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Weißmann does not express an opinion as to whether the polarity of democratic center versus hate resonates in the same way across the world. In Mexico for example, the polarity of “democracy versus enemies of democracy” is also used by politicians, but it may resonate very differently there, given that contempt towards the legitimacy of democratic order in Mexico is linked to drug cartels. What meaning does right or left have in a country where administrative and social power and authority does not lie exclusively in the hands of the state?
A recent example of the public declaration of the polarity in Europe between “our democracy” and those outside it, can be found in the introduction to the Council of Europe’s 2025 annual report by European Secretary General, Alain Berset, entitled Towards a New Democratic Pact for Europe. Berset associates the defense of the political ideology of the “democratic center” in military terms. His choice of the word “reset” will ring alarm bells in the minds of those who believe that there is a globalist project to reset society in a way that would make left-right polarities redundant. (The argument that globalist versus anti-globalist cuts across left right divides is another important subject absent from Weißmann’s book):
We cannot meet today’s challenges with yesterday’s playbook. And we must never forget that democracy is our first line of defense. What Europe needs is a reset: a New Democratic Pact for Europe. Because what is at stake is nothing less than Europe’s security, the values we share and our place in the world.
Weißmann believes that the anathematization of the right by an empowered left posing as the defenders of a political center is a secular formulation of the religious division between the true believer and infidel. Ironically, Weißmann’s association of political with religious totalitarianism might easily have been penned by a left-wing thinker, at least in the days before showing glowing respect for Islamic identity had became mandatory on the left. Weißmann writes:
This model of thought is extremely old and has always played a role in religion, be it that the cynic is punished who does not revere the religious rites, thus running the risk of incurring the wrath of the gods, be it through the deployment of the “champion of light” against the “champion of darkness”, the “true Prophet” against the “false Prophets” who threaten the Umma of the faithful, or be it the persecution of heretics by the Church, heretics who threaten the immaculate Una Sancta….the spectrum of possible sanctions extends from banishing the troublemaker among hunters and gatherer societies, to social ostracism, to subtle, or not so subtle, measures taken against class enemies, enemies of the race, enemies of the people, enemies of humanity.
Weißmann refers to the sociologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, published in 2012. This is one of the major works in what is termed “moral foundations theory.” Haidt argued that people are motivated more by communally created gut feelings that give individuals and groups a sense of meaning and purposes than by rational, pragmatic discourse among individuals. People develop self-awareness and their understanding of the world through stories, not through rational argument. There are a number of moral foundations, such as authority and loyalty, by means of which people find their moral, and by extension political, compass.
Weißmann’s points to what he believes is a weakness in Haidt’s thesis.
Haidt neglects the historical component in political world views, which is important for two reasons. Ideologies cannot be explained without due regard to the historical circumstances in which they originated …secondly, every advocate of an ideology is later defined by what is called the Zeitgeist. What is essential to a political doctrine does not lie in its theoretical husk and it often includes elements which in principle are alien to it.
Are historical circumstances and personal narratives necessarily distinguishable? In many languages the words “story” and “history” are the same. Both religious and political convictions grow out of recitations, stories. Be that as it may, the essential point that both Weißmann and Haidt presumably agree on is that holding right or left-wing views may result as much or more from narratives handed down in school, at home, from colleagues, in church, temple or mosque, than out of intelligent, rational evaluation. And what of personal traumatic experience? As the old gag has it: “a liberal is a conservative who has just been beaten up by the police; a conservative is a liberal who has just been mugged.”
Weißmann’s critical talk about incurring “the wrath of the gods” may be easily interpreted as a “left” critique of religion, the claim that religious tales are myths used to keep the people in awe of a prevailing hegemony. To what extent can we associate the left with skepticism towards what is emotionally and not rationally composed, for example religion, patriotism? It is generally more typically left to question these with the force of reason, more right to emotionally rely upon them. On the other hand, it is probably the right which is more rational about human nature while the left tends to be more sentimentally optimistic about it. William Golding’s pessimistic novel, Lord of the Flies, reads like a riposte to a perceived naivety on the left about human nature. Rousseau’s uncivilized savage is embodied in Jack, a cruel and bloodthirsty hunter.
Weissmann in a short chapter on the symbolism of right and left points to an association of the word “right” with what is good and the word “left” with what is bad. “The righteous will sit on the right side of God the Father”. In some languages the word for “right” meaning position and “right” meaning “correct” is the same. In English “sinister”, the French “sinistre” is a negative word, derived from sinistra, the Latin word for left. Students of the esoteric will be familiar with the terms left and right-hand paths. Is this association of the right with positive forces and the left with negative ones due to the fact that right-handedness has evolved among humans to become biologically normal and left-handedness is distrusted because it is not normal? What relation might this have if any, to definitions of political left and right? Again, the author touches on a potentially fruitful area of debate without discussing it.
Most people are aware that historically the political left-right divide grew out of the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly prior to the French Revolution, when the radicals of the Third Estate took their places on the left of the king and loyalists on his right, although Weißmann notes that the left-center-right pattern only established itself in France as a permanent arrangement at the Restoration. The Pugin and Barry design for the British parliament is a confrontational one, the Government benches facing directly across from the opposition benches. The Government benches are on the Speaker’s right and the Opposition on the Speaker’s left, presumably not a coincidence. Historically, the “right” tends to embody normality and order, the “left” disruption, the oppositional, the subversive.
