Political axes (left and right)

Ideological analysis based on political axes has as its raw material stereotypical themes.

In a previous article I discussed the erroneousness of understanding ideology as a fixed system of categories that determine the perception of reality. fixed system of categories that determine the perception of reality.. Today I deal with another common mistake in understanding the concept of political ideology: the fact of defining it according to contingencies, arbitrariness, taking the part for the whole.. 

For this purpose, it is useful to talk first about the political spectrum, or rather political spectra. The bipolar dimension of political axes such as that of the left-right is a good example.

Political axes: right and left

The conceptualization of political positions into left and right constructs a continuum between two poles with a central point. It is historically linked to the times of the French Revolution. French Revolution and served to distinguish physical and political positions: in the National Constitutional National Constituent AssemblyRepublicans sat to the left of the president, while monarchists sat to the right. Thus, this polarity is linked to an assumption of the existence of progress. It is more than anything else a matter of distinguishing between progressives and conservatives. Unfortunately, we cannot know what is the essence of two categories that are characterized by their temporal mobility. characterized by their temporal mobilityAt any given moment, the conservative response is one, and the same goes for the progressive one: both are linked to the development of history.

Thus, in the face of certain political questions, the answers given by different ideologies can range from left to right, from left to right, from left to right. can be aligned from left to right, one extreme being a certain position and the other being its opposite position. It is a quantitative analysis and, as such, is much more descriptive than explanatory. more descriptive than explanatory. And yet, nowadays it is very difficult to talk about politics in non-axial terms. Pau Comes, in his blog Independència és Llibertat, proposes the following to avoid this simplistic approach: "As many people have written lately -for example Xavier Mir, in his blog-, Catalan politics can be explained with more than one axis, not only left-right". He refers, in effect, to the inclusion of the Spanish-Catalanist axis.

Substantive ideologies and relative ideologies

According to this view, Catalan politics can be explained along more axes than one.n the more axes the better.. However, this is not a way to understand Catalan politics, this is not a way of understanding ideologies as something substantive, but to limit oneself tobut to limit oneself to account for the different manifestations that can be found in each one of them. The explicit manifestations carried out by a series of political agents stereotypically related to certain ideologies are transformed into ideology itself, and therefore ideology is transformed into something purely explicit. Political analysis makes use of axes insofar as ideological positions become a degree of agreement in the face of certain facts, something easily measurable. We have found a relationship between this and what is explained by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man:

Thus arises the one-dimensional model of thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations and objectives, which transcend by their content the established universe of discourse and action, are rejected or reduced to the terms of that universe. The rationality of the given system and its quantitative extension gives a new definition to these ideas, aspirations and objectives.

This trend can be related to the development of the scientific method: operationalism in physical sciences, behaviorism in social sciences. The common feature is a total empiricism in the treatment of concepts; their meaning is restricted to the representation of particular operations and behaviors (Marcuse, 2010, p. 50).

Marcuse, furthermore, quotes Bridgman to explain the operational point of view and its implications for the way of thinking of the whole society:

Adopting the operational point of view implies much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand "concept"; it means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, because we will no longer allow ourselves to employ as instruments of our thinking concepts which we cannot describe in terms of operations (Bridgman, 1928, p. 31).

The interplay between the quantitative and the qualitative

The axis running from left to right becomes significant pseudo-qualitativewhen it really only serves to establish quantitative quantitative differences. In other words, what determines the political position of an entity is the type of response it gives to a given problem. Political ideology becomes simple conventionThe political ideology becomes mere convention, regardless of such subtleties as the philosophical source from which each position draws, its conception of demiocracy, and so on. This given problem, of course, comes raised in the political agenda. Three things to note:

• What measures the axis running from left to right is totally arbitrary and refers to attitudes towards different socio-political aspects set by the media agenda: attitudes towards religion, promotion of a type of health care, importance given to the environment, etc. In reality, none of these dimensions in itself explains an ideology. If the way of measuring positions on a specific issue is rational, the raising of these questions responds to purely propagandistic intentions.

• Part of the defining aspects of a political ideology become directly folkloric expressions proper to the historical and social context: attitude towards certain nationalisms and the Catholic religion, type of international allies sought, etc. For example, orthodox communist symbology does not have the same significance in Spain as in present-day Russia. Propaganda and the media are in charge of incorporating these features into the ideological sphere in order to gain power, because the defense of certain measures generates acceptance or even grants authority. In Cataloniafor example, the conventional political left is defined simply by its opposition to centralist Spanishism.The political parties, although in the economic and social spheres they are practically indistinguishable from the right-wing parties.

• As a consequence, the dominant ideology is normalizede. This is perhaps the most relevant consequence of the existence of political axes: in spite of the apparent freedom that Western man enjoys to create his own future, at the moment the past only seems to return again and again. Revolutions are rare and when they occur they are not the fruit of rationality and creative spirit but of desperation to break an unsustainable framework. In the words of Marvin Harris (p. 324):

I assert that it is perniciously false to teach that all cultural forms are equally probable and that the mere force of will of an inspired individual can at any moment alter the trajectory of an entire cultural system in a direction convenient to any philosophy. Convergent and parallel trajectories far outweigh divergent trajectories in cultural evolution. Most people are conformists. History repeats itself in countless acts of individual obedience to cultural norms and models, and individual desires rarely predominate on issues that demand radical alterations of deeply conditioned beliefs and practices.

Stereotypes and commonplaces

The analysis of ideology based on these political axes has as its raw material stereotypical and really unmeaningful themes of what constitutes a worldview. Based on the ordering of positions in the face of relatively tractable issues from the hegemonic ideology, a range of very broad categories is created. a range of very concrete categories of what are possible political ideologies is created.. The consideration of issues that cannot be raised (such as the possibility of the use of violence from the popular classes) can be cynically associated with political positions "of the extremes". See the discourse "the extremes touch each other"which serves to equate and discredit two or more alternative worldviews for transgressing the rules governing the political axis by taking similar measures from different ideologies, an analysis that once again focuses on the measures taken and not on their truly ideological background.

It is worth remembering the usefulness of this polarity. It never hurts to give credit to the promoters of the "center" policy, because the order of things proper to the state system requires a certain stability and, of course, the immobility of the majority of the civilian body is in its interest.. Very graphically, if alternative worldviews are cornered at the extremes of the axis, they are marginalized, while at a given moment the center can be nourished by sympathizers from both one half of the continuum and the other.

Bibliographical references:

• Comes, P. (2006). Independència és Llibertataccessed on 08/06/2013 at 20:00h.

• Marcuse, H. (2010). The One-Dimensional Man. Barcelona: Planeta.

• Harris, M. (2011). Cannibals and Kings. The origins of cultures. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.