1. The distinction between left and right is often useful for political thinking. It’s significant that the terminology comes from a representative assembly (you know the story, I assume): voting is binary, “aye” or “nay,” so in a political system based on voting, at the end of the day you have to pick one of two sides. In a two-party system, citizens do this themselves, during elections. In a multi-party system, politicians do it, by forming coalitions within parliaments. (The former seems better to me, but that’s a question for another day.) Either way, the decision is necessary, and the simple spatial metaphor neatly reflects that need to choose.

  2. The difference at the heart of the left-right distinction has to do with equality–or perhaps it’s better to say “egalitarianism,” the idea that from the notion of equality you can spin out a whole way of thinking about public policy. To treat the left-right distinction as if it is fundamentally about anything other than egalitarianism vs. its critics (e.g., new vs. old, state vs. market) is to obfuscate. (Norberto Bobbio made the definitive argument about this about thirty years ago.)

  3. But that doesn’t get you very far. There are a number of different conceptions of equality (Michael Walzer’s distinction between “simple equality” and “complex equality” is a good place to start), several competing ideas about why we ought to value equality, and any number of conflicting ideas about how to achieve it–not to mention the myriad reasons for and ways of opposing or criticizing or just worrying about egalitarianism and its consequences. We need a more complex vocabulary, because we quickly run up against the usefulness of the terms “left” and “right”.

  4. The limits to those terms' usefulness are more apparent the more widely the terms are used. My impression–anecdotal, uncertain–is that until around fifteen years ago most Americans (most journalists, most politicians, most citizens in general) didn’t use these terms often. The few Americans who did use them much were the handful who were self-consciously ideological–say, Harringtonites on the left, or Buckleyites on the right, people who were deeply immersed in political activity and who took a more or less intellectual approach to their political engagements. I think a shift happened around the time of the rise of the Tea Party “movement” and a new aggressively and self-consciously right-wing media world, after which use of the left-right distinction quickly became ubiquitous. (To whit, here’s an n-gram using the best proxies I could think of for the political uses of the terms.) I may have the dating wrong; perhaps the spread of that terminology was gradual, and I only noticed its widespread use suddenly. In any case, one consequence of the (relatively) recent ubiquity of the terms left and right is that in recent years I have often found myself unable to recognize what others call “the left”. The notion that we could use the term “the left” to include, for example, university managers who pontificate about “inclusion” while keeping adjunct pay as low as possible and shunting students out of classrooms and onto screens…well, words fail me.

  5. I would like to propose that the best way to use the left-right distinction is neither by retaining the simplistic binary nor by extending the spatial metaphor through the addition of more spatial terms (“center”, “far”). The left-right metaphor is insufficient, but it strains when stretched. Instead, it is more helpful to introduce qualitative adjectives: authoritarian, sectarian, democratic, statist, decentralist, techno-optimist, green, humanist, market-friendly, religious, secular, populist, decent, etc. This yields terms that highlight substantive differences within “left” and “right”.

  6. Adding substantive adjectives to the terms “left” and “right” can also suggest strange or surprising cross-cutting agreements. If the spatial metaphor is most useful for describing voting decisions, then it follows that the left-right distinction loses salience the farther you get from the act of voting. We might then ask which matters more, the alliance I make on election day, or the alliances I make on the other 364 days of the year?

  7. One adjective in particular interests me right now. Can there be both a humanistic left and a humanistic right? That is to say, are there distinctly “left” and “right” versions of the project of staying human in antihumanistic times? Or, rather, is it that there are wormholes from certain parts of the left, and likewise from certain parts of the right, getting you to a humanism that is not quite either left or right? I find this to be a conundrum, as puzzling as the conundrum that @ayjay mentions in his post today about humanism. I’m not sure that it matters much: the work (and the need for wisdom and courage) is more or less the same, either way.

  8. After all, what’s a spatial metaphor among friends?