Left/Right in Politics

[unspeakablehorror]

A while back I wrote about trying to understand what left/right actually means regarding politics, because despite the fact that I would identify as a leftist, and despite the common usage of these terms, it has been kind of difficult to get a handle on what their core defining features are.  There are so many, and so many types of either, after all.

But I think I have, if not a complete understanding, a considerable improvement on my prior attempt to understand this divide, which I knew was lacking in some way, but for which I couldn't quite articulate how or why. 

My previous understanding was based on the conservative focus on tradition, which would mean that leftism would focus on breaking with the status quo while conservatives focus on maintaining it.  There are certainly many instances where this dynamic plays out, but seeing it as the whole picture seems incomplete.  After all, new laws and social structures can make society more conservative at times, and conversely, leftists are not necessarily preoccupied with abandoning all traditions, even if they are more likely to be critical of such things.

However, I do think there is something that really gets at the root of the core difference between leftists and conservatives: class stratification.  For conservatives, class stratification is seen as good, and the only question is who is the 'right' class (or classes) to be on top.  Class here can refer to race, caste, gender, economic class, intelligence, physical ability, or anything else that denotes a division of people into different groups whose societal value is determined primarily based on their division into those groups.  Thus, when conservatives want to preserve tradition, what they want to preserve are the benefits of the top social classes that those traditions foster, to the detriment of anyone not in those groups.  What they want to preserve are the traditions that say 'yes X group is inherently better than Y group and should be treated as such'.  Thus, conservatives can disagree with each other as to *which* groups should be on top, but what they all have in common is the core goal to maintain a hierarchy of value for people.  Whereas being a leftist means to reject the idea that some types of people are inherently worth less than others.

So that's how I'm conceptualizing the left/right political division now.

Comments

[whaelan]

this is really well-put!

[unspeakablehorror]

Glad you found it useful! I think there's a lot more complexities to this kind of thing than can be covered in a post of this size, but I do think this is a more consistent definition than the status quo one, though it so happens that I do think large changes are required to the current status quo as well. I just don't think that 'changing the status quo' is as useful to base the definition of a political term on given the lack of consistency of what that term refers to in a practical sense.

[rugessnome]

I grew up around enough conservatism that I originally had some moral qualms around listening to the Chicks' Taking the Long Way; I also incidentally read years ago some sort of discussion of post-Soviet Russian politics that used some form of a left/right paradigm and was eye-opening about political relativity for me. Between those experiences and observing the 2010s shift in the GOP from the outside, I'd conclude that right/conservative vs leftist/liberal is inherently a loose designation and relative to the political situation, and I don't think your theory about class stratification is more thorough or more accurate, though it may in some cases be more illuminating, than the tradition conception (and could occasionally be inaccurate).

[unspeakablehorror]

Hmmm, well, I'll not go into detail about my personal life experiences, but I was very much around to see what was going on in the GOP in the 2010's, and also the disturbing shift between the pre and post 2001 era as well, as a matter of fact (while my politics have changed a lot in that time, I've been antiwar for as long as I can remember, and was opposed not only to the war with Iraq, but the one with Afghanistan as well). Everyone takes their own things away from these kinds of experiences, though, depending on their perspective. No matter what we respectively take away from the historical events we observe, our experiences of them cannot have been identical. And neither of us, nor even the oldest who has ever lived, has really experienced even the barest fraction of the history that humanity has undergone.

And so yes, my understanding of politics must by necessity be incomplete and is, to be certain, inaccurate in places. However, I feel a great urgency to understand these things and engage with them as best I can. One reason being that I think the continuation of the status quo in our world is leading to, and will lead to, innumerable deaths. Change, regardless of what political words are used to describe it, is necessary to avert this catastrophe. But change is a very difficult thing, and only very specific changes will actually improve matters.

I also do think words have power, as does the ability to define those words. I think in order to understand what leftism or conservatism is, there has to be some quality to define them. I'm neither a moral nor political relativist, so rather than shifting my definition of terms based on the shifting politics of different times and countries, I prefer to acknowledge that the terms I use do not refer exactly to some specific person or political parties, but rather to more general categories that such specifics will never precisely fit. And yet while these more general categories will never be a perfect fit for the specifics of our world, I think they can better encompass the range of political positions in existence.

I'd say that I don’t think the left-right paradigm encompasses the entirety of what people are concerned about in politics, whereas specific political parties that may be labeled as such tend to specify opinions on a much wider range of concerns, and I would also not expect them to perfectly (or sometimes, even closely) fit these categories. This is why there is no one unified group of leftists, and no one unified group of conservatives, though I would argue that there is some consistent quality to both words, and that what that consistent quality is is worth examining.

I'd also say that I do not think liberal is a synonym for leftist. I haven't looked into that term enough to formulate an entirely clear definition of it, but my understanding of it from my readings and observations of others use of it is as a term with different and possibly much more specific implications politically.

