It is a mistake, that plays into the hands of groups like the Republicans, the Ontario Conservative Party and the Conservative Party of Canada to pretend that we are seeing a polarization between the Left and the Right. We absolutely are not. If anything our entire social structure has been hauled to the “Right” by extremists on that flank.
Moderates, Liberals, New Democrats, and Democrats are not left-leaning but rather represent an intent to maintain and strengthen the institutions and policies that created robust widespread prosperity in the 20th century. In this respect these parties are the true conservatives, conserving the social development that hauled civilization out of the barbarism and iniquitous inequity of past centuries and created just and prosperous societies.
Right-wing propagandists want to characterize their “alternative” as legitimate by representing it as one end of a balanced spectrum. This kind of both-sidesism is necessary to legitimize what is more accurately an attack on civilization and democracy itself.
We all have to stop helping this along by pretending that there is a struggle between left and right-leaning ideologies. What we have is a crisis of radical extremism, which if our societies survive it, will look in the history books like a kind of widespread suicidal hysteria.
