| Flilix said: I guess it mostly depends on the meaning of the words 'left' and 'right'. They're very vague, and people can't seem to completely agree on their exact meanings. In my country, 'left' is often used as a synonym for socialist, while 'right' is liberal. I think these two words are pretty outdated and useless, I prefer to use words like socialist, liberal, progressive, conservative, authoritarian, anarchist... |
Agreed, I see the "left" and "right" as anachronisms that explained Revolutionary France and the politics that came out of it well, but are hard to apply to modern world coalitions.
Having said that, there were trends in the views of the people who sat on the left and who sat on the right in the French assembly during the revolutions (where this paradigm originated.)
The people who sat on the left were more often liberal (cherished individual freedom), anti-state (against the consolidation of violence into one institution), anti-hierarchy (against the domination of one group or class over all others), anti-traditionalist (against accepting things merely because they were always done that way), and anti-monarchist (against the idea that the monarchy was sovereign.)
State socialists really only seem focused on one hierarchical system (capitalism) and say very little about individual freedom otherwise, the status of the state, whether or not a monarchy is okay, and conflict with the left when it takes positions that individual liberty must cede to collective power, hierarchy is okay if the people approve, the proleteriat can rule other non-proleteriats, institutions that help the proleteriat mustn't be questioned, etc.
Then you also get the technocrats who hide under socialist dressings. All they really want is to create a society in which an educated ruling elite instructs all human activity according to technical standards. That is left-wing?
If we are to be strictly reductionist, I only really consider left-libertarians and a subset of liberals to be left-wing. The rest probably would have sat on the right of the French assembly if the aristocrats who sat on it created a welfare state and exterminated the bourgeoisie. I mean state-socialists did ally with Bismarck after all, so strong was their disdain of enlightenment values. That is where the social democratic movement sprouted.
