Why do we associate liberals with the ‘left’ and conservatives with the ‘right’? We always hear about ‘left-leaning democrats’ or ‘right-wing republicans’ - why?
WAG:
In some long ago legislative body, the conservatives sat on the right side of the chamber and the liberals sat on the left.
Not a bad guess, Bob. IIRC it was the first French Republic (after the Revolution). Can anyone provide a little morebackground?
Here’s an excerpt. Better written then I could do.
From James W. Ceaser _ Reconstructing America - Yale University Press, 1997
“In the realm of political thought, the modern categories of “RIGHT” and “LEFT” derive from the French Revolution. These words originally referred to the physical location of various groups and parties at the Constitutional Assembly. On the right sat those who were opposed to the Revolution or were undecided, and on the left, those who supported it. After the Revolution, the Right came to designate the political forces who hated the Revolution and who regarded rationalist thought as the root disaster of modern times. The Left designated those who lamented the failure of the Revolution and who sought, under one form or another, to renew it. The development of the principal school of modern thought, historicism, was also connected with the French Revolution. The Right because conservative by adopting a version of historical thinking that provided a foundation of opposition to the Revolution, while the Left embraced first a doctrine of historical progress and then the full-blown historicism of Marx to support the Revolution.”
Here is the SDMB wisdom on the subject:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=15062
“Even in communist countries the right wing prevails.” --Joseph Heller
LEFT VERSUS RIGHT: The result of an unfortunate seating arrangement.
In October 1789 the Paris mob, led by women, walked to Versailles, stormed the palace and dragged the king back to town with them. The Assembly had no choice but to follow. Louis was put in his gilded cage, the Tuileries Palace. The nearest building capable of seating several hundred elected representatives in the same room was the palace stables out in what are now the Tuileries Gardens. The need to board and exercise a large number of horses had imposed a particular sort of structure. That shape in turn imposed a semi-circular seating plan on the carpenters brought in to do the emergency conversion.
It naturally followed that those who hated each other the most sat as far away from each other as possible, to the extreme right and left of the podium. Thus the needs of horses helped to create our idea of irreconcilable political opposites. Had architecture permitted this semi-circle to complete itself, the reactionaries and revolutionaries would have found themselves quite naturally sitting together. See: NEO-CONSERVATIVE.
-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion
The notion of folks with different views sitting on different sides dates back, I beleive, to the Roman Senate. When a vote was to be taken, the main proponent of each view would move to opposite sides of the Senate hall, and all the other senators would move to the one side or the other to register there vote. Of course, two folks who disagreed on one issue might agree on another, so it wasn’t quite the same as different political parties.
Matt, something signed by JRS is automatically suspect to me even if it is something as commonly known as that.
I understand the nobles sat on the right because this was (and is) the place of honor.
Sorry to blow the dust off a dead thread, but ignorance needed fighting.
Today on CNN, there was brief synopsis of the attitudes of our two main political parties in the last fifty years. One of their statements implied that the terms right wing and left wing only went back to the Hawks vs. Doves in the sixties, and had to do with which claw the Eagle has arrows or an olive branch in on our seal.
I said, “That has to be false.”
First, wouldn’t that be right claw and left claw, not wing?
Second, I distinctly remembered a line in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Hemmingway about right wing or left wing, which is set in the thirties.
So, I came here and rather than start a new thread I found the old one. I figured I would tell my tale and bump the thread up to help anyone else who was confused by CNN’s misspeak.