Moving Beyond Two Sides-ism

In my last essay I used the terms left and right extensively, a choice I regret. It was expedient, I thought, to speak in the current language of politics. The problem is that by doing so I also reify its terms and empower the worldview underlying it. That’s ironic, because my essay was about othering. Using terms like left and right establishes a conceptual frame in which us-versus-them politics is inevitable. So, my essay was working at cross purposes to itself.

Furthermore, the terms sow confusion and misunderstanding because they mean very different things to different people. People on the “right” call Hillary Clinton a leftist, but few who self-identify as leftists would agree. Meanwhile, the liberal media calls people like Glenn Greenwald “right wing,” even though he represents positions that fifteen years ago would have been considered left.

Right and left are arbitrary signifiers. They aren’t features of objective reality, like two sides of a brain. So, when I describe the political situation with those terms I end up reinforcing an unnecessary, artificial division. Why should we assume that the polity naturally cleaves into two halves? That is what those terms suggest. One could just as easily apply other categories, quadrants instead of lines, maybe spirals or fractals, to describe the political order.

Well, maybe not “just as easily.” Part of the allure of the left-right schematic is its simplicity. Psychologically, the simplest (and most puerile) drama is one with two sides, one right and one wrong. Children play it out all the time and, if they have the right models and social conditions, come to learn its limitations and are able to mature beyond it.

Our society, though, seems stuck in binary categories that don’t even make sense. Does “left” mean “those who identify as left?” Does it mean, “Those whom others identify as left?” Same for right. The terms are fuzzy. Furthermore, the ideas around which these groups coalesce are not static. Certainly, they each draw from a body of literature, a long historical discourse, but lately the positions that people call “right” or “left” have changed so dramatically as to have sometimes switched sides. For example, over the last decade most (though not all) opposition to war has come from the libertarian right. During Covid, most of the so-called left abandoned its traditional defense of civil liberties, opposition to censorship, hostility to megacorporations (e.g. Big Pharma), and skepticism of the intelligence agencies as it fell into lockstep with Covid orthodoxy. “Who is left and who is right?” I wondered. The terms lost their utility except as group identifiers. No longer did they refer to a consistent set of beliefs.

In a bold series of essays, “How the Left Got Fucked,” Rhyd Wildermuth describes how the CIA funded and promoted an “anti-communist left” after World War Two. “The anti-communist left,” he says, “which we can probably in all accuracy call the only left that is allowed to exist, poses no threat nor even obstacle to the continuation of capitalism.” Thanks in large part to CIA influence, over the decades the left has largely replaced the politics of class struggle with those of intersectional identity. As Wildermuth explains,

This “New Left” choked out earlier and rival leftisms, starving them of attention and exposure. It became the leftism taught in universities, creating a new generation of radicals more interested in debating the finer points of gender, racial, and colonial oppression than figuring out a way to fight the rich.

Although called “cultural Marxism,” today’s leftism has little to do with Marx. Capitalism operates just fine whatever the race, gender, or sexual preference of its functionaries.

Side note: Capitalist/anti-capitalist creates another artificial division. The nature of capitalism depends on the nature of capital, but capital—money and property—is but a set of social agreements, and agreements can be changed. The Marxist definition of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. However, “ownership” is not an all-or-nothing predicate. Property isn’t attached to your body; it’s not yours the way an arm or a leg is; it is only yours because people agree that you have special rights over it. These rights are not absolute. I “own” a plot of land where my house sits, but I cannot build a hog rendering plant or toxic waste dump on it. When the nature of the agreements called money and property change, the nature of capital changes and so does the nature of capitalism. My book, Sacred Economics, explores how internalization of negative externalities and the elimination of “economic rents” align money and property with a post-scarcity world and the principles of the gift.

An avowedly leftist friend reached out to me with a helpful distinction. Within the left, she said, there is an increasing polarization between what she called the “othering left” and the “atonement left.” The former is much about punishment, us-versus-them, “fuck you” politics. The latter is fully aligned with the ideas in my immigration essay. (In fact, most of those ideas I have drawn from decades of reading in the left tradition.) She also calls it the “listening left.”

One might make a similar distinction within the right. Indeed, it offends reason to group inveterate warmongers such as Lindsey Graham and John Bolton in the same political category as war critics like Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard, or hateful ideologues like Glenn Beck with thoughtful, evolving right-identified journalists like Tucker Carlson. Carlson, who still identifies as a conservative, would be a great example of the “listening right.”

Dropping left-right terminology and the bipolar us-them thinking that accompanies it, other questions rise to help us understand our political figures. Do they listen? Do they change? Are they willing to admit they were wrong? Do they give fair and generous treatment to those with whom they disagree? Do they look for truths visible from different perspectives than their own?

To the extent that our leaders and we ourselves embody those virtues, society will be able to resolve its enduring conflicts. Dialog becomes possible. We can bridge our differences. War, genocide, ecocide, exploitation, and oppression wither in the bright light of empathy. Empathy is the heart of listening. To listen truly means to step into another’s shoes. What does the world look like as you, and how does it feel?

Those who listen become aware of the complexity of the issues that create conflict. Us-them, right-left thinking suggests a simple solution to every problem; namely, to defeat the other side in political combat—or military combat; hence the terrifying drama unfolding in the Middle East. If self were truly separate from other, then this solution might often work, but when self and other mirror each other, contain each other, and uphold each other, then whatever problem the defeat of the other solved will arise in some new form.

Another consequence of political listening is the collapse of the narratives that contain each side in its rightness. In order to maintain us, each side must exclude any information that humanizes or validates the other, or adds complexity and nuance to their disputes. More insidiously, both sides must collude to maintain their battlefield and deny any larger story that would make it irrelevant. The information they agree to ignore would, if brought to open public view, transform society and politics. I’m talking about things like the JFK assassination, UFO disclosure, free energy technologies, MK-Ultra, and all kinds of other paradigm-smashing topics, some very dark and others magnificent, that must be banished from official reality in order to maintain the relevance of our divisions.

Because the terms left and right feed the mentality of self and other, I intend to stop using them carelessly. I’d also like to add a new term to our political lexicon, in rejoinder to the accusation of “both sides-ism.” What we need to be done with is two sides-ism. We have to let go of the mental template that casts every drama into bipolar terms. I am going to be more careful to avoid feeding two sides-ism in my choice of language, and I hope others join me. It may not be an easy habit to break. It is so tempting to invoke those horrible people to arouse the passions of us, the good people, who oppose them. You can channel that outrage into likes, followers, subscribers, votes, money, power. It is the old way, tried and proven. But each time we do that, we add another bit of fuel to the fire consuming our world.