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Leftism vs. Right-wingers, and the stupidity of every political “spectrum”

What plagues humanity is the staying power of bad ideas. Concepts that are logically irrational or nonsensical can stick around in popular thought indefinitely if the social psychological conditions remain in place. The “left” versus “right” dichotomy is one such concept – one that is both irrational and nonsensical, yet pervasive. It’s how many people talk about “politics” and it is completely stupid.

Consider the most basic point: what exactly is “left” and what exactly is “right?” Dictionaries tend to only offer for definition, for instance, that leftism means “the principles and views of the left” whereas rightism means “the principles and views of the right.” They do not usually specify what those “principles and views” are, and for good reason: there are no such ‘principles and views,’ there are none that are necessarily right-wing but not leftist or viceversa.

The terms are largely arbitrary. They can mean anything or nothing, and often do. What is “left” to you may be “right” to me, or to my grandpa, or to a person in another state or country or in a different language.

Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (“Nazis”) are often cited as an example of the “extreme right-wing,” but they are also less often cited as an example of the “extreme leftism.” Self-identified leftists may refer to Josef Stalin and his Communist Party as “right-wing,” yet he is more usually put forward as an exemplar of “extreme leftism” by others. You can’t even get the extremes clearly defined…

At the root of this confusion is the very concept of an aggregated, one-dimensional left-right spectrum of positions itself. It is inanely childish, an oversimplification to the point of being worse than nothing. (Worse because it creates artificial division, confusion, groupthink, etc.) If it were an accurate representation of the differences between human positions on the sociopolitical world, imagine the epiphanic moment of its discovery: “My God! A line!”

Various political scientists have attempted to refine the concept into a form that actually means something. MIT political scientist David Nolan popularized the so-called Nolan Chart, where economic and civil liberty are the two axes and left-right is the diagonal:

This Nolan Chart is less stupid, but it’s still stupid because actual sociopolitical positions (statist, libertarian, socialist, etc.) exist on different levels of complexity and what all “political spectrum” visualizations miss, among other things, is importantly the matching of means to ends. Two people may want the same ends, but argue different means to those ends as logically optimal. A simple graphing of means to the same ends is not a question of personal position or identity, but one of communication, evidence, and logic. To adhere to some means to an end based on some attraction to the means other than its likelihood of bringing about the ends is irrational.

Furthermore, of course, people have differently prioritized ends, which are not aggregatable as Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel prize for demonstrating… and this is assuming “left” or “right” really even are positions, as opposed to

• geocultural background (I grew up a small town in the South, naturally I’m a conservative) or
• aspirations of social identity (I want to show people I’m a cultured urbanite so I’m man of the left) or 
• personal identity or emotive labeling (I care about people. I feel I’m of the left, it’s part of who I am) or
• a perceived general attitude about the world (I’m for America, I’m a patriot, I’m of the right)

or various other things unrelated to the actual substance of the positions. With regards to the substance of sociopolitical positions, political spectra in general and the “left” vs. “right” dichotomy in particular are non-concepts. They add absolutely nothing to the discussion. They distract and confuse everything, turning a means-ends discussion into a signalling battle of personal identities and group loyalties… and in a perfect world they would have been abandoned long ago.

Leftism and rightism are not positions at all and, even if they were, a one-dimensional line would not be a sensible way to compare them. Alas, “left vs. right” persists in popular thought and discourse to detriment of critical thinking.