The Left Does Not Exist

The False Polarization of Imposed Ideology as Propaganda to Preserve the Established Order

Introduction
Modern political discourse is obsessed with dualities. Left and right. Liberal and conservative. Capitalist and socialist. Republican and Democrat – it never ends.

And these binaries shape not only how people identify themselves and others, but how they perceive political life overall - consequentially as a contest between two opposing forces locked in perpetual struggle. The group-oriented narrative is persuasive and feels natural.

Yet, upon closer inspection, this entire framing collapses.

The hard truth is that “the left” does not exist—not as a coherent category of political orientation. Rather, it is a relational construct; a rhetorical placeholder for opposition to whatever order happens to dominate at a given time. Its content shifts with circumstance, its moral claims mutate, and its alleged identity is defined not by what it is, but by what it is opposed to.

(Please note I have explored this general issue before in my specific criticisms of the false duality of Capitalism versus Socialism, by which “socialism” is also an incoherent entity. Read Substack here.)

Meanwhile, “the right” persists as the defender of the current established order. As such, it is continually absorbing, neutralizing, and re-describing the field of discourse so that even resistance (the “left”) remains functionally conservative. The illusion of polarization thus becomes an instrument of propaganda: a managed dialectic ensuring that structural power remains unchallenged.

1. Origins
The left–right divide idea originated in the French National Assembly of 1789, during the Revolution. Those seated on the left side of the hall favored sociopolitical change, such as the dismantling of monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and ecclesiastical authority, while those on the right supported preservation of the monarchy and the church and hence the existing, traditional social order.

The seating arrangement created a convenient visual metaphor. Over time, “left” became synonymous with change and reform, while “right” denoted stability and tradition. But these words were purely positional, not ideological. There was no “essence” of leftness — only a contingent spatial relationship reflecting the social forces of that moment.

Had the monarchy prevailed, those same revolutionaries would have remained a small radical fringe, remembered perhaps as utopians or terrorists. Again, “Left” was not a doctrine; it was simply the direction of opposition.

2. Positional Nature of Political Identity
Every society, at any given time, has a dominant mode of organization — political, economic, and cultural — that defines what is “normal.” Those who defend that order today are to be labeled “conservative” or “right,” while those who seek to transform it are called “progressive” or “left.”

Hence, this relationship is entirely contextual. The French revolutionaries of 1789 were “left” because they opposed monarchy. A century later, classical liberals who supported free markets, secularism, and representative government were “left” in their day, as they challenged feudal hierarchies and church power. Yet in the 20th century, neoliberal economists defending deregulated capitalism became the “right,” precisely because markets had become the new orthodoxy.

The same ideology — individualism and private property — migrated across the spectrum purely because the social base of power shifted. The positions are mobile, not fixed. To speak of a permanent “left” is therefore to mistake a direction of critique for an enduring identity.

Similarly, during the time of Abraham Lincoln in the United States, the more progressive reformers were found in the Republican Party, which sought to abolish slavery. The conservative establishment was represented by the Democratic Party, which defended slavery as part of the traditional social and economic order (this shape-shifting will be touched upon more so in a moment).

Today, each party has fundamentally reversed roles in general when it comes to support of tradition versus progressive change (even though, as an aside, we must account for the highly muted nature inherent to the gesture of progressive change, as a consequence of the overarching dominance of conservative or traditional thought and its control over essentially both parties, as will be talked about moreso).

3. The Semantics of Control
The endurance of this left–right dichotomy is not an accident. It is a kind of weapon that only serves the traditionalists who oppose change. Put another way, it is a linguistic technology of containment — a way to channel social discontent into predictable patterns. By mapping political thought onto a single axis, the ruling order can neutralize genuine complexity and make dissent intelligible only in terms that reaffirm the system’s logic, in part.

In other words, if you can establish limits of debate within a culturally expected framework (left and right), you can control thought by reinforcing a narrow definition of those assumed extremes, specifically with respect to restricting gravitations toward increasingly radical change, which is precisely the goal. The left–right divide functions as a semiotic fence, helping keep discourse within the acceptable parameters of the existing order.

