The Meaning of “The Left is Right”

If you’ve ever wanted a primer on how leftist, progressive, socialist, social democrat, liberal, liberal internationalist, etc. relate to each other, this is for you.

Joshua Hill has a good post explaining why being on the political left is not an identity, or at least not a meaningful one. Among the interventions he makes is the following:

Being on the left isn’t something inherent, it’s not an identity marker, it’s not just who we are – it's not even just what you believe.

You might have noticed that I don’t throw around “left” or “progressive” as adjectives very often. While I get invitations to appear as a token “progressive” in various foreign policy settings, and everyone seems to identify me as a progressive, I almost never refer to myself that way. The word doesn’t appear in my bio, except in the title of one of my books. And while friends and enemies alike have wanted me to play the role of “progressive” police—holding forth about who gets to be on the left and who does not—I don’t want to do that and I don’t think it would make any difference even if I did.

In fact, on the rare occasions when I explicitly use terms like “leftist” or “progressive,” it’s usually as a stylistic shorthand for a particular configuration of political commitments—against militarism, but also for political and economic democracy. Nothing more. I much prefer to speak from a place of analysis or explicit commitments rather than rely on signifiers and euphemisms. My book, in fact, was trying to cut through the signifiers in favor of the analysis that made sense of them.

For understandable reasons, I occasionally get friends (and strangers) asking me about how best to understand these terms—leftist, progressive, socialist, social democrat, liberal, liberal internationalist, etc.

What I’m sharing below is an amalgamation of how I’ve responded to such questions in hopes that it’s helpful. And if you prefer to understand these categories differently than I do, I have no problem with that!