Defining the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
The words “right” and left” are currently used to describe
positions taken on varied themes. Their use commonly relates to political,
social or economic matters, literature and arts, but also to ways of feeling or
being. The terms have such diverse meanings that many observers claim they have
lost any value to classify ideological, cultural or moral positions.
Regardless of the talent, culture and notoriety of those
with this opinion, “right” and “left” have continued to be commonly used terms
and are indispensable for ideological analysts.
This fact seems to demonstrate there is something
substantial and authentically expressive at the very core of these terms.
Therefore, they cannot be so simply disregarded, at least not until common
usage consecrates other words to replace them.
I propose to make a brief analysis here of this “something
substantial” to check with my readers whether my feeling about these terms
corresponds to theirs, as well as to that of the general public.
I begin by noting that not everything is imprecise in the
meaning of these two words. There is one clear zone that can be defined. Then,
after showing this, we can detect the connecting thread that will lead us, step
by step, through the more ambiguous meanings to a final clarification of what
is meant by “right” and “left.”
Left: Radical acceptance of the ideals of the French
Revolution
The clear zone is in the word “left.” One need only think of
the trilogy of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. To this
day, the general consensus describes the perfect leftist as one who defends not
just any liberty, equality and fraternity, but a total liberty, a complete
equality and an almost universal fraternity.
Marat's position, the extreme of the French Revolution
radicalism, represents the entire left
In short, he would be an anarchist in the etymological and
radical sense of the word (from the Greek an – without – and arche –
government), with or without the connotation of violence or terrorism.
Moderate leftists consider the dream of the radical leftist
as utopian (it is “unfortunately utopian,” they say). None of them would deny,
however, the full leftist authenticity of this utopia. If this is the pole of
absolute leftism, then it is easy to discern how – on the leftist scale – a
program or method can be described as being more or less leftist. Its
classification derives from its distance from that total anarchism.
For example, the more a socialist is leftist, the broader
and more operational is the equality he demands. One who demands total equality
will be totally leftist.
A similar appraisal can be made about another “value” of the
1789 trilogy. I refer especially to political liberalism. The more a person
calls for total liberty, the more leftist he is.
Of course, there are certain contradictions between
Socialism and Liberalism that lead to objections to what I have just affirmed.
One such objection is that economic totalitarianism can easily destroy
political liberty, and vice versa. But this contradiction exists only in the
intermediary stages before total anarchism is reached. Neither Socialism nor
Liberalism represents total anarchism, although they can both prepare the way
for it. For one can reach total anarchism either through absolute liberty or,
more often the case, through absolute equality.
Absolute liberty is more readily adopted by those who are
less or have less against those who are more or have more. Complete equality,
in its turn, results in the denial of all authority and, therefore, all law.
These two ways that appear so different are not parallel roads that run
infinitely without ever touching. However contradictory they may appear to
today’s moderate, they converge at a final anarchical point, where one meets
and completes the other.
Thus, according to the general consensus, leftism has a
well-defined goal and scale of “values.”
The true right defends proportional, harmonic inequalities
The question then turns to whether the “right” also has a
well-defined goal and values.
Here there is undeniable confusion. We need to find a
connecting thread – like that which we found on the left – which will lead us
step by step toward classifying the subtle nuances of rightism.
Justice lies in harmonic and proportional inequalities
The words “right” and “left” surged in the political, social
and economic vocabulary of 19th century Europe.
Leftism was an ideological participation in the thinking and work of something
still new and quite defined in its general lines, that is, the French
Revolution. The left was not only a volcanic negation of a tradition that
appeared to be dead, but also the affirmation of an inescapable future. In face
of this devastating Revolution, the right has only gradually come to define
itself - in an undecided and contradictory way (cf. Michel Denis, Les
Royalistes de la Mayenne et le Monde Moderne, Publications de l'Université de
Haute-Bretagne, 1977).
What, in the full rigor of logic, would be the right, if it
were defined as anti-leftist and a fortiori as anti-anarchist?
As I already noted, total anarchism affirms that each and
every inequality is unjust. Thus, the less the inequality, the less the
injustice. Liberty
is dear to anarchism precisely because authority is in itself a denial of
equality.
On the other hand, rightism affirms that inequality in
itself is not unjust. Rather, in a universe where God created all beings
unequal, especially men, injustice would be imposing an order of things
contrary to the one that God, for the highest reason, made unequal (cf. Mt.
25:14-30; 1 Cor. 12: 28-31; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Book
III, chap. 57).
Thus, justice lies in inequality.
In passing, let me note that from this basic truth one
cannot deduce that the greater the inequality, the more perfect the justice.
For leftism, the antithetical affirmation is logical (e.g. the greater the
inequality, the greater the injustice). There is, however, a flagrant
difference between the leftist and rightist perspectives.
The rightist knows that the inequalities God created are not
terrifying and monstrous, but proportioned to the nature, well-being and
progress of each being, as well as appropriate for the general ordering of the
universe. This is the Christian inequality.
Similar considerations could be made about liberty in the
universe and in society.
It is important to understand that the standard of rightism
is not an absolute inequality, symmetrically opposed to absolute equality. It
is a harmonic inequality. The more a doctrine opposes the trilogy of 1789 and
comes closer to this standard of harmonic and proportional inequalities, the
more it will be rightist.
Those thinkers or men of action who rose up the 19th and
20th centuries against the Revolution were called rightists only for this
reason. But they not always understand this important rule of rightism. They -
or those who studied them – imagined at times that the label of rightism could
justify abysmal inequalities (political, social and mostly economic), as if the
extreme right position coherently were this.
False right and true right
Franco, although adopting a few points of Christian
rightism, was fundamentaly a National Socialist
Other “rightists” made concessions to the egalitarian spirit
because they were themselves infected by the revolutionary principles they were
combating. Or they made concessions for tactical reasons to protect their power
or gain it. We see this in the official socialist character of Fascism, and in
the unofficial but evident nature of Nazism.
For these reasons, the term “right” was much less clearly
defined than “left” in current language. It came to designate not just the true
rightism of a sacral, hierarchical and harmonic Catholic inspiration, but also
“rightisms” modeled in part by some Christian traditions and in part by some
atypical ideological principles (and experiences).
What seems certain to me is that even though certain
so-called rightist currents have had socialist notes, the current language
nonetheless only calls them rightist because it supposes they have a greater or
smaller affinity with the ideal Christian rightism that I described above. This
ideal, through a centuries-old tradition, entered the consciousness as well as
the sub-consciousness of everyone.
In summary, there are defining marks for both the right and
the left, and a whole gamut of intermediary nuanced stages proceeds from them.
Posted January 21, 2009
Translated from the Site Sacralidade
