A Century of American Left and Right, Excursus (1)
In which we begin a brief effort to establish clear definitions of a few key political terms.
Right off the bat I would like to take a pause in our examination of the politics of the past century in order to offer a broad view of the origins of the modern left and right and clarify some terminology.
One of the many pitfalls in modern political discourse arises from confusion over terms. When words mean different things in different contexts, or when words change their meanings or acquire new significance faster than usage can keep up, we misunderstand each other, often without realizing it. Disparagement and contempt are so pervasive in our political rhetoric that the subtle confusions arising from the misuse of terms can become obscured by the impertinent noise and pass unnoticed, silently contributing to the disfunction.
This is something that should be corrected at a large scale if we wish for improvement in our national conversations. In any case, it’s something we can and should attend to here, for the sake of clarity in our explorations of the American left and right.
What is the left? What is the right? Do the two terms have inherent meaning? Or, as their names suggest, do their meanings depend on where you’re standing and which way you’re facing? Does right mean “conservative”? Does left mean “woke”? Is the left “progressive” or “liberal”? And what does “liberal” mean, anyway? These terms and others stem from a common root, which splits into shoots that re-entwine in ways that are hard to keep track of. Often two branches lose sight of their common trunk and experience each other as alien, when in fact they are siblings.
Some readers will already be aware of the subtleties and histories of these matters, but it’s clear that many people use political terms differently and sometimes wrongly. Even high-profile opinion shapers and media outlets are guilty of playing fast and loose with terminology, and so it’s very understandable that many would get lost in the tangle. I think it would be useful to revisit the development of modern political parlance, generally to help orient our present-day conversations, but particularly to simplify the project of thinking through the history of left and right as proposed in the previous essay.
We begin with “Liberalism,” which has been central to American politics from the founding up to today. Liberalism has roots in theological and philosophical authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who began to explore ideas and methods of inquiry that required and supported independent thought, free from the dogmas of religious authority and the jealous scrutiny of princely rule.1
This mode of thinking was thematized and formalized in the philosophy of John Locke, who proposed an account of the human mind and soul from the ground up, appealing only to reason and the evidence we find within our own experience of living and thinking.2 Locke developed a novel conception of the self, upon which he based a science of politics that posits the individual as the fundamental unit of political life, as opposed to the Realm, the kingdom, the city, the caste, the tribe, or even the family. Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) presents the political expression of this fundamental insight and is considered by many scholars to be the intellectual and historical starting point for political liberalism, although this was not a term Locke himself used. “Liberalism” came to be associated with those who rediscovered Locke and advanced his conceptions almost a century later.
Lockean liberalism holds that the individual is sacrosanct and possesses a liberty that cannot be rightfully violated. Locke’s political theory prescribes a structure for government that secures this liberty by separating powers and arranging them in a fashion designed to secure their basic operation, using power to check power under law. He presents a structural approach of government, which abstracts from religious or cultural values for the sake of protecting such values from popular convulsions and ambitious leaders. This is a feature of liberalism that represents a sort of pivot point, around which a variety of anxieties and controversies tend to form. This will become important as we attempt to trace the lines of the American left and right.
The American Founders drew heavily on Locke’s structural approach to government, and the Declaration borrows explicitly from him in its enumeration of certain “unalienable rights.” Men are naturally free, and government exists to safeguard their freedom to enjoy their life and property and to pursue happiness, which for Locke connoted the freedom to think, believe, and worship as one felt was best, for the sake of earthly fulfillment or eternal felicity.3 Thus, the American founding is an essentially liberal project. Or, at the very least we may say the founding has a strong Lockean component.
There are limits to freedom, namely those limits that maximize it. How this works in practice is tricky, and principled disagreements sprang up regularly, from the late eighteenth century onward. Eventually, the English philosopher John Stewart Mill famously formulated a coherent set of principles of liberty that are often viewed as the definitive version of “classical liberalism,” in which a society is considered to be free only if its individuals are free to live their lives as they see fit — to think, speak and do as they please—provided they do not restrict the freedom of others. Laws and regulations are necessary to establish and preserve a community within which individuals can enjoy this maximal freedom.4
Even in the early days of the American republic there were disagreements over the degree to which government should exert itself in order to maximize liberty, as well as to foster another value that is liberty’s concomitant: equality. While Locke observed that all men are by nature fundamentally equal, and the Declaration of Independence affirmed this truth, the American commitment to this idea has grown more fervent over time. Equality has gradually taken on the character of an aspirational value rather than an observed fact. As early as the 1830s Tocqueville noticed this fierce passion for equality among the Americans.
This is another point where principled commitments began to diverge. To what degree should government work to establish equality? It is along these lines that liberalism began to resolve into the liberal left and the liberal right, although as we will see, it’s not quite this simple.
Examples include Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Milton, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689. Many scholars would disagree with this characterization, arguing that Locke ultimately relies on God (whether or not this is the God of Abraham) and thus not merely on reason and nature. See Thomas West, “The Ground of Locke’s Law of Nature,” Natural Rights, Individualism, and Progressivism in American Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). It is nevertheless significant that even if one grants this, Locke is explicit in his commitment to religious toleration and unfettered speech and reason.
Mill, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (1975) [1689], Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Book 2, Chapter 21, Section 51.
On Liberty, 1859.