They're Not Left-Wing, They're Anti-White
The racialisation of the Left–Right divide is not only happening, it’s inevitable.
Imagine a runaway trolley hurtling down a track toward five people. You stand at the switch; by pulling it, you can divert the trolley onto a side track where only one person is tied down. Do you flip the switch, sacrificing one life to save five? This classic “trolley problem” tests whether you believe in the principle of the greater good or hold that killing is always wrong. Now, imagine adding a twist: what if that one person on the side track has a different racial identity than the five? Would it change your decision? It might surprise some, but research suggests that for many people the answer is yes and the way it changes depends heavily on one’s political orientation. In other words, your moral choice in this scenario may not be guided by abstract ethics at all, but by tribal instincts about group identity.
The Trolley Problem, With a Racial Twist
Psychologist David Pizarro of Cornell and colleagues set out to probe how race and politics intersect in our moral judgments. They presented participants with a variation of the trolley dilemma. In one scenario, the lone person who could be sacrificed was named Tyrone Payton, a name stereotypically associated with a Black man, and saving him would spare 100 members of the New York Philharmonic (an audience assumed to be mostly White). In another scenario, the person to be sacrificed was Chip Ellsworth III, a name conjuring a White man of old American stock, and sparing him would save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra (assumed to be mostly Black). Crucially, nothing explicit was said about anyone’s race, the names and group identities did the work implicitly.
When confronted with these scenarios, participants’ political leanings predicted their choices in striking ways. Self-identified liberals were far more willing to sacrifice “Chip” (the White character) to save the Black orchestra than to sacrifice “Tyrone” to save the white orchestra. Conversely, conservatives showed the opposite (though weaker) bias, they were more willing to sacrifice Tyrone than Chip. In effect, each group’s moral utilitarianism (willingness to kill one to save many) was not applied neutrally, but selectively. As Pizarro observed in a talk on the results, liberals proved “just as prejudiced here as conservatives were, but in reverse,” readily endorsing the death of the White man while recoiling at the death of the Black man.
These findings demolish the notion that people (especially politically progressive people) apply moral principles in a colour-blind or universal way. If one truly believed “kill one to save five” as an absolute ethical rule, it shouldn’t matter who the one and the five are. Yet clearly it did matter. A principle was invoked (“it’s necessary to sacrifice one for the greater good”) only when it aligned with a preferred outcome and what determined the “preferred” outcome was the racial identity of who lived and who died. Pizarro interprets this as evidence that our lofty moral reasoning often works backwards. We arrive at a desired conclusion first (driven by emotional or tribal loyalties), then retrofit a principle to justify it. As he put it, “People aren’t using these principles and then applying them. They arrive at a judgment and seek a principle”.
In this case, liberals’ judgment was apparently driven by an out-group preference, a desire, perhaps unspoken, to protect the minority individual even at the expense of the majority individual. Only after that instinctive judgment, they reached for a convenient ethical rationale (utilitarian logic) to defend sacrificing the White character. Conservatives, on the other hand, showed a more familiar in-group preference, expressing more willingness to save their own perceived group at the expense of the “other.” The experiment slyly revealed that beneath the high-minded talk of moral philosophy, tribal loyalties were pulling the levers.
Patriotism vs. “Pathological Altruism”
The pattern Pizarro identified, people bending moral rules to favour either an in-group or an out-group doesn’t stop at domestic racial dilemmas. It extends to questions of national loyalty and war. In another scenario the researchers tested, participants had to consider a military strike with collateral damage. One version described an American military operation against terrorists that would unintentionally kill innocent Iraqi civilians. Another version flipped the script, an Iraqi strike on terrorists that would accidentally kill innocent American civilians. Would those deaths be morally justifiable if the strike achieved an important objective?
The results showed that conservatives, true to expectation, were more willing to justify the collateral killing of foreign civilians (Iraqis) if it saved American lives, than to accept American civilian casualties in a similar strike. This is a classic expression of patriotism or in-group favouritism, the instinct that one’s own countrymen’s lives should be guarded more jealously. Liberals, however, did not share this instinct. In fact, liberals tended to be equally or even more tolerant of American deaths than of foreign deaths in the scenario. In other words, liberals as a group displayed no special concern for protecting their “own” civilians, some evidence even suggested the most left-leaning were less forgiving of collateral damage when the victims were foreigners, implying they found it more acceptable when the unintended victims were Americans. This is the same inversion of the usual bias, a striking willingness to harm in-group members (Americans) if it ostensibly serves a greater good for others.
Such a stance has been dubbed by some critics as “pathological altruism.” It’s an altruism that many would consider excessive or misapplied, sacrificing one’s own people out of concern for others. In evolutionary or historical terms, this is an outlier. Nearly all societies and cultures have valued in-group loyalty as a virtue, from an evolutionary perspective, preferring the well-being of your family, tribe, or nation is normal and adaptive, since groups that failed to protect their own members tended not to survive. What Pizarro’s studies highlight is a new moral divide, one side still hews to this age-old, normal preference for one’s own (whether defined by race, nation, or culture), while the other side has somehow adopted a moral code that inverts this preference. Liberals in these studies weren’t neutral or colour-blind, they actively favoured the out-group. And they aren’t exactly shy about it, in modern political discourse, traditional in-group loyalty often gets attacked as “racism” or “xenophobia,” while overt out-group favouritism is held up as a sign of moral enlightenment. Thus, patriotism in its traditional form is recast as a sin, and cosmopolitan indifference (or even hostility) toward one’s own people is recast as a virtue.
