Right v. Left....

[Plantman]

Can someone explain where/when the whole right/left liberal/conservative labels came from?

Botnst
Kirk

Have at it......

[euronatura]

I could be totally wrong but did this not start with what was called the "Wig" party from the late 1800īs?

Iggy

[The Warden]

IIRC, the "right" and "left" labels came from seating. In a hall (I can't remember if it was one of our congressional halls or the British Parliament or where), it came to be that the liberals would tend to bunch up together on the left side of the hall, while conservatives tended to bunch up together on the right side of the hall.

I don't know where the label "conservative" came from, but I believe that "liberal" was originally used to describe people in Europe during the Renaissance who were anti-monarchy yet not radical enough to be democratic. Ironically, their views are more appropiately compared to modern-day conservatives... *shrug* Liberals were the moderate-right of the day, with monarchists being the extreme-right, the democrats being the moderate left (extreme left, with liberals being in the middle, before Marx), and after Marx, the communists became the extreme left.

[Zeitgeist]

...it comes from an overly simplistic linear interpretation of political thought and opinion, whereupon all political attitudes appear on a continuum consisting of two poles: a left and a right. According to this viewpoint, all politics can and must be boiled down into binary terms, you're either a 1 or a 0; black or white; left or right; liberal or conservative. You are either closer or farther from one or the other, but you can never ever be both, or something else entirely.

The real world corresponds very little to this continuum, therefore it is an imprecise and ultimately irrelevent reflection of the true scope and scale of political expressions held by any population*. Any one of the political 'power-hitters' on this forum fail at some point to neatly fit into a pattern consistently reflecting just one of the poles--myself included. Even the term "centrist" is deceptive, as who, when and where do we define the 'center' to exist? What was 'centrist' 20 years ago, would now be considered left, but those of today would've been considered right back then.



*I believe that in the end, the prevalence of a mass and homogenized media may come to render my analysis moot, as folks willingly and uncritically allow themselves to be funneled into the little binary boxes defined for them via repetition.

[KirkVining]

Originally posted by Plantman
Can someone explain where/when the whole right/left liberal/conservative labels came from?

Botnst
Kirk

Have at it......

Party politics begin in England 1750 or so

Liberal and Conservative come to us from England. The most contentious question in England after 1750, when it became more democratic and the House of Commons began its rise to power, was the right to vote. The Liberals wanted to "Liberate" the masses with the vote, while the Conservative wished to "conserve" the body politic as it was. This became the official names of the two factions as parties became more formal in the mid 1800s. The terms were probably in use before that, but in this instance they became the capital L Liberals and capital C Conservatives, and we all know how we Americans prefer everything to be official. In America we some time use slang terms for these two parties, calling the Conservatives "Torries" while commonly referring to the Liberals as "*******s".

The terms left and right emerge in 1789:

Originally it came from the French Estate General, a sort of assembly that only met rarely. It was divided into three sections, or "Estates". The First Estate, the nobles, sat on the right. The Third Estate, the commoners, sat on left. The Second Estate, the Clergy, sat in the middle, probably to keep the other two from gouging each others eyes out. After many, many years of not meeting, the last Estate General was called by Louis XVI in 1789. Before that Estate completed, there were plenty of open seats on the right side, because the left side had guillotined all the guys who sat on the right side, by about 1799 or so. That's probably why the Lefties liked the seating arrangement so well, it is so easy to see who is next, and how many more you had to go before you were finished.

Eventually, the Lefties wanted to kick the Clergy out of the Estate General, in fact a lot of the Lefties, led by Maximillain Robespierre, wanted to first kick them out, then guillotine them. The Clergy got lucky because before the ox carts arrived, Robespierre himself got guillotined by the more moderate of the Lefties, probably because the more moderate Lefties, being French, were just plain jealous of Robespierre's killer wardrobe.

After Robespierre became dead, the hall slowly filled back up again on both sides. The guys in the middle never came back, probably because their turn is still officially next. They didn't get a name either, which proves that in politics those in the middle never get $hit.

Some of us on the left still call those "the good old days", but certainly not me, although Robespierre is a little bit of a personal hero of mine- he dressed so sharp for a leftist mass murder. I mean, look at Lenin and Mao - borrrring wardrobes or what? They ruined leftist fashion until the '60s, when US potheads rescued it - and I've got the tie-dyes to prove it.



