Yes, There is a Left and a Right

Even if all politics can't be jammed into a narrow, unidimensional spectrum, there is still utility in using the left-right dynamic to describe basic political dispositions.

Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis’s new book The Myth of Left and Right has sparked a conversation among journalists and academics. Barney Quick and I got into a bit of a discussion about it, and he suggested we both write on the topic. 

At a time when Republicans have gone dovish and the Democrats sound hawkish (on Ukraine, although not on Taiwan or Israel), many are questioning whether it is time to rethink the left-right spectrum. Yet even that example does not prove what some seem to think it does. For all the talk about the Democrats being the party of national security, they have not proposed massive increases to defense spending, even during a time of great power competition. Even as Democrats have pivoted to some extent on foreign policy issues, defense spending, America is spending less on defense as a share of GDP than we have since the 1930s. Our defense capabilities continue to atrophy, particularly our shrinking Navy, as our enemies are growing bolder around the world.

The contention of the Lewis brothers is that there is no such thing as a left or a right in politics, an extraordinary claim that flies in the face of what countless politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and voters have believed for two centuries. The authors are correct that left and right include shifting coalitions and that, at different times and places, leftists and rightists have switched sides on specific issues. But that does not, to me, convincingly prove that there is no such thing as a left or a right, merely that left and right are not a simplistic binary. Indeed, the idea of a unidimensional spectrum seems, to me, to be a strawman. 

Having not read their book (but having heard them speak about it), it seems to me that the authors overstate their claims (i.e., that there is absolutely no right or left) even as they raise interesting points. However, since I have not read it, I will instead draw on other sources to make my argument that, yes, there is a right and a left in politics. 

When asked about this book, Yuval Levin very quickly explained that the left-right divide does, in fact, represent a real divide going back at least to the French Revolution. One might think of them as two separate worldviews or tendencies, rather than hard-and-fast lists of principles. Thomas Sowell’s constrained and unconstrained visions don’t map perfectly onto right and left (although they often come close), but they do offer an interesting parallel. Sowell aptly demonstrates how there could be wide disagreement among constrained (or unconstrained) figures throughout the ages, even as they begin from a similar approach to the world. He also showed how the presence of hybrid ideologies and hybrid thinkers did not disprove the thesis of a debate between two opposing sides. 

So it is with right and left. Perhaps it would be better to think of two areas within a three-dimensional space rather than two directions on a single axis. There is a great deal of nuance as to who fits where on the left or the right and what positions they will support. However, left and right do generally represent alternative ways of thinking about the world. They will make alternative types of arguments and use alternative reasoning even when they come to similar conclusions. 

What defines the difference between right and left? A variety of oppositions have been proposed: individualism vs. collectivism, strength vs. weakness, past vs. progress, etc.

Most of these are very imperfect, but I think there are three things that come closest to defining the difference. While it is not perfectly true to say that the right is simply the opposition to the left, that is often true: the left has generally defined as “right-wing” all opponents to their agenda, and the right has often been a mixed coalition of groups united by a common enemy. 

What is the animating principle of the left? If there is a single element running throughout all left-wing thought (in some way or another) going back to the beginning, it is equality. The right is the collection of groups and individuals who are opposed in some way to equality…or to the left’s vision of equality. This is true even if past left-wing thinkers supported what we today think of as inequalities (i.e., racism, segregation, etc.). The left are the people animated by egalitarianism in some form, small or great, and the right are the people opposed to it. “Equality vs. hierarchy” is not perfect because many right-wingers are not in favor of hierarchies, however we tend to acknowledge natural hierarchies and see no reason to eliminate them (i.e., some people are smarter than others and society should not try to hinder smart people in the name of a “fairer” world). 

There are some objections to this. One will be from right-wingers who say, “we believe in equality, too, just not in the left’s version of equality.” To reference A Conflict of Visions again, Thomas Sowell pointed out that the semantic debates over “true” equality and “true” liberty are attempts by both sides to redefine terms that favor their ideological opponents in ways that favor them. There is not nothing to these debates, however I tend to think that for clarity’s sake we should agree on one definition. “Liberty” means what we today call “negative liberty,” and “positive liberty” should properly be termed “security, comfort, safety, and pleasure.” Likewise, “equality” being the animating principle of the left, the leftist definition of it is the correct one, right-wingers’ arguments about “equality of opportunity” (which might better be termed “fair play” or “a fair process”) notwithstanding. 

The other objection will be that wokeism has given us many examples of inverse hierarchies (i.e., the hierarchy of oppression and victimhood). Straight, “cisgender,” white men occupy the worst position on the hierarchy and much of the animating spirit of wokeism intends to put them in their place. 

