The methodology behind this study has been criticized. My essay isn’t a comment on this study, but I believe nonetheless the graph does illustrate something true.
People like to talk about the Left and Right as if they were timeless archetypes with certain universal essential properties, mostly for polemical reasons. This looks something like “the Left is for equality and the Right is for hierarchy” or “the Left is chaos and the Right is order” (notably Yarvin uses this typology, usually implying that order means statism). I propose that to be properly understood the Left and Right must be thought of as historically contingent formations that emerge with the rise of the modern state.
I’ve attempted to do two things here: apply a historicist approach to the question, and account for how we use the categories LEFT and RIGHT today in discourse, i.e., how they’ve evolved over time as polemical tools. Carlsbad would say that we are all LEFTISTS today. I tend to agree, but this view is of limited analytical value.
Naturally my approach is ideal typic (following the Weberian tradition) and somewhat messy. Most political movements don’t neatly fit into the three dimensional space I’ve developed. A lot of this is intuition based.
Part 1: Historical origins and structural dynamics
Historical emergence and state dependence
The Left, in a recognizably modern sense, only becomes possible when absolutist monarchies break feudal particularisms, centralize authority, and construct bureaucratic apparatuses capable of large-scale extraction and redistribution. The French Revolution is emblematic: its Left proclaims universal rights and uses the centralized state to abolish aristocratic privileges, seize church lands, and impose mass conscription. Redistribution requires surplus and the coercive-administrative capacity to reallocate it; without these, egalitarian politics remains mere moral protest. Similarly, the Bolsheviks used war communism and later the New Economic Policy to seize surplus and centrally redistribute it, demonstrating that revolutionary egalitarian regimes require extraction capacity. Yet this egalitarianism is always bounded—it levels old inherited privileges but replaces them with conditional normative hierarchies based on loyalty, ideological commitment, and moral conformity. The Jacobin terror, Soviet purges, and even modern ideological policing show that Leftist projects—as any political project—invariably discriminate between the “virtuous” and the “enemy,” merely shifting the basis of exclusion.
Even explicitly anti-statist Leftist movements (like anarchism) often confront a paradox: redistributive levelling requires enforcing new norms and suppressing resistance from entrenched interests. Historically, this has driven them to adopt coercive apparatuses even when ideologically opposed to them. Violence and bureaucratic enforcement become tools for breaking existing structures of privilege and imposing egalitarian rules. There’s nothing intrinsically Leftist about statism (if we take into account the moral sense)—it’s a practical mechanism for achieving flattening goals against resistant, differentiated social orders. This helps explain why many revolutionary movements that began anti-authoritarian ended up constructing centralized, coercive states.
At the same time, what we now call “Rightist” politics often emerged as a reaction to this absolutizing tendency—affirming that even monarchs were bound by divine or natural law, ancestral custom, and intermediate orders, resisting the flattening logic of centralized state authority. The most prominent historical example would be La Fronde of the 17th century.
Classical liberalism emerged as a reaction to absolutist centralization, especially its control over taxation and regulation, articulating universal moral claims—rights and legal equality—but historically distinguishing between universal civil rights and more restricted political rights, often limited to property-owning European males as proxies for capacity. It accepted particularistic outcomes shaped by market differentiation, local property regimes, and an anti-statist bias against broader levelling projects. It doesn’t fit neatly into either Left or Right in this framework.
While people often reduce Left and Right to a single spectrum—from equality to hierarchy, or chaos to order—this analysis treats them instead as positions within a multidimensional space. Specifically, I argue for distinguishing at least three orthogonal axes: entropy/extropy (flattening vs. structured differentiation), statism/anti-statism (centralized coercive power vs. decentralized coordination), and universalism/localism (uniform global rules vs. context-specific traditions)1. These dimensions intersect in complex ways, producing real-world political strategies that cannot be plotted on a simple line. Recognizing this complexity is essential for understanding how Left and Right emerge and transform within the context of the modern state. Statism itself is a structural feature of modernity that centralizes authority and tends to level older local distinctions, making it a tool whose use complicates any clean mapping of Left and Right.
