A history (and defense) of left vs right

The concept may be rooted in 18th century French politics, but it's still useful today

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try to step back a bit from the day-to-day of the news cycle with a four-part series that both examines my personal political trajectory and takes a big-picture look at what I think the left and the right have gotten right (and wrong) in recent history.

To that end, I wanted to start with an explicit defense of the idea that a unitary left/right axis of political conflict is a useful simplification. I think there is a deep, non-contingent reason why “everyone should have cheap insulin” and “abortion should be legal” go together and also why zoning reform occupies an ambivalent and unsettled position in the ideological landscape. Left and right are not, exactly, two distinct sets of coherent ideas, but they are two different poles of thought — one that emphasizes the existence of a God-given hierarchy that must be upheld and entrenched and one that wants to tear it down in the name of equality and reason.

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Some observations I have offered about the contemporary American political scene:

• The mass public’s policy preferences shifted right during Barack Obama’s eight years in office, but Democratic-aligned interest groups grew impatient with the limited policy change that Obama was able to deliver.

• In the 2016 primary, Democrats argued between moving left on cultural issues (Hillary Clinton) and moving left on economic issues (Bernie Sanders) and they wound up synthesizing in the 2020 cycle on the idea of moving left on both fronts simultaneously.

• Joe Biden was the right-most “major” (i.e., raised a lot of money and got a lot of media attention) candidate in the 2020 Democratic field, with Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris all positioned to his left.

• Biden has positioned himself to the left of Obama on most issues, though Israel is an exception. And it’s interesting that the Pod Save America gang has criticized Biden’s departure from Obama’s approach to Israel pretty aggressively, but not really done the same on the issues (trade, K-12 education, cost-benefit analysis in the regulatory state) where Biden is to Obama’s left.

People have various disagreements about this and other related issues. But one big picture objection I sometimes hear is that, in making these observations, I am relying on an overly simplistic left-right framework for characterizing both people and policy positions. It’s an incredibly accessible framework, but I think it strikes almost everyone as flattening and reductive. The terminology’s origin in seating arrangements for the National Constituent Assembly of France in 1789 only makes its use in contemporary politics more puzzling.

Surely whatever they were talking about in Year One of the French Revolution is not the same as what Biden and Donald Trump are arguing about. How can one possibly deploy a framework developed to understand the factional politics of 18th century France to discuss the 2016 Democratic Party primary?

But I want to defend the audacious proposition that this lingo sticks with us for a reason.

It’s a simplification, to be sure. But it’s a productive and useful simplification, one that has endured not because of laziness or lack of principles, but because the divisions cleaved in those early meetings of the Constituent Assembly capture something deep and important that has continued to resonate throughout western (and, to an extent, global) politics in the centuries since.

The French Revolution, very briefly

The French Revolution is a famously long and complicated series of events that I can’t possibly do justice to in one segment of one post. I heartily recommend Mike Duncan’s epic season three of his Revolutions podcast, or if you can go back in time and take Patrice Higonnet’s French Revolution class, that’s good too. And for those with more literary tastes, there are obviously a million books on the subject.

But I think the relevant notes for the concepts of left and right go, essentially, like this:

Kings of France had been trying, for years, to build up a more centralized state, which in a practical sense meant disempowering nobles relative to the traditional medieval setup. But, due to wars and financial mismanagement, King Louis XVI found himself needing to raise taxes, and this, per the laws and traditions of France, could only be done by calling for a meeting of the Estates General. Meetings of the Estates General were common in the early 1300s, then kind of faded away until they were revived in the 1560-1614 period, but then fell off again for almost 200 years until Louis needed to call one in 1789.

How did this quasi-defunct institution work? There would be an assembly representing the clergy (the first estate), an assembly representing the nobility (the second estate), and an assembly representing the commoners (the third estate). Traditionally, the function of an Estates General was to create an opportunity to assert the prerogatives of the nobility and the Catholic Church against the desires of the king in exchange for meeting some revenue needs. But this was 1789, and notions of parliamentarism, constitutional monarchy, and even republicanism were in the air. There was a successful “doubling of the third” — ensuring that the Third Estate would be half the total membership rather than one third of it. Then when the Estates met in Paris, agitators called for them to meet collectively as one body (a quasi-parliament) rather than as three separate estates. Commoners were strongly in favor of this and, joined by some liberal-minded nobles and some parish priests (as opposed to lofty bishops), they carried the day.

