Face Off
5 Ways the Political Left and Right Have Swapped Places
In my lifetime I have watched the political left and right swap places. This first became apparent in the early 2010s as the big social media platforms supplanted all the legacy mediums of communication, but in recent years the phenomenon has accelerated so markedly that it now represents an almost complete inversion.
It is important to note at the outset, that the terms ‘left’ and right’ have become meaningless in the 2020s and that my usage of them here simply denotes the broad demarcation that is used in mainstream, everyday analysis – dichotomies such as Democrat v Republican; Labour v Conservative; and socialist v capitalist. These are artificial constructs and red herrings to the masses, designed to keep us fighting amongst ourselves and blind to the true nature of our world.
I will discuss this in my next article but by way of a primer, I want to demonstrate the absurdity of our established bipolar political system by illustrating five key points on which the so-called left and right have exchanged their core beliefs in the past twenty years.
War
I remember when the Twin Towers fell, I remember exactly where I was, who I was with, and what we were doing. The same is likely true for anyone currently over the age of thirty. In the aftermath of 9/11, the divide between ‘left and right’, which had been conspicuously absent for much of the preceding decade, dramatically reasserted itself. And I remember this vividly also.
As the Western war machine geared up, the lines at home were clearly drawn – lefties screaming “Fuck Bush” and the conservatives cheering on the Patriot Act and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
At the time this stacked up – it was, it seemed, merely a continuation of the domestic battlelines of the 1960s, with the anti-war left up against the tradcon religious right. Conspiracy theorists, musicians, and black sheep journos were united in their anger at the Bush-Cheney regime and their cynical ties to Halliburton. Michael Moore made films about it, Immortal Technique spat angry raps, and Green Day prefaced their seminal rock opera on the subject. It was all very clear and familiar – the liberty-loving left was against the war, and the loony-tune right were still baby killers.
But in 2022 this has somehow inverted. The consensus now on the ‘liberal left’ is for war with Russia. Those who don’t advocate for it outright, clamour nonetheless for provocative actions like no-fly-zones, and for spending billions of our tax dollars on guns and missiles to sustain Ukraine’s war effort. In fact, so ubiquitous is the support for a hawkish stance on Putin that even the centrists are on board, and it is only the hardcore ‘right’ who oppose war.
Not only is this a complete inversion of the left’s position of twenty years ago on foreign military entanglements, it also exposes a fundamental shift in their attitude toward the armaments industry and other massive corporations.
Corporations
As recently as 2011, the ‘left wing’ view of big corporations was a dismal one. And it was no secret. In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, spawned by the fraudulent behaviour of the big banks, the left came out in force – as indeed it had done for many years on the subject of corrupt financial institutions and globalisation.
#OccupyWallStreet was the clarion call and for several months this movement looked as though it might finally hold the international banking elite’s feet to the fire. And then, somehow, it all just went away… I will delve into this in my next piece – for it is a critical turning point in our story.
But being anti big business is by no means a recent facet of left-wing thought. It hardly bears pointing out, but the very foundation of socialist dogma lies in the writings of Marx and Engels, and their strident condemnation of capitalism and the wealth that it concentrates in corporations.
It is strange then that in 2022 the ‘liberal left’ are now the most fervent acolytes of large corporations. As noted above, they are enthusiastic about using the public purse to bankroll defence contractors like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. But this phenomenon predates the war in Ukraine by a decade.
Consider the early 2010s again – we keep returning to this date because it is pivotal, as I will discuss next week. 2012 marks not only explosion of social media, as mass smartphone adoption made it possible for people to interact with their networks whenever, wherever, but also the wholesale rebranding of the corporate world.
This new breed of corporation was not like the old – the bright young things at Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google were hip to the cause. So hip in fact that they didn’t even call it ‘hip’ any more, they had a new, far hipper word: Woke.
And on the heels of Silicon valley followed all the other big players – Nike, the NBA, Starbucks, Disney, and of course the entire corporate media complex. These were corporations that Millennials could vibe with; corporations that reflected their values.
And so now, when Facebook cancels or censors someone for saying the wrong thing, it is not the ‘liberal left’ crying foul and boycotting the evil corporation. No, they will tell you “It’s a private company it can do what it wants”, while in yet another bizarre inversion, it is the so-called right calling for regulation – the faction which, up until ten years ago had been the bastion of free market corporate power.
Censorship
Perhaps the left always loved censorship, and it is only our naïve caricature of the puritan religious right and their hatred of sex, drugs and rock n roll, which they sought to wipe from popular discourse in the 20th Century, that has cemented ‘the right’ in the popular memory as the proponents of censorship.
This was certainly true in my lifetime. As a teen, I was incensed no end by the removal of spicy song lyrics and steamy movie scenes by the pencil-necked prudes who staffed many of our public institutions. This was most certainly a ‘right wing’ phenomenon at the time, and not a feature of the ‘liberal left’.
But we need only look back as far Soviet Russia, or even at many modern-day socialist states to find rampant examples of left-wing censorship. One could argue that it is simply a feature of authoritarianism, and this is certainly true of the left and right.
Yet it is also true that throughout the democratic West, widespread support for censorship in the population has migrated from the up-tight right in the 80s and 90s to the woke left in the 2010s and 2020s.
Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 the left has completely abandoned the fundamental democratic principle of freedom of speech, and instead adopted increasingly hard-line demands for the removal of ideas that do not conform to their woke ideology.
It began with the removal of popular right-wing personalities from YouTube and Twitter – people like Sargon of Akkad, Tommy Robinson, and Milo Yiannopoulos but has since ramped up dramatically, culminating in the cancellation of a sitting US president, and the Biden regime’s establishment of a Ministry of Truth (Disinformation Governance Board to use the Newspeak of the day).
Most significantly, during Covid, the ‘liberal left’ were the cheerleaders not only for lockdowns, masks, and travel restrictions, but also for the burgeoning ‘fact checking’ industry which spawned to combat ‘misinformation’ on the virus itself and the hurriedly produced vaccines.
Through its obfuscation of the facts, this unprecedented wave of Big Tech censorship served to sustain public support for lockdowns and the other unnecessary measures that have crippled the world economy and created an insolvent financial system whose rampant inflation now threatens to relegate all but the very wealthy to a state relative poverty.
The fact that much of the so-called misinformation has now been proven to be true, that the lockdowns did not work, that masks were ineffectual, that Covid was not a threat to young, healthy people, and indeed that the vaccines themselves were not only ineffective but also unsafe – all this is lost on the ‘liberal left’ who continue to shill vehemently for Big Pharma and to label anyone unwilling to get jabbed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and an ‘antivaxxer’.
Vaccines
Every antivaxxer I ever knew pre-Covid was on the left of the political spectrum. This is not to say that elements of the religious right did not also occupy this space, but in my experience the most vocal day-to-day opposition to vaccines came from the organic, dreadlocked, my body my choice crowd. They were the hippies, the environmentalists, the single mums on welfare, the struggling musicians, and the activist types. And I saw this trend reflected online, around the world.
Yet with the advent of Covid, many of these folk did an about turn – virtually overnight – and the pejoratives ‘right wing’ and ‘antivaxxer’ suddenly became synonymous.
The above is merely my anecdotal experience, yet it is true that the faction within society collectively known as ‘the left’ have become so publicly enamoured with mRNA vaccines, that it has gained a cult-like freneticism. To signal their adulation and unbending compliance, people plastered their socials with smarmy vaccination day selfies, got vaccine tattoos, produced cringey Tik Tok odes, salivated religiously over Tony Fauci, and condemned anyone who took a more cautious approach as a Nazi.
And of course, who could forget peak vax hysteria? Stephen Colbert’s ‘Vax Scene’ – a bilious 10-minute advertainment spectacle for Big Pharma dressed up as a hokey late-night PSA.
But who exactly are these people? Is it really ‘the left’? For when one scrolls the comments section of Colbert’s video it is an unadulterated deluge of scorn. Here are but three of the most upvoted examples:
“This is genuinely some of the darkest, most sinister shit I’ve ever seen. Imagine when people watch this back in 50-60 years’ time.”
“This is honestly the one of most disturbing pieces of propaganda I've ever seen.”
“Saying this is creepy is being kind. This is true horror.”
One gets the impression when reading these comments and the hundreds just like them that most regular folk are not on board with the pageant of enthusiasm for these experimental shots for which we have no long-term data and whose clinical trial results the FDA and Pfizer attempted to conceal from the public for 75 years.
Yet according to the government stats, 80-90% of our populations have indeed rolled up their sleeves. This raises the question both as to how accurate these figures are, and how many millions consented to the jab only because they felt coerced.
But regardless, the story we are told by our ‘leaders’ and the mainstream media is that being ‘antivax’ is now a solidly right-wing position. Which is interesting, because up until 2021 the issue of bodily autonomy, as now espoused by the ‘far-right antivax’ crowd, had been a cornerstone of left-wing thought – My body, my choice… Ring any bells?
I believe there’s more to it though. I do not necessarily see a left right split on this issue but rather, as I will discuss next week, a class divide.
The working class
If it wasn’t evident throughout most of 2020 and 2021, as the ‘liberal left’ cheered for lockdowns and business closures, resulting in the greatest ever transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to the top 1%; and if it wasn’t evident over the previous five years when socialism ceased having anything to do with workers’ rights and adopted the intersectional creed of wokeism and began advocating instead for so-called ‘minorities’, then it became undeniable early in 2022, with the spectacular rise of the Canadian Truckers Convoy, that the ‘left’ were no longer the champions of the working class.
Wall-to-wall ‘liberal’ media coverage painted the truckers as Neo-Nazis and far right extremists for the crime of gathering to peacefully protest draconian government vaccine mandates.
Little more needs to be said on this topic, so fresh is it in the popular memory. Few issues have been as divisive – indeed, like the question of vaccine mandates itself, one was either for or against, and saw the truckers either as heroes, or villains. There was very little grey area.
What cannot be denied though, is that the Trucker Convoy was a working-class uprising – probably the largest and most significant in living memory. Yet the unmistakable delineation in the public narrative was that the left was opposed to the convoy and the right (or the ‘far right’ as indeed was the claim) were its primary advocates.
How did this happen?
How have our two political poles become so conspicuously inverted?
This is a question I will attempt to answer next week in part two of this discussion – but I’ll give you a hint: It’s not actually about ‘left’ and ‘right’.