Everyone has their favourite explanation for the left/right divide. Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio had an especially pithy summary by invoking the difference between Rousseau and Nietzsche: the former believes people are born equal and made unequal by society, the latter believes people are born unequal and artificially forced into equality by society.
My own favourite summary was provided by Dwight Macdonald at the beginning of his essay The Root is Man (1946). Macdonald assumes the years between 1789 and 1928 as the time when everyone knew what the terms left and right meant. Casual readers can grasp why the story starts in 1789 (French Revolution, separation of the Jacobins and the Girondins). But why end in 1928? Because this was the year Stalin formally expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union.
You can tell immediately that Macdonald’s take bears the imprint of its time. Trotsky’s expulsion, according to Macdonald, triggered the era of ‘Bureaucratic Collectivism’, an amorphous conceptual beast meant to describe the new fascistic power-complex of the modern state. Among other things, it was a concept intended to give shape to the confusing amalgam of techniques and ideologies that formed regimes like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, as they both destroyed the categories of left and right by combining them in unholy ways.
It’s worth quoting Macdonald’s articulation of the left/right divide in full:
Macdonald’s dichotomy is ultimately a marginally expanded variant on Bobbio’s: the left believe society is the means and the individual the end; the right believe the individual is the means and society the end. The reason I quoted the whole passage is to give the reader a taste of Macdonald’s old-school, relaxed intelligence which reflects the values of that nebulous group known as the New York Intellectuals.
Of course Macdonald has set up this dichotomy only to bring it down. They no longer reflect the times (post-WWII). His essay is both a reflection on the meaninglessness of these terms and a discussion of the possible usefulness of new ones. He goes on to distinguish between the Progressive and the Radical (‘the Progressive makes History the centre of his ideology. The Radical puts Man there’), aligns himself with the latter, and attempts to forge a new vocabulary to face the future. I’ll get back to you about how successful he was at this.
But it has become a familiar pattern in political commentary to establish what the terms left and right have traditionally meant, in order to demonstrate how they are no longer applicable. The ubiquitous Australian public intellectual Waleed Aly began his Quarterly Essay titled What’s Right? (2010) by quoting philosopher Anthony Kenny to the effect of saying the terms had lost their currency. Aly writes that ‘in spite of their ubiquity’ left and right ‘are utterly meaningless and should be abandoned by anyone interested in having a substantial political conversation’.
Aly insists that our continuing use of terms like left and right reflect an impoverishment in our political discourse. He’s probably correct in this. After all, left and right are historically conditioned categories that don’t reflect succeeding generations of political actors dealing with different issues. The million dollar question, then, is why are they still around?
Surely part of the answer has to do with the fact that although the concepts are vague and insufficient, people still find them a useful tool of identification. This was revealed most tellingly in the responses to Aly’s essay. The Quarterly Essay performs a helpful service by compiling the best responses to an essay and publishing them at the end of the next issue. With What’s Right?, all responders were eager to clarify further terms such as ‘conservatism’, ‘liberalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘radicalism’, ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘neo-conservatism’. In this case the argument around labels was mounted by coming up with more labels.
Coming up with more labels to supplant the labels that are not working is not a source of confusion for a certain class of people. You might call them ‘political sophisticates’ or alternatively ‘political obsessives’. Mostly these men and women are found in the academy in humanities and social science departments, or they’re editors of political journals and magazines. Or extremely refined and intelligent bloggers with a certain interest in, say, books and ideas.
But the definition game is hard work for people who don’t fit this category. The phrase ‘ordinary people’ can’t help but sound condescending, even if you only mean by it people who don’t tenaciously keep up with current events or read political theory. Suffice it to say the bulk of political debate that takes place in the world (both historically and contemporaneously) takes place between exactly these sorts of people, namely, most people.
The sociologist Randall Collins makes the observation that in the world of ‘private sociability where intellectual matters are subjects of conversation, it becomes increasingly mixed with ideological appeals, or breaks down into heated argument in which nonverbal appeals supplant verbal ones’. What Collins refers to as the ‘conversational elite’, people ‘who can puncture the intellectual pretensions of others without raising voices and waving fists’, constitute and have always constituted a minority of the population. Most people do not bring to discussions of politics a preoccupation with ideas, theories or principles. And this can become a problem when it comes to political self-definition, as all definitions of this kind are loaded with assumptions which, when they remain unarticulated, produce angst.
