The

The Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.

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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today are Hiram and Verlin Lewis.

Hiram and Verlin are brothers. One is an associate professor of history

at Brigham Young University, Idaho, and the other is a political scientist at Harvard's

Center for American Political Studies. Together, Hiram and Verlin have written a very interesting

new book called The Myth of Left and Right, How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms Americans.

In this book, they challenge the widely held belief that the political left and right

represent two distinct philosophies, liberalism or progressivism on one end and conservatism on the

other. Instead, they argue that people on the left and the right are more like sports

fans. They are born into a particular tribe, and then they adopt the random assortment of

beliefs that that tribe currently holds. Now, they acknowledge that there are such things as political

philosophies, like libertarianism, for example. They just think those philosophies have nothing to do

with what we call

the left and the right in everyday speech. In other words, the words left and right do not name

philosophies. They name arbitrary tribes that then invent convenient but false stories about what

their philosophies are. That thesis is the topic of this conversation. And I think it's very

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