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Are Left and Right actually useful political terms?
poshniallo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This was inspired by @ronya talking about people who are pro-union but anti-immigration, since they believe that immigration drives down wages. So lefty unionists or right-wing xenophobes? Hmmm.
For a long time now, I've just found these labels uselessly vague and even actively obfuscatory. Is racism right-wing? Certainly I believe 'right-wing' parties are more unapologetic about being xenophobic, but what is the core connection between low taxes and bigotry? Nothing, I would say. And equally, what is the connection between open-mindedness and high taxes?
The whole thing brings this article to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept
Is there any ideological core to the terms 'left wing' and 'right wing'? Something that holds up internationally, that we can apply to politics across the world? Is North Korea left wing because they're communists or right-wing because they're a dictatorship? To use a less extreme example, France.
France is fairly socialist, that's clear, that's a useful term. But they're fairly xenophobic, there's quite a bit of racism, the countryside can be very socially conservative. They don't invade other countries, but they will send agents to blow up Greenpeace ships. They are fairly secular but often aim that secularism at minorities. I can't say they're left wing or right. They are what they are.
Do 'left' and 'right' have any political meaning? Did they ever?
Personally I think they were never very useful. How about you?
For a long time now, I've just found these labels uselessly vague and even actively obfuscatory. Is racism right-wing? Certainly I believe 'right-wing' parties are more unapologetic about being xenophobic, but what is the core connection between low taxes and bigotry? Nothing, I would say. And equally, what is the connection between open-mindedness and high taxes?
The whole thing brings this article to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept
Is there any ideological core to the terms 'left wing' and 'right wing'? Something that holds up internationally, that we can apply to politics across the world? Is North Korea left wing because they're communists or right-wing because they're a dictatorship? To use a less extreme example, France.
France is fairly socialist, that's clear, that's a useful term. But they're fairly xenophobic, there's quite a bit of racism, the countryside can be very socially conservative. They don't invade other countries, but they will send agents to blow up Greenpeace ships. They are fairly secular but often aim that secularism at minorities. I can't say they're left wing or right. They are what they are.
Do 'left' and 'right' have any political meaning? Did they ever?
Personally I think they were never very useful. How about you?
I figure I could take a bear.
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They refer to which side of a tennis court various representatives chose to sit on during the first 'Assembly Nationale' of the French Revolution from the perspective of the President/Speaker/Chair of the Assembly. Those more sympathetic to Republicanism up to and including beheadings were on the left, Monarchists and Establishmentarians were on the right.
So they meant radical and conservative?
Do you think they still have those connotations?
I tend to think of them as being vague but generally favoring or being against tradition.
What that tradition is depends on the culture in question.
I prefer to talk about policy, rather than ideology. Left/right/blah blah is good for building team spirit. I think it's bad for brain cells though.
An interesting read on this I happened across today, and even if I don't buy all the author is selling this part is pretty germane for you.
Basically the author argues that what we consider Right wing tendencies are those that are good in a crisis while those we consider Left are good in periods of abundance.
It meant Monarchists and Republicans. It does not still have those connotations since the only real absolute monarchies that exist are basically just Saudi Arabia. The terms evolved over time to their current meaning, more or less, but from the outset they were completely arbitrary. It literally derives from the fact that friends of King Louis sat on the right hand side of a tennis court. It's only about as useful a shorthand as 'liberal' or 'conservative' themselves are, which is not very. At the very least political thought is 3 dimensional (social, fiscal, hawk/dove), and even then it's all much more complicated than that. But it's convenient to gloss over complexities for the sake of brevity, so long as you realize that this is what's happening.
Eh, I'd say it's more that different political coalitions build up over time for a variety of reasons. Some of them sensible, some of them accidents of history, some of them natural outgrowths of the dominant philosophy behind a political party. Every now and again you get a resorting as the discordant views become more difficult to keep together with a large enough majority to actually win a seat. Which is the whole point of political coalitions to begin with. It's what happened to the Democrats in the 80's and is happening to the Republicans now.
The Right opposes it, the Left embraces it. The Left proposes it, the Right shuns it.
(guess who the politician was for 5 points)
I really rather like that perspective. It's intriguing, to say the least.
being left-wing in the 1900s US meant more religion, not less, for instance
P sure this is how Germany split.
Similar thing was true in Labour in NZ for a while too. The Christian socialists of my parent's generation (although not my parents) are still pretty influential in NZ Labour although much lower profile than the Christian Right. They did however help lead the anti Vietnam and Apartheid / Tour movement. Then, as discussed recently, the Polynesian and Maori (see Ratana) members of the Labour Party still tend to be more religious than the other Labour members
Are you seriously confused as to why the issue of women have bodily autonomy is a completely different issue than gun control?
