Field Guide to the Right Part I

This will be the first of an ongoing series (not necessarily guaranteed to appear sequentially) about major figures and trends on what is commonly called "the political right." I'll mix personal observation, news reports, and historical anecdotes and attempt to describe the major camps on the right. However, I'm going to digress a bit first and discuss "left-wing" vs. "right-wing" and "liberal" vs. "conservative."

Although liberalism as a philosophical and political movement predates the French Revolution - it influenced the United Provinces, for example, and the American Revolution - conservatism and the concepts of left- and right-wing have their origins there. The deputies of the Third Estate to the Estates-General of 1789, an assembly of the French population convened to discuss the issue of taxation in order to pay debts incurred during the American Revolution, represented the commoners (all of them, in theory; in practice, the bourgeoisie were represented). Since they sat to the left of the President of the assembly, and the liberal deputies to subsequent bodies such as the National Constituent Assembly and National Assembly continued to do so, they were known as the left wing. The nobles, the Second Estate, sat to his right, as did the more conservative deputies to the National Constituent Assembly and National Assembly, and therefore became known as the right wing.

Conservatism becomes defined in reaction to the French Revolution. Conservatives believed in the value of tradition and reacted against the abstract rationality embedded in the projects of the revolutionary governments of France. They often supported monarchy, although not necessarily out of support for the institution per se, but rather because it was traditional. Indeed, this is the essence of (classical) conservatism: reaction against liberalism's emphasis of abstract concepts and rationality in favor of tried-and-true methods and the natural development of human society.

Classical liberalism can be broadly understood to be supportive of free markets (laissez-faire capitalism), freedom to worship as one pleases, a commitment to the rational (re-)ordering of society, and cultural freedom - that is, living one's life as one pleases so long as it does not harm others. Politically, most liberals supported some form of republican government. Classical liberals took different positions on various issues, and there was no "liberal bible," although there was a broadly accepted canon, and thus no one liberal programme.

Wikipedia provides an excellent overview of these trends, and often provides links to titles for further reading.

However, classical liberalism, at least insofar as it addresses economic issues, is no longer considered very liberal. Indeed, advocacy of free trade is now often a hallmark of conservatism! Both camps understood the need for some government intervention in the economy, if only at the very basic level to ensure that the conditions necessary for capitalism to operate were maintained. Modern economic liberalism, however, advocates more state intervention in the economy in the form of social programs and fiscal policy as a means of stabilizing it and reducing the impact of economic downturns on the population.

Furthermore, even within liberalism and conservatism, there is a great deal of debate about how to understand these words. And who is left and who is right often depends on where you locate yourself on the political spectrum; an anarchist might consider a Marxist to be right-wing, as the Marxist believes that a state will be necessary following the revolution - the anarchist does not. Since left, right, liberal, and conservative are such murky terms, I have advocated elsewhere, following others, abandoning a one-dimensional political spectrum and moving toward a two-dimensional (at minimum) chart. See, for example, the following Wikipedia articles: Political compass, Nolan Chart, Pournelle chart. I'm not really satisfied with any of these, although the Pournelle Political Axes are the best of the three, IMO.

Someday, I'll even get around to publishing my own (3-dimensional) set of axes.

That's it for this post. I'll get to the real meat tomorrow.