Three Reasons Not to Use “Left” and “Right” in 2021
When I was a kid I used to think that “left” and “right” in politics were mere descriptions of where MPs were seated in the parliament.
When I was in high school they taught me the political connotation of these terms, even though they sounded still vague.
At university, they taught me that they are becoming obsolete terms that have no universal meaning.
To explain why I believe we should stop using “left” and “right” for contemporary politics, I must introduce the necessity of a spatial metaphor for politics.
Politics is intricate, a human construct that has no universal unit of measurement. There are no meters, kilogrammes or cm³ of politics, so we compared a theoretical concept to something more concrete and familiar: space.
We exist in a space, so political actors and ideas are located in it as well.
To make things simple, we reasoned on left and right as if there was a line to describe politics on.
Political scientists usually take this further and using two-dimensional space represent political scenarios. These dimensions are therefore more sophisticated than Left-Right so generally more accurate. Even though the maximum number of dimensions graphically representable is three, political reality is arguable made by many more. For example, we could evaluate the proposal of a candidate on dimensions such as welfare, tax policy, foreign policy, environmental policy and so on.
The tool to quantify an actor’s position in this imaginary space is people’s perception of it. By asking voters what they think about a candidate or a policy proposal we obtain their perception of her. Asking “What do you think of Politician P?” and receiving as an answer “I (dis)like her very much” or “I don’t know her” doesn’t help. Therefore, the question must get more specific and include an indication of the dimension considered, a specification of the unit of measurement. The question could then be “How do you rank Politician P on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 means ‘completely pro-European integration’ and 10 means ‘completely anti-European integration’?”. It is immediate to see how different is the type of conversation emerging from the two questions.
Given this general introduction, I list three reasons why we should stop talking about politics in terms of left and right.
1. It Confuses and Differs Worldwide
The original point of bipolar fronts used to be fight communism versus promote and try to apply it. Nowadays, proper communists are as extinct as dinosaurs and blue-collar professions are getting rarer due to technological substitution. That means that the cards now on the table didn’t even exist when ‘left’ and ‘right’ dichotomy raised.
Furthermore, those words mean different things in different places. An intranational comparison is very troublesome as in the USA it is ‘leftist’ to encourage public health when it is the norm in European welfare countries, despite their colour.
2. It Promotes Bias
Even though issues have drastically changed, ‘left’ and ‘right’ have an intrinsic positive or a negative connotation. It is often based on the environment where we grow up and on the influences we are subject to. Nobody is free from bias, but experts are believed to be more neutral than the average person. Results show that the more specific questions are, the better and more neutral answers are, but the more ‘left’ and ‘right’ are used, the more experts’ answer will be a gut reaction. This leads to the last point…
3. There Are Better Dimensions to Focus On
Modern life is all about making news fit in a tweet and turning information into clickbait, but, we don’t lack tools to preserve the importance of some areas of our living, such as political decisions. It may be as easy as discussing environmental policies, foreign policies, tax policies and welfare instead of two vague expressions with an emotional implication rather than a meaning.
The words we use shape our perception of reality. Waiting for politicians to suddenly decide to speak clearly and encourage fair intellectual debate rather than rooting for them is rather pointless.
Imagine if electors, journalists and pundits started speaking and reasoned more rationally and focused on the specific dimensions. It would not be enough, but I am optimistic that a change would be not long in coming.