This becomes further reinforced by the very nature of the imposed group identity itself. Today, we increasingly hear politicians (and the general public) often criticizing this thing called the “left,” experiencing the sense that this “leftist group” is structured and identifiable. If a politician decides to attribute a problematic characteristic to this “left” or perhaps some variation, such as “extreme left,” associating political violence, it tends to energize a raw, animalistic group antagonism by which anyone perceived as being on the “left” must gravitate toward this violent characteristic and be opposed.

Hence, it serves the conservative, traditional establishment well to attribute all of the problems in society to a group of “leftists” — creating inhibition, fear and tension by way of chain reactions that flow through a citizenry that falls victim to the incoherent false duality and propaganda. Suddenly, an individual that has a certain belief about, say, economic fairness, may feel increasingly threatened both politically and in their own social circles, as they become associated with violence because of a belief in economic fairness.

This example, of course, is an old strategy we saw during the McCarthy era. The 1940s film It’s a Wonderful Life, which was a Christmas film about community and sharing, was actually once considered “communist propaganda” by the FBI.

So, not only are the limits of debate preserved by force of the imposed structure that is traditionalist, they are further reinforced by the scrutiny of any progressive thought that deeply exceeds those narrow confines of acceptable discourse.

Overall, it serves three key ideological functions:

1. It simulates diversity. People believe there are meaningful alternatives within a given system, when in truth both “sides” accept the same structural foundations (I.e. private property, wage labor, nationalism, capital accumulation).

2. It personalizes systemic issues. Conflict appears as a matter of individual preference or moral taste — as though politics were a consumer brand.

3. It moralizes difference. “Left” and “right” become emotional identities, not analytic categories, encouraging loyalty to symbols rather than critique of ideas, policies and systems.

4. Historical “Left” Shape-Shifting
To reinforce the nebulous nature of this category of “left,” history reveals just how incoherent “the left” framing has been.

• 18th century: “Left” meant anti-monarchical republicanism — the Jacobins and radicals of the French Revolution.
• 19th century: It came to include liberals, socialists, and early labor movements — strange bedfellows united only by opposition to aristocracy.
• 20th century: “Left” splintered into reformist social democracy, revolutionary communism, and later, post-1968 cultural movements focused on identity, ecology, and sexuality.
• 21st century: The label encompasses everything from technocratic progressivism and NGO humanitarianism to anarchist mutual aid and Marxist anti-imperialism — ideologies that share almost nothing beyond rhetorical distance from “the right.”

This shape-shifting demonstrates, again, that “the left” is not a stable worldview but a mobile signifier. The same word has described both social democrats who defend capitalism with welfare programs and revolutionaries who reject it outright. If “left” can mean both moderate reform within the system and abolition of the system, then it means nothing concrete at all. Again, all it can mean is the interest in some kind of change. It is simply a placeholder for the next available form of opposition, whatever that may be.

5. The “Right” as Structural Gravity
Unlike the assumed left, the right has objective continuity — not because of any moral or ideological superiority, but because it is simply anchored to whatever exists. The right’s core principle is preservation of the current normal and (today) ideas such as hierarchy. Since hierarchy is the onging state of organized societies today (largely rooted in market-economic determinism), the right’s metaphysical home is this perceived stability itself.

In monarchies, it defends kings; in capitalist economies, markets; in theocratic systems, faith. Its loyalty is not to any single doctrine but to the maintenance of order as such, once again.

This also explains why the right (dominant establishment) can absorb nad modify its enemies so well. The labor movement becomes “responsible unionism.” Feminism becomes “equal opportunity capitalism.” Environmentalism becomes “green growth.” The system often digests and repackages its critiques as innovations within itself.

This is why Noam Chomsky once stated that there really is no existing “left” (assuming the traditional duality) in the context of political institutions in the United States. There are only really conservative and more extreme conservative orientations in US politics.