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But when we question why this might be, we must conclude that wokeism is still very much influenced by notions of equality. Why must white men be derided in order to celebrate nonwhite “non-men?” Because for large chunks of human history, white men dominated most other groups and this domination must, according to the logic, be balanced out or rectified. Or, to put it a different way, the left opposes existing hierarchies and seeks to tear them down or invert them because such inversion would be “justice.” To them, existing hierarchies are, by definition, “unfair.” Why are they unfair? Because fairness means equality. 

The right tends not to think that fairness means equality. We tend to emphasize proportionality, or if it comes to it, we tend to defend some hierarchies on instrumental grounds, or on the grounds that overturning them is worse than the disease, or on the grounds that there isn’t really anything wrong with inequality in the first place (i.e., income inequality). 

The other enduring divides are on the question of property and the question of nature vs. convention. The left generally tends to be sympathetic to, or entirely sure of the idea that, “property is theft.” At the very least, they believe there might be something wrong with private property. The right tends to be those individuals and groups who defend property (either their own or other people’s). We tend to argue that “taking other people’s property is theft” including taking from the rich to give to the poor (we might add the words “without just compensation and against their will” to clarify the original statement). 

Whether it is the ancien regime defending feudalism or “free market fundamentalists” defending shareholder values or populist demagogues defending your right to a gas stove, the right essentially rejects the idea that property represents a crime or a problem or an injustice. The left tends to be sympathetic to criticisms of property, even as many center-leftists defend property rights. Likewise, even rightists fairly critical of some specific examples of property rights, or very willing to deny the property rights of some individuals or companies, will nonetheless defend property in other contexts. Once again, there are some on the center-right who find themselves sympathetic to leftist critiques undermining private property and yet they will tend to find themselves taking the right-wing position nonetheless, usually for small-c conservative reasons (i.e., they may believe that the foundations of modern property rights are shaky, but we should nonetheless preserve the status quo because uprooting it would be disastrous; besides property rights have served human beings better than any alternative).

It is crucial to note here that one of the primary distinctions between right and left is not the conclusions they will come to on every issue but the way they get there. Sowell showed how unconstrained and constrained thinkers could reach similar (or wildly different) conclusions but would use different logic and styles of argument because they begin from different premises about the world.

Finally, there is nature and convention. The right tends to emphasize human nature, universal verities, and that which does not change. The left tends to emphasize that which does change. It is not that the right believes in the past and the left believes in the future (although some on the left and right like to believe this is the case), but that the right desires continuity with the past for the reason that capital-T Truth does not change and the left seeks a break with the past because they believe it impedes progress. 

The right will hold fast to religious truth, tradition, and philosophical reason, while the left believes in History with a capital H. Truth, according to the left, depends on context. Historicism, relativism, postmodernism, subjectivism, and even some flavors of romanticism characterize left-wing thinking on the matter. 

It is not so much that all rightists reject the concept of change or that no leftists believe in human nature but that the right will tend to believe that the important things are the things which do not change and the left will tend to believe that the important things are the things which change. Being on the right, I tend to think that things that are subject to change are less important than those that are not. A leftist might say, “Sure, there’s such a thing as human nature, but it doesn’t extend much beyond the fact that we all eat food and sleep and defecate.” A rightist might say, “Sure, the world has made some progress since the Middle Ages, but probably less than is commonly supposed.”

An illuminating example might be slavery. Leftists will say, “If nothing changes, how come we abolished slavery?” Rightists would answer, “Slavery was always wrong, even when it was common. If truth is contextual and morality is merely convention, there is nothing to say that slavery is wrong.”

Hybrid ideologies do not disprove left and right. Nazism (which emphasized a hard break with the past), fascism (which conceived of itself as historical progress and an ideology of the future), and certain forms of libertarianism or anarchism might all qualify, but that just shows that the lines are blurrier than we tend to think (especially when you get to extremes of either no government or total government). 

The New Right contains many dissident thinkers who spent time in the margins because their thinking was not neatly “right” or “left.” Some of them play games to pretend that they are the “true” right, but more likely they are hybrid thinkers. Where do we place an ultra-traditionalist Catholic who is an avowed communist? Rather than eliminating the distinction between left and right, such an example shows that human beings are complex and a simplistic binary does not define all of politics. 

Right and left are loose categories, rather than unchanging battle lines. But just because they are hard to define does not mean they are not real. We can learn something from the theory of left and right, even as we recognize that the world is more complex than the theory.   

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712