Left–right political spectrum

[6][7][8] One deputy, the Baron de Gauville, explained: "We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp".

[clarification needed] When the succeeding National Convention met in 1792, the seating arrangement continued, but following the coup d'état of 2 June 1793 and the arrest of the Girondins, the right side of the assembly was deserted and any remaining members who had sat there moved to the centre.

[12] The terms "left" and "right" were not used to refer to political ideology per se, but, strictly speaking, to seating in the legislature.

After 1848, the main opposing camps were the "democratic socialists" and the "reactionaries" who used red and white flags to identify their party affiliation.

"[16] In British politics, the terms "right" and "left" came into common use for the first time in the late 1930s in debates over the Spanish Civil War.

[18]Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on "ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism" while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on "notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism".

[41][31] Various political ideologies, such as Christian democracy,[42] some forms of liberalism, and radical centrism, can be classified as centrist.

[43][31] A number of significant political movements do not fit precisely into the left–right spectrum, including Christian democracy,[44] and regionalism.

Andrew Dobson suggests that green politics contains an inherent conservatism as it is "adverse to anything but the most timid engineering of the social and natural world by human beings".

Beyme was able to arrange seven of them from left to right: communist, socialist, green, liberal, Christian democratic, conservative and right-wing extremist.

[56] Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan observed that modern party systems are the product of social conflicts played out in the last few centuries.

[58] The first modern political parties were liberals, organized by the middle class in the 19th century to protect them against the aristocracy.

[60] Socialist parties were organized to achieve political rights for workers and were originally allied with liberals.

[67] The left-right political spectrum can change over time in a process that affects the views on politicians from more than one country.

[68][20] In the 2001 book The Government and Politics of France, Andrew Knapp and Vincent Wright say that the main factor dividing the left and right wings in Western Europe is class.

The nature of the conflict depends on existing social and political cleavages and on the level of economic development.

To the left, this is seen as a selfish and reactionary opposition to social justice, a wish to impose doctrinaire religion on the population and a tendency to authoritarianism and repression.

The initial cleavage at the time of the French Revolution was between supporters of absolute monarchy (the right) and those who wished to limit the king's authority (the left).

[73] Peter Berkowitz writes that in the U.S., the term liberal "commonly denotes the left wing of the Democratic Party" and has become synonymous with the word progressive,[74] a fact that is usefully contextualized for non-Americans by Ware's observation that at the turn of the 21st century, both mainstream political parties in the United States, generally speaking, were liberal in the classical sense of the word.

[75] Kazin writes that American leftists "married the ideal of social equality to the principle of personal freedom" and that contributed to the development of important features of modern American society, including "the advocacy of equal opportunity and equal treatment for women, ethnic and racial minorities, and homosexuals; the celebration of sexual pleasure unconnected to reproduction; a media and educational system sensitive to racial and gender oppression and which celebrates what we now call multiculturalism; and the popularity of novels and films with a strongly altruistic and anti-authoritarian point of view.

[82][83] Norberto Bobbio saw the polarization of the Italian Chamber of Deputies in the 1990s as evidence that the linear left–right axis remained valid.