Left Wing And Right Wing
By Peter Goodchild
17 July, 2012
Countercurrents.org
What if anything do "left wing" and "right wing" mean nowadays? In France long ago, the terms had a precise meaning, based on where one was actually sitting -- in which "wing" of the room -- and this seating arrangement largely indicated one's attitude toward the "establishment." Now the dichotomy seems to take a form somewhat as follows.
The left wing believes in:
big government -- now somewhat irrelevant or incidental
big spending by government -- now somewhat irrelevant or incidental
above all, supporting the poor -- or supporting the lazy, as the right wing would say
The right wing believes in:
small government -- now somewhat irrelevant or incidental
small spending by government -- now somewhat irrelevant or incidental
above all, supporting the rich -- or supporting the greedy, as the left wing would say
Not every political or economic issue can be put neatly in one "wing" or the other, of course. Two examples are immigration and the United Nations. The first issue breaks down into "pity the poor immigrant" versus "curse them for overrunning our country"; the division was tidier long ago, but each of these two phrases seems to jump from one "wing" to the other nowadays. The second receives a more consistently similar treatment from the more vocal on both sides: "The UN's plans are part of the New World Order, destroying our national sovereignty and turning us into the slaves of a global government." I suppose religion can sometimes also be put in the "neither wing" category; Christianity, for example, once entailed certain prerequisites of theology and morality, but it now appears as little more than a low-tech precursor to Facebook.
It's also curious to see what major issues are largely ignored by both wings. That includes the biggest of all: the decline in fossil fuels and other natural resources (and the question of "alternative energy"), and the converse, global overpopulation. Translated into the familiar symbolism of "money," those two issues result in an ever-increasing gap between wages and prices that will continue until the day when, as in Weimar Germany, it is realized that prostitution and potatoes are more-useful means of exchange. Money, like government (at least in its present form), will finally be regarded as redundant.
If the real issues are far beyond a clumsy rehashing of eighteenth-century French politics, we are then led to the question of why both wings are run by people with such low levels of awareness. If there's any "conspiracy," it's there. When I was a kid, if you made one spelling mistake, you pretty well had to leave town. What's happened since those days?
Those "wings" have little application to any future trends. For example, how is a New World Order going to institute global slavery in the absence of fossil fuels, metals, and electricity? But as statistical clusters the two sides are still very real. For the average Web site, if the first name or buzzword one encounters clearly suggests either "left wing" or "right wing," it's possible to predict what any article is going to say on any topic, no matter how many authors or articles are on that site. So these are not just random factors coming into play.
The reason why the dichotomy is statistically valid, perhaps, is that psychologically the two sides are quite different. It may be that left-wingers suffer from low self-esteem and a general "victim" mentality, whereas right-wingers are equally neurotic in preserving their reputations within a society of considerable inequity. Both sides would have much to gain by discarding such obsolete mentality.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild[at]gmail.com
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