In the middle ages, this hierarchical ideology more or less matched reality in terms of who held political, economic and cultural power. But over the centuries, as europe slowly recovered from the fall of the roman empire, polities got bigger and more centralized. As a result, the source of power shifted away from controlling land and being able to squeeze grain out of peasants,. towards being able to accumulate cash from trade and taxes and fees. Eventually, merchants, who were members of the order of the common people, often became more wealthy and more powerful than many nobles.
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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.
