Pinning the tail on the donkey
To his back legs, The Grasshopper detests labelling, as typified by the increasing tendency to hear ‘…well you would say that, wouldn’t you, you’re a <insert label here>’. If the word ‘extreme’ can be added (which it often is), then so much more damning the polemic.
There are no more frustrating labels as ‘left’ and ‘right’. What do they even mean? The terms appeared in France after the storming of the Bastille in 1789 when the newly formed National Assembly – the new government of the Revolution – debated whether the power of veto should remain with the king. Those in favour organised themselves to the right of the president - basically, it seems, to stop themselves from having a punch-up with the those who wanted all power to the people and who gravitated to the left. Of course, Louis XVI lost the support, as well as his head in 1793.
The addition of ‘-wing’ – left-wing and right-wing – seems to have been a later thing that labelled those who deviated from the Stalinist line in pre-war Soviet Union. Not generally a good idea to disagree with Uncle Joe.
But what does ‘right’ and ‘left’ mean today? Well, like everything else these days it seems, the whole thing has become word salad. Here are a couple of the simpler attempts at explaining it to the masses, based on the chart developed by David Nolan in 1971.
So where would you pin your donkey’s tail? Well, that’s the problem isn’t it. In an issue-driven world, your stance on, say, immigration might place you as a socialist, while if you’ve strived to buy your own property and want to hang on to it you’re labelled conservative.
Oh, and by the way, if you think of yourself as ‘liberalist’, forget it. It doesn’t appear except in one or two of the more dubious versions which conflate liberalism with socialism and co-opt the two as the natural enemies of ‘the right’.
Charts like these may be accused of being for the simple-minded, although they do at least acknowledge (in line with Nolan’s original frustration at ‘right’ and ‘left’) that there is more than one dimension. But here’s where paper (or your computer screen) lets you down. There are many dimensions – personal, economic and cultural being just three.
The Grasshopper thinks it better to throw all that away and focus on one’s stance on every issue. If we take the original spirit of right = ‘keep it’ (ie. conservatism with a small ‘c’), centre = ‘change it’ and left = ‘scrap it’, where do you stand on: government censorship vs. media’s own responsibilities; sex between consenting adults; abortion; drug use; immigration; taxation; healthcare and welfare; property; money; and a host of other issues.
The World’s Smallest Political Quiz is an over-simplistic attempt to assign a person to a point on the Nolan Chart, based on 10 questions. But how can 10 questions define a person’s whole worldview? The real world is much more complex.