Welcome to the show, everybody.

I want to start today with something I've been thinking about and reading about, which

is the completely broken nature of dividing politics into left and right.

Now, you know the drill we talk about are you on the left, are you on the right, is a policy

left wing or right wing is an elected official pushing for a left-wing ideology or a

right-wing ideology.

And it can be sometimes useful as a shorthand, but it's a binary framework that is extraordinarily outdated and increasingly

broken in the kind of modern political space. And I'll explain why. I recently read the book

The Myth of the Left and Right by Hiram Lewis and Verlin Lewis. And we're going to link to the book

in the description to the YouTube video for this clip.

But I want to tell you a little bit about it because it's critical to understand the broken

spectrum in the middle of this wacky Trumpian movement.

So the first problem with the left-right spectrum, which I mentioned earlier this week,

is that it is so reductive that it ends up lumping people together

who have nothing in common. Take the right wing, for example, then we'll go to the left.

On one end, and I know I've used this example, you've got Milton Friedman,

the free market economist who championed deregulation, privatization, small government,

happened to also be Jewish.

On the other end, you've got Hitler.

Now, both are often labeled right-wing, but does anybody seriously think that Milton Friedman's vision of laissez-faire capitalism

has anything to do with Hitler's

genocidal, fascist authoritarianism, but the left-right spectrum doesn't really care. It's just

...