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Weißmann concludes a brief chapter on left and right symbolism with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s oft-cited grandiloquent declaration in the Italian parliament as he crossed the chamber from the right to the left: “Di là i morti, vado verso la vita.” (“From the dead over there, I am going over to life.”)
Weissmann quotes only in German “I am going over to life”, inexplicably omitting the first four words. The full quotation sounds more typically Nietzschean (the polarity between those who affirm life and those whose lives are death-in-life). The duty to life is the affirmation of strength and the willingness to live in extremes, that is Nietzsche’s riposte to the Christian moral dictum of dedication to good works, meekness and piety. For human beings, this will to power usually, but by no means necessarily, entails agitating politically “on the right.” The right-winger is sometimes described as the person who amorally enjoys life more, lives more to the full and is less likely to be oppressed by guilt about himself or the sufferings of the world than is an ideologue of the left.
For Nietzsche and those under his influence the political polarity of right and left is less important than the polarity of life affirmation and life denial. Weißmann interprets the significance of D’Annunzio’s crossing of the political aisle differently, however. He asserts that D’Annunzio’s flamboyant gesture is a symbolic historical event marking the end of stability in a hitherto left-center-right political balance which he believes characterized the nineteenth century. The tumult caused by D’Annunzio’s crossing from one side of the Italian parliament to the other “made evident”, claims Weißmann, the tumult of a new era of instability:
The [nineteenth century] continuum from right via center to left was so stable that in the developed European countries in the course of the nineteenth century it was scarcely questioned. But at the end of the century it was shown that there could be no guaranteeing that this stability would last. That was made evident by the political tumult which D’Annunzio created after his election to the Italian Parliament.
Weißmann surely overrates an amusing but hardly momentous event. Many other events towards the end of the nineteenth century and around the beginning of the twentieth, for example the assassination of the Russian Tzar Alexander II in 1881, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the rise of the Young Turk movement, far more profoundly “made evident” a growing instability, rising opposition to the old monarchies and the erosion of a relatively stable left-center-right continuum; but the small field of reference of Weißmann’s book does not extend to include them.
Throughout Right or Left Weißmann evades discussion of most of the issues his book raises. He is unwilling or possibly even unable to discuss them. The D’Annunzio quotation does however enable him to conduct the reader smoothly into the first of his two major chapters- “The Nineteenth Century” (the other major chapter is “The Twentieth Century”). “The Nineteenth Century” opens rather grandiloquently:
The notion that “life” was on the side of the left gradually prevailed in the course of the nineteenth century. That is to be explained by the victorious march of belief in Progress, the new “people’s church” which was gradually replacing the old church, with its Gospel of the constant improvement of humanity, and which gathered an ever growing congregation.
The reader is now taken on a guided tour of some salient events in the history of left and right movements and writers of the nineteenth century, the tour including discussions of liberalism, conservatism and socialism. The chapter is divided into subchapters: “The Classic Model”, “Liberalism”, “Socialism”, “Conservatism”, and “Disappointed Expectations.” The names Liberalism, Socialism, Conservatism may remind readers of the similarly named chapters in Moeller van den Bruck’s Das dritte Reich, published in 1923. From van den Bruck we have the famous aphorism “with liberalism a people sinks into ruin.” Das dritte Reich, when discussing these fundamental ideologies, presents the case for the paradoxical concept of a conservative revolution. Right or Left does not consider any possible combinations of left and right world views.
Weißmann notes that the nineteenth century was characterized by a general belief in progress and widespread optimism concerning the material and ultimately spiritual benefits that progress would bring to mankind. As described by Weißmann, faith in material progress gradually replaced religious hopes in an afterlife as an underlying “motive for living.” Weißmann addresses the term “ideology” in this chapter, noting that it first appeared around the year 1800, arising at the same time as religious faith declined. He doubts that ideological activists are much aware of the literature in which their ideology took root. Their attachment is emotional not intellectual:
That the sans-culottes cried out “equality or death” does not mean that they were familiar with the thoughts of the Enlightenment; most “Marxists” have rarely if ever even taken up the works of Marx and Engels, while the French royalism of the early nineteenth century drew its strength from the determination of its milieu, one in which the women set the tone and the picture of the royal pretender was placed next to that of family members on the chimney piece.
The claim about “Marxists” (the puzzling quotation marks are Weißmann’s) not reading Marx is questionable. This reviewer recalls Marxists citing writings by Marx and Engels with the fervor of Christian evangelists citing scripture. The peculiar description of royalists of the early twentieth century living in a closely knit milieu and the women setting the tone in their families is taken from a German translation of a book by the French historian Philippe Ariès called Le Temps de l’Histoire. A dogmatic claim by Weißmann and a colorful but eccentric portrait by a French historian does not constitute persuasive argument. What is indirectly hinted at here but obscured by tenuous assertion and obscure quotation is the question: is an intellectual justification necessary for someone to belong to the right or the left, or can sentiment and social affiliation be sufficient?