Why do we divide politics into left vs. right? Blame France.
Our left-vs.-right conception of politics was born in revolutionary France. The maps that followed were more sophisticated, but each carries a bias of its own.
by Frank Jacobs
Why do we grade politicians on a spectrum from left to right? Blame the French.
On September 11th, 1789, France’s newly formed National Assembly voted on whether to grant the king a veto over its laws. This was no arcane point of procedure. As a direct challenge to Louis XVI’s absolute power, it was a hinge moment in the French Revolution.
Defenders of the monarchy, pro veto, gathered to the chairman’s right. Radicals in favor of clipping the king’s powers drifted to his left. From that fateful seating arrangement — in a meeting now more than two centuries past — comes the most powerful shorthand in democratic politics: left versus right.
La gauche, the left, became synonymous with pro-revolutionary forces who wanted to abolish privilege and empower the common citizen. La droite, the right, were the anti-revolutionaries — conservatives scrambling to prop up an old order that was crumbling around them.
Within a year, the terms were common parlance in French politics. Over the next century, “left” and “right” colonized conversations across the world. This directional shorthand for political persuasions remains in daily use today. But as the centuries wear on, the model is showing its age. And it had flaws baked in from the very beginning.
The propaganda gift that keeps on giving
One problem was right there in the language itself. In French, gauche means clumsy or awkward. And, as in English, droit doesn’t just mean right-as-opposed-to-left, but right-as-opposed-to-wrong.
This intrinsic bias is much older than the French Revolution, or even the French language. In Latin, “left” is sinister — the root word of all things foreboding and malevolent. “Right” is dexter, which gives us “dexterity,” a decidedly positive trait. In the Bible, Jesus sits at the right hand of God, not His left.
It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to connect this bias — repeated across dozens of languages and worldviews — to the prevalence of right-handedness. Only about 10% of us are “manual lefties.”
For the political descendants of those pro-monarchy assembly members, being “right” is the propaganda gift that keeps on giving. For those on the other side, their position on the political spectrum requires overcoming associations of “left” with everything sinister.
Communists, Nazis, and horseshoes
But it’s not just the lingo of the model that’s flawed. In 1972, French political scientist Jean-Pierre Faye coined a term for a phenomenon he’d noticed while studying Weimar Germany: the political horseshoe. Observing how Communists and Nazis had frequently collaborated in the early 1930s to undermine Germany’s liberal center, Faye proposed that the farther you travel from that center, the closer the two ends of the spectrum grow to each other — bending into a horseshoe rather than stretching into a line.
Horseshoe-shaped or not, the left-right divide animated most of the 20th century, which can be imperfectly summarized as: capitalism tempered by democracy first defeating fascism on the right, then communism on the left. But those old divides no longer map neatly onto the politics of the 21st century. People can feel strongly “left” on some issues and strongly “right” on others, which makes for strange political bedfellows and acrobatic vote-switching.
The old paradigm struggles to explain the many Bernie Sanders supporters who in 2016 went on to vote for Donald Trump. But those voters weren’t confused or irrational. They were responding to a signal the standard model can’t process: a profound distrust of the establishment — whether left or right — and an equally profound desire to upend the whole apple cart.
Economic and personal freedom
To better capture such signals, it helps to think of the political landscape not as a one-dimensional line, but as a two-dimensional field. A map, in other words.
Arguably, the most influential is the Nolan Chart, published in 1971 by David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party of the United States. Nolan argued that any ideology should be measured along two distinct dimensions: how much government control it allows over your economic decisions, and how much over your personal life. The traditional left-right spectrum, he complained, collapses those two very different things into one.
By giving economic and personal freedom each their own axis, the Nolan Chart generates four quadrants, not coincidentally with libertarianism at the top. That bit of self-serving design aside, the underlying insight is real. Societies can be socialist and free (the Nordic social democracies), socialist and unfree (the Soviet Union), capitalist and free (Singapore, Switzerland), or capitalist and unfree (Chile under Pinochet). These four permutations are nearly impossible to distinguish on a simple left-right line.
The chart also stakes out a coherent position for libertarianism — a distinctly Anglophone political tradition that is neither conventionally left nor right, and is essentially homeless on the traditional French-inspired linear spectrum. And it helps visualize where modern authoritarian movements sit: at the bottom of the chart, on both sides of the vertical axis, which goes some way to explaining why the old labels feel so inadequate when applied to them.
