One of my pet peeves is the use of the left-right spectrum to categorize the diversity of political visions. There are three reasons for my dislike. First, the terms left and right have no enduring meaning, which has shifted with time. Second, they are frequently used as terms of derision against an opponent, to whom, once we have assigned the label, we have decided we no longer have to listen. Third, they obscure the genuine religious character of the ideologies so categorized.
1. The left-right spectrum is no older than 1789, when left and right were used quite literally to describe the groupings seated in the French National Assembly. Monarchists sat to the right of the parliamentary speaker and republicans to the left. There is still a tendency to seat conservative and progressive parties on the right and left respectively in many, but not all, parliamentary chambers. However, the meaning of these terms has changed dramatically in the past two centuries. Virtually no monarchists are to be found in the French National Assembly today, as the monarchy is a dead issue in that country. The same is true of the United States, where left and right have nothing to do with the issue that originated the labels.
Throughout much of the twentieth century left and right were generally understood economically. Those on the right were favourable to classical liberal economic policies with government limited to setting procedural rules only, while leftists tended to support a more interventionist government, as advocated by John Maynard Keynes and his followers, and implemented by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In continental Europe left and right were often understood culturally and religiously, with Christian Democrats and similar groupings seated to the right and the more secularizing liberals and socialists to the left. In more recent decades something of this pattern has come to characterize North America as well. We never had our own French-style revolution, but in the wake of the cultural shifts of the 1960s something of the cleavage between the traditionally religious and the devout secularizers has taken hold here as well. This is the significance of the culture wars we hear so much about. Ten years ago John Fonte wrote of this development in Why There Is a Culture War, in which he saw fit to divide Americans into quasi-Marxist Gramscians and Tocquevillians, with their appreciation for the institutions of civil society. (Also relevant is Gerald De Maio and Louis Bolce, Our Secularist Democratic Party.)
Yet even here the left-right labels are not necessarily helpful. There are many who would find themselves firmly on the side of the “right” on issues of life, marriage and family, yet are suspicious of those who would trumpet the free market as a panacea for all our woes. They might see themselves on the economic left, siding with the labour unions against big business, while they would likely be labelled right-wing extremists by the popular media for being on the cultural/religious right. So where would we locate them on this one-dimensional spectrum?
2. Left and right are as often as not used as negative labels. Once we have assigned one of these to someone, we have given ourselves a reason not to listen further to him or her. Here is where the guilt-by-association game enters the picture. Adolf Hitler was a right-winger. So apparently was George W. Bush. The conclusion is obvious: Bush must have been in league with the nazis. Given that the latter were on the right, how could any self-respecting person possibly sympathize with the right? Every rightist must be a racist or worse, and the best we can do is to place a considerable distance between ourselves and anything that smacks of right-wing thinking and policies.
But, as we all know, the game can be played in the other direction too. Barack Obama is on the left. So was Joseph Stalin, and we all know what he did. Obama is obviously a fellow traveller. If we disapprove of Stalin’s atrocities, then everyone on the left is tainted by these. If we oppose the left and if Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are on the left, we can now safely discredit everything they say, freeing us from the obligation to hear them more closely and to do the hard work of critically engaging their ideas.
3. Finally the use of left and right masks the religious character of the various ideologies on offer. Most of the modern ideologies are members of the same religious family. Each in some fashion makes humanity into a god and all thus have at least this in common. But they differ on which manifestation of humanity they choose to worship. Liberalism, whether in its “rightist” or “leftist” form, idolizes the individual, socialism the economic class, and nationalism the nation-state or ethnic community. Although one might conceivably create a spectrum that places ideologies along a continuum between individual and community, it would be unable to distinguish among varieties of community.
Furthermore, there is a cluster of political doctrines that would be difficult to place along any continuum. Such would include European Christian democracy, the radical Islamism of al-Qaeda and Hamas, and the Hindu nationalism of India’s Janata Party. The rather basic differences among these historic religions could not be easily captured by a one-, two- or multi-dimensional model.
For all these reasons, I would love to exclude completely right and left from the political discourse. However, as this is not likely to happen, I will limit myself to asking readers to be aware of the deficiencies inherent in these terms and not to use them as a way of bypassing more careful and critical means of assessment.
March 5th, 2010 | 10:03 am | #1
Right ahead.
Left behind.
