I suggest there is a key difference between left and right politically. The right feels comfortable with spontaneity, thinking that when people make decisions about their lives, the overall order that emerges will be superior to any planned agenda. The left, by contrast, prefers to take society towards preconceived and planned outcomes.
The divide between right and left is not mainly about money, class or even the size of the state. It is about order, and where order comes from. The right trusts order that grows. The left trusts order that is made.
It starts with knowledge because no planner, however clever, can know what millions of people know about their own lives. Hayek pointed out that the information that matters most is scattered, local and often unspoken. Central planning boards would never perform as hoped, because planners could never acquire the knowledge held by local agents to set prices. The shopkeeper knows the customers. The farmer knows the soil. The parent knows the child. When each acts on what they know, the result coordinates their efforts far better than any blueprint could.
This order is real, even though nobody designed it. Language was not drafted by a committee. The common law grew case by case. Markets emerged from countless trades. These orders emerge as the result of human action, but not of human design. The right looks at these achievements with respect and some humility. It sees them as stores of accumulated wisdom, tested by time and refined by trial and error. That is why it is wary of tearing them up.
The left starts from a different place. It looks at society and sees outcomes it dislikes, outcomes such as inequality, insecurity and unfairness. It then asks what society should look like, and how to get there. The goal comes first and the method follows. This is not malice. It is usually generous in motive. But it treats society as a machine to be steered rather than a living process to be nurtured. It assumes that the destination can be known in advance, and that the people in charge can be trusted to drive.
The record of planned outcomes is not encouraging. Rent controls aimed at affordable housing and produced shortages. Industrial strategies picked winners that lost. Whole economies built on five-year plans fell further behind every five years. The pattern repeats because the flaw is structural. A planned outcome needs the planner to know what cannot be known and to predict what cannot be predicted.
Spontaneity has another virtue. It respects people. To allow individuals to make decisions about their own lives is to treat them as agents, not as pieces on someone else’s board. A plan for society is always, in the end, a plan for other people. The right prefers to set the rules of the game and let people play it. The left prefers to decide the score in advance. There is also a moral point in freedom. When people choose, they learn, adapt and take responsibility. When choices are made for them, those habits wither.
Nor does the right’s position mean disorder. It wants firm rules such as property, contract, the rule of law, national defence and policing. These are the framework within which spontaneous order flourishes. What it rejects is the idea that the framework should dictate the detail. The right is not against order. It is against orderers.
So the distinction holds. The right is comfortable not knowing where society will end up, because it trusts the process. The left is uncomfortable with that uncertainty, because it trusts the plan. One bets on the many. The other bets on the few. History has been rather unkind to the few.
Madsen Pirie