"Are right-wing and left-wing meaningless terms"
- Edward Jameson, via BlueSky, 17th Feb 2025
"The political terms 'left' and 'right' are vaguely defined and almost meaningless. We'd all be better off not using them."
- Damon Dirtape, via X, 19th Feb 2025
"A lot of you don't have coherent defintions of 'right' and 'left' and it's leading to sheer insanity."
- Punkstawny Piglet, via X, 19th Feb 2025
"Is there a term for people who's both 'left' and 'right'? Do those things even mean anything?"
- PraiseDale, via BlueSky, 20th Feb 2025
Probably because I started writing this piece some time ago, I have been experiencing both the frequency illusion and the recency illusion. They are both cognitive biases which explain why both a thing which you have been primed to notice for some reason, or a thing that you have recently learned, now starts appearing everywhere. This is why for instance, when driving on the road, you are more likely to notice cars that are similar to yours, rather than there being a sudden increase in those kinds of cars.
After having a chat with a friend of mine, my thoughts were yet again turned to the left/right spectrum in politics, and the apparent rejection by a lot of people in wanting to use the terms 'left' and 'right'. This rejection is likely caused by the fact that people love to use terms in the pejorative since with no reference to any kind of technical definition whatsoever.
I have found many times over the years, especially in online discourse, that if you probe someone with even basic questions about what they mean, over practically any topic at all, they will get really defensive and/or abusive as if they expect you to already know what they mean; and the fact that you don't already know what they mean must mean that you are a fool (insert other abusive term if appropriate) including when they genuinely don't know what they mean. So when it comes to the terms 'right' and 'left' in the political realm, not only are these terms broad but often people who use them know them only in relation to whom they hate. Any actual logic behind the terms is either lost or was never used, and even what they happen to be right or left of is either unknown or not even cared about.
Historically speaking, the broad beginnings of the terms 'left' and 'right' originates from the French National Assembly of 1789, where the supporters of the revolution sat on the left hand side of the chamber, whereas supporters of the monarchy sat on the left hand side of the chamber. The orientation of left and right in this case, is from the point of view of the Speaker/President/King/Judge et cetera as they look outwards into the chamber. To wit, in Westminster Parliaments, the Government sits on the right of the chamber and the Loyal Opposition sits on the left of the chamber relative to the Speaker's/President's point of view.
Now while that might be instructive about direction and the physical location of people, it helps neither an iota or a jot when it comes to actually defining the terms 'right' and 'left' in political discourse. Here's where it gets really interesting...
...there has never really been a hard and fast set of rules to define 'right' and 'left' in politics.
Oh dear.
Even when you consider the two most obvious outer points of a spectrum through which to filter political discourse, it is as if you have split a beam of light into parts and there are many different colours through which to view this. When we speak of collectivism and individualism, that can either be taken as a statement on the economic ownership and distribution of stuff, or a statement on the cultural overlay about what degree of control that law should have over people's decisions and rights to do stuff. There are probably (definitely maybe) other colours through which to filter political discourse but I like those two as they can be laid as axes upon a political compass.
The collectivist west and individualist east (and by individualist we also include private corporations as they are explicitly set up as private individual persons even though by definition they are collective purchasing arrangements) and the authoritarian north and libertarian south, make up a good compass rose upon which to view a lot of politics.
Conservatism is broadly north and east.
Libertarian is broadly south and east.
Communitarianism is broadly south and west.
Communism is broadly north and west.
There are myriad of positions within both sets of axis; and if we start to apply other axes through which to evaluate political questions, then of course we are going to end up with a confused muddle. It turns out that when you view any political issue through multiple filters of colour, you do not end up with many shades of grey but many myriad shades of brown.
Curiously, both of these axes relate to the three basic economic questions:
What should be produced?
How should it be produced?
For who should it be produced?
The 'what' refers to all manner of goods and services. The 'how' not only refers to the methods by which those goods and services should be produced, which includes the land and labour and capital and management employed to do so. 'For who' can include all kinds of sub-questions such as exclusivity, whether or not people should have access, how large the optimal sharing group is, whether or not someone's use of a good or service prevents someone else from using it, the network effect which is when the addition of a new quanta expands and/or improves the network as a whole, et cetera, et cetera. et cetera.
Usually those questions are mapped through the east/west axis in relation to the collectivism and/or individualism needed to produce goods and services but weirdly, those same three basic economic questions can also be mapped to the north/south axis in relation to the amount of control or freedom should be exerted or allowed to people, to the use, or ownership, or access, of those goods and services.
This whole things gets even more complex when you consider that not only could there be (and probably is) a number of axes upon which to filter those questions through, but those questions might be answered differently across a range of different kinds of goods and services.
Consider a range of policy issues like:
- Taxation
- Immigration
- Foreign Policy
- Defence
- Environment
- Trade
- Health Care
- Veterans Affairs
- Welfare
- Aged Care
- Education
- Criminal Justice
- Civil Justice
- Family Law
- Industrial Relations
- Gun Rights
- Personal Rights
- Food Safety Laws
- Labour Laws and Conditions
- Infrastructure
- Privacy Law
- Antitrust and Monopolies Law
Now only are there broad questions over who should own and control these things, such as government or private enterprise, but there are questions over the kind of access that people should have to these things, and the minimum standards that we think that people ought to have with regards to these things.
I personally think that most questions reduce to government/private enterprise economic questions and authoritarian/libertarian questions; with the two caveats that there are both societal expectations that we generally think that people should have access to, as well as the optimal sharing group of the good or service in question. What's even crazier is that you will find even among people who think broadly similar about a range of these things, will have wildly different views about other things.
Then there are moral questions about what kind of liberty or control that government or private enterprise should have over these things, about what kind of liberty or control that government or private enterprise should have over other people with regard to these things.
Consider a range of policy issues like:
- Sexual rights
- Marriage rights
- Religion in government institutions
- Drug policy
- Gun control
These things in the classical sense are NOT left/right issues. This is reasonably easy to prove as well, because issues like Sexual rights and Marriage rights, literally have nothing to do with the ownership of things in the economy whatsoever. By the same token, tighter gun control is by definition an authoritarian policy and lax gun control is by definition an libertarian; which is exactly counter to the way that this is used in American discourse.
What's insane about all of this is that because government itself has only two end-game conditions (either you have won government or have lost government), then we are sort of half-expected to see everything as a set of binary choices when very clearly if I have just given you 27 things which government policy can be framed around (there are many more) and four quadrants where someone's opinion might lie (and inside which is absolutely an infinite amount of variation) then at absolute bare minimum, I have just described 108 different policy positions. How the jinkies are you or I or anyone supposed to resolve those to just two?
The other side of all of this is while there is a great deal of truth in the idea that political terms 'left' and 'right' are vaguely defined and almost meaningless, there is also the underlying constant that human beings are always selfish. Yet again we come down to the core central problem of humanity and that the centre of the universe is 19mm behind people's corneas. It is literally impossible to view the universe from anyone else's point of view and that naturally creates a feedback loop; wherein people are convinced that they are the heroes of their own story and therefore correct.
Politics and voting for government, then demands that we take our selfish point of view while convinced that we are the heroes of our own story and therefore correct, and then impose that selfishness and what we think is correctness upon other people in commonwealth. The very nature of any nation/state is that the rule of law is ultimately based on who can control the most swords/guns and democracy is based on the conceit/deception that selfish people will act in civic fidus when the history of the world thus far, repeatedly demonstrates that this is a lie.
The rule of law itself is an authoritarian north concept and the fact that the nation/state is itself the nation/state, then that is a collectivist west concept, because what bigger collection of people in a nation is bigger than the nation?
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