Left and Right: The Evolution of Political Ideologies

By Pranab Bardhan*

The Origins of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’

The terms Left and Right emerged from the time of the French Revolution. The origin of the term Left and Right was due to how, after the revolution, the members of the French National Assembly sat—usually, those who stood up more for progressive perspectives once sat on the left, and that's how the coining took place. In many parts of the world, the differentiation between the Left and the Right was in terms of economic issues. But even long before globalization, there were ambiguities in this Left-Right distinction in many countries. In the United States, abortion, gun rights, and in more recent decades, gay rights were issues taken by the Right Wing, not the Left Wing. So the part of the Right-Left distinction in the United States, for quite some decades even before globalization, was also based on cultural issues. 

Now, to turn to the case of India: where was the distinction between the Left and Gandhians? Of course, Gandhians tried a different economic strategy compared to the Nehruvians and the Left, but there were also some non-economic —one might call it cultural—issues. What I have in mind is: how does each faction look at the State? Usually, the Left wants the State to be important. In the early 1990s, I wrote an article on this issue; I openly said that the Left-Right distinction seems to be less relevant in the usual way. What is more relevant is the approach towards the State vis-a-vis the Society. Gandhians and the Left had different ways of looking at the State and Society. Gandhians emphasized local community and under-emphasized the State, whereas the Left emphasized the State. And paradoxically, the other groups that emphasized the state at that time, were the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) and the BJP. They wanted a strong state. So it is paradoxical that the BJP—which jumped into the political scene before the time of globalization—would also emphasize the state while the Left— the far Left and communists—wanted a strong state. Those who didn't want a strong state emphasized the society and community—whether Gandhians, Subaltern Historians, or environmentalists, though they wanted the local community to be much stronger. [1]

I give this as an example to show that even though historically, and particularly in Europe, the Left-Right distinction has been mainly on the issue of state-versus-market (those who emphasized the market were called the Right, and those who emphasized State were called the Left), in the United States and India other distinctions were important: non-economic issues were important, and perspectives towards state vis-a-vis the local community were very important. So in that sense, already before globalization, there was an emerging complexity in the distinction between the Left and the Right. 

Education and Job Stability

After globalization, because of the China shock in the United States and also somewhat in Europe, workers started going against the Democrats. Here also, I would emphasize the question of the liberal elite. I think it has to do with one important economic issue: over time, when we talk about the distinction or the contradictions between capital and labor, ‘capital’ is not the same capital as it was fifty years ago. The nature of capital has changed. Capital is not just physical; over time, even before globalization, another type of capital became increasingly important—something that economists call human capital. Human capital is partly about education; so educated professionals became more important over time, as technology progressed. These educated professionals are also capitalists of a sort: they are more in the business of human capital, so we could call them human capitalists. Another aspect of this is that those who have education (and human capital) can adapt much more easily than blue-collar workers. For blue-collar workers, it is very difficult to change jobs or skills, whereas education—and that's one of the major advantages of education—gives people more adaptability. That's where globalization came in. 

And it was not just globalization. Automation was the other reason why the working classes lost jobs in wealthier nations. The educated became much more cosmopolitan, as professional jobs were much more globally available and accessible. As a result, they became much more pro-globalization over time, for these two reasons: firstly, their adaptability was much greater owing to rising globalization, and secondly, human capital became much more important in the production process in the globalized market.

This has to be taken into account even in the face of the perceived job stability enjoyed by educated professionals. This stability is itself quite contingent; for example, in the United States, even professional workers’ pensions are not secure. So, while one could say that some aspects of these jobs are much more stable than those of blue-collared workers, the issue of adaptability is more crucial. Professionals could lose their jobs in the private sector, but if they are educated, they enjoy greater ease of transition to another job. So the issue of employment stability and adaptability are part of the same general scheme of things. With greater adaptability (focusing on adaptability rather than stability as the characteristic of educated professionals), comes a different attitude hinged on culture. Education by itself adds a cultural value to people’s minds. Both this cultural education and acquired adaptability allow a growing interest in other larger, cosmopolitan issues such as climate change.

