The government of Germany has labeled a highly popular political party, the Alternative for Germany, as “right-wing extremist” and seems on the verge of banning it. They say this stems from Germany’s history, an obvious reference to its Nazi past.
The problem here comes down to the label “right wing.” What if it is so loose and so confusing that anyone so tagged can be driven out of public life? In that case, right wing can become like the word communist a few generations ago, a kind of ideological leper bell that creates an excuse for cancellation, speech controls, and voter disenfranchisement.
This model would fit with other such efforts in Romania and Brazil. Globally, the political parties that have raised doubts about mass immigration and caste aspirations on the political establishment have faced growing bans on their activities on grounds that they are right wing and hence a long-term threat to democracy itself.
This rationale comes close to the idea that something needs to be destroyed to save it, a dangerous strategy that reduces people’s government to a slogan with no practical meaning.
Much turns on the actual meaning of right and left in today’s world. Most people have an intuition of the definitions but there is so much malleability in the categories that precision seems elusive.
Certainly in my case, I’ve stopped taking the terms seriously and started just listening to arguments over issues and considering them one by one. Putting thinkers and ideas into pre-set buckets can end serious discussion before it even begins.
The terms right and left had no presence in 18th and 19th century America. We had plenty of conflicts of course: industry vs. agriculture, peace vs. manifest destiny, North vs. South, Protestant vs. Catholic, and so on. They were always described in precise terms, and mostly centered on economic issues and some cultural ones.
That changed only in the early 20th century and mostly with and following the administration of Woodrow Wilson and the advent of Progressive ideology. Here was a period when the notion of the stable Constitution gave way to a new romance with science as a governing force.
Three crucial changes happened in 1913. The Federal Reserve was created. The income tax was approved as an amendment. And the bicameral Congress was fundamentally restructured with the introduction of the direct election of Senators. Soon after, the United States entered the Great War, normalizing conscription and shattering the belief that the world had entered on a permanent path of peace and prosperity.
Here was the period in which the current version of right and left took shape. The Bolshevik Revolution inspired the belief in the inevitably of socialism, a conviction shared by many among the American progressives. This came to be defined as left, while opposition to those impulses was thrown into the bucket called right.
To be sure, every survey course on the history of political ideas offers a different version of events. The conventional story is that the terms left and right refer to 18th-century French history. The monarchists and defenders of the establishment sat on the right side of Parliament while the free traders and democracy defenders sat on the left.
Whatever the plausibility of this observation, it has no connection to the emergence of these ideas in American history. Our own history of these terms traces to the Hegelian revolution in philosophy in Germany in the 19th century. Hegel mapped out a theory of history in which forces beyond our control were creating a destiny for the German nation. He was a statist, to be sure, but lacking in specifics on how his god-like entity would function.
Fifty years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Hegel’s ideas had largely conquered Germany, and popular wisdom was that his ideas were embodied in the reign of Otto von Bismarck. It was during this period that Karl Marx fashioned himself into a new form of socialist, one who was scientific rather than socialist. He fastened Hegel’s theories of history and proclaimed his new system of thought to be predetermined by the gods—an implausible claim but the Bolsheviks later seized on it and made Marx their hero.
In the ensuing years, two general branches of Hegelianism had formed. The left version celebrated state ownership of the means of production, labor rights, high taxation, public schools, central banking, population control, and technocracy as the embodiment of progress. Obviously, this had absolutely nothing to do with the designations that trace to the earlier years of the French Parliament—indeed you could say it was nearly the opposite.
Meanwhile, the rightist version of Hegelianism imagined a future of overweening state power, the unity of church and state, family and race at the center, a revanchist spirit, plus imperial conquest as the realization of the forces of history. You could say that the Nazis were the successors of this view but it gets complicated when you remember that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was indeed socialist and pro-worker.
It’s a decent shorthand to say that left-Hegelianism landed in Marxism while right-Hegelianism landed in Nazism. But this is a messy history and there are many gradients and specifics that make even that claim confusing. Regardless, it was this version of right and left that came to inhabit the American political context.
This is because so many top American academics in the late 19th century had been influenced by the German model by virtue of migratory graduate studies in Germany, all backed by substantial immigration. Again, what came to America had nothing to do with the French experience and everything to do with the German one.
What does any of this have to do with America today? Not that much really. The Trump administration is seen to be right but is widely inclusive of refugees from the Democrats who are regarded as left. As for policy positions of the Trump administration, they borrow from all sides. For example, there is a working class spirit about MAGA and a liberal crunchy feel to MAHA plus a libertarian ethos to the efforts of DOGE that similarly transverse ideological boundaries.
What I look for in intellectual colleagues and inspired writings today are minds that practice political independence and avoid all tribal traps. This is unusual in our times given the huge bifurcations that have occurred along partisan lines. I have no issue hanging out with and learning from members of the non-woke left, but also Trump partisans who regard him as constructively disruptive even if they find disagreements on a variety of topics.
For the most part, the reflexive invocation of these terms seems to have outlived its usefulness. The danger of continuing to invoke them without precise definitions is that it becomes an excuse for censorship, cancellations, and disenfranchisement, as we are seeing in Germany, Romania, Brazil, and other places today. This is a dangerous path: the anti-right embodying precisely what they claim to oppose.
America was blessedly spared the reckless deployment of these ideological buckets for much of its history. Maybe we can be again.
