Left, Right, etc.

   The current political climate in both the US and Europe is straining the standard conceptions of political ideology.  Traditional terminology like left, right, and center haven’t been adequate to characterize Trump, Brexit supporters, or the Greek governing coalition.  To address this ambiguity, I’ve been trying to examine two relevant issues.  First off, I’ve tried to understand what the left/right ideological spectrum really describes.  On top of that, I’ve tried to understand what additional ideological descriptors we need to use to give more complete description of what ideologies underlie the movements that affect the world right now.  I’ve decided to write a bit about my unauthoritative thoughts on these two issues.  Hopefully, we can start a conversation that will help me (and maybe the rest of you) clarify the meaning of these political philosophies.  I'm particularly sketchy on what terminology I should use to label each of the seven factors that I'm going to discribe, so if some of them seem wrong or inadequate, just share your thoughts and I'll try to replace it with something better.

     So, I’m going to start by sharing my thoughts on what left and right mean in terms of political ideology.  I’ve often heard people refer to the supposed dichotomy between fiscal/economic ideology and “social” ideology by saying that someone is, for example, “socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”  In my opinion, however, the “social” dimension should be separated into two parts, which leaves us with three components that combine to produce a leftist or rightist political orientation.  For lack of better names, I would call the components economic, social, and cultural.

     The economic component is probably the most salient, although that may be changing.  I would define economic leftism as the belief that the government is better than markets at guiding the economy, that positive liberty is more important than negative liberty, and that redistribution is more important than wealth creation.  The economic right would likewise favor markets, negative liberty, and wealth creation.  Of course, there are many more possible combinations of beliefs and many subtleties that may underlie them, but I think the sum of those three tendencies is a decent representation of left/right ideology regarding the economy.

     I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard anyone distinguish between what I call social ideology and cultural ideology, but I think the two concepts are independent enough to be worth separating.  On the one hand, I would define social ideology as a relative preference between “outgroup” and “ingroup” interests, which I think correspond to what people might call “social justice” and “group interest”.  Opinions regarding immigration and nationalism would likely fit into this dimension, as might those on race and gender.  The cultural dimension would then measure positions between modernism and cultural flexibility on the left and traditionalism and cultural rigidity on the right.  Distinguishing between the social and cultural components of rightism makes it easier to describe the divisions that occurred in the 2016 Republican Primaries, when Trump was clearly the farthest to the right on the issue of group interest, but several other candidates were much farther to the right on cultural issues.  This distinction also helps make sense of movements, particularly in Western Europe, that seek to stop immigration from Muslim nations in order to protect liberal values.  I would call those movements socially rightist, but culturally leftist.

     Ok, so I’ve described three ways of categorizing political orientations.  But, how do they fit together?  The best answer I’ve been able to give myself is that all three components deal with some distinction between insiders and outsiders, although those terms are defined differently in each case.  Obviously, the social component represents beliefs about social groups that are more or less included in the general population.  Less literally, the cultural dimension deals with insiders and outsiders relative to traditional cultural norms and the economic dimension deals with insiders and outsiders relative to economic position.  So, leftism would be a general tendency to oppose undue influence by “insiders” and rightism would be a general tendency to oppose undue influence by “outsiders.”  Or something like that….

     In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the ideological orientations that I see as independent of left/right classification.  Whatever your thoughts are on this issue, please share them below.