Fig 1: French voting machine, currently being disassemled, cleaned and oiled before being shipped to Florida. Should arrive Nov 2 or so Inscription: Gift of the French people, to the Democratic Party of the United States of America

Robespierre, right before he "gave head"

Fashion alert! Queer Eye Needed For the Red Guy:

Fig2: Vlad, shown above wearing hat he found at bus station. He is rumored to be James Carville's dad.


Fig 3: Above, James Carville, the man Dick Cheney may have referred to has "That bastard son of Lenin", fueling rumors of Carville's parentage, altho others have attributed this statement to a certain "MedMech" who is thought to be spreading these rumors, which may be true, via the Internet


Fig 3: Fashion Emergency Commies, sharing a good "guillotine joke".

(Mao says - "Lin, my dog's nose got chopped off in the guillotine". Lin replies: "How does he smell?"
Mao says: "Fu*king awful")

[moparmike]

James Carville

Oh, geeze, did someone open the Ark of the Covenant?

Thanks for keeping me in mind Kirk.

I think they should rename the left "wrong".

[Botnst]

I vote for Kirk's history and sartorial critique combined with Z's over-all assessment.

My political philosophy is either one of those designations times +/- sqrt(-1).

"Imagine all the people, living for themselves...".

B

[Zeitgeist]

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Political polarization runs deep in U.S.

By DAVID BROOKS
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

I've been writing about polarization a fair bit recently, and the more I look into it, the more I think I'll just move to Tahiti. That's because the causes of polarization -- at least among elites -- have little to do with passing arguments about the war, the Bush leadership style or the Clinton scandals. The causes are deeper and structural.

To a large degree, polarization in America is a cultural consequence of the information age. This sort of economy demands and encourages education, and an educated electorate is a polarized electorate.

In theory, of course, education is supposed to help us think independently, to weigh evidence and make up our own minds. But that's not how it works in the real world. Highly educated people may call themselves independents, but when it comes to voting they tend to pick a partisan side and stick with it. College-educated voters are more likely than high-school-educated voters to vote for candidates from the same party again and again.

That's because college-educated voters are more ideological. As the Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz has shown, a college-educated Democrat is likely to be more liberal than a high-school-educated Democrat, and a college-educated Republican is likely to be more conservative than a high-school-educated Republican. The more you crack the books, the more likely it is you'll shoot off to the right or the left.

Once you've joined a side, the information age makes it easier for you to surround yourself with people like yourself. And if there is one thing we have learned over the past generation, it's that we are really into self-validation.

We don't only want radio programs and Web sites from members of our team -- we want to live around people like ourselves. Information age workers are not tied down to a mine, a port or a factory. They have more opportunities to go shopping for a place to live, and they tend to cluster in places where people share their cultural aesthetic and, as it turns out, political values. So every place becomes more like itself, and the cultural divides between places become stark. The information age was supposed to make distance dead, but because of clustering, geography becomes more important.

The political result is that Republican places become more Republican and Democratic places become more Democratic.

Between 1948 and 1976, most counties in the U.S. became more closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. In 1976, Gerald Ford, a Republican, could win most of New England and the entire Pacific Coast, and he almost won New York.

But since then we've been segregating politically. As Bill Bishop of The Austin American-Statesman has found, the number of counties where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled over the past quarter-century. Whole regions are now solidly Democratic or Republican. Nearly three-quarters of us, according to Bishop, live in counties that are becoming less competitive, and many of us find ourselves living in places that are overwhelmingly liberal or overwhelmingly conservative.

When we find ourselves in such communities, our views shift even further in the dominant direction. You get this self-reinforcement cycle going, which social scientists call "group polarization."

People lose touch with others in opposing, now distant, camps. And millions of kids are raised in what amount to political ghettoes.

It's pretty clear that nobody in this election campaign is going to talk much about any of this. This election apparently will be decided on the question of whether it was worth it to go to war in Iraq. That's sucking the air out of every other issue and inducing the candidates to run orthodox, unimaginative campaigns.

Still, it's worth thinking radically. An ambitious national service program would ameliorate the situation. If you had a big but voluntary service program of the sort that Evan Bayh, a Democrat, and John McCain, a Republican, proposed a couple of years ago, millions of young people would find themselves living with different sorts of Americans and spending time in parts of the country they might otherwise know nothing about.

