Rethinking "Left" and "Right"

It is vital that we repudiate the false paradigm of left wing egalitarianism vs. right wing patriarchy. This vesitge of the French Revolution is a grand equivocation that is deceptive when applied to American politics. It supports the clever deception that liberals are about freedom and fairness and conservatives long to oppress people, when in fact the reverse is true. The real dichotomy is actually with regard to the fundamental role of government.
 
In a classical sense, "liberal" meant support for the proposition of the State being less controlling, offering the people more liberty; "conservative" meant preserving the prerogatives of the State to invade, control  tax and regulate the people's lives, holding the reins of power ever tightly. But America, with the help of ideas borrowed from elsewhere, was founded on the principle of limited government: the state inherently has no powers but those explicitly granted by the people. Liberal has come to mean loose with regard to the amount and scope of power the people allow the state to exercise: the government now spends quite liberally, for example, and elected officials and unelected bureaucrats tend to see few, if any restraints on their ability to regulate. By contrast, conservative now means giving the state less power and maintaining strict limits on its scope.

Even the terms "left" and "right" come from the seating arrangements in the french National Assembly. As in the French Revolution, leftist revolutions merely transfer the power of the State from one group of people to another, without substantially changing the fundamental presupposition that the State was to centrally control everything.
 
Because Leftism repudiates limited government, even leftist "revolution" merely devolves to functional feudalism, albeit by a different ruling class. Class warfare is the Marxist revolutionary's stock-in-trade. Leftists pit disparate interest groups against one another while dangling in front of both sides the carrot of special treatment by the state. Leftist egalitarianism is merely pandering to the envy of the masses in order to acquire the critical mass of power to control everyone, resulting in a least common denominator situation with everyone having the same amount of nothing, except for the ruling class. Economically, Leftism basically amounts to capitalism for a much smaller amount of people. Politically, it amounts to a neo-feudalism, with alliances forged not by marriages among ruling families but by the greed and hatred commonly shared among interest groups that function as tribal identities. Seeing the State as the savior who will give them what they see as equality, they readily relinquish their liberty and give the State more power.

Populism, the central rhetorical strategy of the left, is merely a means to an end: inciting the masses with a sense of cheatedness born of envy to leverage their collective will in a democratic majority that votes to transfer wealth from the minority into the hands of en even smaller ruling class, on the promise that they will in turn get a bigger slice of the pie. If not for the realities of human nature, this might conceivably work. But as conservatives acknowledge and liberals deny, consolidation of power in the hands of the State is a petri dish for corruption, abuse and tyranny. Thus, invariably, leftist leaders distribute confiscated wealth to their favorites, as they deem politically expedient.  

Those who long for the old way see the limited government as a regrettable development because it is an obstacle to them seizing that power to do all sorts of things they think are wonderful and noble. They need this power, they say, so they can impose their idea of righteousness on the world with scientific precision by means of new technology, toward a new destiny. Therefore, they call themselves "progressive." So, despite the Left's forward-looking aspirations of an evolutionary leap for humankind wrought by advancements of "new" organizational structures, progressivism is a significant regression to central control by an elite ruling class who thinks they can run your life better than you. 

What other terms ought instead to be used is fodder for another conversation. Suffice to say that in the very sense leftists use the term as a pejorative to disparage the authority of their parents or the wisdom of prior generations, you can't be more "patriarchal" than the progressive Left.