Why I Object to a “Left vs. Right” Political Spectrum

“The left, in all its myriad forms, is unified by a utopian vision and end goal. Meanwhile, ‘the right’ has no such vision and is made of many disparate groups who do not share end goals beyond a general opposition to the left.”

In June, I wrote an article for Quillette called “The Prison House of Political Language”, which provoked criticism from some commentators that it was “unbalanced” and “biased.” The article attacked the totalitarian language games of the left, while claiming that “the right”—at least as a meaningful and unified movement—does not exist. In fact, I argued that “right-wing” is used near-exclusively as a smear term by the left, and as a linguistic kill shot to circumvent debates before they can even take place. In this article, I want to explore my reasons for coming to these conclusions by analyzing some groups typically said to be on “the right”.

What does “bias” mean? Facts do not conform to an Aristotelian golden mean. They tend, rather, to swing quite heavily in one direction. Therefore, when one is dealing with facts, the expectation of “balance” is quite unreasonable. The fact that I established in “The Prison House of Political Language” was that the two sides—the left and those who oppose them —are not equal. My chief claim was that the left, in all its myriad forms, is unified by a utopian vision and end goal. Meanwhile, “the right” has no such vision and is made of many disparate groups who do not share end goals beyond a general opposition to the left. I want to spend the rest of this article exploring this point further, because it is seldom, if ever, discussed.

As the influential psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has pointed out, the left—despite its many tedious Judean People’s Fronts—is still united by the utopian vision outlined in John Lennon’s “Imagine”:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
…