Sunday 7 April 2024

Right Look Back, Left Look Forward

The terms politically Left and Right originated in the French Revolution with the National Assembly divided into supporters who wanted change sat to the left and the supporters who wanted to maintain the status quo sat to the right.
If you look at the political slogans today then you can still see that thread running through so for example the Right talk about 'Taking Back Control' and 'We Want Our Country Back' while the Left go for slogans like 'Britain can be better', 'A better plan, a better future' and 'Britain's Future'. 
In America, which has an election around the same time as us,  you have Republican Donald Trump regurgitating his 'Make America Great Again' slogan for 2024 while in 2020 Biden's was 'Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead' and his 2024 offering is 'Let's finish the job'  which shows the Right looking back to a supposed better time and the Left looking ahead for the supposed prosperous times.
There was a recent study published: 'Ideology shapes evaluation of history within the general population' which asked participants from the Italy, Mexico, Poland, UK, US and South Africa to judge whether society would improve over the next 25 years and in every country, right-wingers evaluated the recent past more positively than left-wingers and left-wingers were more optimistic about what humanity could achieve in the near future.
In one experiment for the study, a group of participants were encouraged to reflect on the recent past and again viewing it positively or negatively split down left and right lines with the right-wing participants became more nostalgic about traditional communities, the hierarchical order, stronger family ties and about traditional culture, the state of the economy and left-wing participants less so.
The left wing participants, although more positive about the future were also more concerned of the future dangers in areas such as the economy or climate disasters.
The researchers conclude that this explains why it’s so common for right-wing politicians to appeal to voters with promises to take them back to the good old days, and for left-wing slogans to tell voters to prepare for building a better future.
All makes sense and the Labour Party have already unveiled their slogan for the General Election which is 'Build a better Britain' but the Conservatives are still working on theirs which is probably sensible as their last one was 'You Deserve Better' which was a bit of an own goal considering they had been in power for the past 14 years.
Seems like the left-right ideology of France in 1789 still applies today.

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