What do "left" and "right" mean to you? [View all]

[Recursion]

I read a piece by Noah Millman in the American Conservative a while ago that kind of summed up how I use the terms:

I do not believe there is a conservative party in America. There is, rather, a right-wing and a left-wing party, in each case relatively speaking. The Republican Party is relatively right-wing and the Democratic Party is relatively left-wing.

I’m using my own idiosyncratic definition of “right” and “left” here, but it’s an idiosyncrasy I’m increasingly fond of. The distinction between “right” and “left” in my view has to do with the relationship to “winners” and “losers” in society. The right is more interested in rewarding winners. The left is more interested in helping out losers.

I should be clear that “winners” and “losers” are not moral terms. If the game is rigged, then both “winners” and “losers” can be undeserving. You can make a moral case for helping “losers” on precisely the grounds that the game is rigged against them, and they deserve better than they are getting. But you can also make a case for helping “losers” entirely on the grounds of need, or on the grounds that inequality as such retards social progress, without regard to desert. Similarly, you can make a moral case for increasing the reward to “winners” on the grounds that the game is not rigged, and they deserve everything they’ve earned. But you can also make a case entirely on the grounds of dynamism, that rewarding “winners” is how you get a more successful society in aggregate, regardless of desert.

But the party of the right is going to be more concerned with the interests of groups that are winning (or have won in the past), whether fairly or unfairly, and the party of the left is more concerned with the interests of groups that are losing (or have not won in the past), again whether fairly or unfairly. That’s a political definition that, in my view, works pretty well over long stretches of time and through various permutations of “winners” and “losers.”

I think this is a good point, and is a separate question from whether one is progressive or conservative.

One can be a right-wing progressive (Herbert Hoover comes to mind): that would be belief that government should align itself with society's winners, and the temperament that big sweeping changes are more effective than adapting existing institutions. One can be a left-wing conservative (dare I say it, Barack Obama comes to mind): that would be the belief that government should align itself with society's losers, but that gradual change and adapting of existing institutions is the best course of action.

Anyways, I just think of this every time I see the libertarian-focused "Political Compass" brought out as inevitably seems to happen every so often: there are a lot of ways to divide the political spectrum into different axes.

EDIT: also, can anybody confirm that I'm correct that the actual origin of the terms is where the various estates sat in Louis XVI's court?