5. How we know what Left and Right actually mean: who’s who, 1789-1917

This episode is for everyone who keeps writing to me to insist that one or the other wrong, incoherent, popular definition of Left and Right is actually the correct one. How do we know what left and right actually mean? When we use the terms “left” and “right” in politics, we’re making an analogy to who was on the left and right sides of the national assembly in France in the early French Revolution. What is it about right wing populists vs. left wings populists, or socialists versus capitalists, or communists vs nazis or anarcho-communists vs anarcho-capitalists that links them to the left and right sides of the french national assembly of 1789? To answer this, we look at who was considered as being on the left and on the right in three different time periods: 1. The early French revolution in 1789, which is what the whole left-right political spectrum is an analogy to. 2. The 3rd republic in France where seating in the National Assembly was first purposefully a