Principles of legitimation and hierarchy
Understanding this requires examining the principles of legitimation that define how both Left and Right structure hierarchy. The key distinction isn’t the presence or absence of hierarchy—all social systems discriminate—but how they justify and structure it, and what forms of asymmetry they see as legitimate. Asymmetry is the condition of structured differentiation because it creates time and context specific stable, predictable differences in roles, obligations, and privileges—making social cooperation and complex coordination possible. Without asymmetry, you get undifferentiated sameness that lacks the information content needed to manage varied functions. Rightist traditions see these asymmetries as necessary for order (even if they debate their sources—divine law, nature, custom, contract), while Leftist traditions tend to see them as contingent, unjustified, and ripe for moral critique and reform. Flattening means reducing these asymmetries to enforce more universal, equalizing norms. Historically, traditions we call “Rightist” defend hierarchy as natural, but the grounds of that “nature” have varied widely over time. Traditional conservatives anchored social order in transcendent claims like divine will, natural law, and ancestral custom, often with the implied subordination of the monarch to the eternal order of His Will. Modern currents we now consider to be “Right-Wing” adapted to secular and materialist worldviews in divergent ways: some stress individual property rights and contractual freedom (libertarian or classical liberal strands), while others embrace strong centralized authority to maintain order or engineer collective outcomes (Hobbesian/ Neoreactionary). British constitutional conservatism justified hierarchy through inherited institutions like monarchy and common law, while American libertarian traditions grounded it in natural rights and individual contract. Nazism illustrates a particularly complex hybrid: it fused a naturalistic, evolutionary view of social hierarchy based on group racial struggle with Leftist elements like smashing older class structures, mass-mobilizing the working classes, and using state-directed redistribution—though strictly limited to the defined racial in-group. Its centralized planning and social programs served to reorganize society along exclusionary but internally flattened lines—aimed at eugenically cultivating the volk to breed higher specimens. Fascist Italy retained monarchy and church influence even as it centralized authority, but also implemented corporatist institutions intended to mediate class conflict, regulate industry, and redistribute benefits through syndicates and state welfare—a hybrid approach that blended traditional hierarchy with modern statist and quasi-egalitarian elements. Hierarchical legitimation can adapt and recombine elements across the political field, especially when mediated through modern state power.
By contrast, Leftist movements typically legitimate hierarchy conditionally, on moral or ideological grounds of egalitarian virtue: they aim to dismantle inherited orders in favor of norms that promise universal equality, policing inclusion through moral criteria rather than inherited rank. This convergence on universalizing moral principles is a key signature of Leftist legitimation, even when enforced hierarchically.
Entropy/extropy dynamics, surplus extraction, and universalist tendencies
Building on these principles of legitimation, we can analyze the dynamic tendency of Left and Right to produce either structured differentiation or flattening entropy—flattening one domain to impose some form of order in another. The entropy/extropy dynamic is best understood as relative—varying by context—and recursive, in that each act of flattening or structuring sets the stage for new conflicts over differentiation. Entropy in social systems means the dissolution of structured differentiation—roles, privileges, customs, institutions—that organize complexity into coherent forms of order. As well as providing structure, local customs, roles, and institutions also encode context-sensitive knowledge—knowledge about resource use, conflict resolution, norms of reciprocity, and social expectations that reduce uncertainty—providing predictable roles, customary limits, and discrete, distributed decision-making. These are statistically unlikely, information-rich social arrangements that emerge over time to solve coordination problems and maintain stability. Leftist politics injects entropy by flattening and dissolving these inherited distinctions through surplus redistribution and egalitarian reform. When these differentiated patterns are erased, the system loses embedded knowledge that made local cooperation and order possible. For example, Soviet collectivization destroyed local peasant knowledge of planting cycles and land management, resulting in famines. Similarly, the abolition of guild systems in revolutionary France eliminated local quality standards and apprentice networks, requiring weaker centralized regulations to substitute.
Even when Leftist movements impose new moral-ideological hierarchies that define virtue and loyalty, their systemic signature remains flattening and parasitic redistribution: they depend on surplus generated by existing productive arrangements. I use “parasitic” deliberately here—not as mere polemic, but to highlight that this logic depends structurally on surplus generated elsewhere, extracting and reallocating it without itself producing the differentiated structures that sustain it. The loss of high-resolution local structures forces the creation of universal rules imposed through bureaucratic administration and ideological policing. These substitutes are less adaptive and often generate dysfunction because they can't replicate the fine-grained fit of local contexts.
It’s important to note that “flattening” here is not absolute erasure of all hierarchy but a reconfiguration: Leftist movements often dismantle inherited social, economic, or cultural differentiations only to replace them with new moral-ideological hierarchies based on virtue, loyalty, or grievance. Intersectional frameworks, for example, establish complex stratifications of privilege and oppression that become conditions for social inclusion and status. Thus, the dynamic is less about eliminating hierarchy per se than redistributing and moralizing it along new axes, enforced through cultural norms and institutional policies. Additionally, while universal egalitarianism is the rhetorical tool, actors are usually driven by petty personal or group grievances, and establish and rationalize a worldview based on a rejection of a previous paradigm. In essence, this can be viewed as the Leftist project based on a rejection of a white, male, European historical order, with everything it implies (I don’t like the term Western civilization).