Culture and Globalization

The growing visibility of cultural issues over merely economic ones can be seen in the distinct attitudes that emerged in the United States and Europe over the issue of immigration. For both the US and Europe, immigration was—at least relatively speaking—an important issue; the China Shock (2001) had been a major issue, although its effects were cushioned in Europe because of Europe’s financial safety net. This was therefore a period of deep economic uncertainty. However—as I have also written elsewhere—if this was fundamentally an economic issue, based on loss of income and employment, how does one explain the reason of the workers rooting for the Right? Why not go to the far Left? After all, the far Left was anti-globalization in its position and advocated for stronger protection of workers. 

If one tries to answer this question, culture becomes a very important part of the answer. The far Left did not appear as the workers’ choice because the far Left also supported immigration. The far Left advocated for abortion rights, gay rights, and so on. The workers deviated from the far Left on those cultural issues, and in the specific case of the United States, on gun rights too. However, immigration is not just a cultural issue; immigration is obviously an economic issue, and that is related to the job insecurity issue mentioned before. In Europe, the economic aspect of the issue of job loss was less prominent because of the safety net. There, the discontentment was mostly from the view that immigrants were becoming a strain on the welfare state. If we take an example from some studies of the 2020 presidential election in the United States: they found that a majority of less educated, white working-class people voted for Trump; while a significant proportion—though not the majority—of Hispanics and Blacks voted for Trump. This signals then that cultural issues triumph over economic issues, and the tensions between the two produced a divide within classes or communities.

And because they were divided, if one were to ask the Hispanic voter or the Black voter if they wanted minimum wages—which the Democrats were in favor of—most of them would reply in affirmative, but when asked if they were in favor of abortion rights, gay rights etc., it would emerge that they are socially conservative. In terms of economic issues, they were quite often with the Democrats, but on the cultural issues, they sided with the Republicans. And that was why the majority of Blacks and Hispanics voted for the Democrats, but a significant fraction voted for Trump.

If I may now go back to India about what I earlier mentioned about the distinction between the Left and Right: before the origin of Right-Wing parties, RSS was mainly a cultural organization. What is the RSS’s economic policy? It is economic nationalism. What does economic nationalism mean? Protection—what Indian leaders today call ‘atmanirbhar’— was the basis of RSS’s economic nationalism. If one thinks about which other political faction was economically nationalistic in that sense, that is, advocating for economic protection, protesting against imports substituting industrialization— the answer would be: the far Left in India. Quite often, many of the communists want protection, and have an anti-globalization outlook. So the traditional Left-Right division no longer exists; we see both the RSS and some of the communists being equally economically nationalistic in that sense. Clearly, the Left-Right distinction becomes quite complex.

And it’s not that the aforementioned attitudes towards globalization in India are shaped by India being insulated from globalization. In fact, India has been affected by globalization; the products that the poor buy today are made in China. Even the Ganesh idols sold in Mumbai are made in China. Recently, I saw a survey on attitudes to globalization; a large number of developing countries are by and large pro-globalization, while developed or rich countries, not so much. [2] But some, particularly the most pro-globalization countries, are poor—eg., Nigeria, one of the poorest countries; and on the other hand, one of the most anti-globalization nations is France. 

Attitude to globalization is not a major distinction between the Left and the Right in developing countries, particularly India; instead, there is this peculiar convergence between the Right and far Left. The far Left is anti-globalization and RSS is anti-globalization too, in that sense. Rather, one has to distinguish between economic and cultural issues; RSS has worked primarily on the cultural level for longer. They want a Hindu Rashtra in India; the Right-wing is now identified more with this cultural issue—Hindu majoritarianism. This has been the case in some other countries as well. In Turkey, there has been popular mobilization for Muslim majoritarianism, and Erdoğan is their leader; to some extent, in Brazil, Bolsonaro gets the vote of the white, Christian evangelicals, and so on. In my opinion, religious majoritarianism is the major factor of division between Right and Left in countries like India.

