Political left and right

This post explains my view of political left and right based on this source and this source (pp. 182–186), which I had usually sent directly for people to read, but which no one reads when I send them, so I figured maybe I should write my own thing.

Liberty cap, copied from this article at JSTOR Daily.

The idea of political left and right comes from the French Revolution, which was a conflict between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, where the proletariat was entirely uninvolved. There was the Right, which wanted to preserve throne-and-altar statist absolutism as well as an actually-legally-frozen caste-hierarchy where the ruling class is supported by war, and there was the Left, which supported the bourgeoisie in its fight against the aristocracy, defending radical liberty, markets, peace, and secularism. The Right defended privilege, and privilege was understood in its true etymological sense of priva+lex or “private law”, a law that applies only to a certain group of persons instead of applying equally and universally, which is to say, actual legal privileges formally given to a legally-defined nobility; there was no notion of someone being “privileged” by simply being born with any advantage whatsoever.

Confusion was created historically due to the socialists, a movement that arose only later, successfully propagandizing themselves as left-wing even though they weren’t exactly that: they professed the ends of freedom, withering away of the state, peace, high living standards, administration of things not men, class-analysis of rulers vs. producers, etc; but the means they actually wanted to use to achieve those ends were statism, collectivism, central planning, community control over the individual. So they didn’t fit into the spectrum at all, or they were a kind of center, but they wanted to look progressive so they framed themselves as the left-wing, and their propaganda succeeded.

To reduce the confusion as ecumenically as possible, the political compass was created, which gave the socialists the “economic left” while adding a separate authority axis. So we have the Historical left-and-right and the Compass left-and-right, which are, at least, clearly understandable, but oriented roughly opposite from each other. And nothing binds people to use any particular conception when they speak of left-and-right, so if someone appeals to left-wing values by citing people who were historically known to be on the left, this is still persuasive. So it is basically indeterminate in people’s minds whether regulatory interventions are left or right-wing, it depends whether you frame it as an instantiation of hierarchy or try to frame the government as somehow really standing for the people in that context.

Many libertarians think the liberty–authority spectrum is most important but accept the socialists’ framing of themselves as left-wing, so they think of themselves as radically right-wing. (Stephan Kinsella is one such libertarian, who gets offended if you call him a left-winger.) Conversely, you have the aeons–archons spectrum (depicted below) where egalitarianism is blended into the liberty–authority spectrum, and the most radical left idea would be to somehow merge all humans into one thing. (The aeons–archons spectrum frames itself as a crazy “transcended” meme, but its central portions underlie how many people subconsciously think, as a result of a common particular mix of historical awareness and socialist propagandistic confusion.)

The aeons–archons political spectrum meme, artist unknown.

In this context it is indeterminate whether libertarians are left-wing or right-wing. As Walter Block emphasized in the title of a not entirely great article, libertarianism is unique. This idea that libertarianism is properly neither left-wing nor right-wing, which Block calls “plumb line libertarianism”, was shared by the late great Jeff Riggenbach, who hosted a great podcast, The Libertarian Tradition, covering many historical pro-liberty theorists who might be seen as on either “side” by current lights, but who Jeff rightly saw as firmly libertarian. It was also shared by Mr. Libertarian himself, Murray Rothbard, who famously aligned himself with the so-called New Left during the Cold War, due to his overriding antiwar concerns preventing him from wanting to utterly destroy and devastate the Soviet Union (as the conservatives of the time would have wanted it), however unjust its political arrangement may have acknowledgedly been. People who have not read Rothbard on these issues think he “switched sides” throughout his life. As he explained it thoroughly in The Betrayal of the American Right, he was just sticking to his convictions. (His article on Left and Right is also great, and is my other main source here.)

I think of myself as historically left-wing, culturally left-wing (on issues such as LGBT rights, immigration, etc) and “economically” “right-wing” per the compass usage which I don’t really accept, since it implies some vague association between privilege/hierarchy in the old/true sense of it and in the newfangled confused socialist senses of it. As an example of a problem with the compass usage, protectionism is very culturally and historically right-wing, since it wants to protect our nation from foreign upstarts (and secure an actual literal legal privilege to freeze the status of our current captains of industry in relation to those upstarts), but if we focus on how it involves government control over free enterprise, then it’s “economically left-wing” per the compass. I don’t buy it, but whatever; certainly most libertarians today have been driven by their anticommunism to think of themselves as very right-wing, so it’s hard to fight the tide. There is, of course, no meaning to left-wing and right-wing simpliciter, and it is confusing to use it in any meaning, but sometimes I use it, mainly when it is clear that the context is American politics regarding issues (mostly cultural issues) where we can draw a clear line between the two main political parties. It is fraught to extend this into a broader-perspective political theory.

I don’t strictly mind being called either left-wing or right-wing, but I really prefer not being called right-wing given the ideas it might give off about my cultural values (which I worry I don’t emphasize clearly enough), whereas given how I’m very clear about my laissez-faire economic policy views (which are, in the American context, not even fully a Republican thing anyway), I’m mostly happy to be called left-wing, although of course, I don’t insist anyone call me that if they find this hard to buy, like, whatever, go off. I don’t call myself either thing.