Looking Right to the Left
Part 1

1,783 words

Karlheinz Weissmann
Rechts oder Links: Von der Notwendigkeit politischer Unterscheidung
(Right or Left: On the Need for Political Differentiation)
JUNGE FREIHEIT Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2025

The first time that I visited the United States, I stayed with a friend in Virginia. On my arrival at his home he offered me coffee and blueberry muffins. The blueberry muffins came in a packet bearing the words JUST AS GRANDMA USED TO MAKE ‘EM! On the back of the packet there was a long list of ingredients. “Blueberry” was not on it, but  “edible ink” was.  “Your grandmother never made muffins with edible ink instead of blueberries, did she?” I asked. My host was sure that she never had.

I feel similarly misled by the title and subtitle of Karlheinz Weißmann’s new book, Right or Left. On the Need for Political Differentiation. They led me to expect a scholarly treatise, an examination of the distinction in politics between right and left. The blurb on the back of the book implied that Weißmann’s book would counter a view held by many sociologists and political theorists that the political designations “right” and “left” are out of date. I thought Right or Left would scrutinize the left-right paradigm and reach conclusions about it. I was wrong.

Here is the anonymously written back cover preface to Weißmann’s book in full:

The political opposition of right and left has often been declared dead, and like everything declared dead, it has a robust hold on life. In Karlheinz Weißmann’s view, this is partly to be explained by anthropological constants, partly by the historical circumstances under which the right-left polarity developed, firstly in Europe, and then in other parts of the world. For this reason, the polarity still serves as a guide to identify both one’s own political beliefs and those of other people. As a rule, everyone can place themselves on the “right” or on the “left”, by virtue of a certain manner of thinking, and will thus answer important questions-notably about the essence of what it is to be human, and what community, history and nature mean-in a given way, drawing conclusions which reinforce their corresponding world view.

“What it means to be human.” That is strong philosophical meat; and what are the “anthropological constants” (anthropologische Konstanten) that play a role in left-right classification? Ensuing discussions in the book might be expected to include an examination of how left and right beliefs denote truths about human psychology.

If the left-right polarity serves “as a guide” to identify beliefs, in what way does it do so? “Left” and “right” are still widely used classifications, but are they only labels of convenience to denote adherence to a specific political agenda at a given time, or do they reflect permanent world views, identifiable by means of unchanging criteria?

The statement that “The political opposition of right and left has often been declared dead, and like everything declared dead, it has a robust hold on life” (“ein zähes Leben”) reads like a challenge to those who believe that the left-right division is archaic, overemphasized, of secondary importance or even of no importance at all. However, it is far from the case that everything which is declared dead, whether biologically or intellectually, maintains a “robust hold on life.” The very first line of the blurb is patently false.

To be fair, the blurb does not indicate that Right or Left will offer views or conclusions on the meaning in politics of right and left. But if Right or Left, which is two hundred and sixteen pages (excluding notes) of small print, is not about what it means to be “right” or “left”, what exactly is it? The answer is that the major part of Right or Left is a history lesson. That is the substitute (to return to the blueberry analogy) used to replace a study of the ontology of right and left.

Right or Left is not exclusively a history lesson, however. It is a compilation of two quite different subjects, awkwardly aligned. The greater part of the book is an anecdotal guided tour of European history since the French Revolution with regard to the use of right, left and other terms denoting political orientation. The other, much smaller, part of the book is a critique, a latter day J’accuse!, to make use of a historical reference of the kind dear to the author, of a prevailing pro-left bias in public life in Germany.

The summaries of the thoughts of political thinkers and anecdotes about them in this book are enjoyable and informative, although they can probably all be found online. Right or Left is best described as an almanac. It is an almanac of the history of political thinkers and their works since the end of the Enlightenment, composed of anecdote, citation and summaries.

It begins with a ten page introduction, the opening lines of which intriguingly classify “left” and “right” as a natural polarity:

Where there is a left, there must be a right. That applies to spatial and political orientation. …They [the terms] stand for opposing views of the world, movements or parties. They can be used to describe oneself or others. It is never just about clarification, it is also about evaluation.