By contrast, Rightist formations typically exhibit more internal divergence in how order is generated and justified. They can rely on traditional lineage-based hierarchies, local conventions and customary law, emergent spontaneous order, market coordination through price signals, or centralized authority as needed. Examples include English common law, which emerged from customary practices, or medieval charters that balanced lordly privileges with local obligations. The unifying feature is defending structured differentiation, but the mechanisms are varied and often decentralized.
While market capitalism undeniably dissolves many local traditions and enforces a universal logic of price signals—thus exhibiting a kind of entropic, flattening tendency—it differs from Leftist levelling in that it generates and relies on structured differentiation within its own system. Market competition produces a spontaneous order of roles, firms, and specializations, coordinated through price information rather than bureaucratic fiat. So while capitalism flattens certain inherited social distinctions, it also fosters new, decentralized forms of differentiation and adaptation, making it neither straightforwardly “Leftist” nor exempt from entropic dynamics—it is better seen as a system with its own complex balance of levelling and ordering tendencies.
Meanwhile, Leftist politics tends to converge on singular criteria, systematically dissolving older forms of order and complexity in favor of uniform allocation. Worth noting: 20th-century statism in practice often blurred these distinctions. Modern states—regardless of ideological orientation—built coercive apparatuses and mass bureaucracies that both levelled old privileges and created new hierarchies, continuing the project of absolutist monarchies. This makes any clear-cut division provisional and analytic rather than absolute. Statism remains orthogonal: both Left and Right can use centralized power, but their systemic roles tend to differ. Leftist politics has historically relied on state capacity to pursue flattening goals through redistribution and restructuring (e.g., Jacobin France, Stalinist USSR, Maoist China), often requiring bureaucratic and coercive apparatuses even when ideologically opposed to them. This reliance reflects the need to redistribute surplus and impose egalitarian norms against resistant social orders. Rightist politics has used statism to preserve, reorganize, or intensify structured differentiation (e.g., Prussian legal unification, Fascist Italy’s corporatism, Pinochet’s market-liberal authoritarianism), but has also employed levelling measures strategically to consolidate state power. In some cases, traditional elites were integrated into state-building projects (e.g., Prussian Junkers), illustrating how rightist statism can be conciliatory—preserving older asymmetries within new centralized forms. Statism has its own expansionary logic: it grows by extracting surplus, whether outward through conquest or inward by penetrating and leveling local autonomies. This structural drive makes it entropic toward inherited orders even as it generates new administrative hierarchies.
Additionally, the universalism versus localism axis, while technically orthogonal to Left-Right, clarifies a real tendency. Leftist levelling logic pressures systems toward universal rules: eliminating inequality in one context demands applying the same principle universally. This moral universalism treats inherited boundaries as arbitrary or oppressive, demanding a coherent standard that resists local exceptions—fueling support for open-border policies or global moral claims (although difficult to implement absolutely, as many other interest groups fight over policy, and the reality is a lot more complex than what I describe here). Rightist formations, by contrast, treat differentiations as meaningful and necessary, often defending plural, local, or particularistic orders without insisting on one universal moral rule. But not all rightist projects are localist: some are universalist in scope while remaining exclusionary in principle, aiming to impose structured differentiation on a larger scale—such as pan-European racial-nationalist visions like Francis Yockey’s Imperium, which sought a unified, hierarchical European order while excluding those outside the civilizational in-group. The result is that Leftist politics systematically dissolves inherited complexity in favor of singular moral criteria, while Rightist politics preserves or generates diverse, context-dependent mechanisms of order—even when that order is projected onto a universalist stage.
