Many people born in the new era may not understand that just a few decades ago, our country would still divide people into “left” and “right” people. The “left and right” mentioned here is a political indicator, which is widely used to divide everyone’s political tendency. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly included royal nobles, religious figures, emerging capitalists and urban craftsmen. The former sits on the right side of the parliament hall and supports the monarchy and the Catholic Church; while the latter sits on the left side of the hall and supports the republic and opposes the dictatorship of the church. From then on, in politics, those who advocated maintaining the current system and opposed radical reforms or revolutions were called “rightists”; while those who advocated breaking the current system and supporting radical reforms or even revolutions were called “leftists”.
When we face these 24-word core values, we may not realize that “freedom” and “equality” are actually a pair of contradictory concepts. Because in a free competitive market, inequality will inevitably arise due to differences in background, family education, social opportunities and other aspects between people. And this kind of inequality will continue to intensify over time. This is the so-called “Matthew effect.” And if we want to artificially suppress this natural trend of inequality and promote the formation of a situation of “equality for everyone,” we must restrict the freedom of society as a whole. Although this does not mean that a society can never balance freedom and equality, there is indeed an inherent contradiction between these two values.
Therefore, in the pair of contradictory values of freedom and equality, those who believe that freedom is higher than equality can be generally classified as right-wing; and those who believe that equality is higher than freedom can be roughly classified as left-wing**. For example, on a one-dimensional coordinate axis from left to right, Obama, who promotes “Medicare for All,” will definitely be to the left of Trump, who announced the repeal of the bill as soon as he took office.
After entering the 20th century, with the rapid development of modern economics, the traditional one-dimensional coordinate axis can no longer accurately reflect people’s political stance. For example, people usually place Stalin on the left end of the axis and Hitler on the right end. However, the two men are very similar in their views on many policies. This reflects the shortcomings of the traditional one-dimensional political coordinate system. Because it is entirely possible for a person to be on the left economically but on the right politically. Stalin is a good example. He and Hitler were both far right politically, and the main difference between the two was economic.
In order to make up for the shortcomings of the traditional one-dimensional coordinate axis, people introduced a longitudinal coordinate axis, extending the political coordinate system to two dimensions. In this two-dimensional coordinate system, the horizontal axis represents the economy and the vertical axis represents politics. The left side of the horizontal axis represents economic egalitarianism, advocating the redistribution of social wealth through state intervention to narrow the gap between rich and poor in society as a whole; the right side represents economic liberalism, believing that a free competitive market is the solution to most problems, and opposing excessive state intervention in the economy. Preliminary; the upper part of the vertical axis represents political authoritarianism, which advocates the use of stricter legal systems to restrict the behavior of individuals and enterprises, and puts the interests of the country above all else; the lower part represents political liberalism, which advocates that individual value is the ultimate goal, and the state is only a means to realize personal value.In the two-dimensional political spectrum, everyone will have a point consisting of an abscissa and an ordinate. The closer this point is to which direction, the stronger the person’s identification with which doctrine is. In this way, Comrade Stalin found his rightful position, that is, the extreme left economically and the extreme right politically; while the head of state is here, the economic center is right and the political extreme right. From this picture, we can easily see that it is actually inaccurate to blindly judge the head of state as “extreme right”.
This two-dimensional political coordinate system is often called the “political spectrum”. It is a quantitative tool in political science used to scale everyone’s tendency in political and economic positions. Nowadays, you only need to take ten minutes and take a test questionnaire to roughly find your position in this coordinate system and which historical celebrities will be your close friends.
Historically, there have been several interesting phenomena regarding the political spectrum. As we all know, the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States today bring together elites from all walks of life on the left and right of the country respectively, that is, the Democratic Party is on the left and the Republican Party is on the right. But this situation was exactly the opposite a hundred years ago. When it was first established, the Democratic Party was actually a conservative right-wing party that mainly represented the interests of American farmers. Therefore, the Democratic Party passed a bill in the mid-19th century to forcibly expel Indians, launched the Mexican-American War, and obtained large amounts of land for farming. During the Civil War, they supported slavery to maintain the established agricultural system. For a long time, the Democratic Party gained support from southern states. However, since the 1930s, President Roosevelt Jr., as the candidate of the Democratic Party, implemented the “New Deal” to restore the U.S. economy after the Great Depression. These practices, which seemed very left-leaning at the time, became the main policy direction of the Democratic Party in the future. As a result, the Democratic Party gradually changed from a conservative right-wing party to a radical left-wing party until today.
When it was first established, today’s Republican Party was a left-wing party that advocated economic reform and opposed slavery. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, and his taking office was the direct cause of the outbreak of the Civil War. It was not until President Reagan took office in the 1980s that the political stance of the modern Republican Party was finally finalized. But a hundred years later, the Republican Party has transformed into a conservative right-wing party representing whites, men, middle-aged and older people, farmers and people with low education. In other words, over the past hundred years or so, the positions of the two major political parties in the United States have had interesting exchanges. This also reflects some of the essence of modern capitalist party politics.
There is another interesting phenomenon. Whenever we think of the Nazis these days, we automatically categorize them as being on the far right. But if we take a look at the full name of the Nazis - the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, we will be surprised to find that it was also a left-wing party representing the interests of workers at the beginning. As for the history of the Nazis, and how Hitler transformed from an unknown Austrian art student to a head of state with blood on his hands, that is another story.
This episode of our program mainly introduces some common sense about political science. If you are still interested in this type of topic, you can search for relevant information and read it yourself.
My name is Gu Yue. Thank you for listening to “Gewu Zhi”. I will do my best to clarify history and society in this program. If you like this episode, please subscribe to my channel, give me a like, and leave your thoughts in the comment area. See you next time.