Left vs Right

Discussion

N.S. Lyons:

"How should we define “right” and “left”? Each label has come to be associated with a whole cluster of otherwise unrelated political values and beliefs that have then been conflated into chimerical political personalities (despite these conglomerations falling apart as soon as anyone holds both “left” and “right”-coded values at the same time, as many do). But, beneath all the accumulated political detritus, there is one essential difference between a rightist and a leftist. This is not the conservative vs. progressive axis, but one between egalitarianism and hierarchy.

To be right-wing is to especially value hierarchy, and indeed to perceive and think about the world through hierarchies. This is to be “discriminating” in its original sense: to be able and willing to recognize that A is better than B in some way, and to therefore place A ahead of B and call this a proper and just ordering of things. In contrast, to be left-wing is to value the principle of equality over other values. Whereas Plato and Aristotle would have defined justice as the giving to each of precisely what they deserve, in a pure left conception justice and equality are synonymous: justice is when all receive the same. This precludes hierarchies. To favor or even recognize person A over person B – or in the most radical conceptions even idea or behavior X over Y – would be to create inequality, and therefore injustice.

This division over hierarchy goes beyond the sociopolitical hierarchies many typically think of when they hear the word (kings, hereditary nobility, etc.) Meritocracy, for instance, remains an inherently right-wing idea because it is a way of ordering people in a hierarchy, in this case based on their relative talent. To the radical left-winger this is still unjust (and unkind, hateful, etc.), because the outcome is unequal. In her view the system should rightly be structured to produce equality as its primary object. This applies to abstract values like morals as well: in a state of equality how can one person or behavior really be held as more moral than another? The result is relativism. Even science (real science) is arguably a distinctly right-wing pursuit, because a scientist cannot be egalitarian with facts. The dispassionate pursuit of truth requires the valuing of truth over all other goods.

There is another distinction in values that is commonly seen to divide right from left: preference for order vs. anarchy. The right is seen as promoting a more strict, even authoritarian, social and moral order, while the left excuses or even promotes forms of social and moral chaos, such as crime and deviancy. Relatedly, the right believes strongly in the importance of borders and boundaries of all kinds, whether between countries or between genders, while the left prefers fluidity and transgression. But these tendencies are in large part also merely reflections of respect or lack-thereof for hierarchical structures, including legal and moral value structures. Stable social order is everywhere a product of hierarchies, and cannot be maintained under conditions of pure egalitarianism. For the leftist this is an acceptable tradeoff for greater equality."

(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-right-wing-progressives?)