Long-run dynamics of surplus and decay
This brings us to the long-run consequences: how these tendencies affect surplus generation, stability, and eventual decay. Crucially, while Leftist redistribution depends on surplus and state capacity in the short run, it often undermines surplus generation in the long run. Redistribution destabilizes existing productive arrangements but must replace them with structures that sustain surplus. Historically, early Leftist projects could piggyback on surplus produced by industrialization or colonial extraction, or use coercion to force modernization (as in Stalin’s Soviet Union). But absent adaptive mechanisms like market pricing and decentralized investment signals, these systems often stagnate once easy gains are exhausted. In postcolonial states, socialist land reforms often redistributed holdings but failed to maintain productive capacity, leading to stagnation or reliance on foreign aid. Policies like rent control—intending to help tenants but usually reduces landlord incentives to maintain housing stock, contributing to urban decay—overregulation, or rigid quota systems exemplify this dynamic by introducing local egalitarian uniformizing while reducing adaptability and incentives to produce. Thus Leftist politics risks becoming entropy-generating in an absolute sense—eroding the very surplus it relies on to sustain redistribution, leading to cycles of stagnation, crisis, or collapse if it fails to solve the problem of regeneration. Not all redistribution is equally entropic. Some models, like the Nordic social democracies, have historically managed to balance flattening moral goals with adaptive market mechanisms for surplus generation. However, whether such arrangements can remain sustainable over the long run without eroding their productive foundations remains an open question. While these structural dynamics help us map Left and Right, modern political discourse often distorts them through polemical labeling. To understand how these categories are used—and misused—we need to look at how “Left” and “Right” function in contemporary labeling.
Part 2: Modern Discourse and Labeling
Far Left and Far Right as categories
People often treat “Far Left” and “Far Right” as symmetrical categories, but in reality this is misleading. The Far Left does show genuine convergence: its flattening logic systematically dissolves existing differentiations through surplus extraction and redistribution, enforced through moral-ideological policing. This produces recognizable structural outcomes—centralized administration, conditional inclusion based on ideological loyalty, and a universalizing impulse that resists local exceptions. By contrast, what's typically lumped under “Far Right” is much more divergent: it includes authoritarian statism, racial nationalism, religious theocracy, aristocratic restoration, and even extreme market libertarianism. Compare Salazar’s Catholic corporatism, Pinochet’s market liberalism, and Franco’s authoritarian-monarchist alliance. Consider how this label lumps together everything from monarchist restorationists (French Legitimists), clerical theocracies (the Taliban), neoliberal autocrats (Pinochet), racialist regimes (Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa), ethnic expulsionist militarists (Idi Amin), civic nationalist anti-immigrant parties (Danish People’s Party), to even anarcho-capitalist secessionists in the U.S. militia movement. These share only the defense or reconfiguration of structured differentiation, but vary widely in their methods and rationales. While Marxist analysis might stress their shared role in preserving class hierarchy, this risks ignoring real conflicts between real actors and assumes more class cohesion than exists in reality—like monarchist opposition to bourgeois capitalism, or liberal bourgeois resistance to fascism.
Nationhood’s liberal and modern origins
It’s also important to recognize that modern nationhood itself wasn’t originally a “Right-wing” idea at all but emerged from Liberal and even Left-leaning currents as a way of breaking older, more particularistic orders. Absolutist monarchies had already centralized power by dismantling feudal privileges, creating the administrative capacity for uniform rule. Early nation-states then rebased legitimacy from the monarch to “the people,” claiming sovereignty rested with citizens. Even early expansions of suffrage were justified this way: the nation as a moral and legal community replacing dynastic rule and local privileges. French revolutionaries declared the nation sovereign, while Italian unification relied on liberal-nationalist alliances under Cavour and Garibaldi. In this sense, nationhood historically represented an internal levelling—uniform laws, taxation, military service—enabled by the very centralization of the absolutist state. What varied was how inclusive the definition of “the people” would be and how citizenship was contested over time. The nation-state is inherently dual: it levels internally while differentiating externally. Modern Leftist politics often presses its internal logic toward universalism (open borders), while Rightist politics now emphasizes its boundary-setting function.
The problem with “Far Right” as a label
This is why “Far Right” is often a blunt, low-resolution polemical term rather than a meaningful analytic one. It suggests a false symmetry with the Far Left by implying a unified endpoint of extremism, when in fact it describes a collection of divergent strategies for generating extropy, hierarchy, or differentiation. It would be more precise to specify what kind of order or exclusion is being advocated—racialist, nationalist, authoritarian, statist, theocratic, or laissez-faire fundamentalist. Even defending borders or nationhood isn’t inherently “Far Right”—historically it's been a standard function of states across liberal, social democratic, and conservative traditions. The Australian Labor Party historically supported immigration restrictions while maintaining progressive labor policies. Thus, immigration policy especially shows this complexity: Leftist politics has often promoted open borders and universal inclusion, but not uniformly, while Rightist politics has tended to emphasize maintaining boundaries and in-group cohesion—but with diverse justifications ranging from civic nationalism to ethnic exclusion. Labeling any defense of borders as “Far Right” flattens these distinctions and obscures real differences in goals and methods and underlying worldviews.
