“He’s right-wing!” — “She’s left-wing!” Thus goes our political language today, and it reflects a basic and widening civilizational division. It also, however, can be ambiguous, as “right” and “left” are associated with different positions in different times and places. And because the terms have relative meaning, they can be made relative to whatever agenda suits propagandists at the moment.
This is what so often happens, too. In fact, claims one commentator, the Left-Right spectrum has become a “weaponized tool,” one that should be discarded.
Before getting to that, I’ll mention that I also use the political terms Left and Right — always with some dissatisfaction. Oh, they do have provisional value in that these are our time’s common ideological terms. And people generally know what “team” you’re referencing when using them. But they don’t involve much specificity. Why, when hearing that someone is “right,” for example, we might ask, “Right of what?”
It wasn’t always this way. The political meanings of “Right” and “Left” originated in the late 18th century with the French Revolution. In other words, the “social construct” spectrum in question was unknown for most of history.
As for particulars, the people seated on the right side of the French revolutionaries’ national assembly became known as “rightists.” Those on the left side were the “leftists.” It could make you wonder, too, what would’ve happened had that assembly’s hall been differently configured.
Had the different factions been separated Orchestra/Mezzanine-style, would our “two political sides” be “Over” and “Under”? Maybe not. No one, after all, wants to be the untermensch (“underman” — a Nietzsche reference there). This is even though this would describe a certain type of ideologist’s character quite well.
Or, if that assembly had been divided by direction, let’s say “north/south,” would those be our descriptors? “Those darn north-wingers are cold-hearted, they are.”
“Man, Bill used to have common sense — but his his politics has really gone south.”
In fact, this all sounds just as meaningful as when we’d play middle-school pick-up basketball games of “shirts” vs. “skins.” Only, the French Revolution’s factions were actually divided by belief (and were all fully dressed). The “Right” back then comprised monarchists. And the “Left”?
They were republicans, not democrats.
Really.
(Note the lower-case “r” and “d”)
Today, of course, the terms reference very different things. And, complains the aforementioned commentator, Tadas Klimas, they’re also manipulated mischievously. As Klimas, a former U.S. intelligence officer, writes Friday:
When the left invokes the left-right framework, it doesn’t do so to clarify political thought. It does so to game the system. By constantly shifting leftward — embracing ever more radical positions — it redefines the center to suit its needs. What was once normal becomes “far-right.” What was once common sense becomes “extremism.” And in this way, the public is nudged, pressured, and gaslit into moving left just to avoid being labeled a fascist. This is the shifting of the Overton Window.
For sure: An “extremist” is sometimes just a person who’s right 50 years too soon — or too late. Back in the 1950s, for example, virtually everyone was “conservative” (which correlates with “right”) in today’s way of thinking. So how meaningful is this terminology?
Klimas complains about one example of spectrum manipulation in particular. He points out that 54 percent of American “liberals” (another provisional term) and 40 percent of registered Democrats find Charlie Kirk’s assassination “understandable.”
“Yet we [‘conservatives’] are ‘fascists,’” Klimas notes wryly.
The commentator then points out that, if anything, fascism belongs on our political spectrum’s left side.
No doubt. Fascism founding father and WWII-era Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was clear on how to epitomize the ideology. To wit:
“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” he explained.
It is a statist, big-government belief.
Note, too, that Mussolini had always been a hard-core “leftist.” In fact, he’d been a member of Italy’s socialist party and never resigned from it. Rather, he was expelled, along with many others, for advocating Italy’s involvement in WWI.
In other words, avers Klimas,
Fascism is way closer to socialist thought than [to] anything resembling American conservatism. Both exalt the state. Both suppress dissent. Both demand ideological conformity.
In fairness, all ideologies/religions “demand” ideological conformity in certain areas. (E.g., can you be a libertarian and support complete alcohol and drug prohibition?) The question is: Are you demanding conformity to Truth — or falsehood?
Speaking of which, Klimas, rejecting the political-spectrum model, gets at the matter’s crux. “There is only a core truth,” he writes, “and those rabidly opposed to it.”
This recognition was once the Western default, too. That is, well before we ever talked about “right” and “left” or “liberal” and “conservative,” we recognized the only distinction that really matters, the only one that’s timeless: Truth and lies.
This has also been called orthodoxy and heterodoxy (or, perish the though, heresy).
This was back when virtually everyone actually believed in Truth (objective by definition). They used it as a yardstick, and the only question was: Does a proposition align with it or not?
Moderns, however, have descended into that ancient Protagorean error of believing that “man is the measure of all things.” Given this, is it any wonder that instead of Truth, so many now reference the political “spectrum,” which is defined by the opinions of man? Is it any wonder that without God, so many deify government, which comprises men? Is it any wonder that without belief in the Devil, so many have made a man, President Donald Trump, their Satan and his supporters their demons?
This is a deep subject about which far more could be said. But the bottom line is that we must return to fundamentals. Forget about right and left and liberal and conservative and, instead, think in terms of good and evil. You’ll be amazed at how clear things become.