So while I think it would certainly be correct to say that the specifics of politics in different countries and time periods play out differently due to the different contexts in which they occur, I do not take this as changing the definition of what it means to be a conservative or a leftist, but rather that the extent to which these different political parties are concerned with furthering these ideas and to what extent the politics in a given country is based on them to begin with. I hope that gives some idea of what my thought process is, and I hope I’ve understood you correctly, though please feel free to let me know if that is not the case.

[mothereader]

This post reminds me of The Righteous Mind by Haidt? Have you read it?

[unspeakablehorror]

No, I haven't. Why does this post remind you of that book?

[mothereader]

It talks about the difference in... worldviews, mostly, between liberals and conservatives. IIRC this is the terminology used in the book, instead of left and right.

Perhaps it was this bit in particular that got me thinking about it:

My previous understanding was based on the conservative focus on tradition, which would mean that leftism would focus on breaking with the status quo while conservatives focus on maintaining it. [...] For conservatives, class stratification is seen as good, and the only question is who is the 'right' class (or classes) to be on top.

Also I'd add that something didn't sit right with me about the book. The author states somewhere in the beginning that he'd label himself a liberal, but throughout the book there's this undercurrent of fascination with the conservative... whatever. Or maybe it's just pride in the theory he came up with that was coming through for me. It's been a while since I read it, but I vaguely remember him being defensive of conservative way of thinking about the world.

In any case, I think it's at least worth skimming, if anything I mentioned sounds interesting to you.

[unspeakablehorror]

So I took a look at the main ideas of this book by poking around online and I have....thoughts.

I would go a little further and say that Haidt isn't merely fascinated by conservatives, but greatly admires them. And it seems a number of conservatives would agree:

" We owe a debt of gratitude to Jonathan Haidt for his splendid book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion."
...
"Conservatives should celebrate the fact that science has vindicated our fundamental intuitions about political philosophy, but with this enlightenment comes the responsibility to hold strong to our convictions while kindly and gently showing liberals the errors of their ways."
does_science_prove_conservative_values_right_over_liberal_ones.html

I'll not get too far into my philosophical difference here that science cannot 'validate' a moral position, as the point is to show that Haidt's admiration of conservatives is a position that both conservatives and I agree on. How bipartisan of me! Excepting, of course, that I still do not support or agree with the core ideology of conservatism.

Here's a couple quotes I'd like to address as well:

"These moral foundations, according to Haidt, act as our political “taste buds” and explain our political preferences in the same way that our taste buds explain our culinary preferences."
https://dividedwefall.com/2018/07/15/the-righteous-mind-moral-foundations-theory/

"Haidt uses the metaphor of taste buds to explain how the most important human values can be reduced to six flavors or foundations, regardless of history, culture, or socioeconomic status."
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/does_science_prove_conservative_values_right_over_liberal_ones.html

So it seems that he positions morality as being simply a matter of taste. These two concepts are not the same thing in my mind at all. If a person doesn't share many of my preferences, I can still happily associate with them and work with them to allow us to both maximally enjoy our own preferences. But if a person doesn't share many of my core values, it is not conducive to the well-being of myself or those I care about to compromise with or accomodate them on those matters. This comes above even a disagreement of facts, as it is a core philosophical difference I have with his position. If someone sees no distinction between preferences and principles, their ideology is fundamentally incompatible with mine.

Another illuminating quote:

"I first began research for The Righteous Mind in 2004, motivated in part by a desire to help progressives do a better job of connecting with American moral values. But after immersing myself in the writings of all sides and doing my best to find the good on all sides, I became a non-partisan centrist."
https://righteousmind.com/why-the-righteous-mind-is-the-best-common-reading/

So he's a centrist. But I am not. And in practice, I find that many centrists have more respect and admiration for conservatives than leftists, viewing those farther left than them as the real threat to their safety and happiness, while viewing conservatives as upholders of safety and order, even when they are anything but. This dynamic seems to play out in exactly this fashion with Haidt.

The idea that he apparently believes is an Earth-shattering revelation, that there are good people on 'all sides' is, in my estimation, anything but. He seems to conflate good intentions with goodness itself, but to me, the intent of the act does not define its morality--that must also look at its results. I did not become a leftist because I think that all conservatives have bad intentions--I am a leftist because I think their policies lead to disastrous and deadly consequences regardless of their intentions.

So yes, this could be a grim but illuminating read for me on some of the thought processes used to justify the centrist drive to cede political ground to conservatives, though as I've already quite the full roster of political reading, I don't know if or when I'd get the time to look at it. This is especially because I'd view pirating it as the only moral way to read this book given that I do not wish to support the author by obtaining it in any way that he might financially benefit from.