Populism, Nationalism and Community 

The politics of majoritarianism discussed before are intertwined with the growing populist politics in these countries. Different people mean different things by populism. Most economists essentially term those who are short-term thinkers as populists—those who don't look at the long-run interest go for popular short-term gimmicks—on the other hand, scholarship in political science largely perceives populism as fundamentally illiberal. Populism wants to get rid of liberal processes which delay things. Leaders like Trump or Orban in Hungary, Putin in Russia, or Erdoğan in Turkey promise the delivery of perks and goods but denounce liberal processes—the so-called due processes—which are time-consuming. This is also consistent with majoritarianism because of majoritarians’ opposition of or indifference towards minority rights. One of the reasons why they're so antagonistic towards liberals is because the liberals—at least according to them—would appease the minorities: from their perspective, Left-liberals in India would appease the Muslims, Left-liberals in Turkey would appease the Kurds, Left-liberals in Europe would appease the immigrant Muslims, and so on. President Macron in France and his party use a term called Islamo-Left (Left which likes the Islamic people). 

Essentially then, populism becomes a kind of majoritarianism that tramples upon minority rights. I have in my writings distinguished between two kinds of nationalism. The nationalism that Indian leaders, leaders in Turkey, Trump in the US, Orban in Hungary, and Putin in Russia have is what I would call ethno-nationalism—nationalism based on some ethnic group, on ethnic pride. The other kind of nationalism is what I call (and some other people have also called) civic nationalism, in which nationalism is based on constitutional liberal values. If we take the two largest democracies in the world: they started with civic nationalism—the nationalism of Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru, and Ambedkar. Yet these two forms of nationalism are not always stable. For example, in Europe, civic nationalism takes the form of soccer. Yet it can combine with ethnic nationalism; many European teams now have colored people, something which some supporters oppose; so this opposition is a case of ethnic nationalism within civic nationalism. [3]

The forms of centralized power today have a direct correspondence with ethnic nationalism. During the Capitol riots, the  ‘patriots’ invading the U.S. Congress were all fanatic supporters of Trump. For them, Trump stood for the motto— ‘Make America great again’. In their perspectives, they were the ones who stood for patriotism because the centralized power affirmed this narrative. The same thing is taking place in India: a person who is lynching Muslims thinks he's patriotic because the central powers have tacitly declared the minorities to be ‘traitors’ to the nation. 

Let me now emphasize two things that I have not discussed so far. One is: the differences in the potential to which the Left and the Right utilize social media. Of course, social media can be a good vehicle for Left-wing ideas as well, but now, data from surveys is increasingly showing that social media is being dominantly used to spread false ideas, rumors, and propaganda; the more outrageous it is, the faster it spreads. Bad ideas spread faster, and this is now documented—conspiracy theories spread like wildfire in social media; some psychologists are writing about this. Why is it that the Right Wing can use social media much more effectively than the Left Wing? It's this human psychology or mob psychology of bad ideas, conspiracies, rumors etc. spreading much faster that gives the Right Wing an advantage.

The other matter pertaining to the present times—and to me, it is extremely important— is the decline of trade unions. Trade unions have gone down all over the world. The decline of the trade union itself is an endogenous variable, but for the time being, if I regard it as an exogenous variable, the decline of trading and labor organizations is very important to this cultural-economic distinction that we have discussed earlier. Previously, blue-collar workers had a sense of belonging to a shared institution through the trade union; the trade union was not just an institution for bargaining wages. The trade union was also a cultural and social institution for the workers. I have personally known workers in Europe who regarded the trade union as a kind of local club where they could go for cultural activities. But with the decline of trade unions, there has been a cultural void— and this is the void that the populist Right-wing cultural issues fill. The Left needs to fill in that cultural void if it has to make a meaningful difference in the political climate.

