What do I call myself now that the Left has made ‘Right-wing’ synonymous with ‘racist’?
The way we talk about politics has been rigged so ‘Left’ is good and ‘Right’ is evil. It’s time for a change
When I recorded an interview for “Triggernometry” this week, it arose in our discussion that the podcast, the creation of two comedians, had been summarily labelled on Twitter as “Right-wing”. Yet the pair’s guests have included distinguished, thoughtful intellectuals like the political scientist Sir John Curtice and the evolutionary psychologist Dr Diana Fleischman, who would hardly qualify as hardliners. On the other hand, the Left has gone, as one of my interlocutors put it, “bat-s---”, and the two comedians are especially concerned with the protection of free speech, a cause the Left has all but abandoned. So you couldn’t call this podcast “Left-wing”. By the process of elimination, doesn’t that put the duo on the Right? If so, what’s wrong with that?
The label matters because the language of politics has been rigged. On a linguistically level playing field, the connotations of “Left-wing” and “Right-wing” would balance. They don’t. “Left-wing” has a neutral-to-positive shimmer to it. We conjure
reasonable, principled, well-meaning champions of social justice with strong convictions who care about others. If we don’t happen to share their view that anyone with 20p in his pocket should be taxed within an inch of his life, we might append, “but who may be a little misguided”.
As for “Right-wing”, that’s a doddle to decode. It means “racist”.
The proof of this asymmetry is the fact that Labour politicians and voters alike wear the label “Left-wing” as a badge of honour. By contrast, I can’t remember a single politician or punter proudly proclaiming on my television that he or she is “Right-wing”. Nigel Farage is called Right-wing by his detractors. He does not call himself Right-wing. Because “Right-wing” is pejorative.
What does this incongruity mean? First off, that the Left is controlling the conversation. We absorb linguistic connotations from many thousands of mentions from multiple sources. Because the Left has successfully dominated so many of those sources in the mainstream media (the BBC, Channel 4, etc), it controls the meaning of the words we hear. Secondly, these disparate undertones leave a large segment of the electorate directionally bereft. If you believe in a small, efficient state and a balanced budget but don’t fancy yourself a bigot, you’re probably at a loss to position yourself on the traditional political axis.
Americans can resort to the milder, less geometric term “conservative”, but for the British that word is bound to be contaminated by Conservative with a capital C. Further confounding the usefulness of this brand, the contemporary Conservative Party isn’t remotely conservative in the lowercase. We have a “Conservative” government that lifts its policy on energy companies from Ed Miliband, and nothing’s more inimical to conventional conservative economic thinking than state-mandated price caps. A “Conservative” government is confiscating the highest proportion of GDP for 40 years, while you’ll never catch Philip Hammond following the word “tax” with “cut”. Worst of all, a Conservative Government has conspicuously failed to honour the 2016 referendum. If you’re a Leave supporter, could you now accurately describe yourself as a “Conservative”? For Britons, not just the party but the very word “conservative” is broken.
Because “Right-wing” has been so successfully stigmatised, the odd non-left politician will reluctantly accept the label “centre-right”, as if clinging to the pole dividing the barbarians from the decent civilised people and holding on for dear life. In the UK’S post-blair years, “centre-left” is less in use. “Left-wing” has a perfectly respectable gloss, so there’s no need to cling to that centre pole.
The mainstream media’s having tinged the vocabulary pertaining to the Right with a repellent racism is especially convenient in discussions of immigration. Slapping the adjective “Right-wing” on anyone who advocates better policing of borders dog-whistles to the audience that this person is a bigot, without the accusation having to be made outright, much less be supported by evidence.
Of course, Brexit ought logically to blow the whole directional political axis out of the water, because EU membership is not really a Right/left issue. (Recall that until 1983, Labour advocated leaving the EEC.) Sir John
Curtice defines the Brexit divide as between “social liberals” and “social conservatives”, not between the traditional Left and Right, which is why the issue is tearing the two traditionally Left and Right parties to pieces.
Nevertheless, the moral taint attached to the R-word is deployed with fiendish efficacy in relation to Leave MPS. On the news, members of the European Research Group (ERG) are routinely tarred as “hard-right Brexiteers” – the better to capitalise on the connotation of the Right as not only prejudiced, but extreme. (The very idea that the BBC et al could cast the dapper Jacob Rees-mogg as a rogue revolutionary is hilarious.) Yet the only thing that makes the ERG “hard-right” is that this beleaguered camp of Conservative MPS actually want to leave
the European Union. By implication, over half the UK electorate is “hard-right” – in other words, bigoted extremists.
Yet, aside from a handful of isolated English Defence League types, most of the real political extremism these days is on the Left. Dismayed by the fluffy, anodyne connotations of “Left-wing”, I’ve taken to tagging the authoritarians of the identity politics movement “hard-left”, which at least conveys a degree of inflexibility – but still not the moral dubiety of “hard-right”. “Farleft” is even lamer, while “far-right” decodes “neo-nazi”.
Socially liberal and economically conservative, I can’t be the only one who’s baffled by where to locate herself on the Right-left continuum, to which I’m prone to picture myself as perpendicular. As I hew roughly to the principle that we should all be able to do whatever we like so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, I’ve sometimes described myself as “libertarian”. But in the UK, that word often elicits a blank stare. In the US, libertarians are widely disparaged as kooks; the doctrine is bizarrely and illogically linked to an obsession with bringing back the gold standard and a fetish for Ayn Rand novels. As a useful thumbnail for other people, then, the term doesn’t work.
I’ll occasionally adopt the tag of “classical liberal”, to distinguish myself from the rabble consumed with intersectionality, cultural appropriation, and microaggressions. And there is a growing group of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic – mostly older boomers like me – who are pushing back against the illiberality of identity politics. But “classical liberal” would seem to contradict my support for flat taxes.
The loaded connotations of political directional terms are not merely a matter of vocabulary. If “Left-wing” is synonymous with “virtuous” and “Right-wing” with “racist”, then if you don’t identify as on the Left, there’s something wrong with you. Only claiming to be on the Left is socially palatable. While the usage of “Left” and “Right” feigns to be neutrally informative, today these descriptors function as propaganda.
So I’ve had it with that axis. The “Left” is full of proto fascists, while the “Right” is a purgatory to which the Left banishes people it doesn’t like, but it’s not a territory the prudent would ever inhabit voluntarily – for what sane person would willingly don the mantle of “white supremacist loon”? Their meanings having been warped, these classifications are now dysfunctional. We need a new political language. As for what to substitute, I throw it open to my favourite section of this paper: the letters page.