On the Redundancy of the Terms “Right” and “Left”

“Is there anyone who can give a clear definition of Leftist or Rightist doctrine with which even half of those who consider themselves to be on the Left or the Right would agree? I am inclined to doubt it…”

A few centuries ago, Europe was afflicted by religious conflicts of such intensity that they culminated in a struggle—known to history as the Thirty Years’ War—in which around a third of the inhabitants of its central region were killed. Subsequently, everyone agreed that the only solution to the trouble was for each state to recognize the rights of other states to have their own religion, and the Treaty of Westphalia was signed. Pretty soon, the notion of a life-and-death struggle for the imposition of one or the other version of the same religion began to seem absurd. Even to an 18th century observer like Voltaire, the European humanity of the 17th century appeared not only barbaric but certifiably insane. Apart from a few refractory places like Ireland, the great division between Catholicism and Protestantism vanished as a serious issue—in the political realm, at least—without the victory of one over the other.

As it slowly passed, however, a new, secular species of political division emerged. The French Revolution gave birth to the modern West and at the same time to its ur-conflict: Left versus Right. It did so by virtue of the utterly contingent fact that the factions which sat in the left and right-wings of the chamber in the French National Assembly took to calling themselves “the Left” and “the Right.” Ever since, people in the West have learned to define themselves, moderately or emphatically, by which of the two camps they fall into. In the United Kingdom, for instance, it is common for people to say things like, “I’ll never vote [for one or the other of the main parties],” simply because of the perception that one is the voice of the Left and the other of the Right. The division is not of great consequence in times of political stability, when sanity generally prevails over ideology. However, in troubled times, when economic instability or global conflicts begin to press on our day-to-day lives, the emotional appeal of the two camps increases.

During such periods, people of the emphatic frame of mind seek answers from their idols on the Left or the Right—Vladimir Lenin or Benito Mussolini; former Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn or former President Donald Trump (tragedy really does repeat itself as farce). The more moderate sort of Leftist or Rightist then begins to question whether they really have a political home, and are too tortured by the idea of what they have lost to realize that they never needed one. This happened after the September 11th attacks when the emphatic Leftists gravitated toward anti-Western groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. and the Stop the War Coalition. More sensible people, who continued to identify with the Left but did not wish to be associated with that Left wrote books about their disillusionment with titles like What’s Left? (Nick Cohen) or The Fallout (Andrew Anthony). Or, otherwise, they drafted manifestos, like the Euston Manifesto of the British Marxist and long-time contributor to the New Left Review, Norman Geras, to clarify that their Left was the “anti-totalitarian Left.” Others of the liberal-Left persuasion, such as the American public intellectual Sam Harris, took to using the term “the regressive Left,” so as to distinguish their mild, Democrat-voting version of Leftism from that advanced by what has increasingly come to be known as the “Woke Left.” The same thing happened on the “Right” when then-candidate Trump rose in the Republican Party and saner politicians who thought of themselves as paragons of an old-fashioned Right, like former Governor Mitt Romney and Senator John McCain, joined conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan in the political wilderness, while chancers such as Steve Bannon set about re-defining what was meant by “right-wing.” Lately, in light of the pogrom-supporting faction of the Left which has been making a vulgar exhibition of itself since October 7th, a younger generation of moderate and Jewish “Leftists” are questioning where they belong. Indeed, the struggle for the soul of the American Left can be traced back to Sidney Hook’s polemics against the Soviet sympathizing Left in the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, the “Right,” too, was going through a similar tribulation. Was it best represented by its presidential candidate, General Eisenhower, or the inebriated demagogue Joseph McCarthy—the Trump of his time—for whom Eisenhower was nothing but a closet communist?

The above only begins to touch on the difficulties any historian of the Left or the Right must encounter if they aim to discover the real meaning of these factions. Is the political Right, for instance, best represented by the reactionary conservatives like Edmund Burke and François-René de Chateaubriand, who insisted on turning back or arresting the changes pulling the world away from the old feudal order and toward the acquisitive and capitalistic society that developed in the 19th century? Or is it to be represented by the economic liberals of that age, who believed that the world would be liberated by free trade and free markets? Certainly, today, free-market fanatics, or libertarians, are strongly associated with the political Right. Such has been the case since the emergence of the Austrian neo-liberal school of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. But in the age of the Corn Laws such tendencies were decried by those who thought of themselves as being on the Right as socially corrosive radicalism. It is true that Racialism, as developed by people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain and taken up by Adolf Hitler, is strongly associated with a political far-Right. Yet Nazism was neither conservative nor economically liberal; it was a revolutionary movement with an economic regime of autarky, barter, conscripted and billeted labor, workers’ passports and organized leisure time. Progressively, it resembled the “Leftist” Bolshevist one it so fervently claimed to be resisting.