Ellipsoidal transverse Mercator projection, via mapthematics.com, showing accurate relations from pole to pole along the Greenwich Meridian, unlike the familiar standard Mercator projection, in which the polar regions are enormously distorted, Greenland as big as Canada, and Antarctica big enough for a planet in its own right, so vast there’s no place to put the poles themselves. This version has the same kind of distortion, but displaced to the equatorial Pacific, swelling Indochina and India, Central and western South America, to monstrous proportions and scattering Indonesia and the Philippines to the farthest corners.
What I really like about it is the alternative vision of the Poles as being at the center of their respective hemispheres, rather than the extreme—a map with two centers rather than one—which in turn suggests an alternative vision of the concept of political polarization, which seems to be a geographical metaphor (I don’t know what other kind of metaphor it would be; not light, or electromagnetism).
That is, if political polarization is defined as “the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes” (Wikipedia), it could be just as well understood as the concentration of political affiliations around two centers in two ellipses, of which one is generally the government (the governing party, or governing coalition in a multiparty system) and the other the opposition; a Left Pole and a Right Pole if you like (where the pole of government flips from time to time, the way the Earth’s magnetic poles do every 200,000 or 300,000 years, only with elections). While the extremes are the places farthest from both, not especially north/left or south/right, around the International Date Line. An increase in polarization isn’t necessarily the respective parties growing more “extreme”, just of their opposition becoming more perspicuous; it’s a decline in the number of undecideds, as the need to take sides gets clearer.
And the “centers” don’t represent some kind of mathematical midpoint on an ideological scale, but a meeting point of coalition building, where various tendencies and interest groups come together.
***
I’ve been trying for a while to find a way of rethinking the left-right distinction as something other than a one-dimensional array, composed of atomized individuals full of anxiety over their status relative to the persons on either side (who's more Left, or more Center, than whom?); but rather as a coalition of groups of allies with shared interests gathered into bigger groups with fewer shared interests but aggregating more democratic power.
Such was the origin of “left” and “right” as political concepts, at the session of the French Estates-General in spring 1789, called for the first time in 150 years by Louis XVI in the hope of raising some desperately needed tax money, and held at the Versailles complex, in a temporary hall behind the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs (house of the king’s “little pleasures”, where royal festivities and entertainments were organized), opening on May 5 as depicted in a contemporary engraving by Isidore-Stanislaus Helman (1743-1806) and Charles Monnet (1732-1808):
With the king, queen, and princes of the blood ranged on the stage under a fantastical baldachin, the 300 or so delegates of the First Estate (the clergy, mostly parish priests inclined to sympathize with the problems of their congregations but also frightened at the thought of going against their bishops and other superiors) ranged in their white cassocks to the presiding officer’s right, the 300 of the Second Estate (the nobility, generally conservative but with exceptions of whom the most famous were the Marquis de La Fayette, veteran of the American Revolution, and the radical duke Philippe d’Orléans) to his left, and the 600 of the Third (commoners, largely lawyers dressed in black) in the back, while a massive and eager audience looked on from parterre and balcony behind the Doric columns, vividly portrayed in the foreground of the engraving.
The parliamentary dice were, naturally, loaded by the king’s proposal that they should vote “by orders”, that is with separate votes for each of the Estates, with each vote from the First and Second counting double against those of the Third, so that as long as the clergy and nobility stuck together they would always have a majority, which meant that the 96% of the nation represented by the delegates of the Third Estate would end up paying all the taxes, as per tradition, whether they consented or not, and some of them were demanding the vote “by head” with all three orders voting together and all voices equal, to give themselves a meaningful voice.
After that opening and on through late June, each Estate held its own meetings separate from the others, and the Third, still in the provisional hall, buckled down immediately, on May 7, to this question of the vote, with a faction led by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, known as Mirabeau, suggesting they should refuse to present their credentials except at a meeting in which all three would be combined into an assembly of the nation, assemblée nationale, and vote by head.
At this point they hadn’t really thought out how they were going to vote themselves—a roll call of some 600 members would be unbearably tedious. The logical solution would be what’s still known in Britain as a “division”, the physical separation of the yeses from the noes, but they didn’t have division lobbies as the House of Commons does. Instead, they just arranged themselves on either side of the table at which the chairman was seated, Mirabeau’s supporters (in the majority) to the left and those who wanted to stick to the king’s plan to the right. That’s the exact moment when “left” and “right” began to have political meanings.