The sexual revolution and modern identity politics
More broadly, this flattening logic doesn't just apply to borders and national identity, but also extends into the cultural and social domains—most strikingly in the sexual revolution and modern identity politics. The sexual revolution and modern identity politics can be seen as contemporary extensions of this homogenizing Leftist logic, but applied to cultural and social capital rather than purely economic surplus. The sexual revolution attacked inherited family structures, gender roles, and sexual norms, dissolving older forms of hierarchy in favor of individual choice and moral-ideological policing around consent and liberation. Policies legalizing contraception and no-fault divorce reflect this logic at the institutional level. This levelling represents social entropy: dissolving inherited norms that stabilized cooperation and social reproduction. In their place emerge universalized, often unwieldy consent frameworks that regulate intimate behavior but lack the adaptability of local customs. Modern identity politics similarly targets entrenched cultural differentiations—race, gender, sexuality—demanding recognition and redistribution of social status while enforcing moral conformity through institutional norms. Examples include diversity quotas in hiring or speech codes in universities. Diversity quotas exemplify this levelling by replacing locally adapted hiring practices with bureaucratically enforced, categorical targets that erase context-sensitive evaluation. While these movements don't necessarily redistribute material surplus directly, they depend on surplus and bureaucratic enforcement to sustain themselves, using it to dissolve inherited complexity in favor of universalized, moralized inclusion criteria.
Addendum: On generalization, historicist limits, and abstraction
It's important not to overgeneralize this framework or apply it indiscriminately to all historical conflicts. For instance, Roman popularism can appear superficially “Leftist” because it challenged senatorial privilege and redistributed conquest surplus, but it lacked universal egalitarian ideology, moral policing, or the administrative apparatus to enforce uniformity beyond factional clientelist politics. Similarly, some medieval peasant revolts demanded local customary rights rather than systemic egalitarian redistribution.
This framework is historically contingent: it emerged with modern states capable of surplus extraction and redistribution at scale. Yet it remains useful as an abstraction because it highlights systemic dynamics—the tension between entropy and extropy, flattening and structured differentiation, surplus extraction and generation—that recur in different forms. Many features once associated with Leftist politics—universalist moral frameworks, centralized bureaucratic administration, and rationalized redistribution—have become endemic to modern political orders across the spectrum. In a sense, we are all “leftists” now, at least structurally.
Conclusion
It is crucial to remain aware of when terms like “Left” and “Right” are being used not as analytic tools but as polemical weapons. Much of intellectual and political debate functions as this sort of rhetorical boxing match, reducing complex historical and structural dynamics into slogans. Instead of accepting the political spectrum as a given, we should see the political field as an evolving landscape of concrete actors employing varied strategies of coordination, extraction, legitimation, and control.
This analysis aims to be historicist—tracing how Left and Right emerge from specific institutional developments—yet dynamic, treating them as systemic tendencies that evolve and recombine. By framing these axes as interacting forces rather than fixed essences, it clarifies how these categories continue to be deployed and transformed in contemporary politics.
These dynamics intersect as axes of political strategy. Entropy and extropy describe tendencies toward homogenizing or structured differentiation, but movements can mix these logics in complex ways. Statism, for instance, is orthogonal—it can impose universal flattening or integrate old and enforce new, highly differentiated structures. Similarly, universalism and localism define scope: whether rules apply globally or respect local particularisms. Real political movements occupy positions in this multidimensional space, blending these elements to suit their aims. Recognizing this complexity resists simplistic moral mapping and encourages concrete, structural analysis of political strategies.
This framework does not claim that flattening versus structured differentiation is a perfect binary. Leftist movements often replace older hierarchies with new moral-ideological stratifications, but these tend toward broader homogenization of norms and categories—greater social entropy. Markets are orthogonal: they dissolve inherited orders yet generate emergent differentiation through price signals and competition. Universalism and localism often correlate with Left and Right logics but are not reducible to them; one can imagine anti-statist, market-driven universalism that is not Leftist in moral aims (think race-realist, global social-Darwinist, or classical 19th-century liberal). Statism, although historically rooted in flattening logic, is best treated as a tool or arena—a driver that can be wielded for either flattening or differentiation, depending on the project. These axes intersect in complex ways, and the analysis is unashamedly Euro-modern in focus. Class dynamics underlie many of these patterns but are not foregrounded here. “Parasitic” is retained deliberately as a polemical term to underscore structural dependence on surplus extraction. The question of stable mixed systems is left open: the model describes tendencies, not inevitabilities.
Bro cooked with this one