What does ‘far left’ and ‘far right’ mean anyway?

Despite his recent endorsement of Donald Trump and his decision to hire a GOP strategist, Elon Musk has long insisted that his political views don’t fit neatly in a box. In 2019, he declared himself “openly moderate,” and in 2022, he said, “I am neither conventionally right nor left.”
That doesn’t stop the media from branding Musk and his beliefs “far right,” a nefarious label that people struggle to describe, and a description that relatively few people assign to themselves.
A similar misbranding occurs when people speak of Megyn Kelly, the Fox News personality turned podcaster. Despite being a registered independent who disavows party labels — “I will never wear a team jersey of either one of these (parties)” she has said — Kelly is frequently derided as “far right” by critics on social media. Certainly she is not shy about criticizing Democrats, Kamala Harris and the mainstream media she was once a part of, regardless of the label.
In both of those cases, there may be some “guilt by association” at play — Musk because of his support for Trump, Kelly because she once interviewed Alex Jones, whose name is rarely mentioned by the media unless it is preceded by the words “conspiracy theorist.” Still, the idea that we can cast aside people’s own assessment of their ideological views and assign them labels that no one can clearly define is one of the more bewildering aspects of our current political climate.
It’s even more odd when you take into account that the labels that falsely categorize Americans are a byproduct of the French Revolution.
Verlan Lewis, a political scientist at Utah Valley University and co-author of the book “The Myth of Left and Right,” is a proponent of purging “left” and “right” and similar labels from our political discourse altogether. “The left-right spectrum is both misleading, and it’s harming us,” he said.
But what would an America without “right” and “left” look like? How would we describe our ideological opposites? And are there ever cases when it’s appropriate to use the terms?
The practice of defining ideological opposites dates to Paris in the 1790s when members of the National Assembly were debating the French Revolution, Lewis, the Stirling Professor of Constitutional Studies at UVU, said. “Those who were more in favor of the revolution sat on the left hand side of the hall, and those who were opposed to the democratic revolution were sitting on the right-hand side of the speaker.”
Then, saying “right” or “left” was a useful way to describe members’ positions, since the terms only referred to one thing. “It is a unidimensional label,” Lewis said, and can be useful as such. The language was periodically used in Europe in the next century, but came to the forefront again during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia during the 1910s as the Bolshevik revolutionaries saw their work as similar to that of the French revolutionaries. “They saw themselves as left wing and they argued that their opponents were right wing.”
American journalists reporting on the revolution started using that language, and the terms trickled into domestic politics in the U.S., although it took awhile for them to find purchase. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the use of the words picked up beyond academic circles.
“It really ramped up in the past few decades, whereas today, you can’t open a newspaper, you can’t turn on a television program, you can’t listen to political radio or go on social media without someone using these terms, left and right, progressive and conservative. Now it is the absolute dominant framework of the 21st century,” Lewis said, adding that you can see the rise in the terms’ usage on Google nGram, which tracks word usage in books.
In common use, the terms are something we assign to other people, not ourselves, because few people want to think they’re “on the extremes of this imaginary left-right spectrum — most people think ‘I’m center-right or center-left, I’m a moderate conservative or progressive. But those people over there, they are extremists on the far left or the far right. They are the radical left wingers or the reactionary right wingers,” Lewis said.
“Not only is the left-right spectrum misleading, but it’s harmful because it allows people to slander their political opponents without talking about actual issues.”
And not only is it wrong to denigrate someone with a label they don’t embrace, it’s usually factually wrong as well, since many people, even if they vote a straight ticket, have at least some views that diverge from their political party. For example, a person may be passionate about cutting government spending (a view typically associated with Republicans) and about green energy (a view typically associated with Democrats). “Ordinary people have positions all over the place because there are lots of different issues,” Lewis said.
Journalist Heath Druzin, the creator and host of the “Extremely American” podcast, which examines Christian nationalism and militias in the U.S., frequently uses the the term “right wing” in the podcast. Druzin, who lives part of the year in Germany and part in Idaho, told me that he gets mixed reactions to his use of the term. “It’s a mixed bag. Some people don’t mind it. Some people lean into it. Some people don’t like it at all.”
That’s true of any descriptive, of course. One militia leader that Druzin featured joked with his group about them being labeled as “extremists,” and it’s true that in an increasingly polarized and secularized society, being a frequent church-goer, or a homeschooling parent of a large family, can get you labeled an extremist or radical by someone somewhere.
