Why the Left Invented the 'Right', and why it's Pushing People Towards Trump

The right is an artificial social construct that needs to be challenged

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

In this article, I want to further explore the idea that the 'right' is an artificial construct, that I first discussed in a recent article about why libertarians should oppose tariffs, and why they need to 'leave the right' to do that effectively. In that article, I reasoned that 'the right' can't refer to conservatism per se, because Trump is clearly not conservative by the standards of Burkean conservative philosophy, and it also can't refer to the original meaning of the 'right' as coined during the time of the French Revolution, because most of today's 'right' clearly aren't monarchists, which was the thing that defined the French right back in the 18th century. I hence concluded that the 'right', in its current usage, is simply a collection of people, groups and ideas that are skeptical about, and critical of, the ideas of the 'left'. This time, I want to expand on this analysis, and find out who exactly the artificial construction of the 'right' actually serves.

In society's discourse, words often come to have the meaning that the group most keen on using it give it. A good example is 'woke'. While 'woke' historically originated in African American English, and referred to the need to be conscious about racism against black people, during the 2010s it was adopted by postmodern critical theory-inspired activists to denote belief in their worldview of interlocking systems of oppression (which was also not limited to racial oppression). Later on, with the rise of anti-woke critique, 'woke' became associated with an unpopular style of activism that is defined by an oppressor vs. oppressed worldview, and deploys tactics like cancel culture, and hence began to carry a negative connotation. To this day, many linguistic purists like to insist that only the original meaning of 'woke' is valid, and that the latter meanings are a misuse of the word, or worse, an invention by racist people to hijack the word. However, it has also become an objective fact that the word 'woke' is now used pejoratively most of the time. If you hear someone say that a certain politician or celebrity is 'woke' in 2025, it is most likely that they are criticizing that person, often for a belief or behavior that has nothing to do with racism at all, rather than praising them for being actively aware of racism. Thus, as always, words effectively come to be defined by the people who are using them most prominently, most loudly and most frequently, whether we like it or not.

Using this logic, our current definition of the 'right' should logically stem from the way it is used by the group who use it the most. I think that would actually be the leftists. (Note that 'leftists' here refers to self-identified leftists, who are much further left than the mainstream center-left like the Democrats or Labour, and they generally reject the center-left as being part of the left. This is important because, as I illustrated last time, the far-left is basically at war with the center-left, and I consider the center-left to be fellow travelers, but not the far-left.) Leftists generally use the word 'right-wing' very pejoratively, often with an implied meaning of being on the same side as the fascists. They tend to use it to describe, and hence lump together, adherents of all political ideologies that disagree with contemporary leftist philosophy, including classical liberals, libertarians, moderates and centrists, conservatives, reactionaries, and actual fascists alike. The more extreme leftists might even label the mainstream center-left as 'right-wing', simply because they, too, disagree with much of the leftist agenda. This is why we sometimes hear them unironically say that 'Joe Biden is right-wing'. Furthermore, given that the current dominant version of leftist philosophy, at least in the West, is the version that talks about intersecting systems of oppression, even old-school class-first socialists have occasionally been labelled as somehow right-adjacent (using language like 'Strasserism', 'red-brown alliance'), simply because they reject intersectional identity politics. Putting all this together, it is clear that the 'right', as constructed by leftists, is simply anyone who disagrees with the current dominant version of leftist philosophy. This is consistent with my hypothesis from last time.

This is what we've found so far: the original 'right' of 18th century Europe is long gone, because most people don't support hereditary monarchy with real powers nowadays. As such, the category of 'right' should have logically ceased to exist. Just like the categories of 'Whig', 'Federalist', 'Jacobin', 'Girondin', 'Menshevik' and so on, it describes a real political faction complete with a well-defined ideology and platform that used to exist once upon a time, but no longer exists in a meaningful way. If not for the leftists' continued use of the word 'right' to describe their opponents, the 'right' would have become historicized like the other aforementioned categories. Note that those who identify as leftists in the 21st century West are not the same as the original 'left' of 18th century Europe either. They identify themselves as leftists because they believe they are a continuation of that tradition, but it doesn't make them the same thing. That they choose to identify as leftists has logically meant that they have invented the category of 'right' to apply to those they perceive as their opponents.

Hence what is called the 'right' is basically just a collection of left-criticals, who often don't have much common ground with each other. I mean, logically speaking, a 'tent' that includes such contradictory elements like both libertarians and fascists, and both isolationists and neocon interventionists, can't ever make sense as a coherent category. Leftists often justify the existence of distinct 'left' and 'right' camps, by saying that the left is for social justice and dismantling hierarchies, and the right is for maintaining the status quo and maintaining hierarchies. However, this is no more than a self-definition of the left by leftists, plus taking the opposite of that to define the 'right'. It also doesn't hold up to empirical observation: libertarians clearly aren't the biggest fans of hierarchy, for example, even though leftists have placed them in the 'right' camp. The fact is, the 'right' objectively doesn't meaningfully exist in the way leftists imagine it to. Leftists created the category of 'the right' to satisfy the needs of their own ideology and political organizing. It is functionally the same as the category of 'infidel' that is often created by organized religion to include those of the same religion who have unconventional views, those who believe in a different religion, and those who don't believe in any religion alike. These categories don't mean anything useful in reality, except to denote an outgroup for the ingroup.

Now, some might argue that the 'right' is indeed a valid category because some people actively identify with it. While my above analysis is objectively true, it is also objectively true that some people self-identify as being 'on the right'. This, I think, is because there have been political forces that have actively encouraged left-critical people to adopt an identity of being on the 'right'. The people doing that are usually a particularly well-funded and well-organized faction among the left-criticals, who want to scoop up the support of the rest of the left-criticals to build a movement to serve their own agenda. Historically, this was mostly the neoconservative fusionists who brought together a 'three legged stool' coalition of free market capitalists, foreign interventionists and the religious right. Ever since this coalition fell apart in the aftermath of Bush-43's failures, 'right' identity has mostly been championed by reactionary populists, to gather support for Trump and other Trump-like figures. During the 2010s, there were countless articles encouraging those who disagree with wokeness to identify as part of a 'new right', for example. In both aforementioned cases, encouraging people to actively uptake the identity of being on the 'right' was a method of political coalition building, to paper over the very real differences between different kinds of left-criticals. It is in this context that libertarianism has fallen prey to a Trump-induced identity crisis, much to my own dismay.

As a libertarian reformist, I don't want to be forced to agree with people who want the government to wage the culture wars for them, trampling on free speech in the process, just because I disagree with left-wing cancel culture too. As a progressive conservative, I favor gradual, sustainable social improvement, and I don't have much common ground with those who want to turn the clock back by decades. The reactionary right is clearly my enemy, not my friend. There is no valid category that can include the both of us. This is why I'm certainly not 'on the right', even though I am critical of leftism as it exists.

In summary, the 'right', as we know it, is a category leftists invented to lump together those who disagree with its philosophy. In turn, reactionary billionaires looking to protect their own vested interests and advance their questionable agendas made it more of a real category by encouraging as many left-criticals to identify with it as possible, so as to create a political movement to get their people elected. However, the 'right' is ultimately a category designed (by both these forces) to flatten out the very real disagreements among different kinds of left-criticals, which is bad for independent thinking, freedom of conscience and free speech. What I'm also worried about is that this could mislead freedom loving people to support authoritarian ideologies, or mislead cautiously progressive but otherwise open-minded people to support reactionary ideologies. Therefore, we should challenge the lumping of different and contradictory forms of left-criticalism under the category of the 'right'. I think we would do better without it.

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TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.