Hyrum Lewis - Why You're Not Actually Liberal or Conservative

Hyrum Lewis is a professor, author, and political theorist. He currently teaches history at Brigham Young University–Idaho, where he leads the American Foundations Team. 

Lewis’s research focuses on the history of ideology and the intersection of political and intellectual culture. He has written extensively on the evolution of American conservatism, historical pedagogy, and cultural conflict in the American West.

 He is the author of several books, including his most recent, The Myth of the Left and Right, co-authored with his brother Verlan Lewis. In it, they argue that the traditional left-right political spectrum is a misleading and oversimplified framework for understanding contemporary American politics. 

In this episode, we speak about why tribalism precedes philosophy, how what left and right means is always changing, what Jonathan Haidt got wrong, pathways towards more generative political conversations, and the relationship between religion and politics.

🔗[Links & resources] 🔗

• The Myth of Left and Right by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis
• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• Keith Stanovich
• John Stuart Mill
• The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
• The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley

📝[Show Notes] 📝

0:00 - Introduction 
3:18 - The intuition that the political spectrum is broken 
5:26 - The Essentialist Theory of Ideology vs The Social Theory of Ideology 
8:38 - Why tribalism precedes philosophy 
12:01 - Caricatures of the left and the right 
14:25 - How what left and right means is always changing 
17:44 - We choose our politicians before our policies 
21:31 - How to better use terms left and right or liberal and conservative 
27:03 - Voting on one issue without anchoring 
32:05 - How do we move beyond left & right with a two-party system?
39:25 - What Jonathan Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory got wrong 
 44:45 - Questioning the links between psychological traits and political positions
49:17 - Pathways towards more generative political conversations 
53:51 - Why we need to increase our tolerance for disagreement 
 59:16 - Developing a Scout Mindset 
1:02:08 - What is the relationship between religion and politics 
1:06:55 - The destructive ideology of Progressivism

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