They also took to sitting in the same grouping, over the next few weeks, as an impasse continued over the credentials question and they got to know one another, and compared notes on the issues they had brought from their urban and rural constituents—the demand for equitable taxation, judicial reform, and reform of the seignorial system, plus the idea that France needed a written constitution, pushed by Mirabeau and the Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (a priest, but known for his political writings and a Third Estate delegate for Paris)—those who favored reforms being the ones who were sitting on the left and those who opposed them on the right. I don’t know that anybody on the right side thought of themselves as placed with respect to the king’s representative in analogy to Jesus “at the right hand of the Father”, but one of my best sources, a lovely 2014 anthropological analysis of “Political Left and Right: Our Hands-On Logic” by Frits Bienfait and Walter E. A. van Beek, suggests they may have been unconsciously replicating an ancient cultural pattern.
On June 10, Sieyès successfully moved that the First and Second Estates should be invited to join them in the big hall to formally create the National Assembly, on the 13th some of the parish priests took up the invitation, and on the 17th some more, along with some aristocrats, and they did so proclaim themselves. Louis responded as you would expect a wooden-headed authoritarian to do, by shutting down the Menus-Plaisirs (for “repairs”) on the 20th. The new Assembly then moved to the royal tennis courts bulding where they swore the famous oath to remain united until they had prepared a constitution, adding by the 25th a total of some 163 clergymen and about 40 nobles to their ranks, and on the 27th the king’s resistance broke down and he ordered the rest of the First and Second Estates to join them back in the Menus-Plaisirs. That, to my way of thinking, was the actual revolution.
And the left-right distinction? It seems to have been lost temporarily, but was then in a sense restored, not on purpose but in response to the room’s problematic acoustics, as Bienfait and van Beek report:
In a radical transformation of the chamber in the days and nights of 22 and 23 July, the seating arrangements were changed: rows of staged seating were erected along the side walls as in a modern sports stadium, and the desk used by the president and his assistants was moved to what used to be a side wall. As a consequence, the predominantly revolutionary Third Estate, which used to sit towards the back, now sat to the left of the president, while the highest ranks of the clergy and nobility, who were most sympathetic to the existing regime and used to sit at the front, now sat to the right of the president.
The architect Pâris, who was responsible for this renovation, had therefore made an important, although unconscious, step in the physical confirmation of the left/right polarity.
And this was reconstructed after the Assembly moved to Paris and the old riding academy building called the Salle de Manège. Moreover, two years later an attempt was made to break the thing down, but the words survived as political terms without their spatial reference, as they do today.
In December 1791 it was decided to refurbish this chamber as well. The benches were set closer together and the president’s seat was moved to the opposite side of the chamber, partly in a move to undo the division and radicalisation of the members into a coté gauche and a coté droite, which was considered to be increasingly problematic.
Dulaure (1793, p. 3) attempted to describe the new situation as follows: “In the Assembly the Patriots were in the habit of sitting to the right of the president, with the Montagne [the extreme revolutionaries led by Marat] on the extreme right hand side. This used to be called the left hand side, but now the president’s chair has been moved, this area is to his right. The opposite side, where the Aristocrats used to sit, used to be the right hand side, but is now to the left of the president”. And he added: “I do not want to assert that the Montagne and those that sit around them are all members of this party; I know some who sit there who are not fanatical supporters of any party, but continue to sit there by force of habit”. This ‘force of habit’, which just a few years previously had worked so well to maintain the left/right division in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, had quite a different effect here. The newspapers could make neither head nor tail of it; reporters tried to explain the situation with phrases like ‘the old left, now the right’ and ‘the old right, now the left’, or ‘those of the people’ and ‘those of the king’, but none of these terms gained acceptance. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ remained popular labels for the political divisions in the Assembly, although now they had lost any physical relevance – and for the first time were used purely to indicate political ideologies.
***
But (just to repeat) not to indicate a position on a leftness-to-rightness scale, but a position in a network of social relationships. You are left because you share your goals and interests with other leftists; because you agree to support theirs and they agree in turn to support yours. The French revolutionaries were people enraged by tax unfairness and people enraged by poverty, people sick of the conspicuous consumption of the aristocrats and people sick of the oppression of the church, people who wanted freedom for the slaves in the Caribbean and people who wanted emancipation for the Jews in Paris, Freemasons and Catholics, worshipers of Reason and worshipers of Sentiment, but few if any who were equally committed to all the revolutionary projects, and many, perhaps, who were “sitting there by force of habit” because that’s where their friends sat, though they may not always have remembered what they were supposed to be excited about.