At this point, the whole conversation was no longer about settling some grievances in exchange for straightening out the budget. Instead, there was going to be a Constituent Assembly — meaning a group that would write a new constitution for France.

As the Assembly began to gather, it elected a president. And as members had to find places to sit during the proceedings, they sorted into cliques based on their ideas rather than which estate they had formerly belonged to. The Baron de Gauville, a Second Estate deputy who aligned with the right, recalls:

We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp.

That’s a rightist perspective on the seating division (note that it almost perfectly captures contemporary right characterizations of leftists), but recall that from the king’s perspective, the point of all this is that he wanted to build a stronger, centralized, modern state. That meant he actually wanted to clip some of the privileges of the nobility and the church. So even though the right characterized themselves as loyal to the king, the king was not necessarily loyal to the right. There could have been a world in which the king chose to prioritize (a) the institutional interest in creating a more centralized state and (b) his personal interest in having nice castles and an upscale king lifestyle. That would have meant aggressively accepting a UK-style constitutional monarchy role and turning governance of the country over to political elites represented in the assembly.

But he did not want to do that.

Louis was very active in trying to negotiate a larger role for the monarchy in the hypothetical new constitution, which meant he was subject to the pressures of the Paris mob and the National Guard. This left him increasingly concerned about his personal physical security. He eventually tried to escape Paris for the town of Varennes, where he hoped to meet up with emigré nobles and his wife’s Habsburg relatives and lead a counterrevolution. But he was captured, and the next set of debates were about what to do with him, with the (eventually victorious) “left” position being that he should be executed.

After that, a lot of other stuff happened, Napoleon came to power, more stuff happened, then Napoleon lost and the monarchy was restored, and some French Revolution reforms were rolled back but some things stuck.

And one of those things was the concept of left versus right.

Order and religion

One thing to note about all of this is the central role of religion, from the beginning, in defining the left-right political axis.

There’s a lot about the exact role of the Catholic Church in French society that was very specific to that particular place in time. But an enduring theme is that while religious leaders claim that their religious doctrines are true and that it’s very important (indeed, the most important thing) that people follow them, by the late 18th century, secular intellectuals were arguing that all the religions were false. It starts with an effort to meddle with church lands or the specific privileges of priests or the role of the church in the education system, and the church pushes back. At which point, someone rudely points out that actually, religion isn’t true and no one needs to listen to the church about this. Well, priests do not agree with that! And as it turns out, lots of people are religious, so everyone who has any kind of beef with the direction of revolutionary politics bandwagons with the priests.

This ends with the revolutionary left trying to create a “Cult of Reason” to fill the social role of religion, the church actively supporting counterrevolutionary activities, revolutionary mobs massacring priests, etc.

In a functioning society, we do a better job of keeping a lid on this conflict. But in my lifetime, we’ve had huge, era-defining debates about marriage equality and abortion rights that are profoundly structured by the declining social influence of religion.

Anywhere you look in the politics of a modern society, you find disputes — typically related to sex and gender roles — that are like this. On one side is a view grounded in religious beliefs, and on the other is a secular counterpoint. A recurring theme is that the religious view is not that persuasive on the merits to social elites, which gives strength to the secular side of the argument. But it also generates instrumental cases for religion. Dostoevsky writes that “if God is dead, everything is permitted,” promoting a widely held conservative view that morality will collapse without a strong religious tradition. Religious people, in my experience, believe that this kind of argument is persuasive.

To me (and an important reason I am mostly on the left as an emotional and intellectual matter, despite my many disagreements), this does not make sense.