The point here is not that every self-identified liberal consciously wants to “kill their own” or that every conservative is free of bias, it’s that the emotional centre of gravity in each worldview is different. The further left one goes on the spectrum, the more one’s moral loyalty shifts away from the in-group (to the point of apparent anti-patriotism). The further right one goes, the more one’s instinct is to defend kin, country, and cultural continuity, even at the risk of being labeled bigoted for doing so. These opposing moral orientations are increasingly defining our political landscape and the old labels of “left” and “right” are struggling to keep up with this reality.
The Obsolescence of “Left” and “Right”
Our political vocabulary has not caught up with these developments. The familiar labels “left-wing” and “right-wing” come from another era and increasingly serve as cognitive traps rather than aids to understanding. Historically, these terms were coined quite literally: they referred to the seating arrangement of the 1789 French National Assembly. Reformist, anti-royalist revolutionaries sat to the presiding officer’s left, while the conservative supporters of the monarchy clustered on the right. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, this spatial metaphor evolved into an entire ideological spectrum. Being on the Left came to mean favouring change, reform and egalitarianism, from the liberal push for greater social and economic equality to the radical dreams of socialism and communism. Being on the Right meant favouring tradition, hierarchy, and stability, from conservative defence of existing institutions to nationalist or even fascist urges to restore a glorified past. For generations, the main axis of conflict in Western politics ran along these lines: monarchists vs republicans, capitalists vs socialists, individualist vs collectivist, secular vs religious, different shades of Left vs Right.
That old paradigm was rooted in the social conditions of its time. In the 20th century, issues of class, economics, and the size of government largely defined one’s place on the left-right spectrum. But as we progress into the 21st century, we find that those old economic and institutional debates, while still present, are no longer the primary line of battle. The salaries of billionaires, tax rates, or state ownership of industry, these are side issues compared to the looming question of identity that underpins so many controversies today. Mass immigration, racial preferences, multiculturalism, globalisation, these issues cut across old party lines and have scrambled the coalitions of old. The left/right dichotomy from the French Revolution or the Industrial Age doesn’t neatly map onto questions like “Should our country prioritise our own citizens over foreigners?” or “Is it good that the demographic makeup of our nation is changing?”
In a multiracial, globalised society, race and cultural identity have become inescapably salient political factors. This is not because ordinary people suddenly became more tribal than before, but because the demographics and moral narratives have shifted around them. When one group (say, the historical majority of a nation) is perceived, often by the intellectual left as an oppressor group whose dominance must be dismantled, and other groups are cast as deserving beneficiaries of redress, politics stops being a neutral game of principles. It becomes a zero-sum contest of group interests, whether openly acknowledged or not. We see this in issue after issue. For example, policies on immigration and housing in Western countries often end up pitting the interests of working-class natives against those of newcomers. In East London, one study found that social housing rules based strictly on “need” tended to favour Bangladeshi immigrant families (with their larger households) over young local white British families, who then felt pushed out of their communities; the researchers noted that the native white working class residents were left “seething with resentment” at being leapfrogged by new arrivals. What might look on paper like an impartial, technocratic policy quickly takes on an ethnic dimension in practice. The tension between “helping the other” and “helping our own” is the quiet drumbeat beneath such debates, whether it’s public housing allocation, job preferences, school admissions, or welfare and healthcare access.
Yet we persist in talking about these conflicts in the antiquated language of left vs right. This obsolete vocabulary can be dangerously misleading. It encourages us to assume, for instance, that a right-wing party must be defending wealthy capitalists or hereditary nobility (a throwback to the old Right of centuries past), when in fact many so-called right-wing movements today are populist rebellions of the working class against a globalist elite. It suggests that a left-wing activist is crusading for downtrodden workers, when in reality today’s left is often seen crusading on behalf of identity groups (racial minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+, etc.) even if that sometimes conflicts with the interests of the traditional working class. In short, the content of “Left” and “Right” has undergone a radical realignment.
To describe the current divide, some commentators have proposed new dichotomies: globalists vs. nationalists, or the Somewheres vs. the Anywheres, or open vs. closed society advocates. There’s truth in many of those framings. But at heart, they all point to the same fundamental question: “Who is we?” Who falls inside the circle of moral concern when tough choices must be made, and who falls outside? The classic trolley problem forced a choice about who lives and who dies. In a less dramatic way, every policy choice in a society asks who gains and who loses. Should a country prioritise its own citizens, or humanity at large? Should the majority curb its own advantages to uplift minorities, or should it look out for itself? These are questions of loyalty and identity more than traditional policy. The left implicitly answers that we owe our loyalty to humanity as a whole, or at least to every other group besides the traditionally powerful one. The right implicitly answers that charity begins at home, that we owe our first loyalty to our own people, however defined.