My interaction with my friends in this arena can help clarify this point. Ideologically they are all over the shop. They’ve taken to defending Donald Trump against attacks by the media, left-wing hacks and their hipster associates. But they shy away from completely endorsing him, or demonstrating any understanding of his party’s intentions to push through policies they would most likely be against. The tone of their voices during discussions of politics is shrill and aggressive, with righteous anger directed towards politically-correct leftists who ‘don’t get free speech’.
I attribute this combination of venom and incoherence to a shared characteristic mentioned above: they conduct this debate through the world of political opinions, and not through political ideas. This produces a tension not between particular viewpoints, but between vocabularies. Because I’m the only bibliophile among my peer group, I’m always going to be at odds with them in terms of how the various issues under discussion are framed. Their vocabulary is one derived from social media, YouTube, Reddit posts and the like. Mine is derived from arguments made by intellectuals in books and essays that are usually only found in academic libraries. When they cite evidence for their opinion or belief, it is more likely to be a video (the name of which they often forget) than an article; when I cite evidence it is likely to derive from a paper published by an economist or political scientist. They quote stand-up comedians; I quote philosophers.
As a result of this, when terms such as ‘The Left’, ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ are thrown around interchangeably, I’m likely to be the only one who will pedantically point that they actually denote different things. False modesty aside (it never did me much good anyway) I can project a certain level of confidence in the terms I employ to describe myself. I can quote C. Wright Mills’ definition of the liberal as the person who believes in ‘the control through reason of man’s fate’. I can quote the arch-conservative Samuel Huntington saying that the ‘truly helpless society is not one threatened by revolution but one incapable of it’. I can refer to Isaiah Berlin’s restrained endorsement of the Enlightenment, the difference between revolution and reform and why I think dismantling environmental protection measures is a bad idea. But this of course is all white noise to my friends. It confuses and sometimes I suspect even upsets them. And what Trump’s election has meant in this context is the legitimation of a type of political debate: absent of ideas and focused exclusively on appeals to emotion and condemnation of certain groups. From my vantage point, the future lies with this style of argumentation.
I’m reluctant to characterise the tenor of contemporary political debate as ‘post-literate’, lest I bring to mind George Steiner’s apocalyptic comments concerning cultural illiteracy from In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971). But I guess I inadvertently have. Without replicating his image of a lost Eden of knowledge and curiosity, I do share with the overly censorious and melodramatic Steiner a fear that the dominant vocabulary of today is wretched. It doesn’t enlighten, it only provokes. Politics doesn’t have to be poetry, but it should at least be interesting.
So what is the upshot of all this for the left/right divide? It is that like all ideas, they are mental tools fit for use or abuse depending on the agent wielding them. Their use comes easy to some people and hard for others. Even with the added intellectuality that I just bored you with, they still suffer from incompleteness and vagueness. All charges against left/right as the dominant dichotomy of politics as meaningless are valid. Of course the person who stands up today and says they’re on the left has little connection with the anarchist watch-makers of the Jura Federation in the 1870s. No one wins in the battle for consistency. And we definitely should not demand that everyone render their arguments historically symmetrical.
People like Dwight Macdonald tried to do this, and ended up being defeated. The world is too complex and too messy for anyone to have ready-made positions. He lost faith in posing big questions, like the direction of history or what the arrangement of mass society should look like. Instead, he took up small questions, related to the lives of individuals and what they thought of themselves and the world. But then came the Vietnam War, and Macdonald went back into the breach. It is hard to see how Macdonald could have vigorously attacked his country’s war in Vietnam without the aid of deeply-felt principles. Call them moral principles if you like, but they were expressed politically. And as a general rule, the people who can express themselves politically with the greatest fluency are those who know where they stand.
My own favourite summary was provided by Dwight Macdonald at the beginning of his essay The Root is Man (1946). Macdonald assumes the years between 1789 and 1928 as the time when everyone knew what the terms left and right meant. Casual readers can grasp why the story starts in 1789 (French Revolution, separation of the Jacobins and the Girondins). But why end in 1928? Because this was the year Stalin formally expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union.