It might even be worth monkeying with our primary system. The current primaries reward orthodox, polarization-reinforcing candidates. Open, non-partisan primaries might reward the unorthodox and weaken the party bases. To do nothing is to surrender to a lifetime of ugliness.

David Brooks writes for The New York Times. E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

[PHAEDRUS242]

I was under the impression that the terms "right" and "left" as used to describe political affiliation stemmed from the storming of the Bastille and the end of the French revolution. It is my understanding that after these events transpired the revolutionary leaders stood out on the tennis courts, with those who favored a similar approach to government standing on the right court and those favoring a more in-depth restructuring stood on the left court.

[KirkVining]

Although many of the facts were stretched to achieve a satirical triumph, the core fact of the origins of the word terms were not. The formation of the Estate General preceded the storming of the Bastille. Here is a link that reports the historical record:

http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20011217.html

[KirkVining]

Originally posted by MedMech
Thanks for keeping me in mind Kirk.

I think they should rename the left "wrong".

Actually, the right should be renamed "wrong".

I can hardly wait until the French are done tuning up that thing.

[KirkVining]

Originally posted by Zeitgeist
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Political polarization runs deep in U.S.

By DAVID BROOKS
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

etc..
David Brooks writes for The New York Times. E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

I agree with his article, but to address the root cause is almost impossible in this country. If you look at the history of France and England and the US, you find that two of them, the US and France, have had a bloody history of devasting civil wars and public riots as they progess thru history, while the English have had an extremely stable march. The reason is because the English system of proportional democracy is a fairer system of representative democracy, while our winner take all system, which worked when we were a frontier country, no longer works.
The French used a provincial system much like our states and convulsed thru a series of legislative bodies brought down by civil unrest. After WWII, all of the governments of Europe reorganized under the English system, and great political stability in Europe as a whole has been acheived. We need to do the same to cure the stranglehold corporations, when the Republicans are in, and Special Interests, when the Democrats are in, have on all of us. They are simply taking turns robbing us to pay off their vote base. The idea of "providing for the general welfare" has failed in this country.

I think our system is becoming increasingly unstable as a result. I am an excellent example of a person disenfranchised by this system. I live in Texas. Due to the electoral college system, my vote is meaningless in the presidential election. I live in Tom Delay's district, which pisses him off as much as it does me. I get no representation in Congress, and the way the district is gerrymandered, I never will. If I have a concern about air pollution and call his office, the undisguised contempt of the person taking my call slithers down my phone line. Under our system, I get the Dick Cheney vs Patrick Leahy treatment. Like millions in districts across the country, I have no voice in the parts of government that are supposed to represent me. In the last Texas gerrymander, massive populations of poor black and Latino areas were shifted from Democrat to Republican districts. They have now essentially lost representation in our democracy.

Under the English system, the district would have five or so reps apportioned by the vote count of the parties. In this district, there might be three Republican reps elected, and two democrats. In South Texas, where Ron Paul heads a large Libertarian movement, it might be two Repubs, two Democrats, and one Libertarian. At the end of the election, The House of Representatives would look more like the actual political makeup of the people. If I have a concern, there is someone in my district who will represent that concern for me in the congress, even if they are not in the majority, at least my voice will be heard, and because compromise is so necessaery in a government of this type, I have a good chance of getting at least some of what I want.

In addition, special interests, which now only have to pour money behind one man in order to essentially control one geographical area, would have to deal with the fact that those who oppose them will now have a voice in government no matter what they do. It also allows the emergence of multiple political parties,something ths country surely needs.

Unfortunately, the only way to achieve this is to call a Constitutional Convention. If we did,the results would probably be the same as France in 1789 - the pent up anger of people in general over the shortcomings of a non-representive system rigged to favor the very rich would lead to a second American Civil War. Conclusion: We're screwed.

Originally posted by KirkVining
Actually, the right should be renamed "wrong".

Kirk I expect a much better retort than that, is has JB hacked your account?

[KirkVining]

Originally posted by MedMech
Kirk I expect a much better retort than that, is has JB hacked your account?

It was the best I could come up with. JB no longer has a login on my system.