The King Is Dead. Long Live the People!
May 2021 (Wall Street International)* — The notion of political parties in the non-United States existing along a neat and orderly linear continuum from left to right (or right to left depending on your predilection I suppose) is yet another American fantasy about ourselves, outdated at best and madly simplistic at worst.
This paradigm was borrowed centuries ago from the French Revolution, from which our fledgling nation took so many neo-liberal values and Constitutional principles.
In the summer of 1789, members of the French National Assembly met to begin drafting a constitution. The delegates were deeply divided over the issue of how much authority King Louis XVI should have and, as the debate raged, the two main factions each staked out territory in the assembly hall.
The anti-royalist revolutionaries seated themselves to the presiding officer’s left, while the more conservative, aristocratic supporters of the monarchy gathered to the right.
The divisions only continued during the 1790s, when newspapers began making reference to the progressive “left” and traditionalist “right” of the French assembly.
The distinctions later vanished for several years during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, but with the beginning of a constitutional monarchy in 1814, liberal and conservative representatives once again took up their respective posts on the left and right of the legislative chamber.
By the mid-19th century, “left” and “right” had entered the French vernacular as shorthand for opposing political ideologies.
Source: https://human-wrongs-watch.net/2021/05/31/the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-people/