You can tell immediately that Macdonald’s take bears the imprint of its time. Trotsky’s expulsion, according to Macdonald, triggered the era of ‘Bureaucratic Collectivism’, an amorphous conceptual beast meant to describe the new fascistic power-complex of the modern state. Among other things, it was a concept intended to give shape to the confusing amalgam of techniques and ideologies that formed regimes like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, as they both destroyed the categories of left and right by combining them in unholy ways.
It’s worth quoting Macdonald’s articulation of the left/right divide in full:
The Left comprised those who favoured a change in social institutions which would make the distribution of income more equal (or completely equal) and would reduce class privileges (or do away with classes altogether). The central intellectual concept was the validity of scientific method; the central moral concept was the dignity of Man and the individual’s right to liberty and a full personal development. Society was therefore conceived of as a means to an end: the happiness of the individual. There were important differences in method (as, reform v. revolution, liberalism v. class struggle) but on the above principles the Left was pretty much agreed.
The Right was made up of those who were either satisfied with the status quo (conservatives) or wanted it to become even more inegalitarian (reactionaries). In the name of Authority, the Right resisted change, and in the name of Tradition, it also, logically enough, opposed what had become the cultural motor of change: that willingness, common alike to Bentham and Marx, Jefferson and Kropotkin, to follow scientific inquiry wherever it led and to reshape institutions accordingly. Those of the Right thought in terms of an “organic” society, in which society is the end and the citizen the means. They justified inequalities of income and privilege by alleging an intrinsic inequality of individuals, both as to abilities and human worth.
Macdonald’s dichotomy is ultimately a marginally expanded variant on Bobbio’s: the left believe society is the means and the individual the end; the right believe the individual is the means and society the end. The reason I quoted the whole passage is to give the reader a taste of Macdonald’s old-school, relaxed intelligence which reflects the values of that nebulous group known as the New York Intellectuals.
Of course Macdonald has set up this dichotomy only to bring it down. They no longer reflect the times (post-WWII). His essay is both a reflection on the meaninglessness of these terms and a discussion of the possible usefulness of new ones. He goes on to distinguish between the Progressive and the Radical (‘the Progressive makes History the centre of his ideology. The Radical puts Man there’), aligns himself with the latter, and attempts to forge a new vocabulary to face the future. I’ll get back to you about how successful he was at this.
But it has become a familiar pattern in political commentary to establish what the terms left and right have traditionally meant, in order to demonstrate how they are no longer applicable. The ubiquitous Australian public intellectual Waleed Aly began his Quarterly Essay titled What’s Right? (2010) by quoting philosopher Anthony Kenny to the effect of saying the terms had lost their currency. Aly writes that ‘in spite of their ubiquity’ left and right ‘are utterly meaningless and should be abandoned by anyone interested in having a substantial political conversation’.
Aly insists that our continuing use of terms like left and right reflect an impoverishment in our political discourse. He’s probably correct in this. After all, left and right are historically conditioned categories that don’t reflect succeeding generations of political actors dealing with different issues. The million dollar question, then, is why are they still around?
Surely part of the answer has to do with the fact that although the concepts are vague and insufficient, people still find them a useful tool of identification. This was revealed most tellingly in the responses to Aly’s essay. The Quarterly Essay performs a helpful service by compiling the best responses to an essay and publishing them at the end of the next issue. With What’s Right?, all responders were eager to clarify further terms such as ‘conservatism’, ‘liberalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘radicalism’, ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘neo-conservatism’. In this case the argument around labels was mounted by coming up with more labels.
Coming up with more labels to supplant the labels that are not working is not a source of confusion for a certain class of people. You might call them ‘political sophisticates’ or alternatively ‘political obsessives’. Mostly these men and women are found in the academy in humanities and social science departments, or they’re editors of political journals and magazines. Or extremely refined and intelligent bloggers with a certain interest in, say, books and ideas.
But the definition game is hard work for people who don’t fit this category. The phrase ‘ordinary people’ can’t help but sound condescending, even if you only mean by it people who don’t tenaciously keep up with current events or read political theory. Suffice it to say the bulk of political debate that takes place in the world (both historically and contemporaneously) takes place between exactly these sorts of people, namely, most people.
The sociologist Randall Collins makes the observation that in the world of ‘private sociability where intellectual matters are subjects of conversation, it becomes increasingly mixed with ideological appeals, or breaks down into heated argument in which nonverbal appeals supplant verbal ones’. What Collins refers to as the ‘conversational elite’, people ‘who can puncture the intellectual pretensions of others without raising voices and waving fists’, constitute and have always constituted a minority of the population. Most people do not bring to discussions of politics a preoccupation with ideas, theories or principles. And this can become a problem when it comes to political self-definition, as all definitions of this kind are loaded with assumptions which, when they remain unarticulated, produce angst.
My interaction with my friends in this arena can help clarify this point. Ideologically they are all over the shop. They’ve taken to defending Donald Trump against attacks by the media, left-wing hacks and their hipster associates. But they shy away from completely endorsing him, or demonstrating any understanding of his party’s intentions to push through policies they would most likely be against. The tone of their voices during discussions of politics is shrill and aggressive, with righteous anger directed towards politically-correct leftists who ‘don’t get free speech’.
I attribute this combination of venom and incoherence to a shared characteristic mentioned above: they conduct this debate through the world of political opinions, and not through political ideas. This produces a tension not between particular viewpoints, but between vocabularies. Because I’m the only bibliophile among my peer group, I’m always going to be at odds with them in terms of how the various issues under discussion are framed. Their vocabulary is one derived from social media, YouTube, Reddit posts and the like. Mine is derived from arguments made by intellectuals in books and essays that are usually only found in academic libraries. When they cite evidence for their opinion or belief, it is more likely to be a video (the name of which they often forget) than an article; when I cite evidence it is likely to derive from a paper published by an economist or political scientist. They quote stand-up comedians; I quote philosophers.
As a result of this, when terms such as ‘The Left’, ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ are thrown around interchangeably, I’m likely to be the only one who will pedantically point that they actually denote different things. False modesty aside (it never did me much good anyway) I can project a certain level of confidence in the terms I employ to describe myself. I can quote C. Wright Mills’ definition of the liberal as the person who believes in ‘the control through reason of man’s fate’. I can quote the arch-conservative Samuel Huntington saying that the ‘truly helpless society is not one threatened by revolution but one incapable of it’. I can refer to Isaiah Berlin’s restrained endorsement of the Enlightenment, the difference between revolution and reform and why I think dismantling environmental protection measures is a bad idea. But this of course is all white noise to my friends. It confuses and sometimes I suspect even upsets them. And what Trump’s election has meant in this context is the legitimation of a type of political debate: absent of ideas and focused exclusively on appeals to emotion and condemnation of certain groups. From my vantage point, the future lies with this style of argumentation.
I’m reluctant to characterise the tenor of contemporary political debate as ‘post-literate’, lest I bring to mind George Steiner’s apocalyptic comments concerning cultural illiteracy from In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971). But I guess I inadvertently have. Without replicating his image of a lost Eden of knowledge and curiosity, I do share with the overly censorious and melodramatic Steiner a fear that the dominant vocabulary of today is wretched. It doesn’t enlighten, it only provokes. Politics doesn’t have to be poetry, but it should at least be interesting.
So what is the upshot of all this for the left/right divide? It is that like all ideas, they are mental tools fit for use or abuse depending on the agent wielding them. Their use comes easy to some people and hard for others. Even with the added intellectuality that I just bored you with, they still suffer from incompleteness and vagueness. All charges against left/right as the dominant dichotomy of politics as meaningless are valid. Of course the person who stands up today and says they’re on the left has little connection with the anarchist watch-makers of the Jura Federation in the 1870s. No one wins in the battle for consistency. And we definitely should not demand that everyone render their arguments historically symmetrical.
People like Dwight Macdonald tried to do this, and ended up being defeated. The world is too complex and too messy for anyone to have ready-made positions. He lost faith in posing big questions, like the direction of history or what the arrangement of mass society should look like. Instead, he took up small questions, related to the lives of individuals and what they thought of themselves and the world. But then came the Vietnam War, and Macdonald went back into the breach. It is hard to see how Macdonald could have vigorously attacked his country’s war in Vietnam without the aid of deeply-felt principles. Call them moral principles if you like, but they were expressed politically. And as a general rule, the people who can express themselves politically with the greatest fluency are those who know where they stand.
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