The Political Ideology of Right and Left is no longer relevant in Modern Politics
-Maitri Chaturvedi
Political ideas have existed in a neat line running from left to right since ancient times. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided themselves as supporters of the King sitting to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. When the National Assembly was replaced in 1791 by a legislative assembly comprising entirely new members, the division continued where the ‘innovators’ sat on the left, ‘moderates’ gathered in the centre, while the ‘conscientious defenders of the Constitution’ found themselves sitting on the right.The term ‘left’ and ‘right’ was not to refer to political ideology but only for the seating arrangement in the legislature. During the rule of Louis the 16th, society was vastly divided and in the parliament discussions, the Feudal Lords sitting on the right believed that there should be no monarchy at all and people sitting on the left believed that there should be no involvement of the church and religion in the nation. People who said that the government should look after its citizens stayed on the left of the parliament and people who believed citizens should be independent of government interference stayed on the right. This is how the concept of right and left can be traced in France.
The left-right spectrum does not really exist because we cannot put all the issues that exist in the world into some neatline. The terms right and left were useful during the time of the French Revolution as they somehow explained the fight people were having during that time and place. The terms used up till now describe the debate back in the French hall. Eventually, the term calling of left and right became a habit. In modern politics, we are not talking about republics and kings anymore. After the 20th century, the new societies were republican societies and all the new problems and ideas entered into the new divisions of politics. Communism and fascism became a completely new way to organize a society that was neither the republic nor the monarchy.
People kept trying to find ways to keep them in the same left-right spectrum. The political ideologies of right-left neglect the new ideas brought for the betterment of society. The conservatives and the liberals conflict with each other and it creates tyranny. We are at a place where private companies and multinational companies with branches beyond borders. have more influence on people than political parties. There is a shift in people’s ideas which is not limited to either being a rightist or a leftist. We believe that politics is about having a position in the right-left spectrum. However, we cannot fit all the issues in the straight line of right and left. For instance, China is a social conservative and is called a leftwing.
It is also believed that politics is about pulling back and forth with certain people on the left and the right. In the article, “Neither left nor Right”, written by Libertarian Capitalist Leonard Read from 1956, he says that the left and the right end up being the same thing at the extremes. He gives examples of Hitler’s Nazi Germany on the extreme right and Stalin’s Soviet Union on the extreme left which resembled each other in important ways. According to him, the real divide in politics is not left and right but ‘authoritarianism’ versus ‘libertarianism’ is his preferred ideology. The article titled “The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus” states that we cannot just divide left and right because they are ultimately meaningless terms. The arrangement of positions along the left-right axis- progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, communist to fascist, socialist to capitalist, or Democrat to Republican — is conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, and historically contingent. Nobody has up till now found that we would define something as left or something as right in the first place.
The terms left and right are tribal designation and have no unifying philosophy or principle behind them that can be represented on a one-dimensional spectrum. In an era of nakedly transactional politics, the traditional ideological underpinnings of right and left have dissipated, notes Clive Veroni, author of “Spin: How Politics Has the Power to Turn Marketing on its Head.” The American ‘right’ as represented by the Republican party does not have at its centre what the party used to have, a set of principles. Polarized situational politics are amplified by social media, which rewards and encourages extreme, simplified opinions. If we have two parties we refer to one as left and another as right just out of habit. The words ‘right’ and ‘left’ are used to tell the direction but are no longer useful in stating political ideologies. Leftist certainly like change that moves the society to the values and ideals that we naturally call left, but resist the change that moves the society towards the ideals and values we arbitrarily call right. State and corporations, or political and economic power can be pulled apart and set against each other. This is false because hierarchies tend to coincide.
A corollary of PHC (Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence) is that resources flow towards political power, and political power flows towards resources, or the power of the state and capital typically appear in conjunction and are mutually reinforcing. It is not just about change. Left and right cannot just be about tolerance for change. There is no acceptable way to define right and left which makes the entire framework fall apart. The left-right spectrum is the unfortunate result of a centuries-old metaphor about seating arrangements. There are countless issues in today’s modern world that could be understood in many different ways rather than believing in ways as right and left that have been followed from the centuries.
The concept of right and left has not yet been defined properly up to this date. There have been different researches and works done on the right-left concept but there is no single proper definition of what is right and what is left. The concept of right and left end up being the same thing at the extremes. People believing in the right economically believe in the left socially. In modern politics, people are having shifts in their beliefs on different modern issues. The people who call themselves right on an issue believe in the idea of the left on another one. The terms left and right was the tribal designation for the seat placements rather than for the political ideologies. It came up for support and against the monarch system in the parliament of the French Society.
Issues change from time to time and even people who call themselves leftist switch to the right on a different issue. This suggests that the right-left idea is not constant within an individual either. There are different political issues and dimensions today. The right-left division was a division between social identities. The views associated with left and right are constantly shifting for social reasons that have nothing to do with essential principles. There are no true people as ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’; they are merely ideological coding measures.
There are no proper definitions of the ideologies that people look up to. Ideologies are just the reverse-engineered terms to fit the tribal actions and attachments. Even people belonging to the same political parties have different views on the political spectrum. Political parties in the past were often driven by region and economic interests and began to solidify around central ideologies. At the present time, people on both the right and left spectrum have begun to reject the old political beliefs. Modern Politics has worked to advocate a new set of ideas, disagreeing with the philosophical underpinnings of the expanded government. The left and right have suggested progressivism and conservatism. whereas the definition of the centre has been everchanging. There is a diversity of thoughts among people these days who refrain from putting their views on a straight line of right and left. The reason behind not aligning those diversified views in a straight line of right and left is because they neither fully agree with the right or the left either. The idea of right and left is no longer relevant in modern politics.
The opinions expressed in the article solely belong to the author and do not necessarily represent the official opinion of Youth in Federal Discourse (YFD). YFD is only providing a platform for youths to express their opinions about Federalism, government policies and laws of Nepal.