The Community Question

The relationship between the state and the local community is where the Left-Right distinction becomes somewhat vague. To return to the example of Gandhi: for Gandhi, the village community is the beating heart of society. Gandhi openly says in Hind Swaraj that he is an anarchist and doesn't believe in the state, and this is what the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate was all about. Ambedkar, for understandable reasons, said that the village community is a cesspool of caste discrimination and oppression; so the local community is the problem. 

I'm glad that Raghuram Rajan has produced a book called The Third Pillar, and community is this eponymous third pillar. I have written elsewhere on decentralization; decentralization is about taking some of the power from the state and bringing it to the local community, because local communities have more information coordination, making problem-solving somewhat easier. [4] There are many factors involved in local community dynamics, including the environment. Irrigation, grazing, land, forestry—these are local environmental issues that are difficult to solve by the centralized state. For example, in America, the Right Wing is in favor of state rights. They don't want the federal government, and instead, want state rights; that way, they can go on oppressing the Blacks. There is a similar structure of oppression of Dalits in India— khaap panchayats in Haryana get all the power, and it is that power in the community that preserves the torturous status quo for the oppressed. Hence, I think community is a complex issue. I would advocate for decentralization; at the same time, I want some checks on that community power.

In spite of the rampant rise of ethnic nationalism that aggravates these cultures of oppression, I want to emphasize that generation of counter-imaginaries is possible; there is no reason why we cannot inspire people nationalistically through civic nationalism as well. To take the example of the United States: in some sense, they started with civic nationalism with the Constitution. During the American Civil War in the mid-19th century, Abraham Lincoln who was fighting the pro-slavery South invoked civic nationalism in his speeches. His Gettysburg Address starts with the claim that a nation is born in liberty. According to him, they are a nation, and are not drawn by ethnicity; they are a nation born on some values, of which liberty is very important (the reason why he was bringing it up to fight against the interest of slavery). Thus he mobilized major public support through the values of civic nationalism. 

Civic nationalism is more difficult to practice, because discourses like Hindu nationalism or Christian nationalism sometimes appeal to people’s emotions, but the reason why social movements are important is to say that these imaginaries can bear greater values and tolerance and not intolerance and discrimination.

Notes

1. See further Pranab Bardhan, “A Political Economy Perspective on Development,” in The Indian Economy: Problems and Prospects, edited by B. Jalan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992). and Pranab Bardhan, "The State against Society: The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse", in Nationalism, Democracy and Development, edited by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1996).

2. See further Daniela Arregui Coka, & Thomas Rausch, 2020 GED Globalization Survey: Attitudes on Globalization on the Eve of the Corona Crisis (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2020); and World Opinion on Globalization and International Trade in 2021 (Ipsos Global Advisor 25-Country Survey for the World Economic Forum, August 2021).

3. See Pranab Bardhan, “Coping with Resurgent Nationalism,” 3 Quarks Daily (2019); and A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries (2022).

4. See Further Pranab Bardhan, “Decentralization of Governance and Development”,  Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 2002); and Decentralization to Local Governments in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee (MIT Press, 2006).

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Professor Pranab Bardhan is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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* This essay has been developed using excerpts from a recorded conversation between Prof. Pranab Bardhan and Prof. Ashok Kotwal titled “Left and Right: Examining the Evolution of Political Ideologies” (16 September 2021), as a part of the series “Conversations” organized by Ideas for India, a forum of which Prof. Kotwal was editor-in-chief. These excerpts—consisting of the contribution made to the conversation by Prof. Bardhan—have been reproduced from this aforementioned video by Ideas for India (www.ideasforindia.in) with written permission from Prof. Bardhan. 

Professor Ashok Kotwal was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Economics at University of British Columbia, Senior Fellow at (BREAD) Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis in Development and an Associate, (ThRed) Theoretical Research in Economic Development. He passed away on 28 April 2022. This piece is curated at Frontier Web in honor of his memory.