Most human societies over the past 12 thousand years or so have been organized into political hierarchies. The left right political spectrum is all about where one stands in regard to these hierarchies, says Peter Bergen. In episode four, we looked out how words and definitions are communication tools. We saw how they fail as a communication tool in two important ways. They cause confusion when reading history books or making historical analogies. And more importantly, number two is that they make us focus on superficial aspects of politics that don't give us any insight into the actual divisions and political coalitions that exist in the real world.
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This episode is for everyone who keeps writing to me to insist that one or the other wrong, incoherent, popular definitions of Left and Right is actually the correct one.
How do we know the left and right refer to equality and hierarchy?
To answer this, we look at who was considered as being on the left and on the right in three different time periods:
The early French revolution in 1789, which is what the whole left-right political spectrum is an analogy to.
The 3rd republic in France where seating in the National Assembly was first purposefully arranged on a left-right spectrum, analogous to the early French Revolution.
The different branches of late 19th and early 20th Century socialist movement: Anarchism, Revolutionary Party Socialism and Parliamentary Socialism.
And we apply all of the junk cold war definitions – the market vs. the state, the individual vs. the collective, big vs. small government, equality vs. liberty – and we watch them all crash and burn, leaving only the equality vs. hierarchy / class conflict paradigm left standing.
Apply this exercise on your own to any historical period from 1789 until the rise of the USSR and the cold war, and you get the same results.
Now can everyone accept it and move on?
Bonus episode to follow shortly to explain why Fascism is on the far right and Communism is on the far left when Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR are both archetypical “totalitarian” societies.
