[Update at the end]
When I offered my definition of "The Left" a number of Commenters made some very trenchant criticisms and suggestions. The entire discussion has been educational for me and leads me to some tentative conclusions which I will present before I try to define "The Right" in a future post.
A number of people (including, especially, Mrs. ShrinkWrapped) pointed out, in various different ways, that our labels for people tend to be much too restrictive to do justice to the depth and complexity of people's political thinking. This is unquestionably true. Ideally, whenever discussing an issue that is in the public square, we should define exactly what we think the position of our opponents consists of and work from that, without the shorthand of labels, which too often are misleading, incomplete, and too easily lead to the replacement of rational and engaged disagreement with straw man arguments.
At the same time, this can become rather cumbersome. If we are discussing the difficulty of combating Islamic fascism, it is useful to have a shorthand which encompasses those who tend to take positions that make effective prosecution of the war more difficult. (Please note a caveat; I am talking about those who think we should not be at war, or are prosecuting the war too vigorously, or have taken too much power to the executive branch. All those issues have been argued ad infinitum and will continue to be argued and that is not my interest here.) Many, perhaps most, of those people identify themselves as "liberals" (a term that often appears to be used interchangeably with "leftists") and present themselves as anti-war. There is a line between those who criticize the conduct of the war, or even criticize the decision to go to war in Iraq, as ineffective and counter-productive, and those who seem to actively prefer that America (and the Iraqi people) suffer, as long as it injures George Bush, but this line is easily blurred. Additionally, the decision to go to war was fought and decided during the 2004 elections; those who oppose the war would seem to me to have the burden of showing some new evidence for their positions rather than continually recycling old arguments and canards. When they fail to make the rudimentary effort to construct convincing arguments, it suggests they are either on the Far Left or a more ignoble species of political opportunists who value their own short term political success over the long term good of the country.
Which leads to another criticism raised in the comments.
The differentiation of Left from Right politically is only one important axis upon which there is significant political disagreement. Dick Meyer, who casts a particularly acute eye on the political world, yesterday on his blog wrote 'We Know What's Best For You', a look at a new recommendation for the Democratic party:
My hunch is that Democrats will capture House and Senate seats but not the House or Senate. And if they do, the victory will be fleeting and they will do poorly in 2008.
That's a hunch, no more, and I admit it. But I felt it as a certainty when I read a column by The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne this week. Dionne was arguing with a fellow liberal who wrote what the Democrats need to do is destroy today's "radical individualism" and replace it with "a politics of a "common good." That's fine, Dionne said, but we need to hear "more about self-interest, rightly understood."
That phrase made me cringe. It still does.
"Self-interest, rightly understood" is a fancy-pants way of saying, "I know what is in your interest better than you do." It is, in my view, a politically stupid and morally diseased position. Democrats, by temperament, are slightly more susceptible to it than Republicans.
He integrates this with a discussion of Isaiah Berlin's concepts of "Negative" and "Positive" Liberty and describes how both parties include elements of both:
Negative liberty means simply that one is free from interference by the state and others, that one has a zone of liberty and in that zone there can be no interference so long as another's liberty isn't constrained. What you do in the zone of negative liberty is your business.
Positive liberty takes a dim view of simple negative liberty, arguing that it is meaningless unless a person has a real, positive freedom - the power "to do" vital things. Being left alone, in the world view, is meaningless if you don't have the power "to do" the important things, whatever they may be – get an education, earn a fair wage, live in an alienated society.
Negative liberty is the ethos of classic liberalism, not 'liberalism' in the partisan sense that the word is typically used in America today. Its essence is, "I know what's best for me, leave me alone."
Positive liberty, according to Berlin, is the ethos of idealism and great political dreams. Not content with "leave me alone liberalism," the positive libertarian thinks people must have the power to do and be certain things in order to be free in "meaningful" ways.