And when you think about all of this in terms of establishment preservation and social control it reveals a truly powerful trick, facilitating the attenuation of true opposition into managed adaptation: A kind of cybernetic equilibrium, in fact, that ensures nothing fundamentally alters. And it works particularly well because the very structure of this control becomes acceptable to the very people needing to be controlled, without them even knowing it.

6. How Opposition Reinforces Power
Every ruling order requires the illusion of contestation to sustain legitimacy. The spectacle of two opposing camps — “left” and “right” — serves this function perfectly. It channels social frustration into ritualized competition where outcomes are structurally predetermined.

This is why capitalism thrives on polarization. The system depends on continual debate about how to distribute wealth, not why wealth takes the form it does; on who should govern, not what governance is for. By framing every question as a matter of degrees between “left and right,” the system ensures its own immunity.

Elections become theater. Each party accuses the other of corruption or extremism, while both serve the same financial and institutional interests overall. The “left” thus becomes the moral mask of the system — the fake conscience that keeps the machine running. Put another way, it creates a binary equalization that doesn’t actually exist but gives a gratifying illusion.

The history of capitalism “versus communism” is a classic example. If Karl Marx is to be the “ideological originator” of socialism and communism (as is traditionally argued) — he was actually born after the invention of left and right. The fact that communism was to become the ultimate symbol of “leftism” is perhaps the most powerful false duality and polarized framework manipulation history has seen so far, in the interest of preserving Western capitalist hegemony.

In my upcoming film Zeitgeist: Requiem, I have archival footage of former U.S. President Richard Nixon giving an interview where he states: “…to cut through the hypocritical double standard of those who can see all the danger on the right, but don’t see the danger on the left!”

The statement completely embraces the propagandized ideological framework which people like Richard Nixon firmly believed (As do most conservative politicians - which is most all polticians). In essence, the association to this thing called communism — which was born out of a fundamental antagonism to capitalism and hence born out of an interest in change — collapses the entire history of governments that profess to employ communism and its outcomes into the category of “left.”

How strategically convenient.

This nonsense leads people to say things like, “Well, the Nazis might’ve been deeply right-wing and highly intolerant and violent — but you know, those darn communists on the LEFT were also very violent.”

The stupidity of this framing cannot be overstated. It has absolutely no validity on any level and doesn't make any epistemological sense at all. It's just made up propagandized rhetoric. There is simply no viable comparison, because there is no left identity that can be homogenized to serve any kind of polarized mirror to the long-standing, old-world, highly traditional, nationalistic and race centric intolerant realities - that define Nazism.


7. The Ontological Error
To restate from a philosophical perspective, the belief in a coherent “left” is a category mistake. It confuses vector with essence. “Left” once again merely indicates movement away from the dominant order, not a stable body of principles.

This is why so-called leftists themselves (meaning change seekers) have always fought bitter internal wars — between reformists and revolutionaries, libertarians and authoritarians, humanists and materialists. They share no common ontology because their unity is defined only by negation, not position.

A movement defined by what it opposes can never define what it is. “Left” and “right” reappear in every new order, each time masquerading as a fundamental choice while concealing their mutual dependence, ultimately in the long-term benefit of the establishment (or “right”).


8. Systemic Function of Ideological Polarization
In modern mass democracies, it’s critical to realize that polarization is not a failure of the system — it is integral to the system. It keeps populations divided, engaged, and predictable. The left–right narrative functions as a feedback loop of controlled conflict to maintain established normality. It does this by:

1. Stimulation – Media and political elites amplify certain differences to maintain engagement.

2. Mobilization – Citizens channel anxiety and alienation into partisan group identity.

3. Resolution – Electoral cycles provide catharsis without structural change.

4. Stabilization – The underlying economic and power relations remain intact.

The cycle repeats. “Left” and “right” thus become ritual identities — social technologies of governance, not descriptions of genuine ideological diversity. The very act of believing in them sustains the order they purport to challenge.

