Dissecting "Left" and "Right"

John Ray at Dissecting Leftism points out some of the limitations of understanding politics along a simple left-right axis. This is a particularly interesting observation:

Putting it at its briefest, the Left/Right division is so pervasive because that IS how the great majority of people think. There are of course varieties of conservatism — with religious conservatives and economic conservatives having least in common — but they all do have SOME things in common: Principally a respect for the individual. Leftists, by contrast, talk in terms of groups and say that the individual must bow down and conform to some largely mythical “community’. And both the Communists and Hitler were very good at that.

I think there’s some truth in what Mr. Ray says here, even though it’s somewhat contrary to what I’ve written before about modern liberals being heirs to the “Millian” project of liberating the individual.

Another way of understanding things would be to posit an individualist-communitarian axis. Communitarians think that politics should serve a common good, while individualists see the purpose of politics to be fostering the choices the individual makes about what is good. On this understanding communitarians and individualists would both come in “flavors” of left and right. For instance, a libertarian is an individualist of the Right, while someone like Amitai Etzioni is a communitarian of the Left. A liberal who wants to create a “choice-enhancement” State (the term David Koyzis uses) is an individualist of the Left, while someone like George Will might best be understood as a communitarian of the Right. This would account in part for the tensions we often see among those ostensibly on the same political side.