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In the United States, we shorten most political arguments into the categories of left or right. Lets explore what left wing and right wing means, and where it comes from.
Definition of terms:
Capitalism – An economic system where private businesses and individuals own factories, land, and resources, and produce goods for profit in a market. The government sets some rules but doesn't run the companies.
Socialism – An economic system where the people of the country or the state owns major industries and resources, and the resources of the country aimed aimed at improving people's lives, and meeting their needs rather than making profit for business owners.
Communism – A hypothetical way to organize society where there is no state, no money, no private property, and everyone shares everything according to need, while everyone works according to their ability. No country has ever achieved it; the USSR, China, and Cuba called themselves communist but were/are actually state-controlled socialist systems moving toward (or away from) that goal.
Origins of Left V Right
People in this part of the world have been using ‘left and right’ to distinguish political ideas since the late 1700’s. Going back to France of that time, the King called an assembly of all the important people who had political power. The upper-class noble people sat in one part of the room, priests sat in one part, while everyone else (merchants, farmers, city workers) sat in a third section of the room. Eventually disagreements broke out on how to form and improve the French Society. Those who wanted to preserve the monarchy, the nobility, and the church all gathered in the right of the room, and those who wanted to end the rule of kings and queens, equally distribute farm land and remake the society from scratch gathered on the left. The sides they chose to sit on was random and meant nothing at the time, but it stuck to this day.
The left at that time wasn't unified. They agreed on some things, but their disagreements ran deep. The moderate left wanted to keep the monarchy, but with a constitution and laws the King had to follow. Further left, you had people who wanted a king as a figurehead, with no real power. All the way on the edge, you had men like Robespierre and later the sans-culottes ("men without silk pants” a.k.a. the poor). These ‘far left’ men believed a society could only be free if it was built on equality, and a society with kings, nobles, and enslavers was unequal at its core. Such a society couldn't be reformed; it had to be torn down and rebuilt. They succeeded for a time. They got rid of the king, abolished the nobility, and even outlawed slavery. But that new France didn't last. Eventually the right wing, with none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, prevailed. They brought back the king, tried to re-enslave Black people, and crushed the left.
From the very beginning of this right-left divide, the argument wasn’t simply about France, or even about kings. It was about the way a society structures itself, how people relate to one another. The right-wing defended the idea of kings, religion, master and slave, and the left attacked those ideas as incompatible with a free and modern society. The side of the room they sat on was accidental, but the political rupture that it illustrated was real, and stuck with us for more than two centuries.
Early USA concepts of the left-right political bird.
Back when the 13 colonies were still ruled by the English King., they were already arguing over hierarchy. Decades before the French sat down on the left and right side of the room, the Americans were already divided between those who wanted to keep the English monarchy, and saw rebellion as destructive and chaotic and those who wanted to break away from the king and start a new republic free of the king. One side defended the old hierarchy, and the other wanted to end that hierarchy and set up a new one. We know how the American revolution ended. No more king.
By the 1850’s, in the USA, the left-right divide was no longer about kings and priests, it was about chattel slavery. The right wing, at that point was the Democratic party, and southern plantation owners. They defended slavery as good, natural, and essential to order in the south. Slaves being ruled by masters in little plantation kingdoms was their project. The left, on the other hand was the Republican party. Its far left wing, the abolitionists argued that a modern free society was incompatible with slavery. They demanded immediate freedom to the millions of enslaved Black people. The right and left fought a bloody civil war and the left won. The constitution was re-written, granted birthright citizenship to Black people, granted Black men the right to vote, and outlawed slavery in the USA, unless used as punishment for a crime. Folks had new names, Abolitionists, confederates, unionists, but the left right pattern remained.
Democratic – Republican shift (The New Deal)
In the early 1930’s the USA was suffering under the Great Depression. Families were starving, waiting on food lines all across the USA. At the same time, the “communists” in Russia weren’t doing bad. Their economy was growing, and they were hiring scientists and specialists from the USA and Western Europe to keep building. This horrified officials in the United States. Communism was looking good to many Americans, so the Roosevelt administration began implementing social programs to give Americans some of the same benefits the communists offered their people. Programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and welfare for families with children. Every elder today who lives on Social Security should give thanks to the communists and left wingers of the 1930’s.
These policies were known as the New Deal, and the right wing at the time despised them. Conservatives called the New Deal socialism, communism and any negative name they could think of. Republican politicians at the time made arguments that the federal government should stay out of people’s personal life, and if people were starving, they should work harder to make money and feed themselves. Similar to Republican arguments today. They still speak negatively about New Deal benefits, but they can never revoke them. Too many people, including their own voters rely on Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security, disability.
