Left, Right, and Totally Wrong
How Political Labels Make Us Stupid
Left, right. Liberal, conservative, socialist. These labels dominate how we think and talk about politics. Political concepts are meant to help us navigate the world. They are cognitive tools for clarity and orientation. But in practice, our political vocabulary confuses and harms more than it clarifies or helps.
The problem isn’t new, but it’s getting worse. The cultural dominance of the United States has further flattened global political discourse into a simplistic dichotomy: liberal vs. conservative. This reductive lens distorts more nuanced traditions, especially outside the Anglosphere, which might have been forced into this simplistic thinking partially due to the infelicitous design of U.S.- and U.K.-style electoral systems.
An Old French Seating Chart Isn’t a Worldview
The original left–right distinction stems from the French Revolution. It reflected the seating order in the first French National Assembly: anti-royalist republicans sat on the left, while royalists—defenders of monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church—sat on the right. Projecting this historical divide onto contemporary politics makes little sense.
Today, the "left" is thought to include both liberalism and socialism (including social democracy). This is an absurdity. Liberalism and socialism were historically antagonistic—liberalism representing the interests of the wealthy, and socialism the aspirations of working people. In fact, many conservative movements have shared more common ground with socialism than with liberalism.
Thatcher and Reagan effectively transformed conservative movements into liberal parties in traditionalist disguise. But globally, many conservative parties have at times embraced economic and social policies much closer to socialism than to liberalism—be it liberation theology in Latin America, French dirigisme in the mercantilist tradition, or the Christian-social welfare doctrines of postwar Germany.
In the United Kingdom, the postwar Tories under Winston Churchill and especially later under Harold Macmillan upheld and even expanded nationalization and economic planning—embracing public housing, nationalized industries, and the NHS as political givens. Macmillan famously spoke of “the middle way,” blending market capitalism with state planning.
In the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower not only maintained Roosevelt’s New Deal programs but warned against the excesses of corporate power and military spending. He oversaw massive public works investment, including the federal highway system—one of the largest infrastructure projects in U.S. history. And no one other than Richard Nixon implemented price controls and Keynes-style stimulus policies.
This reflects an important point about conservatism: it is indexical. It refers to the preservation of traditional values—but traditions vary widely from place to place and evolve over time.
From Confusion to Harm: Thinking by Association
These concepts do damage on multiple fronts. First, they obscure the dominance of (neo-)liberal assumptions across nearly the entire political spectrum. Second, they are used—particularly by educated middle classes—as tools of social distinction, in the Bourdieusian sense: as instruments of social capital tied to the presumed epistemic and moral superiority of liberal over conservative ideas.
Indeed, the tribal allegiance to parties and their labels suggests that political positions today function more as tools of identity creation than as conclusions of rational reflection. Take climate policy: there is no inherent reason why opinions on this issue should fall along partisan lines. Yet they do—because political labels now express style and social group membership more than reasoned stance. It is thinking by association.
This, of course, does tremendous harm. Rather than rallying around vague labels, we would do better to engage in debate over concrete policies and positions. That’s easier said than done—given our toxic debate culture, media landscape, and the restrictive nature of representative party systems compared to direct democratic or concordance systems. But it remains a deeply desirable goal.
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© 2025 Alexander Jeuk for the text. For the image see the caption.