuse Democrats of social radicalism, “Hollywood values,” or failing to love and support America, those are attacks based around virtue.

To understand the present party system, we have to unlearn much of what we all think we know about what our parties represent. The Democratic Party isn't just a party of liberals on the left. Nor is the Democratic coalition simply an ad hoc alliance of various demographic or identity groups—a mere “coalition of the ascendant” uniting African Americans, Hispanics, women, gays and lesbians, millennials, labor unions, environmental activists, and more. The Republicans aren't just a party of conservatives on the right. The party is more than just a “three-legged stool” of economic conservatives, social conservatives, and foreign policy conservatives lobbying for their specific favored policy priorities. These common descriptions all have it backward, mistaking the result of a coalition—which groups it attracts and what issues it favors—for the cause that unites it. The Democrats are an alliance of populists and progressives united around the ideology of the New Deal. The Republicans are an alliance of liberty conservatives and virtue conservatives united around fighting the New Deal as harmful big government. Populism and progressivism are different things. Liberty and virtue are different things. There's no logical reason these principles have to be paired together inside the same political coalition. Sometimes they find themselves at odds. A populist sometimes demands power and spoils at the cost of meritocratic good government, while expert-led technocratic reforms sometimes harm the interests of ordinary people or demand change they won't like. A virtue conservative might sometimes believe it's necessary to wield government authority to bolster the nation's virtue in a way that alarms a liberty conservative, while a liberty conservative might advocate allowing society to freely take a course a virtue conservative might fear will undercut the virtue necessary for the republic to survive.

Liberty, virtue, populism, and progressivism all have deep roots across American history, from liberty's role in America's Founding, to virtue's role in American revivals, to the populist revolts that have shaken the system, to the Progressive Movement that transformed the nation around the turn of the twentieth century. Deep and forgotten fissures lie between each party's principles, ones we too frequently gloss over or ignore in our careless grouping of people as mere conservatives or liberals. When our parties eventually break, our party coalitions will be undone in the spaces between these principles, and these spaces are where the next era's coalitions will most likely emerge. To understand how this party system is breaking, and what's likely to happen next, we must first unpack the constituent parts of these cobbled-together ideologies that we have taken for granted since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.