When Right is Wrong

The U.S. Congress finally passed a budget for the remainder of this fiscal year. After much negotiation, in which Harry Reid reportedy threatened to sabotage John Boehner’s tanning bed and Boehner in turn threatened to establish a House investigative committee to search for Reid’s testicles, both sides blinked. But the Republicans blinked a little harder. They ditched their efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and NPR and gut the EPA, and to issue every Christian American an M-16 for self-defense against Muslim terror babies, godless liberals and other heathens.

But the fight over next year’s budget is just getting started, with Republicans insisting on increasingly drastic cuts to public services in pursuit of the far right’s goals, which are ostensibly to reduce the size of government and the national deficit, and promote free enterprise and individual liberty. But in reality what the far right seems to want is for the poor, sick and elderly to fend for themselves; big business to be free to run roughshod and unregulated over the public while continuing to ship our jobs overseas; and the establishment of a Christian theocracy in which non-believers are marginalized and preferably shot dead.

I can easily imagine Michelle Bachmann masturbating at the thought of grinding the pathetic remaining bargaining power of unions under her stiletto heels and perhaps returning us to the good ol’ days when we could send 10-year-olds to work 14-hour days in dank factories. (Not that we need to do that, because the Chinese already do it for us.) Maybe tuberculosis and polio could also make a comeback.

Meanwhile the billionaire Koch brothers, who are prime bankrollers of Tea Party and right-wing groups, must be giggling like little girls as they make snow angels in their piles of loot.

All this got me thinking about the political terms “left,” “right” and “center.” When I was a kid, being “left-wing” or “liberal” was not considered such a horrible aberration. I can even remember when Republican Senator Arlen Specter, who until recently served in Congress for about 100 years, was considered to be solidly conservative. But in his final days as a politico, Specter was considered moderate and even switched to the Democratic Party in a vain attempt to save his political bacon. Specter didn’t change much over the years. Our politics did.

Beginning with the Reagan era, the center-point of politics starting getting pushed, and pushed hard, to the right. The Rev. Jerry Falwell and his so-called Moral Majority made great inroads into politics and took a battering ram to the constitutional wall separating church and state. And Reagan’s economic policy, known as “trickle-down economics,” theorized that when big business and the rich did well their prosperity would “trickle down” to the lower classes, presumably down the tailored pant legs of the wealthy. I prefer to call this “piss on the poor ” economics. David Stockman, the architect of this fiasco, later admitted that it was a failure and deemed it “voodoo economics.” And yet it’s still the economic policy embraced by the modern right.

Which brings me back to political terminology. How did the terms “right” and “left” get their political meaning? I know that the term “sinister” originally meant “on the left-hand side” in Latin, considered by Roman augurs to be unlucky. Oops. How did we liberals get stuck with that appellation? On the other hand, the word “right” has many positive connotations: being morally correct, just and fair, factually accurate, etc. The Bible even says that Jesus sits at the right hand of God in Heaven. I’m not sure who sits on the left. Saddam Hussein, maybe? Just to balance things out.

Here is what Wikipedia, that all-knowing, always correct source of knowledge, has to say about these terms:

The terms “left” and “right” appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left.

When the National Assembly was replaced in 1791 by a Legislative Assembly composed of entirely new members the divisions continued. "Innovators" sat on the left, "moderates" gathered in the center, while the "conscientious defenders of the constitution" found themselves sitting on the right, where the defenders of the Ancien Regime had previously gathered.

Mystery solved. Our political identities stem from a seating chart. Who'da thunk?

And now we have with a president whom the right wing laughably calls a liberal and/or a socialist. Obama is no liberal. He may have had liberal leanings as a senator, but as president he’s a centrist. But about 40 years ago, he would’ve fit in comfortably with the Republican Party. That's how much the political continuum has shifted over time.

As the modern right wing tries to turn back the social gains we’ve made over the past several decades and steamroll the middle class out of existence, maybe we need to find new terms for our political leanings. Because to me, being “right” now means being morally wrong.

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