there is a story about how left and right politics became incoherent. or actually, the left-right spectrum is simply a way to mark out the contest between incoherent positions, and has no purchase much before the twentieth century. but at any rate, the left and the right both develop out of a republican tradition: the left out of rousseau, for example, or the right out of...i don't know, schiller or john c. calhoun (who is, actually, an amazing political philosopher). alright, so both have this element of liberatory rhetoric, rights, and so on. but as we segue into the twentieth century, technological innovations - communications, transportation, weaponry - make possible the idea of totalitarianism, and both left and right totalitarianisms arise, of course. and in ideology, you have the admixture of hegel to rousseau, marx to hegel on one side, the development of romantic nationalism, race theory, and so on on the other. and also a teleological view of history. where the republican tradition looks backward to the greeks and romans, the totalitarian left and right ditch that and push ahead toward a transformed species, a utopian endstate, which can of course only be achieved by the force of the state. that's what the state is for, what it is.: a machine for species-transformation.

suddenly, everyone is going: we can make this happen. whatever your vision of how things should be, there is a machine adequate to imposing that vision on history. and that is what totalitarianism is, becuase to make your vision real, people must be constrained to realize it.

so both of these views retain a little hangover of republicanism, and a rhetoric of freedom, and even an origin in liberatory revolutions, in resistance to tyranny. and both graft onto that a massive totalitarian nation-state (or in the left vision, a world-state), a species transformation machine. both are going to seize control of history: definitely not how let's say john adams saw the function of the state. so both left and right both push forward the liberatory rhetoric of their origins, and both betray that origin in every moment, every policy and program. this reached its hysterical height in the conetst between nazism and communism in the 1930s, but muddles on yet.

the left accuses the right of being nazis; the right accuses the left of being communists. and this would be basically right, except that the actual left and right are incoherent, not actually bold enough to take a position, and still not able simply to jettison the idea of freedom (and also not able to endorse it in any meaningful way).

there wil be another political spectrum after left/right. it will still emerge historically. but let's hope it makes some kind of rudimentary sense.