George Orwell would have agreed
The political diamond shown below — clearly indebted to Nolan, and circulating on the internet since around 2000 — updates his chart with a different orientation and a richer menu of political persuasions.
The axes still denote the same scales, but the extremes are now labelled Marxism and Liberalism (on the economic horizontal) and Anarchism and Fascism (on the authoritarian vertical). Each of the diamond’s four sides is labelled with the characteristic uniting two extremes: Marxism and Anarchism can both be called “socialist,” certain strains of Marxism and Fascism can be called “statist,” and so on.
In places, the chart is genuinely illuminating. It captures the intuition that Anarcho-communism and Stalinism both occupy the socialist side of the diamond while sitting at polar extremes on questions of state authority — a distinction the left-right line simply cannot make. George Orwell would have agreed: In the Spanish Civil War, he fought with an anarchist-leaning militia against communists loyal to Moscow. The chart also usefully separates Libertarianism from Conservatism, disentangling two forces of the American right that are often conflated but have very different souls.
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But the diamond also traffics in significant fictions. Anarcho-collectivism and Anarcho-individualism are placed near the same apex, implying a similarity that isn’t there. The freedoms they envision are radically incompatible: collective freedom from property and hierarchy versus individual freedom from collective obligation.
There is also false precision in giving each ideology an equal-sized cell. Real ideological traditions are fuzzy, contested, and historically evolving. Populism, to take one example, is treated by most scholars not as a distinct ideology at all, but as a political style that can colonise virtually any point on the map. And placing Fascism at the pole of extreme Statism strips it of its specific content: the ultra-nationalism, racial hierarchy, and cult of violence that define it. This flattens something monstrous into mere bureaucratic overbearance.
Attitudes toward immigration, identity, and social values
So, why not add a third dimension? Ronald Inglehart’s decades of cross-national surveys identified an additional axis along which values shift from materialist (security, order, strength) to post-materialist concerns (self-expression, environmental concern, quality of life). This shift — and the fierce cultural backlash against it — has arguably reshaped recent politics more profoundly than any conventional swing between left and right.
A similar dimension is the GAL-TAN axis, running from Green, Alternative and Libertarian to Traditional, Authoritarian and Nationalist. Developed for studying European party systems, it captures attitudes toward immigration, identity, and social values that neither of the earlier models fully addresses.
But here is the cartographer’s dilemma: Each map is limited by the intentions of the mapmaker. Every political chart discussed here reveals as much about its maker as about the landscape it purports to chart. The horseshoe implicitly elevates the center. Nolan placed his own preferred ideology at the apex. The diamond shows a soft spot for Anarchism. And all of them are Western in their categories. There is no obvious space on any of these models for Confucian political thought, Islamic governance theory, or the African concept of Ubuntu.
The old cartographer’s saying applies: The map is not the territory. As political charts grow ever more elaborate in the pursuit of completeness, they trade away the one thing that made the original so durable: simplicity.
Despite all its limitations, we’ll be living with the left-versus-right paradigm for a while yet. The model may not be entirely true, but it is reassuringly simplistic — just like a lot of political discourse today.
The vote that started it all
So, how did that original vote between left and right actually play out? The National Assembly voted 673 to 325 to grant the king a suspensive veto — allowing him to delay legislation, but not block it permanently. A compromise that satisfied no one: the monarchists had wanted a stronger king; a bloc of about 150 radicals didn’t want any royal veto at all.
Nor did the vote do anything to endear the crown to the starving masses. A few weeks later, they would march on Versailles, invade the royal palace, and take the king and queen back to Paris as prisoners — and, eventually, to the guillotine.
The left had won. For now.
Strange Maps #12xx
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Man is a social animal; there's no Mowgli, raised by wolves.
If we're not socialized by two or three, we never acquire language or functional identity.
The tension then is the power of the individual versus the group.
Cultivation demanded both China and Egypt have strong central authority.
England across the Channel, and her offspring taming North America, both developed highly independent folks.
The real danger today? A government that offers everything will always demand everything in return.
De Tocqueville had similar thoughts about when "the people vote themselves money..."
Excellent! Clearly most labels used by politicos are rather useless and malleable.....and perhaps that is for the best because total rigidity makes for toxic politics. In the USA, our horrific primary system coupled with gerrymandering actually makes such distinctions even less useful; indeed, old fashioned racial and class voting supersedes any ideology. NIMBYism knows no ideology. Too bad the USA does not offer more political options and choices to reflect your interesting delineation. Proportional voting is all well and good so long as minimal thresholds are used to get a seat.