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The right wants to preserve and the left wants to improve. At least, that's the high level framework that I and I think a lot of other people were taught. There is clearly something to this, but it is equally clear that it isn't the whole picture. In particular, there is no room in this paradigm for an important third category that, while an exotic species in most of our political culture, is quite common in this particular discursive wildlife preserve: the reactionary. Just like progressives on the left, reactionaries don't just want to preserve the existing culture, they want to improve it. The keep difference is that rather than innovation, they want to roll things back to the way they were.
Reactionaries are of the right. No only do they oppose Progress, they actively want to roll it back! Since the long arc of history bending towards justice (or Cthulhu swimming left) is linear, anyone wanting to roll things back must stand in opposition to Progress. This expansion of the basic left-right paradigm is pretty well understood by the people who have become, in their own conception, regime-aware, and by their ideological enemies interested enough to notice. (Marxists have long railed against reactionaries, but my sense is that they just call anyone opposed to the eternal science of dialectical materialism a reactionary be they a conservative or a reactionary proper).
This was my view until recently, when I listened to the recent Political Orphanage podcast with Guy Standing as a guest. Guy Standing very much reads as a man of the left, but all his ideas are callbacks to medieval institutions. I think this is most clear in his view of the commons, but his latest book about labor (that great old saw of the Classic Left) is still a callback to roll things back to the past.
Once I realized that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary, a category that I had previously not thought possible, I realized that large chunks of the left are reactionary in nature. One good example can be seen in the tension between the Marxists and the Bakuninite SRs in the Russion underground leading up to the Russian revolution. Marxists are all about Progress, to a degree that hardly anyone dares to envision these days, but by understanding of Russian anarchism at the time was that it was all about the traditional Russian peasant village. It's true that they wanted to throw of the Tsarist yoke, but the fundamental institution they wanted to center life around was ancient. They wanted to roll things back to before city states really got going.
I think there is also a strong strain of left-reaction in environmentalists. The core of environmentalism is about rolling back processes that everyone conceived of as progress when they got started (how do Marxists feel about industrialization?). Environmentalism is about rolling things back to a simpler and purer time.
We also see left-reaction in the fetishization of indigenous peoples. When people go on about listening to indigenous ways of knowing, they are talking about returning to an ancient epistemological framework, actively rolling back Progress. This also helps explain why Anglos in Britain don't count as indigenous to these people. What's to return to?
I know it's not exactly a novel observation that the linear political spectrum fails to capture important nuance, but this has really driven home to me the idea that what counts as left or right is mostly about vibes and historical coalitions. We can still anchor of Burke as being on the right, but everything else is up for grabs. Liberals are the original leftists, but by this point they straddle the center, with some on the right and some on the left. Because Progress must always march on, no one set of ideas can ever be guaranteed to be on the left, though originality seems like it helps a lot. Patriarchy has reigned though most of history, so feminism seems light it ought to have been pretty well dug in on the left, only now Progress calls for the reinforcement of gender roles and radfems are in coalition with social conservatives. Nothing matters, it's all just vibes, coalition building, and branding.
One big caveat to this is that it doesn't seem like you necessarily get to choose the branding for your own ideas. Your left-right branding is assigned to you by the zeitgeist, and there is some real connection to the historical left and right.
It's also the case that, at least for now, I think this mostly applies to mapping out the range of possible political position space. There are not that many mainstream right-reactionary positions. The biggest and most effective I can think of is originalism, and arguable the pro-life movement is another, but for the most part, the right that is allowed in the Overton window is one big rearguard action. In practice, if someone is trying to change things, they are still usually attempting Progress.
For a decade, people on the left have called me a fascist because I believe people can be better, learn more, accomplish anything. To me, that path is straight forward: Learn the systems which govern the world and make good decisions. If you want to read, learn how the alphabet works, if you want to maintain industrial society, learn economics, physics and chemistry, then keep supply lines up. And yet, people who believe in progress believe phonics is bad, that children should spontaneously understand how to read...
There are some leftist progressives: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0i4ZETgfNuM or the 17th century levers, but it tends towards a negative correlation, sadly.
Even less than that, really. Even people who agree entirely with each other and work for the same political program tend to be there by inertia, understanding different things etc. (unless they are so thoroughly indoctrinated to stop thinking.)
Conserve and progress are meaningless without starting and (intended) end positions, details about methodologies and purpose. You can desire to progress entropy, or progress matter's longevity etc. etc. What aspects do the conservatives want to progress, which do they ignore? Which do the "liberals" want to ignore and which seek they to progress? What if I want to progress the nuclear family into a multigenerational thing, is that reactionary, progressive or?
Well I do think that fascists are right-progressives in the same way that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary. They were all about building a better and more efficient society. They thought their system would triumph by virtue of transcending the squabbling that held democracies back. The Nazi vision is definitely one of Progress, even if it is an alien and twisted sort of Progress. The Japanese thought they were ushering in a new and better age for Asia (or at least that's what their propaganda said).
There were elements of reaction, like the Italian dream of a neo-Roman empire or the German dusting off of old folk religions, but I think that was mostly in service of creating a newly invigorated national spirit.
The fact that left-Progressives usually try to do things that will actively made the world worse is somewhat beside the point in my view. They think their policies will make the world better, and they want to do so by innovating in how society is arranged. Maybe it wasn't obvious in my original post, but I intended there to be a note of irony in the way I was capitalizing Progress.
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