Recent email exchange between members of my debate club:
A: [Suggestion for a debate motion for our debate club]: Right-wingers have the wrong political priorities.
B: I'd much rather have discussions on "what are the right political priorities, wrong political priorities, and why"; then after that, "who are and are not 'right-wingers'?"
A: “Right-wing politics, or rightism, is the range of political ideologies that view certain social stratifications and orders as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position in favour of conservatism, natural law, economics, authority, property, religion, or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.” [quoting Right-wing politics - Wikipedia]
A few comments:
Wikipedia is not an authority but a crowd-sourced first step of an exploration. Political scientists actually disagree on what is left and right. Some even doubt the utility of these political labels
I'm more interested in what non-academics mean when they use these terms, especially when they defend or condemn one or the other. What comes to mind when we speak of the left or the right? What aspects of ideology and behavior are highlighted, what is ignored or minimized?
What do we gain by using these political labels? What do they help us accomplish?
They help us hate, exclude, expel and erase. They help us rationalize power grabs in the name of the greater good.
It’s no wonder labels are generally reserved for the Other Side.
I’ll end with a few excerpts from The Bosnian War and Negative Peace: What three recent deaths teach us about labels and hatred, by Kimberly Mazzocco Hart (The Dispatch September 28, 2026):
History warns us that the road to dehumanization begins with the quiet subsuming of the individual into an ideological category.
And then the other became more than just not you. The other became the one preventing you from being you. They were the ones subjugating you, preventing you from … something. Labels became hatred. And not you, the Other, became less than.
Those others didn’t necessarily deserve to be treated with dignity. They were bad, they were your enemy, they didn’t deserve the same as you.
People were encouraged to label. And then encouraged to hate.
In Life is a Miracle, written in 2000, Wendell Berry teaches us that: “Affection requires us to break out of the abstractions, the categories. …To defend what we love, we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” We can’t know a label. For a label is merely an abstraction.