;-)
March 5th, 2010 | 11:43 am | #2
31″When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34″Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.
41″Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Excerpted from the Book of Matthew, Chapter 25.
March 5th, 2010 | 12:33 pm | #3
Doug Wilson has posted some thoughts on this today also:
http://www.dougwils.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7450:truth-in-labeling&catid=87:politics
March 5th, 2010 | 12:44 pm | #4
Thanks Sam for the link. I like what Doug Wilson says here:
“The problem is that we need more labels, better labels, not no labels. The culturally dishonest want to keep everything in the dark, because their deeds are evil.”
March 5th, 2010 | 6:11 pm | #5
David Koyzis: “The rather basic differences among these historic religions could not be easily captured by a one-, two- or multi-dimensional model.”
Rob Steele on the Doug Wilson thread identifies the difficulty that David has:
“Ah, you’re talking about multi-dimensional clustering on correlated features or attributes. I use machine learning techniques that manage hundreds of dimensions to predict stock prices and there are folks out there who use thousands of dimensions in genomic research. It’s very hard to visualize more than three dimensions but you can often capture the essence of a large data set by rotating it judiciously and abstracting out just a few meta-features, such as gayness.
As with labels, some clusterings and some meta-features are more useful than others. It all depends on what you want to use them for.”
;-)
March 6th, 2010 | 6:28 am | #6
5 years ago, before the last UK General Election, I took the political compass test that puts you on a two-dimensional axis and came fairly close to the centre of the thing. This put me closest to the Liberal Democrats (there are further left and down), so I made an effort to read what they promised to do with power, as they were meant to be ‘my kind of people’. I think I read about three policies and realised that, especially on the social scale, they disagreed with me on nearly every issue, and it just happened that we agreed with similar numbers of authoritarian and liberal, left and right ideas, but rarely on the same ones. On the Culture War, where I’m slightly ‘right’ of centre, they are mid to far ‘left’. On the environment, I’m hearts and minds, they are regulation, regulation, regulation. I can’t see what’s Liberal about them, especially on those issues. Given their stance on the EU (for it no matter what), I can’t say that they support democracy (they like voting reform, but what third party doesn’t, given they would nearly double their seats without increasing their vote!).
Conservative (with big-C) bloggers and commentators are trying to claim back the term ‘right-wing’ and make it not mean ‘Nazi’. It’s quite funny how the media has smeared the Tories simply by calling the fascist British National Party ‘far-right’. After the most recent batch of European Elections, there was disgust at the Tories for not trying to woo the BNP vote (the BNP got two seats, both in Labour heartlands). The thing is that no BNP voter would have ever vote Tory, unless the Tories became as authoritarian as the BNP. The BNP was targeting Labour voters, because it’s National Socialist. These bloggers called the BNP ‘far-left’ and showed how that would be true. They did it not to smear the left, but to try and not be smeared by a brush that they shouldn’t be smeared with.
March 6th, 2010 | 10:17 am | #7
Si, I too have taken these internet based left-right tests to see where I fall along a spectrum whose very validity I otherwise call into question. As often as not I am pegged somewhat left of centre, primarily because of my scepticism of the free-marketeers. (No, I’m not opposed to markets, only to those who would overextend them to cover other areas of life beyond the market proper, as in the marketplace of ideas, &c.) Yet when I look at flesh-and-blood people who are supposed to be left-of-centre, I, too, often find their stance on cultural issues objectionable.
A central flaw of all these measures is that they focus on discrete issues rather than on the spiritual roots of the several ideologies. It is as if one could simply tabulate scores on any number of issues and, presto! now we have an ideology. One of the things I try to do in my Political Visions and Illusions is to get readers to look deeper than the issues and to focus instead on the underlying spiritual direction that animates the several political ideologies. If we fail to do so, we will necessarily be skirting the surface and are likely to fall prey to their deceptions.
March 16th, 2010 | 8:51 pm | #8
Believe it or not the Catholic Church in the middle ages also thought that not only businessmen could be greedy but so could workers. In fact, after the Bubonic Plague there was a huge labor shortage, and wages went up a lot. So, the Church didn’t think of it being a labor shortage, so they favored limiting the wages of the workers. Even Lev 19, tells people to judge justly not favor either the rich or the poor. Nor like some christians believe that only the rich are greedy.
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