Thanksgiving Turkeys Without a Left Wing
You wouldn’t buy a turkey without a left-wing, but Americans buy a lot of news stories without a left-wing
I’m not on the right or left but still can’t help noticing that the adjective “right-wing” is used in the media about eight times more than the adjective “left-wing.” Not only that but the former is typically used as a pejorative to conjure an image of extremists giving stiff-armed salutes while wearing jack boots.
At the same time, news coverage and social-media titans leave the impression that the nation is being overrun by right-wing white supremacists but not left-wing white Marxists.
Buying into such lopsided coverage is like buying a Thanksgiving turkey that has a right-wing but no left-wing.
To employ another fowl metaphor, I don’t have a rooster in the vicious cockfight between America’s left and right. That’s because the traditional left-right continuum is woefully inadequate in describing my politics, just as it is inadequate in describing the politics of many other Americans.
A much better continuum is a continuum of coercion, showing on a scale of 0 to 10 how much coercion the government is exerting over citizens and how much coercion the political parties want to exert. On that scale, “0” represents anarchy (no government) and “10” represents dictatorship. The Constitution of James Madison was about a 3, slavery was a 10, and the America of today, with its huge unaccountable agencies, indecipherable regulations, too-powerful presidency, and ruling plutocrats, is about a . . . . Well, you can pick a number.
Before picking a number, consider this fact: Those who have laboriously climbed from the lower class to the middle class by living below their means, investing in their family’s future, and playing by a plethora of rules, so that their children might reach elite status, can wake up one day and find that the rules were changed overnight by apparatchiks and plutocrats, resulting in a big chunk of their estate being confiscated for the stated reason of social justice but for the real reason of their overlords wanting to protect their privileged kids from competition from the offspring of the hoi polloi.
Does it really matter if those confiscating your liberty, income, savings, and future are left-wingers or right-wingers? It’s the coercion that matters, not the political labeling. After all, it didn’t matter in the end to Eastern Europeans in the 20th century whether they suffered under communists or fascists.
Given their history of brutality and mass murder, both the left and right can count their respective victims in the tens of millions. Therefore, in that sense, it’s not a badge of honor to be labeled as one or the other.
Granted, the body count is muddied—often intentionally so—by the common mischaracterization that fascism under Mussolini and Hitler was right-wing. Actually, their fascism was a combination of nationalism and socialism; that is, both right-wing and left-wing. The nationalistic Italian and German states didn’t own the means of production but did control them. It’s a similar situation in today’s China, which is becoming increasingly nationalistic while allowing private ownership but making sure that it serves the interests of the party.
It’s astonishing and discouraging that the K-16 educational complex doesn’t teach these nuances. Maybe that’s intentional.
Such miseducation might explain why the word “left-wing” is so often missing in the media and in everyday conversation among common folk, but “right-wing” can be found in abundance.
Another possible explanation is that the media has a leftist bias and thus wants to attach the pejorative “right-wing” to conservatives and Republicans but doesn’t want to attach the pejorative “left-wing” to liberals and Democrats. However, that doesn’t explain why a lot of conservative media also use “right-wing” more than its opposite. Maybe they’re dimwitted.
Even some noted historians use “right-wing” more frequently, which calls into question their objectivity and scholarship. As a history buff, I run into this a lot, including cases where “right-wing” is used throughout a book but “left-wing” is not used once. That troubles me, not because I’m a right-winger, which I’m not, but because I don’t want to read biased history.
It’s far more serious for reporters, academics, and historians to not acknowledge a left-wing than it is for you to buy a Thanksgiving turkey without a left-wing. But for heaven’s sake, don’t fly somewhere for Thanksgiving on an airplane that doesn’t have a left-wing.
