What Do "Left Wing" and "Right Wing" Mean?

In some countries such as those in Latin America, "Left Wing" has meant favoring the rights, the voice, and the wages of workers and peasants, and maybe redistribution of land. "Right Wing," on the other hand, has meant favoring or preserving the power of those who've got money and influence—the wealthy, the traditional landowners.

These Latin American countries are agrarian countries with a very pronounced wealthy, landowning class, and a very definite, very poor class at the bottom (usually the indigenous peoples, who have faced egregious racial discrimination since Colonial times). And, in many counties elsewhere in the world, movements on the Left have struggled to further the rights and power of the poor, the masses—in opposition to entrenched monetary and political interests.

But obviously the United States is a different sort of animal altogether.

Well, maybe not. In the 1930s, Socialism was not a dirty word in the U.S., and you had a genuine socialist and even communist movement in the U.S. This was closely allied with the labor movement, which was still fighting for decent wages and working conditions for workers in mines and factories (and, by the way, often being resisted with clubs and occasionally bullets by the factory owners and their allies, the police).

And of course we have had our racial discrimination (and maybe gender discrimination), which has had the effect of causing one group to make less money than others.

And the United States has actually been moving in the direction of greater social inequality. Wealth is becoming more concentrated in the hands of the few at the top of the pecking order. This trend has been going on for a while, favored by tax policies which let the rich keep more of their money than they were able to when the scale of rates of our progressive income tax was steeper. (In other words, the "Bush tax cuts" that favored the rich, and no one has been able to argue that that was not the case.)

Here is a link to an article with some statistics on how wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few in the U.S.:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/disturbing-statistics-on-the-decline-of-americas-middle-class/19676292/?icid=main%7Cmain%7Cdl1%7Csec4_lnk2%7C178480&icid=sphere_copyright

In the U.S., for a long time the principal political party on the Right has been the Republican Party. They are devoted to keeping taxes on corporations and on wealthy individuals low. Despite their attempts to include a wider following, such as by appealing in religious conservatives, and their attempts to have people believe otherwise, they are still the party of a rich minority.

Yet, in terms of who identifies as Republican or who votes Republican, it's not that simple. Many people support the Republican Party who are not in that wealthy upper few percent. Not wanting to oversimplify—I grant it's not that simple—I think that many times these people fail to perceive where their interests lie.

In previous blog postings I've gone into how I think the moneyed interests manage to evoke the sympathy and support of a wider base. They fund the Republican Party and now the Tea Party. And, with their money, they support candidates, lobby Congress, and do a lot of what is essentially propaganda, though nowadays we call it "public service messages" on TV.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein