RIGHT AND LEFT
I got an e-mail today that said:

"i love debating with people like you. i can't believe people can be as passionately right as I am left. damn!"

To tell the truth, I'm not actually comfortable with this characterization. "Right" and "left" have been re-defined so much by the Iraq war that I feel like a fraud when I join in using the terms this way. Quite literally, I don't know what I'm talking about.

I'll explain. Historically, the terms "right" and "left" emerged in the context of the French Revolution, and derived from the physical location within the Chamber of Deputies of the different political groupings.

Those who sat on the right were inclined towards the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI. They believed that God and religion should have a prominent place in public life. They felt that opening the door to civil and political rights would lead to chaos in France. They were suspicious of free thought. They were strong believers in "legitimacy" in foreign relations, respecting the powers that be, including mostly monarchies ruling by divine right, and in peace.

Those who sat on the left believed in freedom and rights, in republican and democratic forms of government. They were willing to dismiss the reigning "legitimacy" as rotten and sweep it away. In foreign policy, they were ready to proclaim themselves "for all peoples and against all kings" and plunge into revolutionary wars.

In 2003, the "left" wanted to maintain in power the absolutist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein for the sake of "legitimacy." They wanted to preserve order, and were afraid that bringing civil and political rights to the Middle East would bring chaos. They wanted "peace." The "right" meanwhile, proclaimed itself in favor of the Iraqi people but against the ruler; they found the reigning "legitimacy" rotten and were willing to sweep it away. They brought to Iraq freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free thought; they strove to erect a democratic and republican form of government there. For these objectives, they were willing to go to war.

Why have the right and left switched places?

In the case of the right, the reason is that this is the American Right we're talking about, and America is a liberal society to the core, right and left (in different ways). Still, the right is pretty conflicted about the war in Iraq.

In the case of the left, the story is stranger. For over a century, the left was always upping the ante. Liberal democracy became passe in the late 19th century, socialism and Marxism took over the "left" role, downplaying and discarding the liberty objective as the revolutionary idea increasingly obsessed new generations of leftists. This trend reached its climax in Soviet Russia, and Soviet communism retained its grip for three or four decades after the revolution of 1917-- after that, disillusion set in, but a strand in human character assures that some among the intelligentsia still lust after violent revolution, so the "hard left" is quite alive today. On the other hand, Eduard Bernstein in the late 10th century launched a different, nonrevolutionary trend, by which workers tried (with much success) to improve their lot within the system. This led to the social-democratic welfare state, a different kind of "left." After about the 1970s, though, neoliberal and free-market ideas made a comeback, especially in the US and the UK, and eventually the Labor Party and the Democrats were ratcheted to the right and largely embraced them, creating a third "left," or "center-left," represented by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. These three "lefts" seems so divergent that a reconciliation or coalition seems scarcely possible, but the Iraq war had the strange effect of bringing about just that. The communist far left opposed it in the spirit of its perennial paranoia and America-hatred; the social-democratic left opposed it from a muddle-headed semi-pacifism; and the pragmatic left (not Blair, of course, but many otherwise like-minded people) opposed it for international-law reasons and because a compelling national interest was lacking. So the divergent streams of the "left" flowed together again-- but very far from where they had begun, for they were now opposing everything that the "left" had originally defined itself by supporting, and supported everything the "left" had defined itself by opposing.

It seems time, then, to retire the term "left," because its meaning is so tangled that it sinks under the weight of its own contradictions. But what are we to call this real anti-war "left" coalition then, when the menagerie of ideas that cohabit in it can't be articulated into a coherent stream of thought, and only one issue (Iraq) and an ultimate ancestry in the left unites them? My suggestion: the "post-left."

The transformed right has a somewhat clearer unifying theme: freedom. Free markets, free Iraq, and so on.

So when I read this reader's letter, this is what it sounded like to me:

i love debating with people like you. i can't believe people can be as passionate for freedom as I am for the post-left. damn!

Maybe that helps you to see where I'm coming from?