> practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy"
Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.
I guess by "the left" you mean Democrats? They're mostly liberals, not leftists, and want to maintain the hierarchies but ease some of the most obvious impacts through regulations.
The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
If you understand left-right as Democrat-Republican, your view doesn't hold true either. Republicans generally want to void labor protections, reduce taxes, cut social welfare and lift environmental regulations, but they also always want to increase the military, intelligence and police budgets. Republicans also tend to want the state to enforce their idea of morality, e.g. by prohibiting (secular or non-Christian) same-sex marriages, criminalizing abortion or restricting sex education and access to contraceptives. They want to enforce what they see as the natural order through punishment whereas "the left" wants to counteract it through support. Prison abolitionists tend to be on the left, not the right.
The government isn't hierarchy. The government is an institution that interacts with hierarchy. As are large corporations for that matter. Reducing the government budget and shifting more economic power to corporations doesn't reduce hierarchies, it only takes power from elected officials to unelected shareholders.
If you believe in an unregulated free market capitalism, you literally support the hierarchy of the market and you believe in a natural order. Or to put it in words that feel less icky if you think of yourself as an anarcho-capitalist: that people should vote with their dollars on what goods and services should thrive or fail.
If you believe money is power and you believe it's good and natural for some people to have many orders of magnitude more money than other people, you believe in a natural order. This is what leftists call a hierarchy and leftists don't like it.
Note: I'm not saying leftists don't want a big government. I'm saying leftists (even outside anarchism) want to get rid of the state. They just disagree on how to get there. And for reformists that answer usually involves using the state one way or another.
> The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
Look at how many Black Americans supported the Loyalist side. Many of the American Founding Fathers were slave owners and supported the continuation of slavery. The British Empire promised freedom to American slaves who supported the Empire, and it mostly delivered on that promise. Both sides were very racist, if judged by contemporary standards, but I think there is a decent argument to be made that the racism of the British was on the whole a lot milder than that of the Americans.
The British Empire, including what is now Canada, officially abolished slavery in 1833; the United States would not finally abolish it for another 30+ years. (And it took a bloody civil war for America to do it; the Empire’s abolition of slavery was largely peaceful.) But in actual fact, slavery was de facto rendered legally unenforceable in most of (what is now) Canada by a series of court decisions in the 1790s, so in practice slavery was abolished in Canada over 60 years prior to its abolition in the US.
While there was widespread social discrimination against Black people in 19th and 20th century Canada, it was generally much milder than in much of the United States. The British and Canadian legal systems generally accepted the theoretical legal equality of all citizens regardless of race, even though it often failed to enforce that theoretical equality in practice; by contrast, the legal systems of many American states contained explicit discrimination against Black citizens.
Lynching was a great scourge on American history, of which Black people were the disproportionate (but not exclusive) victims. Many Americans defended lynching as a form of democracy. Judges, law enforcement and prosecutors in the US were very sensitive to public opinion – in part due to their widespread direct election – and were often loathe to properly investigate, prosecute and convict lynching cases if public opinion appeared to approve of the act. Likewise, many American jurors believed that it was appropriate for them to defer to public opinion in deciding cases, and return "not guilty" verdicts in popularly approved lynchings even when the evidence clearly pointed to guilt.
By contrast, the British Empire strongly objected to people taking the law into their own hands, and would-be lynchers in Canada faced far greater odds of successful prosecution for murder (and its then near-mandatory death penalty) than in the US. British culture–including among politicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors–prioritised upholding the rule of law over popular opinion to a much greater extent than American culture did. Due to this cultural difference, lynching was extremely rare in Canadian history – a mere handful of isolated incidents, compared to many thousands in the US.
So, who were the "egalitarians" and "left-wing radicals" in the American Revolution? I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the American Revolution was in fact a reactionary right-wing movement, widely supported by slave owners who lived in fear that the British Empire might forcibly liberate their slaves, and not really a "left-wing" one.
Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though. I'm not sure why you've decided to spend the majority of your reply on explaining why the American revolution was bad for Black people to address an off-hand comment.
Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism, which is literally a system of hierarchy and the belief that the system is both natural and good (e.g. the "white man's burden" ideology that slavery is good for the slaves because they're unfit to survive on their own).
You won't find any political movement that neatly fits into the "left-right" spectrum. In retrospect even the often lauded direct democracy of ancient Greece was deeply undemocratic because it was restricted by its very narrow definition of citizenship. Under scientific racism Black slaves were barely considered human and even if you only consider white people the US still didn't let women vote until the suffragettes fought for it and won.
My point wasn't that the founding fathers should be considered leftists. My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
As feudalism became less relevant, the meaning began to shift by becoming more generalized. I'm not arguing about morality here but definitions. The 18th century definition of left and right was almost entirely about royalty and the aristocracy. The generalized definition I summarized evolved considerably later.
> Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though.