And the same would go for the French right back then as now, representing the interests of “the in-group whom the laws protect but do not bind” against those of “the out-group whom the laws bind but do not protect”. They were in alliances too, concerned with a variety of subgroups and a variety of laws, each individual with a different set or hierarchy of issues.
I think the one-dimensional or spectrum analysis must have gotten its start around the time of the 1848 upheavals in Europe, with the flourishing of the gargantuan Victorian “ism” systems, vast compendia attempting to unify philosophy and economics, with the habit of anarchists and communists accusing each other of not being left enough or bragging about being leftier than thou, everybody constructing a ranking. The resulting series of competitions did not do the movement any good. It’s worth mentioning that the only sect to end up achieving a real lasting political success, the social democracy originating with the 1875 Gotha program, began as an effort to bring two opposing tendencies into alliance, the Marxist Eisenachers and the Lassalleans of the General German Workers' Association, and Marx angrily criticized the Eisenachers for this disloyal compromising. (It’s especially ironic that the major difference between Marx and Lassalle was the latter’s acceptance of nationalism as a legitimate force, in view of the fact that it was nationalism, as Branko Milanovic has been saying, that finally put an end to European communism in the Warsaw Pact countries, USSR, and Yugoslavia; whereas social democracy still survives, in widely varying ways, in the independent nations of the European Union.)
The right constructed its own isms, of course, in competition with the left for intellectual cachet, starting I guess with the ideas of Hayek and Mises and their school, but it strikes me that they never took it quite as seriously, rightwing theorists of vastly different views remaining good friends—at some level they understood it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, and that they were just manufacturing a variety of shades of lipstick for the self-same pig.
It would have been foolish to argue which is the most truly rightwing philosophy, libertarianism or authoritarianism, when the two are really just opposite sides of one coin, the former to be applied to the in-group (laws that protect) and the latter to the out-group (laws that bind). The closest the right comes to a rightier-than-thou ranking is W.F. Buckley’s purely political formula:
“I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win.”
where “most right” doesn’t need to be defined; like pornography, you know it when you see it.
So it’s really the case that, while there’s support in the record for the idea of a spectrum of leftness, and a tiny bit of support for a spectrum of rightness, the idea of a measurable spectrum of all political opinion from “far left” to “far right”, including a “center”, gets none. It’s just a bad idea, and not really greatly improved by adding a second dimension as in the Nolan chart
(basically just an excuse for pretending libertarians really exist in the wild).
The rightwing approach to coalition building is now so promiscuous that it’s laughable, as when deeply a convinced libertarian atheist like Charles Koch lines up support for mad theocrats in the Holy Roller or Sedevacantist Catholic traditions, but one thing I’d wish for the US left to pick up from them is that ability to not feel threatened by a leftism that differs from one’s own. It’s the right that is literally wrong about everything, polarizing itself out of any possibility of contact. People who regard themselves as of the left have something you can connect with; make an effort to connect with it.
I’m thinking especially about the thing that’s been going on for a while now asserting a conflict between the aims of an intersectional “identity politics” and an economic opposition to capitalism, often couched in Buckleyan political terms (denouncing a candidate as not “viable”), usually launched by a “moderate” Democrat who lacks a strong commitment to either, usually in an appeal to the vote of some imaginary lunchpail white guy who used to have a factory job 70 years ago. Well, we apparently need the “moderate” Democrats too, if we want to win elections, but we shouldn’t let them prod us into that stupid debate. If you don’t like talking about racial/ethnic groups or sex/gender groups or ability groups or diversity/equity/inclusion, you don’t have to, but you don’t need to condemn somebody else who does; and same thing if you don’t like talking about economics. Everybody who’s part of the coalition is part of the coalition, and their voices must be heard. Politicians talk to their constituents, from Josh Gottheimer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and that’s how it should be. Kibbitzers like us should appreciate it, and not demand some particular ideological rigor of them, no matter our own opinions.