I agree that it’s hard to explain social and economic conditions in Utah without recourse to the instrumental benefits of religious belief. But most of the people I hear making this point are not LDS. The fact that Catholic intellectuals, by their own admission, see the instrumental benefits of religion accruing to Mormons and Modern Orthodox Jews seems to strongly undercut the view that the instrumental benefits of these traditions stems from their truthfulness.

Either way, Ross Douthat and I can disagree about this on Twitter in 2024 in the exact same terms that people were arguing in 1794. But there is also the further-left positions that plenty of people have held over time, which is that the association of religious belief with conservative politics goes to show that we need to actively attack religion. It is the “opiate of the masses” in Marxist terms. Because people on the left don’t think religion is true, they are not always clear among themselves as to how far left they actually stand on these issues. If you think the Christian baker should be forced to bake a cake for the gay wedding, is that you upholding a neutral principle or does the anti-religious aspect make it appealing because you think religious people develop bad views about politics?

Another recurring political theme is the Cult of Reason.

That didn’t work out. But conservatives are constantly accusing leftists of concocting ersatz religions. Marxism is like a religion, with The Revolution holding the place of God’s judgment. Environmentalism is like a religion, a cult of Gaia that subsumes human values to a mystical attachment to an idea of “nature.” The climate apocalypse is Ragnarok. Wokeness is a religion, with its emphasis on America’s “original sin” that needs to be expiated. As a moderately left person, I think there is some truth to these critiques. But I also find it ironic that the accusation is, essentially, “you are being as irrational and non-factual as we are!”

Markets, socialists, and the welfare state

Even though the French Revolution did not succeed in establishing a new constitutional order, it did upend economic institutions. And because the Revolution led to a lot of wars, it also upended institutions in countries other than France. According to classic research, “evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850.”

Which is to say that in practice, the progress of the then-left laid the groundwork for the emergence of modern capitalism — a system of abstract property rights and formal legal equality, in contrast to the older system of guild privileges, noble privileges, and complicated land entitlements.

Capitalist institutions plus technological progress equals prosperity, but this led to a new set of debates about what to do with that prosperity.

The left impulse is toward leveling of hierarchies. In the specific circumstances of 1789, that meant reducing feudal privileges and building a more capitalist economy. But almost immediately, some (on the left) began calling for the leveling of general economic disparities, arguing that the original leveling was not driven by a fussy technocratic objection to the operation of feudalism but by a generalized principle of equality. Over the course of the 19th century, the right reconstituted itself to include defense of the interests of new capitalist economic elites, as well as old landed elites and (to the extent they exist) feudal prerogatives. It’s the left that gave the new economic order its name, capitalism, and that spawned socialist and anarchist critiques of it.

But the right itself is a little ambivalent on capitalism.

The 19th century German right included captains of industry, but the hard-core of the right was the landowning nobility and their sons in the officers’ corps. The political practice of this tendency was in the direction of aggressive nationalism, international conflict, and catastrophic war, all of which are much worse for business interests than a chill liberalism of free markets and free trade.

The UK was untouched by this revolution, but clearly influenced by the same left-right issues. In the first half of the 19th century, the political left called for the repeal of “corn laws” that propped up the price of food in order to benefit aristocratic landowners, and the Liberal Party was forged by this effort at repeal. Because the left believes in leveling, under Gladstone in the late 19th century, they pushed reform acts that move the country toward democracy.

Left and right are largely about religion, but of course, the trouble with religion is that there’s more than one of them.

In the UK context, the party of the church and of hierarchy is the party of the Church of England. The leveling and secular impulse favored Catholic emancipation. And through Catholic emancipation, it incorporated demands for Irish Home Rule. The Liberals began advocating for a welfare state, but were supplanted by a further-left party, Labor, which eventually nationalized a number of industries. By the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s program of economic liberalism (“neo”-liberalism) is right-wing politics — and, of course, she was anti-abortion by British standards, though not by the standards of the more religious United States.

