The Seating Chart That Became a Worldview

A room, a question, and a seating plan

In the late summer of 1789, the deputies of the French National Assembly faced a narrow question: should King Louis XVI keep a veto over the laws of the new legislature? Those who favored the royal veto gathered to the presiding officer's right. Those who wanted to limit the crown gathered to his left. The arrangement was practical before it was anything else. Men who agreed wanted to sit together, to confer, and to count their own numbers.

That is the whole origin of "left" and "right" in politics. Not a philosophy. Not a theory of human nature. A seating chart.

As a historian, I find it worth pausing on how modest that beginning was. The deputies were arguing about one issue, in one country, in one year. No one in that hall imagined that the words describing where they sat would, two centuries later, be used to classify an American voter's views on tariffs, firearms, immigration, school curricula, and the size of the federal budget, all at once and with a single word.

Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis, in The Myth of Left and Right (Oxford University Press, 2023), trace the migration. The spectrum, they write, "was imported from Europe." It caught on among American intellectuals in the 1920s and reached the general public in the 1930s, when the New Deal was the dominant question in national life. For a brief moment a single axis fit the facts tolerably well: at one end stood those who wanted the federal government to do more about the Depression, at the other those who wanted it to do less. A line can describe a one-issue argument.

But the country did not remain a one-issue country. The Lewises argue that as new controversies arrived — anti-communism, Vietnam, crime, drugs, abortion — each was folded into the older story of change versus preservation, as if every fresh dispute were a new chapter in a book first drafted in 1789 and revised in 1933. The line had become a habit of mind. Once Americans learned to ask whether a position was "left" or "right," they stopped asking the prior question: do these positions have anything to do with one another at all?

Consider how strange the resulting bundles look when examined cold. Why should a person's view of marginal tax rates predict her view of foreign military deployments? Why should an opinion about firearms travel with an opinion about carbon emissions? Nothing in logic requires it. The pairing is historical, and the history is recent.

From where people sat to what people are

Here is the move I want readers to notice, because the rest of this series depends on it. A metaphor about where people sat became a theory about what people are. Once a citizen is imagined as a point on a line, every opinion he holds is expected to be predictable from his location. If he surprises us, we do not question the line; we call him inconsistent, or a "moderate," or confused.

The Lewises offer a sharp illustration of how little the label can carry. Both Adolf Hitler and the free-market economist Milton Friedman are routinely described as "far right." A classification that places a genocidal dictator and a champion of limited government at the same end of the same ruler is not measuring anything coherent. It is sorting by team association, by who opposed whom, not by shared conviction. "The myth of left and right," they write, "makes us confused, hostile, and cognitively impaired."

That is a strong charge. Over the coming posts I intend to test it against the American record from 1896 forward: the fusion tickets of the 1890s, the Progressive bolt of 1912, the coalition that held segregationists and civil rights advocates under one name in 1936, the party switchers, the debate stages that opened and then closed. The pattern I will argue for is simple. The party names persisted. Their contents did not. And the one-dimensional line, far from explaining those changes, mostly hid them.

Where the evidence pushes back

The strongest objection is that the line works remarkably well for one group: elected officials. Roll-call analyses by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal (the NOMINATE scores) show members of Congress today separating almost perfectly along a single dimension, and Matthew Levendusky's The Partisan Sort (2009) documents how voters, too, have brought their partisanship and their self-described ideology into alignment since the 1970s. If the spectrum were a mere seating chart, why does it predict congressional votes so well? The Lewises reply that the predictive power comes from team discipline rather than from a shared philosophy: the bundle is coherent because the tribe enforces it. Some scholars, such as John Jost, go further and argue that a real psychological dimension, attitudes toward hierarchy and change, underlies the labels. Readers should hold both possibilities open as the series proceeds.

Why this matters for the ballot

If the line is a convention rather than a law of nature, then an election system that offers voters exactly two points on it is a design choice, and design choices can be revisited. Fair ballot and debate access for independents and third parties is one way to give the many Americans who do not sit anywhere on that 1789 seating chart a seat of their own.

— Michael W. Cunningham, Ph.D.

Cover image: "Couder Stati generali" via Wikimedia Commons. See the file page for author and license.