Make the Left-Right Divide History
Make the Left-Right Divide History David Fleming at Independent Alliance asked me to do a piece summarising my thoughts on the Left-Right Divide. Here it is. RUSERE SHONIWA We have to go all the way back to the French Revolution in 1789 to trace the roots of the Left-Right political divide that permeates political discourse in the West today. The burning issue brought before the French National Constitutive Assembly in 1789 was whether the king should have absolute veto power under the new political regime or whether that power should be restricted. When voting on the issue, those who wanted the monarch to retain absolute veto power sat to the right of the president, while those who favoured restricting the power of the monarch congregated to the left. Ever since then, the labels of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have been used to demarcate political opinion across a wide spectrum of issues from economic policy to law, civil rights and even religious attitudes. At this epochal moment in histor