White loyalists didn’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings either. That ideology was promoted by the Catholic King James II, who was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The Hanoverian monarchy (to which George III belonged) was ideologically opposed to it because if true it would mean the 1688 revolution was illegitimate, and hence Hanoverian rule of Britain would be illegitimate too. The main supporters of Divine Right of Kings were Catholics and the Jacobite rebels in Ireland and Scotland, not Protestant supporters of the British government. In fact, some Jacobites supported the American Revolution - such as Hugh Mercer.
> Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism,
The Atlantic slave trade was already well underway when the theory of “scientific racism” was first being developed. And it didn’t become widely popular until the mid-19th century, by which time slavery was approaching its end. It was a post hoc rationalisation for chattel slavery, not a cause.
> My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
The French Revolution was (in part) a revolution against the “Divine Right of Kings”, but the American Revolution wasn’t, since the British had already rejected that ideology in the revolution of 1688. If you define “leftism” as merely rejecting that then both sides in the American Revolutionary War were “leftist”, and the British Empire was a “leftist” empire
Lenin was a political opportunist and Stalin most likely faked Lenin's will to appoint himself after his death. The Bolsheviks also murdered/incarcerated plenty of leftists and disempowered the pre-existing worker coops and trade unions through centralization.
Anarchists, syndicalists and other leftists were literally building decentralized structures before the Bolsheviks swooped in and decided the public would need decades of ideological education before it could be trusted to make any decisions about their lives and "helpfully" started making the decisions for them. It doesn't help that many of the leftists outside Russia who were critical of Bolshevism were murdered by German paramilitaries and later more indirectly by the USSR while trying to fight fascism in Spain.
Saying you have a good understanding what "left" is because you were born in the USSR is like saying you have a good understanding of what pasta is because you've been eating Yum Yum noodles for a decade.
Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Proudhon? Bookchin? There is a wide range of leftist thought outside the very narrow niche within Marxist-Leninist-Maoism that still uncritically defends the USSR.
You try to explain the consequences of communism with "few bad apples"; well, at least it's not a "no true scottsman", I have to give credit for that. However, there have been so many cases of leftists coming to power and building a state, and the only one I know that didn't end is tragedy was Israel — and even it resulted in financial crisis and eventual move to capitalism.
Of course, it's opportunists and sociopaths who come to power. You're absolutely right about that. But it would be silly to explain all these outcomes as fault of particular individuals, even if they are at fault. It's the principles behind the system itself, which make it vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Essentially, the problem is with this: every kind of leftism makes moral behaviour nor a matter of personal choice and responsibility, but something mandated by the state or a quasi-state organisation. This sounds very good in theory, especially for the people who are sensitive to the wrongs of the world. But in practice, it makes those organisations infallible and creates in their place a perfect vessel for said opportunists and sociopaths.
State power is like The Ring from LOTR. It's very seductive to use it for good, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It should be not used, but destroyed.
You do know that anarchist ideology is literally defined by the opposition to states and state-lile structures, right?
It seems odd to tar specifically anti-statists with wanting to create a state. Anarchy being literally the antonym of hierarchy, statism is the complete antithesis of anti-authoritarian left-wing politics.
You're thinking of Stalinist/Leninist authoritarian communism, which certainly doesn't encompass all of left-wing ideology, only a niche.
When Stalin came to power, one of the first things he did was too purge all the anarchists and other non-authoritarian socialists. Thus most leftists despise Stalin and what he did. Mao, too.
Yeah, I think that was the intended reading of that reply given the obviously similar phrasing.
However there's a word for anti-authoritarian leftists. We're called anarchists. Not all leftists are anarchists and not all leftists are anti-authoritarian. Even authoritarian leftists (or "statists") generally believe in the end goal being the ideal of a stateless, classless society.
Statists just tend to believe the only way to get there is with an intermediary socialist state established through a communist revolution and led by a vanguard party who directs the economic, social and philosophical evolution of the people towards bringing about communism. The differences between those groups are largely about what that intermediary state should look like and at what point it can be dissolved.
Some of the aspirationally communist states of the 20th century justified their continued existence with communism having to be rolled out globally simultaneously for it to b successful. Some instead argued that what they had achieved was "real socialism", heavily implying that's as good as it gets and any critics were utopian idealists who'd rather tear down the local optimum in the hope of an unachievable ideal. The USSR opened its markets and collapsed under the dual load of its bureaucrat aristocracy and capitalist oligarchs, China pivoted to Dengism to contain their "capitalist experiments" with the promise of a greater good coming from the temporary toleration of exploitation.
But for anarchists (and mutualists, who fall somewhere between anarchism and statism) the biggest problem tends to be that they usually either start out or end up surrounded by nation states with standing armies who want none of their nonsense.
The most promising approach seems to be dual power, i.e. building anarchist structures[0] within existing states through cooperation and solidarity so that when they inevitably collapse in the future, the people can fall back on those structures as an alternative to just reasserting the old (hierarchical) power structures.
[0]: To preempt the obvious joke: contrary to the portrayal of "anarchy" in most media today, anarchists don't believe in no organizations, just no hierarchical power structures, i.e. usually they agree with consent-driven forms of bottom-up organizing. The one exception tend to be egoists (see Stirner), but most anarchists try to ignore them because they're weird.
Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.