Left and Right: Part VII

In the last post, I indicated how the Democratic Party tends toward the left.  In this post I will show how the Republican Party tends toward the right.

Take, e.g., this quote from Ronald Reagan:  "I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."

As you can see, Reagan was a quintessential conservative in the sense of preferring smaller government over larger.  It is also interesting that right wingers tend to see as their program not the task of transforming government or society into some imagined utopia, but to stop the left from doing so.  It is in many respects, an anti-program.

It is also interesting and not a little paradoxical that both left and right in some ways violate their own principles.  For example, it is characteristic of the left to believe that humans are basically good and that it is genes or the environment that makes them behave badly.  Yet you might think that this belief in the innate goodness of man would result in a policies that give people more free rein to express their innate goodness.  Yet it does not.  The left generally believes that people won't behave well until their environment is transformed, i.e. society is transformed into something that will somehow magically enable them to behave.  They believe in the innate goodness of man, but believe that he prevented from expressing it by the evil social structures that make him greedy and selfish.  That's why they despise or at least distrust capitalism.

Folks on the right are also paradoxically inconsistent.  They don't necessarily believe that people are inherently evil, but they have a healthy skepticism toward individuals.  Yet they tend to advocate fewer governmental constraints on the individual.  This is probably best explained by the fact that right wingers tend to believe in giving people opportunities, but in punishing them if they screw up.