Identity Loyalty: The New Political Spectrum
It’s increasingly clear that ethno-cultural loyalty has become the defining marker of the new political spectrum. In today’s parlance, the “Right wing” is characterised not necessarily by devotion to kings or laissez-faire economics, but by devotion to one’s own people, in Western nations, this often means advocating for the interests of the historical European-descended majority. Meanwhile, the “Left wing” position is often characterised by a skepticism or even hostility toward that majority, frequently framing its decline as a moral necessity or simply a non-issue. If the left-wing position (in extreme form) is that it’s either good or inconsequential for White Europeans to be demographically displaced in their own countries, then by necessity the right-wing position becomes to oppose that displacement and to preserve the cultural and demographic continuity of the nation. The right-wing instinct now is to stand by the native tradition and population, which is indeed a kind of tradition itself, arguably the most primal one.
All other debates, taxes, healthcare, climate change, you name it, increasingly take a back seat to this overarching divide. They still matter, but they are filtered through the lens of identity politics. Even discussions about, say, hiring foreign workers for tech jobs or setting quotas for refugees can’t escape the gravitational pull of the identity question: Whose interests are we putting first? A person’s stance on those tangential issues often correlates strongly with their stance on the core identity issue. This is why you might notice that those who take a hard line on limiting immigration (traditionally a “right” position) also often favor policies that protect the national culture, while those who champion high immigration and diversity (a “left” position) also push for policies that elevate minority representation and downplay the concerns of the majority. The surface issues differ, but the underlying value being tested is the same: in-group loyalty versus out-group altruism.
Political language and categories must evolve to reflect this reality. Clinging to 200-year-old labels without recognising their changed meaning can lead to dangerous confusion. It blinds us to what our opponents really believe, and even to what we ourselves really believe. Many voters have been perplexed in recent years when politicians or parties supposedly on the “left” start ignoring working-class economic pain, or when those on the “right” suddenly champion the working class but focus on immigration and national sovereignty. The confusion dissipates when you realise that the true axis of debate has shifted from class struggle to ethno-cultural struggle (or, one might say, from economics to identity loyalty).
We live in an age when moral loyalty to one’s own nation or ethnic group has become a politicised, polarised choice rather than an assumed norm. On one side, we have a worldview that regards strong in-group loyalty as outdated at best or evil at worst, and thus elevates out-group concerns as a higher moral calling. On the other side, we have a worldview that sees in-group loyalty as natural and even noble, a continuation of the time-honoured duty to one’s family and ancestors, now transposed to the scale of peoples and nations. This is the real debate under way, however uneasily it fits into the old left-right boxes.
Choosing Sides in the New Dilemma
The trolley problem is not just an academic thought experiment; in a metaphorical sense, it is playing out in our societies. We are being forced onto new ethical tracks. Do we pull the lever that sacrifices tradition, heritage, and our own kin-group in the name of a promised greater good for humanity? Or do we refuse and thereby, intentionally or not, preserve our own at some cost to others? This is the uncomfortable question at the core of so many policy arguments today. It may not be framed this bluntly on cable news or in parliamentary debates, but it lurks under the surface of arguments about refugee quotas, affirmative action, “diversity, equity and inclusion” mandates, historical guilt, and much more.
The labels “Left” and “Right” may still be used out of habit, but they fail to illuminate where people actually stand on this fundamental moral choice. It would be more transparent to speak in terms of particularism vs. universalism, or nationalism vs. globalism, or perhaps loyalty vs. levelling. But until such terms become commonplace, we must at least clarify what we mean by left or right in 2025. Increasingly, to be on the Left means to prioritise abstract principles of equality and global humanity over the attachments of tribe, nation, or ethnicity, even if that means, paradoxically, endorsing favouritism toward other tribes as a way to check the power of one’s own. And to be on the Right means to stand for one’s own people first, to see one’s primary moral duty as lying with the historical and cultural community that nurtured you, and to view skepticism toward mass immigration, multiculturalism, and “anti-majority” policies not as bigotry but as loyalty.
We should not pretend these philosophies can be reconciled with a few compromises on policy details. They run deep into our moral intuitions, as the trolley experiment dramatically showed. One side will readily “pull the switch” if the one life to be sacrificed belongs to their own group, rationalising it as justice, the other side will jam the brakes to protect their own, even if it means the “greater good” is not obviously served. These are polar opposite answers to the question, “To whom do we owe our deepest loyalty?”
It’s time to stop deceiving ourselves with outdated terminology. The 21st-century political landscape isn’t a neat left-right line over economic policy or size of government. It’s a tug-of-war between competing loyalties. Understanding this realignment is the first step toward having honest, meaningful debates about the kind of society we want. We can no longer afford to let the old left/right labels cloud our vision. The stakes, who we are as a people, and what we owe to each other versus to the world are too high. They in fact existential. So the next time you hear “left-wing” or “right-wing,” ask yourself not what economic policy or historical position that implies, but who is inside that speaker’s circle of “us,” and who is outside? In that answer lies the real key to contemporary politics, the new divide that will define our future.
Excellent essay, well done.
This is extremely good, love precision on a page like this - very clarifying