Importance of the Left and the Right in Politics

In any political debate there is a general criterion to distinguish ideological approaches. This criterion can be summed up in two words: left and right.

The so-called left includes a wide range of doctrines, political formations and collectives: socialism, social democracy, communism, anarchism, environmentalism, protest platforms, social movements, anti-globalization approaches, etc.

The right is also plural, since it includes conservatives, liberals, Christian Democrats, fascism and neo-fascism, nationalism, etc. Populist movements can be from one corner as well as from another.

In conventional political parlance, the term left is synonymous with progressivism and the term right is equivalent to conservatism. This distinction is directly related to the two great economic systems of the 20th century: communism and capitalism.

the political center

Between two antagonistic approaches there is always an intermediate one. In politics, the center parties are those that combine typical proposals of the right (for example, the free unrestricted trade) with some social measures (for example, the universalization of public services).

The origin of this distinction

After the triumph of the French Revolution in 1789 there was the training of the first national parliament, the Constituent Assembly of 1791. The representatives of the people who sat on the left wing of parliament were the Jacobins, while the Girondins sat on the right wing.

The Jacobins were the most revolutionary and considered that the representatives of the people should be the expression of the general will (they were known by this term because they met in the convent of the fathers Jacobins).

The Girondins were representatives who came from the Gironde region and defended the advisability of agreeing with the nobility, the church and the monarchy and, at the same time, At the same time, they considered that the vote of the popular classes should be limited (the Girondins were reformists and opposed any process revolutionary).

The example of China highlights the limitations of both ideological oppositions

The classic distinction between both sides is not always valid to understand political reality. The government of the People's Republic of China is a good example of this.

The Chinese government is controlled by a single party of communist ideology. Despite this, political reality has a marked capitalist bias. The singular fusion between communism and capitalism contradicts the classic binomial that we observe throughout the article.

Fotolia images. valentinakru