Some labels are there to both simplify and advertise for certain political positions (e.g. Pro-Life. Not a particularly accurate term, especially considering many support, as you mention, war and the death penalty.) But Pro-Life sounds better than anti-choice, and it is not anyone's responsibility to just hand over political victory over any issue, despite what you hear the Republicans whine about Obama.
So you don't think there's any core there either?
So they're just a collection of beliefs that have become affiliated because of the way FPTP systems in the West force a 2-party state?
Hmm.
I think there is often some conceptual affiliation of beliefs. My sense of it is that the right tends to seek to maintain or re-acquire privileges acquired in the past, whereas the left tends to seek privileges to be acquired in the near future ('privilege' in a neutral sense, without any meaning of non-desert). Thus, we see that confusion of the left-right label generally involves combinations of the two, e.g., a club that both maintains a hierarchy of privileges within the club, whilst seeking to expand privileges for club members. Unions move right when promotion in the ranks of the club would compromise the existing order. Churches move left when their internal hierarchy is completely uncontested, or at least contested less than joint privileges.
This said, there is frequently an amount of alliances of conveniences for two reasons. FPTP is one, yes. My favourite example is the loggers vs fishers split during the US 1970s environmentalist movement; the loggers went right and the fishers went left for no apparent reason other than that the greens picked a fight with the loggers first - neither was in a position to unambiguously benefit from "more" or "less" state intervention, and neither was especially environmentally friendly. It was merely that the two sides already disagreed on how rivers should be treated.
The other is merely historical idiosyncrasy and contemporary geopolitics - where being 'left' or 'right' in rhetoric can gain or cost you political support, and so the labels outlast political changes. Cold War, etc. Call this FPTP by brute force.
If I had to boil it down, right generally means favoring the established order of things. If the current order is optimal/just, the current elites and hierarchy are correct, the current social order is correct, and the methods necessary to continue that order is justified. Sometimes the "established order" is actually largely fictional ("back to the good old days" thinking). The left means favoring changing things to improve upon the established order, or even being open to that possibility. If the current order is suboptimal/unjust, the current elites and hierarchy don't necessarily deserve their status, the current social order is negotiable and improvable, and methods to continue that order are often not justified.
On one extreme you have fascism, where an idealized strongman (father figure), strong military, clear and rigid hierarchies, dictated social order, unrestrained domestic repression of attempts at reform or resistance and a tendency to be expansionist because of the absolute confidence that they are right (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, nearly every Empire in history).
On the other extreme you have radical revolutionaries, where there's no order, an ill defined civilian/soldier distinction, ill-defined and malformed social order, unrestrained attacks on the established social order or social order that is trying to reform the wrong way, and two possible outcomes: failed state or a return to a right wing order (Soviet Union, Napoleonic France, PR of China).
Both are harmful in the extreme. The question is usually which side is actually being extreme for that time and place. The US Founding Fathers were pretty radically left. People criticize them for not being democratic enough, but at the same time in France a more radically left revolution resulted in chaos, terror and the rise of a Monarchy/Dictatorship.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Man, I got confused talking to a British friend when he was referring to the more "Right" parts of his country as being blue on the electoral map. The hell, UK?
See, just labels. Left - Right, Blue - Red. Or, if you drive on the wrong side of the road and spell Center as Centre, Red - Blue...
Regardless, I don't use "Left" when describing my political leaning because as a label it is loaded with preconceptions. Words have been weaponized! Gotta find new offenses and defenses; so I call myself "Human", or "Not a Total Jerkwad".
Many anticolonial movements that overtly invoked left-wing ideals tended to invoke "back in the good old days [before all these white people turned up]" ideas too. It's part and parcel of nationalist myth-building. Sometimes it goes terribly wrong, like in the Khmer Rouge and its hopeless dream of a return to Khmer self-sufficiency and domestic ethnic purity and supremacy. Or, you know, North Korea.
Now, maybe the statement 'given enough time and left to itself, leftism seems to usually win out over rightism' is a little... lacking in accuracy or dependent on a pretty special definition of 'left to itself' that is not largely consistent with history. Still, I feel it describes a meaningful vector. That thing it is talking about is the thing I am talking about when I call myself a progressive. Advancement toward an existent, though poorly defined and frankly utopian ideal.
People, and groups of people, are tend to be more complicated than a single direction can describe, but it is a useful enough term when describing a single position, or even a group of related positions, and... well.. even if it is poorly defined, I know conservatism(rightness) when I see it.
Yeah, they are still just labels. But so are most of the terms we use to classify people, groups and beliefs.
It actually did. Then a bunch of radicals took over the formerly right party (in the US context; Europe might finally be falling under the same idiocy), which is why labels are dumb.