What counts is the spirit of the last bit of the Frank Wilhoit law, which rarely gets quoted, and which defines what we need to do in terms we all ought to be able to agree to:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Time is linear, so conflict between the past and the future — whether it's best to "conserve" or to "progress" — is always going to be one-dimensional.
How much of political conflict is about that past/future struggle? Probably not all of it, but time — the only true inescapable master of the universe — determines nearly everything in human affairs, including the movement of civilization (it's impossible to find a value neutral term: "progress"? "advancement"? "development"?).
Human mastery of the planet and its immediate surroundings is a manifestation of intelligence and imagination, the "big brains" Vonnegut correctly called out as the feature that separates us arbitrarily but fatally from the rest of nature. Imagination and intellect lead to society and art (aesthetics begins as early as flint arrowheads, as J. M. Roberts' omnibus world history stresses in its opening pages) and to religion, and to the first attempts to overcome nature's constraints — tribalism giving way to society; agriculture replacing hunting/gathering; the crossing of oceans etc. and then eventually to philosophy, morality, egalitarianism; the invention of concepts like "human rights" and "freedom" and "tolerance" and "crimes against humanity," all progressive monuments as enacted in 1215 and 1776 and 1799 and 1945 and onward.
Timothy Snyder interprets Mein Kampf as insisting that racial struggle for land and food is the only human truth and that all additional imposed social ideas, from Christianity to Capitalism to Communism, are Jewish (Hitler equates St. Peter with Trotsky) — so everything named above as monuments of civilization and progress is lumped together as a literally super-natural force (as he saw the Jews) to be eradicated; this is why Nazism can correctly be identified by Ian Kershaw as "a collapse of civilization."
These collapses, or retrograde movements, are obviously an unavoidable manifestation of the human condition, from the fall of Rome to the Reformation to Trumpism, but their very existence itself emphasizes the inescapability of that relentless progressive drive, away from superstition and "natural" (or animal/tribal) concretized behavior towards abstraction; science; the metaphysical and sublime. (William F. Buckley therefore was correct to say that a Conservative is someone who "stands athwart history yelling 'stop'!".) Reagan and Trump and Hitler all overtly want to go backwards, to return to something "great" that has been lost.
In the present context of "family and faith" vs. "woke-ism," the manifestation of that primary time-based historical linearity couldn't be more clear: as I argue relentlessly here and elsewhere, it's always about the question of human authority vs. the "natural" and the "divine" (both manifestations of pre-civilizational or early civilizational frameworks for determining the arrangement of society and the conception of the Good). David Brooks, Clarence Thomas, Tucker Carlson and all the rest are overtly rejecting intellect-based and enlightenment-based constructions of justice (we "social justice warriors," who presume to know better than God or Nature) — it's only by a deft re-arrangement of historical philosophy that they can use "Originalism" to put the Divine back into the American experiment and overturn its enlightenment foundations.
Obviously the dimensionality you're advocating — today and in the past — is meaningful and useful, and the strict linearity I'm advocating doesn't explain everything (even Timothy Snyder, my new favorite, allows that history, while not "repeating," does get into near-repetitive patterns, and Futurism can be right-wing, as can the effects of technological advancement). But I just don't see how Left vs. Right can be built without starting with past vs. future, and there's nothing more one-dimensional than that.
> (I don’t know what other kind of metaphor it would be; not light, or electromagnetism)
"Polarization" can mean a dynamic distortion of an electrically-neutral bound system so that it gains a dipole moment, deduced from the existence of the adjective "polarizable" as used in chemistry. Large atoms with diffuse electron clouds are "polarizable" in that when they become bound, their electron clouds can be distorted in this way. But in a sense, that is like your geographic metaphor, just in 3 dimensions.
> ... opposition becoming more perspicuous; it’s a decline in the number of undecideds, as the need to take sides gets clearer.
<nitpick>I think that's a misuse of "perspicuous," because perspicuity is a characteristic of utterances or minds, not of situations. "Focused" or even "obvious" would have been better.</nitpick>
A longer explanation of where the left-right distinction comes from than I've ever seen. I liked it.
IDK how deeply you looked into the assorted attempts at 2-D representations of political variation. Of the various attempts, I still like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart">Pournelle Chart</a>, which eschews axes like "totalitarian/libertarian" and "collectivism/individualism" in favor of "attitude toward the State" and "attitude toward planned social transformation." It has the advantage of not requiring that you treat "libertarians" as a real category, though they appear on the chart.