In the multi-party politics of Scandinavia, you can see this pattern recur in a hyper-literal way. The main center-right political party in Denmark is called Venstre, which means “left,” because when it was founded, formal legal equality and free markets were the left position. Today, the somewhat-left position is markets with a welfare state, and the left-left position is a range of anti-capitalisms. But the principles at stake here continue to have more to do with hierarchy and social order than capitalism per se. Long Island Republican NIMBYs who resisted Kathy Hochul’s zoning reform are anti-market, but they’re not wrong to see themselves as upholding the social order, just like Prussian junkers or the British landed gentry with their grain tariffs.

Hierarchy and pluralism

The primary structural weakness of left politics is that most people mostly like their traditions.

But the structural weakness of right politics is that hierarchy is exclusionary. It’s one thing to defend religion, but whose religion? If you go too far with secular leftism, you can alienate all kinds of people. But if you’re chill, you can have religious minority groups inside your big tent coalition. We’re not taking prayer out of school because we’re trying to defame God and brainwash your children into secularism, we’re just trying to be fair to members of religious minority groups!

Similarly nationalism. Nationalism is normally a right-wing impulse: You are crafting a hierarchy in which your people stand above the others. But a Catalan nationalist may still find herself on the left, opposing the forces of Spanish nationalism.

In America, we have racism. Slavery was an economic system based on racial hierarchy. Jim Crow was a system with economic aspects, but it’s fundamentally a system of freestanding social hierarchy. In Du Bois’ formulation, white America received a “public and psychological wage” from the hierarchical system. And to be an advocate of white racial interests was to be on the right politically, while the formal left position was racial egalitarianism. But if you’re an Islamist citizen of Israel, you’re aligned with the political left, even though your actual ideas are kind of conservative. Similarly, impulses toward Black nationalism embed a person in a left political coalition in the United States, as does allegiance to the Black church.

The same leveling impulse that leads toward a politics of pluralism, however, can also pose some really tough dilemmas.

The welfare state has been a very successful leveling project. But it depends implicitly on a kind of nationalism and boundary-drawing. We have a special obligation to ensure that the prosperity of our country is shared broadly with its people. Throughout the contemporary west, the rise of abstract moral cosmopolitanism on the left is causing political problems related to immigration and especially to refugee flows. Who is the “we” in “we are all equal?” Similarly with the domestic racial politics of the United States. The basic principle that everyone should be treated equally without regard to race is actually more controversial than conservatives like to admit, as you see any time you ask them about racial profiling and statistical discrimination. But even equal treatment is distinct from the leveling impulse toward trying to achieve exact proportionality in every social institution. There are ways to provide more equal access to advanced coursework, but there is a certain true left notion that is uncomfortable with the idea that some people are better at some things than other people.

The same — but different

When Calvin Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts, the Boston Police Department went on strike. This was illegal under Massachusetts law, Coolidge had the striking cops fired, and he put together an emergency reserve force to maintain public order that featured many Harvard undergraduates as officers — something I can’t imagine seeing today.

I mention this just to clarify that I’m aware political alignments change over time.

In particular, major social classes that were once crucially important are so small as to be essentially irrelevant in contemporary politics. We still have farms and agricultural interests, but the idea of big picture class conflict between major landowners and landless peasants or tenant farmers is not meaningful in contemporary politics, in the United States or anywhere else. I think most people underestimate the extent to which the traditional working class base of the New Deal Democrats and midcentury European social democratic parties has diminished among native-born citizens of advanced democracies.

JFK won an election in which a majority of the adult population hadn’t finished high school — today’s typical non-college voter would have been an educated elite in 1960. And, of course, concerns about specific issues come and go.

But what I’m trying to say here is that there is a recognizable structure to these debates. And there are reasons why the environmental movement has influence over the same political party that defends abortion rights and wants to tax billionaires to establish a fully refundable Child Tax Credit. And there are reasons why the party that wants to ban abortion also wants to yank Medicaid from poor kids. These movements feature contradictions — the party of law and order also wants to eliminate the federal program to hire police officers, because fiscal tradeoffs don’t care about the logical structure of your ideology. But the logical structure is still there, shaping ideas and events. And part of what makes for happy political outcomes is elite actors successfully navigating these competing impulses to try to address problems rather than dreaming of a total victory where they wipe out the other side.