Mapping Currents of Left-Wing Thought
Part Three (3)
From the Far Right to Wokeism: The Geometry of Conflict in Contemporary Politics
Aydin Areta

In this section I try to show that the “right,” like the “left,” is not a simple or homogeneous formation. It encompasses a broad spectrum, from classical conservatism to the far right, nationalism, populism, and religious and political forms of authoritarianism. What connects this spectrum above all is a vertical impulse: a sensitivity to order, continuity, identity, authority and structure.

But my purpose here is not merely to describe the right. I want to emphasize a more fundamental point: the problem of politics is not the complete elimination of social hierarchy, but the distinction between legitimate and accountable social hierarchy and monopolistic, repressive domination. Just as horizontalism can slide into excessive suspicion, verticalism can decline into defensive verticalism: a fearful, defensive authoritarianism that can lead toward fascism.

Another important point is that part of the left’s historical error arises from a failure to understand the Pareto principle: the recurring pattern whereby, across many domains of social, cultural, economic and intellectual life, a large share of achievement, influence or attention tends to become concentrated in a relatively small minority. This pattern is not necessarily the product only of oppression or conspiracy. It can also emerge through differences in talent, discipline, luck, timing, networks and the gradual accumulation of success. The left errs when it interprets every social hierarchy in advance as evidence of injustice, whereas the central political problem is not the complete abolition of inequality and verticality but the construction of social hierarchies that are legitimate, restrained and accountable—hierarchies that serve truth, merit and responsibility rather than domination and monopoly.

From here, the discussion expands toward more recent forces in contemporary politics: campism, progressive liberalism, wokeism and, finally, their relationship to postmodernism and post-structuralism. The aim of this section is to show that many contemporary conflicts can no longer be understood through simple, inherited binaries. We are dealing with a more complex field of forces, sensitivities and ethical-political formations.

This section is therefore fundamentally an attempt to draw the geometry of conflict in contemporary politics: from the far right to wokeism, from defensive verticalism—fascism—to suspicious horizontalism—campism—and from legitimate order to ideological blindness. The question here is no longer simply who is “left” and who is “right.” The question is what ethical sensitivity and what configuration of power, truth and order each current brings to its understanding of the world.

YouTube link:
https://youtu.be/pR2uFRvsKT4