This is an extremely important distinction. I suspect the vast majority of Americans are classical liberals, who do not see human beings as perfectible and do not support using government power to coerce "perfect" behavior. I suspect this is, in fact, a more important distinction for American voters than traditional Left versus Right; for the last 30 years, the Left has been much more associated with "Positive" liberty than the Right, and as with all politic parties that gain power for a long period of time, they took things too far. The Left was officially repudiated in the 1994 election but the unelected Left (especially in Academia, Media, and Hollywood) have been fighting to regain power since. When the Right overstepped its bounds, it was slapped down, but the long term trend back toward more traditional American "Negative" liberty continues.
Additionally, those who take positions that derive from notions of "Positive" liberty tend to accept the ethos that "the end justifies the means" and this is always dangerous.
Which raises another criticism.
Alan pointed out that when we criticize our opponents we are at risk of constructing a straw man built out of our own projections. I would suggest that while that happens (witness those who want to limit our speech in the name of sensitivity to themselves while insisting upon their free speech right to spew hatred toward others) it is more likely that labels become caricatures and exaggerations:
This is why I naturally am very suspicious of any claim that one side of the political spectrum is inherently bad. That is a CLASSIC sign of projection -- as is the tendency to exaggerate. Again, speaking in psychological terms it suggests that the individual is really engaging in some sort of compensation that invariably distorts his or her perception of events.
I agree that we should be very careful of making such claims. My comment that triggered much of this was "the Left has always been anti-American." I think if I had restricted this to the Far Left, those who would use any means at their disposal to force America and Americans to do what they think is best, are indeed anti-American. This of course refers equally to the Far Right. Skinheads and White Supremacists who believe they know what is best for us and are willing to kill in order to enforce their vision of America are dangerous anti-Americans, as well. However, the Far Right has been marginalized in the last 30-40 years, while portions of the Far Left inhabit a place of honor in the middle of the Democratic Party.
Yet another axis is between those who would continue to be actively engaged, occasionally interventionist, in the world, and neo-isolationists. There are many on the Left and Right who would support actions in various parts of the world, though they might disagree at times on where and how; there are also many on both sides who would like us to bring all our troops home and disengage. I think that is a naive position but a position that one can argue without demonizing the other side.
My plan for this blog (which I am certain I will slip with some regularity) will be to avoid labels when possible, but occasionally, for my blogging purposes, using Left and Right will allow me to be slightly more terse (a relief to many of you) when I describe political positions, even when there are many different views on the particulars.
Ultimately, labels can be important, but they are only useful when we understand what we mean by them. By offering my own working definition of Left and Right, you will know what and who I mean when I use the terms.
Update: The Anchoress makes the point that both sides do it, but with differing emphasis; she also points out a rarely discussed danger of "politicizing everything":
Meyer suggests - rightly - that both right and left have their agendas, that the left is more inclined to concern itself with “what you eat or drink,” while the right is more inclined to hammer you for having or not having faith, etc. He, unsurprisingly, makes the left’s goals sound slightly more noble than the right’s but that is a picayune observation I must make only to needle him a bit. His main point is sound: both sides would, if they could, over-parent their fellow Americans. I agree that the right, which is more concerned with preserving individual liberties, is less-inclined to the totalitarian nanny-statism the left loves. But we’ve got a few folks on our side who wouldn’t mind snapping the whip and getting the trains to run on time, so to speak, if they could. It’s unavoidable.
But what I have learned, in these past few days as I have cut down on my news/blog reading, is that when we insist on politicizing everything, subjecting everything to pass under the lens of our particular ideologies, we tend to suck the joy, and the vibrancy, out of what we are experiencing. We become prune-faced Jane Hathaways, concerned with how things measure up on the charts of our political orthodoxies - that all the rules are being covered - and as we do so, well, we become as joyless and frustrated as that rigid character.
She then moves from the general to the particular and relates this to parenting. I think her observations are very sharp; you should read it all.
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