9. The Propaganda of Choice
This enclosed political spectrum is marketed like a product line in modern democracy. Consumers — now called “voters” — are offered two major brands, both promising different flavors of the same underlying commodity: obedience to the logic of capital and the nation-state.

The “left” appears to promise things like compassion, inclusion, and gradual reform; the “right” promises order, identity, and tradition. Both overall assume scarcity, competition, and hierarchy as immutable realities. The ideological war between them functions like corporate rivalry — Apple versus Samsung, Coke versus Pepsi — maintaining the illusion of freedom through consumer differentiation.

To reject this enclosed binary, pushing to new levels of seeking social and economic change, is to exit the market of sanctioned thought. One ceases to be “reasonable” and becomes “radical,” “extremist,” or “utopian.” These are not analytic labels but discursive punishments — linguistic quarantines that prevent systemic imagination.

10. Systems Theory: Homeostasis Through Opposition
From a systems-theoretic viewpoint, the false left–right duality functions as a homeostatic mechanism — a form of political cybernetics. The system maintains equilibrium not by suppressing dissent, but by cultivating it within tolerable limits, firmly shutting down any breach of the set limits of debate.

Like a thermostat regulating temperature, modern institutional democracy adjusts the range of permissible thought to keep the overall structure stable. The “left” acts as the system’s cooling function, releasing social heat and preventing explosion; the “right” acts as its heating function, reinforcing cohesion when order weakens.

Put another way, the opposition is controlled in the same sense that people in large protest environments walking down the street with signs yelling at the top of their lungs serve as a kind of pressure release valve. It doesn’t really do anything in most cases, but it satisfies the emotional frustration of those dissatisfied with the current establishment.

Put together, this codified “left–right duality” forms a toxic self-regulating loop. When one side gains too much traction, the other is mobilized through fear, outrage, or nostalgia. The result is not revolution but a gravitating oscillation — an oscillation that is firmly contained within the pre-existing traditional structures and beliefs (“right”).

11. In Conclusion
Human beings appear to crave identity and belonging, and politics offers both. To declare oneself “left” or “right” is to join a moral tribe, often in association with political parties, seeking community and order. The cost is critical independence and intelligence. The more one identifies with any side, the less one can see the game itself and what forces are actually in higher-order control.

This psychological comfort is why the binary endures even among the disillusioned. It is easier to imagine defeating the “opposing camp” (“owning the libs!”), concealing a deeper despair: the inability to conceive of politics beyond the known grammar of modern hierarchical power.

Antonio Gramsci observed that ruling classes maintain power not just through coercion but through hegemony — the shaping of cultural norms and “common sense.” Within this frame, even resistance is scripted. The ruling ideology defines what dissent is allowed to mean.

Hence, the modern “left” — from social democracy to progressive NGOs — functions largely as a moral subsidiary of the dominant system. It mostly humanizes capitalism, manages inequality, and provides the emotional catharsis of protest without challenging property or profit. It exists because power needs its own critique to appear legitimate — while those more radical thinkers that go “too far” are essentially dismissed as irrational or even dangerous.

This is why major corporations sponsor “progressive causes,” why universities teach “radical theory” as academic fashion, and why systemic critique rarely leaves the realm of art or activism. The left becomes the fake conscience of the right — its indispensable opposition by which the traditional establishment continues to stabilize its control.

In the end, the political spectrum, as propagandized from 18th-century France, is a cage of perception and dismissal — a binary algorithm ensuring the continuity of power under the illusion of pluralism, to the detriment of us all.

Hence, to say that “the left does not exist” is not to deny the sincerity of those who struggle for justice, equality, ecological balance, or other needed change. It is to expose how their energy is continually redirected into manageable channels of reform, perpetuating the system’s homeostasis in favor of no change at all - especially if they choose to fall victim to this way of thinking.

The real issue is not left or right, but reason versus tradition; dogma versus advancement and/or systemic or anti-systemic.

Until that distinction replaces this inherited false dichotomy, political life will remain a theater of managed opposition — a ritualized war of shadows projected on the wall of the same enduring order.