Should we scrap the terms Left and Right?

Gerald Warner says yes - and that we should proudly reclaim the term "reactionary":

In 1789, in the Assembly, the increasingly alarmed partisans of the ancien régime sat on the right-hand side (Côté Droit) of the president, the revolutionaries on his left-hand side (Côté Gauche). This terminology was first made familiar to the English-speaking world by Thomas Carlyle, in Volume I of “The French Revolution”: “Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cote Droit), a Left Side (Cote Gauche); sitting on M. le President’s right hand, or on his left: the Cote Droit conservative; the Cote Gauche destructive.”

That recognition of the character of so-called progressive forces as “destructive” was a valuable insight; the reviving of the memory of the Left/Right alignment, however, was less beneficial. Yet this terminology did not gain popular currency until as late as 1897, when the psychologist William James disseminated the phrase “left wing”. By the 1930s it was all-pervasive. Today it has infantilised politics (and the BBC) to the extent that mutinous Russian armoured columns advancing on Moscow to restore Marxism-Leninism were described as “Right-wing”.

We have to get rid of this nonsensical vocabulary. The correct terminology for those who futilely seek to improve the world through some innovatory creed such as socialism is “radical”, “liberal” or, preferably, “progressive”, since that places some onus on them to explain to what destination they imagine they are progressing. In the more extreme cases they may be described as “revolutionary”.

Their opponents should not hesitate to reclaim the currently pejorative term “reactionary”. It describes a coherent process: an examination of a failed innovation leading to a determination to return to the status quo ante; it is what a scientist does in the laboratory when an experiment fails. It is ironic that, since the days of Hume, progressive thinkers have been fixated on the notion of empiricism; this has paralysed the human imagination, leading to the discarding of religion and many metaphysical insights. Yet, if empiricism reigns supreme, what could be more empirical than reaction, contrasted with progressives’ blind advance towards an unknown Utopian goal? There is a supreme contradiction there in radical thought, by no means the only one.

Ultimately, political allegiances are determined by cultural factors, which is why in an advanced society such as America “culture wars” are at the core of political confrontation. That is why the most accurate term for anyone who opposes all the disastrous consequences of the French Revolution is Traditionalist. This has long been recognised in Spain where political thought, in this respect, is more than a century ahead of Britain.

The great Thomist political philosopher Juan Vázquez de Mella y Fanjul, in the late 19th century, stressed the distinction between traditionalists and “conservatives”, the opportunists who, under the prime minister Cánovas del Castillo, engineered the alternation of power between the Liberal and Conservative parties, ruining Spain in the process.
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The first begetters of both Communism and Nazism were the proto-totalitarian Jacobins of the French Revolution. The DNA is so precise a match that, in the course of massacring up to 400,000 Catholic royalists, the majority of them women and children, in the Vendée, the revolutionary government instructed scientists to investigate the possibility of mass extermination by pumping poison gas into mines; a tannery processed human skin; does that not strike certain resonances?

I'm quite happy to be called a reactionary. When the Democrats call Republicans the "party of no" I can only agree. We have to be the party of no. Someone has to try to put the brakes on the progressives' dangerous nonsense.