Civil Rights & Black Rebellion 1960’s
In the time of Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar, the folks in the political room switched chairs again. This time Black Americans were on the left, demanding a liberty the New Deal promised but never delivered. The right wing consisted of liberal and conservative whites who strove to maintain legal, state-sanctioned white domination. Again, the "communists" in Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba pointed at the federal government and asked: "How can you lecture us about human rights when you lynch Black people in the streets?" Fearing a rise in left-wing thought. Communism, Marxism, Maoism, etc., the federal government faced the same choice: give ideological ground to the left, or strike another New Deal, this time with Black folks explicitly included. Eventually Kennedy was killed, and his Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, explicitly giving Black people the legal right to vote, backed by the state. He remarked to an aide:
| “ | We have lost the South for a generation. | ” |
He was right. The right wing has since taken every opportunity to oppose Black progress. The Republicans, once called "The Party of Lincoln," became the party of the "Southern Strategy." As Lee Atwater—advisor to Reagan and H.W. Bush—explained it:
| “ | You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.' | ” |
—Lee Atwater quoted, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/ | ||
Up to today, the Republicans haven't changed this strategy.
The Modern Political Discussion Hall
At this point a pattern should be evident. In the USA today, the right wing generally means pro-capitalist, pro-big business, pro-social hierarchies that put White men at the front, pro-war, and willing to throw any other country under the bus in the process. The left, on the other hand, generally favors capitalism with strong regulations, or the outright destruction of capitalism. The left is focused on equity and egalitarianism across race, class, and nations. The national motto of revolutionary France, where we began this essay, was Liberté, égalité, fraternité—liberty, equality, fraternity. Most Americans don't perfectly fit in either box, but these are the sides that most political arguments fall between.
In the last 10 years, the right has opposed and rolled back policies they associate with Black progress or left-wing economics. The Voting Rights Act, signed by LBJ and discussed in the last section, has been gutted. Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama are openly making it difficult for Black people to exercise their voting power. Affirmative Action, which the right has associated with Black people since the beginning, was outlawed. Medicaid, food stamps, Obamacare, and student loan relief have all been attacked and minimized in one way or another. The arguments are usually masked as fiscal responsibility, limited government, or personal responsibility. But we just read how Atwater laid it out. You don't say "nigger," you say something abstract, like fiscal responsibility or limited government. Effectively, we get the same outcome. Defend existing hierarchies—Whites and White billionaires at the front, Blacks all the way in the back and in the gutter—and stop any and all efforts to change or get rid of those hierarchies.
In all these decades, the right hasn't stopped attacking those countries they label as communist: Cuba, Venezuela, China, and Russia when convenient. These labels are meaningless when coming from the right. They're weapons, pure and simple—used to whip Americans into a frenzy so they'll support future military action. Russia today isn't even attempting to reach communism. It's a capitalist oligarchy (rule by a few ultra-wealthy people) run by former KGB officials. China is a state capitalist system which may or may not be working toward communism. Cuba and Venezuela have socialist elements in their economies, but due to endless economic and military aggression from the US and her flunkies, they've been unable to even attempt moving toward communism. The function of calling them communist is to mark them as enemies, justify hostility, and distract from problems at home. It works every time.
We should always use our critical thinking to notice where the political boundaries of debate are drawn. From MSNBC to Fox News, from CNN to whatever right-wing podcast (Rogan, Schultz, Von, Fuentez, Tate, Myron Gaines, etc.), they all share a basic agreement. They are pro-capitalist, pro-American power, pro-empire. They argue about things at the margin—strategy, cultural issues, personalities—but they almost never discuss whether the US military should be in so many countries, whether billionaires should be allowed to exist, or even whether right-wing pedophiles should be allowed to be president. They'll attack those they label as left-wing pedophiles every chance they get. Never the right-wingers though. From MSNBC to Nick Fuentes, they never discuss alternatives to capitalism, or even the problems with capitalism. Actual left-wing voices—anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-working class, pro-Black—are mostly absent from the political debate in American media. All of American media ranges from far right to right of center. There is some left-wing thought and debate in the USA, but it's in unions, in housing organizations, in some sections of the internet, and in very few college classrooms. It's not in power in the USA, not on TV, and not in the national debate. This left-right pattern was established in France in 1789 and continues to this day.
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