CHURCHILL, DISRAELI, OR TWAIN famously might have quipped that anyone who is not a liberal at the age of 20 has no heart and anyone still a liberal by 40 has no brain. I've always wondered why this should be the case, since it seems to me that a person ought to be as likely to become disenchanted with the crassness of individualism as with the insidiousness of the nanny-state as he gets older. It's my intention with this post to clarify the histories and essences of both Left and Right, because I want to remind everyone that if your "Left-Right" spectrum isn't more than a few decades old, you're missing part of the picture. And it's cool.
The Left-Right division in politics traces back to the French Revolution, when members of the French Legislative Assembly sat on the right if "reactionaries" and on the left if "radicals". (Even then, the criteria for Rightness and Leftness were extremely fluid. Those who supported a very limited monarchy in the British style were considered Left before 1791 and unconscionably Right--reactionary--afterwards.) From the beginning, then, Left has always meant progressive reform and Right has meant gradualism and respect for tradition; that much, at least, remains true today. So when Democrats are for change and Republicans aren't, you can't blame either one of them. It's built into the ideology.
In 1791, though, the leftists tended to support laissez-faire capitalism (since it meant less control by the nobility and crown and more freedom for the common man), and the Right preferred to keep allocative control with the crown; from the political side, the Left stood for equality in the form of inalienable rights while the Right defended clerical and aristocratic privilege. Since Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Montesquieu--along with early ("Classical") economists like Smith, Ricardo, and Say--also advanced theories of individual liberty, they called themselves Liberals. And standing against privilege, Divine Right, protectionism, and arbitrary oppression by government, these liberals fell squarely among the eighteenth-century Left. But in the 1800s, thinkers like Marx and Engels developed a radical interpretation of the notions of equality advanced by the liberal Left that was characterized by total equal distribution of wealth, equal sharing of allocation decisions--the abolition not only of feudal privilege but all property rights. Suddenly the followers of the old Left, who did support the individual's freedom to do business and pursue his own happiness, became the Right. This is why I've been using "Left" instead of "liberal", in spite of the quotation I started with: liberalism started Left, then it became Right, and in many cases it's now Left again. Libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism are the ideal types for this new economic Right--just as perfect communism is the ideal type for the economic Left. Much of modern Leftism has embraced anti-Globalization or anti-free-trade views, on the grounds that trade facilitates the exploitation of the world's poor, in spite of the fact that the Classical liberal economic theories of Smith and especially Ricardo held that trade holds mutual benefit for all parties. Thus we can talk about liberal markets that are representative of the economics and philosophies of the Classical Left but are now more directly associated with the modern Right--small government, high levels of individual freedom and control of one's own economic decisions, and as little regulation on business as is feasible. The modern Left, meanwhile, stands for progressive tax-and-transfer policy, more class-specific legislative attempts for create “fairness”, and more regulation on business interests and government intervention in markets. In other words, the economic goals associated with Left and Right have made a complete one-eighty since 1791.
To make matters worse, the social implications and goals of the Left and Right have flipped since then too: the Right has reconnected with its traditionalism and clericalism, which means that it still occasionally objects to (new Left-) liberal ideas like gay marriage that probably fall within the boundaries of the older-Right-original-Left ideals of individual liberty (eschewing them for the "community liberty" side that represents, in this case, religious freedoms). Meanwhile, the Left's post-Marx, post-Keynes orientation calls for more and more government control not just over capital but also over individuals' positive liberties in order to secure negative liberties for the community. This is the source of gun control, for example. I doubt very much that Robespierre would have thought very highly of government gun control--but I think Burke might have appreciated it!
Let's review: the new Left is the old Right, although it is also the old Left (though not the aspects which became the old new Right), and the new Right is the old Left, except where it is the old Right. Clear as mud. For now, Left is for progressive tax (where tax rates vary with ability-to-pay), Keynesian economic principles (government consumption is a major component of income, because spending is high), and higher levels of market interventions (subsidies, rent ceilings, regulations); in other words, it tends to sympathize with the consumer and the employee, where Right tends to sympathize with the producer and the employer.
So it seems to me that young people, who tend not to own businesses or pay very much tax, can more easily get excited about redistribution of wealth, punishment of the big corporation, and so on--and as people get older, they get more and more likely to rub up against Leftist regulation in their business lives, paying more taxes, supporting social programs they don't agree with.
Thus the quip should be revised: anyone not a liberal at 20 owns a business and anyone not a conservative at 40 is probably in a union!
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