That opening, with its consciously ironical flavour, is arguably characteristically “right”, but neither here nor at any other point in his work, does Weißmann consider how his own world view might influence the way he discusses the terms right and left. The opening invites speculation as to whether left and right need each other. Is there a natural creative polarity at work in political struggle, one which not only provides a political compass to those seeking to locate themselves and others on the political map, but on which both poles are dependent for even having a sense? After all, left and right can be seen to be mutually dependent poles in politics, poles which define one another through their contrast, like hot and cold, plus and minus, no pain no gain. What fun is football without an opposing team? Thoughts like these go back to an old theological dilemma: no God without Satan, no Good without Evil, no friend without foe. The belief in the creative nature of struggle is a rich field for speculation and study. It lies at the heart of all evolutionary theory, biological, philosophical and political. Polarity is the essence of Hegel’s dialectic in politics, similar to the struggle for survival in Darwin’s hypothesis of evolutionary development by means of the survival of the fittest. Polarity, and the conflict which it entails, so the argument runs, is the motor of natural, social, economic and political history. We only fully understand our beliefs by contrasting them with the different and even opposing beliefs of other people.

Weißmann does not go down that promising philosophical path. He abruptly turns his attention to pro-left bias in contemporary Germany instead. “There is Good and Evil. Good is everything that is not Evil. Evil is everything which is right-wing.”

That sounds like a hyperbolic reiteration of the interdependent polarity, but it is quoted for an entirely different purpose. The words were written by Eckhard Fuhr in an article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 2nd May 1995. Although from 1995, Weißmann assures the reader that the simplistic Manichaeanism of Fuhr’s statement reflects notions about the political right commonly held in Germany today. The author cites a range of statistics gleaned from surveys among Germans which reveal that for more than half of them the term “right-wing” evokes negative associations, while the term “left-wing” evokes positive ones.

Weißmann writes that the anti-right wing bias he describes is recent. He tells the reader that the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt believed that both right and left were necessary to ensure stability in a democracy. Schmidt, says Weißmann, had once referred to the right and left in nautical terms, portside and starboard, both sides being necessary to ensure that the ship of state was balanced.

Weißmann’s argument is that a far reaching anti-right-wing bias has established itself in Germany since the time Schmidt made his nautical analogy. Weißmann then describes a work which, he says, “legitimized the left” and “delegitimized” the right: Norberto Bobbio’s Destra e Sinistra (Right and Left). (Did the title give Weißmann the idea for the title of his own book?) First published in 1994, Destra e Sinistra was translated into several languages, including German and English, and was reprinted in many editions. Weißmann says that it “remains a standard work to this day.”

Right and Left echoes a common leftist belief that to be on the left is “to be on the right [meaning correct, in this sense] side of history.” Bobbio wrote that the left is “progressive” by definition, because it advocates unrelenting progress towards universal justice, through the extension of equality and by dismantling institutional privileges. From Bobbio’s premise it follows that the left is naturally optimistic, believing that as humans become more rational, they will become more progressively inclined and thus more willing to embrace social and economic equality. By contrast, people on the right are perceived by the left as people who attempt to retain, or in the case of reactionaries seek to restore, interests and privileges that are unjust and anti-progressive. Seen like this, the left is “good”, “altruistic”, and “realistic”, whereas the right is “bad”, “selfish”and “out of date”. Weissmann’s Eckhard Fuhr quotation is offered as an example of such political Manicheanism.

Bobbio wrote of the left that it has always been “the avant-garde of that great historical movement which fought against inequality among individuals and among peoples.” In Bobbio’s view, right-wingers of every kind may be distinguished from fascism and national socialism in degree but not in essence. For Bobbio, fascism and national socialism are radical manifestations of the exclusiveness and inequality which is the hallmark of the irrational world view of the right at all times, irrational because it does not acknowledge that social and economic progress towards equality is inevitable. Views such as Bobbio’s make it clear why people on the left cannot conceive that someone on the right can be idealistic. The left will always impute low motives to the right. Either someone on the right is ignorant of the facts, or pursuing a concealed agenda in the interests of discrimination, exploitation and injustice. Or both.

Weißmann deduces from reading Bobbio that thinkers on the left are predisposed to a historical predetermination, and he attributes what he calls “the impatience” of the left to the belief that progress towards equality and global justice is irreversible and that it is therefore not only wrong but also futile to stand in its way.