The terms Left and Right have become ambiguous and self-contradictory. Today the term ‘right-wing’ is applied to diverse and opposed views such as the following:
♦ Those who favour private ownership and markets are often placed on the political Right, including those who are strong supporters of democracy and human rights.
♦ Those who put private property above everything, and care less about democracy, are also described as Right.
♦ Pro-market libertarians, who are so strongly against states that they oppose wars, are also described as Right.
♦ Nationalists that venerate the national state are also described as Right, even if they support democracy and individual rights.
♦ Fascists and racists are also seen as Right, including those who would pursue wars and would limit individual freedoms or rights
Hence the debased term Right now covers democrats and despots, peace-mongers and war-mongers, nationalists and individualists, and defenders and opponents of human rights. There is nothing about private ownership and markets that necessarily implies racism or belligerent nationalism. Yet these different things are conflated under the same label.
The word Left has also slipped into various contradictory usages:
♦ Advocates of substantial state intervention in the economy, typically with some planning and nationalized enterprises, are described as Left.
♦ Advocates of a minimal state, with autonomous communes instead of nationalized industry, are also described as Left.
♦ People who care less about democracy or liberty, and much more about public ownership, national planning or the abolition of poverty, are often described as Left.
♦ Champions of extended democracy, decentralization, popular sovereignty, individual liberty and freedom of expression are often described as Left.
Accordingly, the term Left is now applied to both statist centralizers and communitarian decentralizers, to both totalitarians and ultra-democrats, and to both minimizers and maximizers of liberty.
Both the Left and the Right have advocated forms of collectivism. The word fascism derives from its symbolic use of the fasces of Ancient Rome, with rods bound together to signify collective strength. Fascism subjected individualism to the collective whole. Similarly, nationalism extols the nation over the individual. If you insist that collectivism is Left, be warned that fascism and nationalism also incline in the same collectivist direction.
