One of the most common phrases that comes up when I hear people talking politics is Left and Right. ‘They’re far left’, ‘they’re extreme right’, ‘I’m a centrist’. I think that these ideas have not only run their course, but now they’re pointless and devoid of any meaning to political discourse.

Left and Right come from french politics at a time when that country underwent a lot of upheaval – the revolution, many centuries ago. That country, the world, and society as a whole, has changed a lot since them. In many places these same terms have wildly different meanings and interpretations, and in recent political discourse historical conventions have often been ignored or terms like this mis-used to the point that they don’t have much meaning.

The traditional view of left and right in many European countries is a totally different spectrum to the left and right as used within American politics¹. Centrist political movements with broad appeal can have wildly different motivations that the typical left/right spectrum cannot capture, despite often being assigned to one side – For example, should we assign environmental activism to the left or right when a majority of people in a society are concerned with the impact of climate change? Should we continue to describe a party like the UK’s Labour as left when many of it’s policies have shifted from it’s founding values, in a country where there isn’t really a viable socially progressive alternative? What impact does a figure like Trump have when he calls his opponent ‘radical left’, when by much of the world’s standards Harris is moderate?

I think it is still true that many people would identify with a left and a right, but my feeling is that is more because we continue to ascribe importance to that spectrum, rather than an intrinsic truth that people fit somewhere on it. If we started using different terminology, people might describe themselves differently.

I can also understand from an editorial standpoint that spinners, journalists, and broadcasters would want something simple to be able to describe the state of politics, and the left-right spectrum has for so long fit that role that changing may seem like a huge upheaval for not much return. But for me the role of the news is to inform people, and to be as objective as possible understanding that everyone has underlying biases. By using a more diverse range of political indicators, more objective language, words which have clearer meaning and so are more difficult to corrupt, I think we would all be in a much better place.

Going beyond a one dimensional spectrum, how could we look at politics? I have often seen two-dimensional planes used. The advantage of these is that they still clearly display the relations of different political ideas and movements in relation to each other, and you can tailor the axes depending on what issues you want to discuss. These axes can be more concrete than vaguely define left/right. Such as Authoritarian-Libertarian mapped against Conservative-Progressive, which I think as a starting point would be a good drop-in replacement for the frequently used left/right. 2-Dimensional frameworks also make it more difficult to employ us-vs-them rhetoric, and divide and conquer tactics like that are very harmful to politics.

We should also do more to separate different policies when running comparisons. For example, when classifying a movement that is economically libertarian and progressive, that does not necessarily mean these same actors are socially libertarian and progressive. In many cases, the exact opposite is true. Both one and two dimensional scales can fail to capture this.

But this leads to a difficult challenge. Do you then move to 3 dimensional analyses, which risk becoming convoluted and unhelpful during discourse? Do you use 2-dimensional descriptions for each and every policy area, which risks becoming difficult to analyse and compare concretely?

I’m not a political scientist so I don’t know the answer, but I do know that we need something better than right left. And for me, if journalists, pundits, commentators and regular people started using different and more objective descriptions, no matter what they are, that is a step in the right direction.

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Wikipedia has a nice summary of some alternatives. Which do you like? Please leave a comment.

1. All of this makes American election cycles particularly annoying to us non-Americans. ↩︎