This episode is for everyone who keeps writing to me to insist that one or the other wrong, incoherent, popular definition of Left and Right is actually the correct one.

How do we know what left and right actually mean?

When we use the terms “left” and “right” in politics, we’re making an analogy to who was on the left and right sides of the national assembly in France in the early French Revolution.

What is it about right wing populists vs. left wings populists, or socialists versus capitalists, or communists vs nazis or anarcho-communists vs anarcho-capitalists that links them to the left and right sides of the french national assembly of 1789?

To answer this, we look at who was considered as being on the left and on the right in three different time periods:

1. The early French revolution in 1789, which is what the whole left-right political spectrum is an analogy to.

2. The 3rd republic in France where seating in the National Assembly was first purposefully arranged on a left-right spectrum, analogous to the early French Revolution.

3. The different branches of late 19th and early 20th century socialist movement, which had its own left right and center.

And then we apply all of the junk cold war definitions – the market vs. the state, the individual vs. the collective, big vs. small government, equality vs. liberty – and we watch them all crash and burn, leaving only the equality vs. hierarchy / class-conflict paradigm left standing.

Apply this exercise on your own to any historical period from 1789 until the ascent of the USSR, and you will get the same results. Now can everyone accept it and move on?

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