Eric Levitz: Left and Right: The "Fiction" at the Heart of the American Political Divide

This was really irritating me until Levitz got around to stating his own view of the matter.

   The currently-fashionable middlebrow view that one encounters commonly in Reddit-level discussions: there's no such thing as "left" and "right".../...the distinction makes no sense.

   Well, bullshit.

   These views tend to be supported by starting with a straw man that Levitz called ideological "essentialism"...'essentialism' being one of the many philosophical terms "appropriated" by the left and vaguely Continental-style academicians outside philosophy...but that they don't understand.

   To cut to the chase, and put it in my own terms: as is often the case, concern with "essentialism" distracts from realism. Left and right are real tendencies--Levitz agrees. There's a certain amount of arbitrariness...but so what? That doesn't matter. It's to be expected. What matters is that there are some strong tendencies that cluster together. E.g. the left's greater love of equality and the right's greater respect for merit and earned advantage. I'd add: the left's affinity for rapid and frequent change and the right's more circumspect approach to it. Freedom...much as I'd like to say it's a more conservative value...tends, IMO, to wander around back and forth. For most of my life, free speech, for example, was something the American left / the Democratic party tended to be more committed to protecting. That all changed on campuses during the political correctness spasm of of the late '80s - early '90s. And it started noticeably changing in the country as a whole ca. 2013ish...until, by 2020, free speech was considered downright reactionary.

   Anyway, bottom line, as you already know: the left/right distinction is a messy one. Like most ordinary, practical distinctions, there's something to it...and it's handy...but not much more than that.