Obviously only half right, because he failed to foresee our media becoming a bunch of courtiers.
he was certainly not a radical by 1980
in what way
deregulation - a process started by a certain jimmy carter? volcker disinflation - also started by carter? was carter a stealth radical plant in the democratic party?
I say rather that your chronology is simply wrong; the radicals had already taken over in the mid 1960s, but retained the allegiance to the old keynesianism until the late 1970s, when their faith collapsed along with everyone else's
there was never a need for the radicals to discard keynesianism to pursue deregulation and union busting; all that was already favoured by right-wing old-keynesian variants of anti-inflationary policy
Also, Gingrich singlehandedly destroyed the research capacity of the Congress.
Red is the color of the left (pretty much) everywhere but the US. For some reason the US decided to do things the opposite way (do we have a history nut than can explain why?).
With the advent of color TV the color of the incumbent party either alternated every election or it changed when ol' Gus got into the whiskey and started playing with knobs. There wasn't much of a rhyme or reason to it, and for a lot of past election coverage the Republicans were blue.
But in 2000 they were Red for no particular reason, while Democrats were Blue. Since that election took an extra two months and spilling more ink/pixels than the preceding two elections combined the colors just kind of stuck. Along with the Bush Presidency. [ cite ] Honestly, even though Red is the color of Socialism and the blood of the worker yearning to break free from the yoke of Capital, I'm kind of glad Dem's are blue. It's a much easier color on the eyes and to incorporate into things more subtly.
The three-legged stool of the American right consists of classical liberalism with some strains of libertarianism (ie. Lockeian individualism/limited government), Christian fundamentalism/a general bent toward religiosity and neocon hawkishness largely thanks to William F. Buckley marrying all three of those together. Reagan cemented Evangelicals to the GOP.
The American left is a broader coalition of minorities, labor unions, feminists, environmentalists, etc.
The anti-immigration stance of the Republicans seems to have more to do with having peeled off racist Democracts into their coalition, than any actual philosophy.
For example, Democrats are characterized as being from the Left in the US, whereas a party running on the same policies could be classified as center-right or right wing in some European countries or even Canada.
In other words, politically speaking, policies are deemed right wing or left wing depending on the context you find yourself into.
For example in the US, the Right is often associated conservatism, both in the economical sense (liberal conservatism, i.e laissez-faire), and social/cultural/religious conservatism (religious nuts & bigots at the extremes).
If you found yourself in a country where there is a general consensus about pro-immigration policies, women's rights and secularism, the entire social conservatism aspect could be taken out of the spectrum. You could then see parties being defined as Right or Left solely based on their economical policies, while anti-immigration or anti-abortion stances would be regarded as neither Right or Left, but as simply backwards and insane.
Are they hurtful? I think they are in a way that all labels can be, in the sense that they reinforce a "us versus them" mentality. However, if there is a clear, generalized social consensus as to which political stances are concerned when characterized as Right or Left, I don't see that harm being very great.
The same assessment can answer your question of meaning. If you conceive of "meaning as use", then, sure, the labels have particular uses and so particular meanings. But if you go with meaning in a Platonic sense, asking if 'left' and 'right' correspond to eternal forms of political ideology, then you may get a different understanding of the meaning of the terms. My guess is that the Platonic concept of meaning, when applied to political labels, creates problems.
In my estimation, all broad labels such as Art, Beauty, Good, True, Right, Evil, Delicious, Conservative, Liberal, Democracy, Communism, Empiricist, Science, Religion, Freedom, Fairness, Happiness etc. are incredibly problematic in their vagueness. Labeling someone as a 'Conservative' does not convey much specific information about the person, just as declaring a particular thing to be 'Art' tells us fuck-all-nothing about the thing.
Human beings like the feeling of stability that comes with naming / labeling things. It's a way to create a feeling of knowing and control over the thing. To foster that feeling of stability, we categorize particular things in reality. I've never spoken with Joe Johnson, but when someone tells me that he's a conservative, that gives me a sense of knowing, of stability and control. The label may not actually tell me anything specific about Joe Johnson, his views on abortion or particular economic theories, but I still feel like I know something about him because I can employ the "conservative" label in reference to him.
So, the labels have utility, and they have meaning in their use.
Do the labels correspond to some aspect of reality that is clearly discernable and defined? FUUUUUUUCK NO!
In my estimation, the world would be far more intelligible if we abandoned most of these general labels and utilized clear, particular labels that correspond to clearly defined, particular positions on specific topics. So, we wouldn't talk about left / right, liberal conservative, but would talk about specific positions on specific laws, theories, etc.
Also, thanks for linking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept. I did not know there was a phrase for that.