Druzin told me that when he describes a person or group as being “far right,” he considers them to have “ideas outside the traditional mainstream thinking on the right” which in America, he primarily sees as the Republican Party.
But even then, the questions that arise are confusing. A person with traditionally conservative values can be ideologically left of Donald Trump, but still considered to be on the right. Sen. Mitt Romney is often characterized by the media as a “moderate conservative” with no clear definition of what that means. And Druzin can’t figure out how he would define Utah Sen. Mike Lee: “He’s a great example of someone where you would need to weigh his record and statements, and I think you could probably argue either way,” Druzin said.
And is Fox News a “far right” cable news network? Fox has some personalities who might be considered “far right” but Druzin says the Christian nationalists that he talks to complain that the network is “not right enough,” and Druzin considers Fox’s political polling “really good and really trustworthy.”
So what are the ideas that Druzin believes unequivocally belongs to the “far” right?
For starters, “If you’re going after people’s rights based on who they are, I think those are far-right ideas,” he said.
Druzin cites people who want to repeal the 19th Amendment and strip women of the right to vote, people who want to criminalize being gay, people calling for a return to theocracy. “If you’re calling for the dismantling of democracy, I think it’s fair to call that a far-right ideology,” he said.
In some cases, Druzin’s explanation fits into Lewis’s contention that “right” or “left” only works on a unidimensional spectrum — for example, when it comes to fascism. Some people use the term “fascist” to casually deride their political opposites, much like “Marxist,” but Druzin says that in his work he encounters people who genuinely admire fascism, sometimes wearing “free helicopter rides” T-shirts that subtly refer to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who dropped the bodies of political opponents in the ocean from helicopters.
“That’s cheering on fascism. That’s far right,” Druzin said.
While Druzin believes it can be fair and and appropriate to carefully cast groups of people as “far right” or “far left,” he agrees that “the far right” get much more attention in America right now. He says it’s because “the far left” — of which he considers Antifa a part — isn’t as politically powerful and is mostly limited to Portland and Seattle, unlike in Europe, where they have more presence. While those groups have made headlines in America, as with calls to abolish or defund the police, or to redistribute wealth through programs like universal basic income, their influence has been limited, compared to their counterparts on the other end of the political spectrum.
“It’s not that (the far left) don’t matter at all, but they don’t matter as much as the far right at the moment. They haven’t made inroads into electoral politics,” Druzin said.
He added another definition of “far left” and “far right” — the willingness to use violence to achieve political goals.
Lewis, at Utah State University, points out that the compulsion to categorize our fellow citizens into competing tribes starts and ends with politics. Think about medicine, recreation or business, he said — we don’t think in unidimensional terms in any other field. “If you went into the doctor, and you said my leg is hurting … and (the doctor) said you had a left-wing illness, you would run out of the room, and rightfully so because he would be trying to take the complexity of human health and collapse it onto a unidimensional spectrum.”
And yet, “almost everyone has bought into this myth that politics can be modeled on this unidimensional spectrum.”
The answer is “to think and talk about politics in the way we talk about virtually every other realm of life,” Lewis said. “We would be better off going granular, which is what we do in every other realm of life.”
Aren’t there times, however, when categorizing people as “left” and “right,” or “conservative” and “liberal,” are necessary, or even helpful?
I offered, as an example, a sentence I’d written earlier in the day, in which I said that “many conservatives believe their posts have been censored on social media.” The distinction between “conservatives” and “people” seemed important there, I said, asking Lewis what he would have written.
“I would have crossed out conservatives and written Republicans,” Lewis said.
But while that is more specific, it also leaves out people who aren’t Republicans but consider themselves leaning to the “right” — Megyn Kelly, for instance, I pointed out.
“Then just go granular,” he said. “Say ‘free speech advocates’ or ‘those concerned about censorship.’ Now you’re talking about a particular issue and not dragging in this other baggage.”
Left and right, conservative and liberal, are simply social groups; there is no fixed and detailed policy statement. As for individuals, “instead of saying left wing or right wing, just say ‘this person is very tribal — this person is very committed to a political group’,” Lewis said.
That might be a hard sell to a population steeped in the language of division. Both most of the time we use the terms, there are probably more accurate words to use, words that when chosen judiciously can help to bring the culture’s temperature down.