Right and left wings in 20 surprising points

The right fears alienation; the left fears injustice.

The right opposes artifice; the left embraces it.

The right prefers common sense to reason, which it distrusts. It uses reason only so that individual or collective subjects can get what they need or want.

The right affirms the given, and as taken for granted; the left questions the given, thinking it more likely wrong than right.

The right looks for harmony, key to a happiness, and assumes contentment is the sign of being morally in the right.

The right thinks if you are unhappy, something is wrong with you, or with something you have done. The left thinks that if you are unhappy the society you are part must have a problem that.you instantiate.

The right unites ethics and politics; the left separates them.

The right judges more than it thinks, for it assumes that it knows.

The right is homecoming, the left exile.

The right restricts movement and keeps people in prescribed categories. The left wants to liberate people to move about more freely.

The right thinks all social evils are caused by the moral failure of persons. The left is able to grasp social injustice as an affair of structures that can be changed.

The right is personalizing and psychologizing. The left is sociological and politicizing.

The right, not the left, identifies injustice with insult, and promises oppressed people pride and dignity as an alternative to struggling for justice.

Scratch the helpfulness of social managers, and you will see constant reminders to stop committing that sin. (It doesn't matter what it is).

The right demands obedience and thinks it is enforcing the true social norms. They are held to be beyond questioning and contestation. Thus it only represents them when it seems they are being violated. The left wants all social power and norms to be questioned.

The left runs on intellect; the right runs on feeling.
The right believes in myth, the left in critique.
The right uses reason to justify, the left to understand and criticize.

Rightists argue only to win, and argue angrily. Leftists argue to arrive at the best solution.

The left needs intellectuals and artists, and its closely guarded secret is that it believes this should be everyone. The right needs only investors and managers, who need workers.

The right enforces norms, which it claims are justified because universal, natural, or necessary. The left questions them.

The left will risk being morally in the wrong to try to make the world less unjust. In the face of this, the right can only affirm an ethics of doing nothing.

The right believes in religion, along with law, medicine, and business. The left prefers to religion or therapeutic projects: theory and art.

Often, what seems to be left is really right-wing. Sometimes, what seems right-wing is really left.