Monday, February 21, 2011

The Term Right

I'm thinking of the political noun, such as it is, not the moral adjective which we use to describe actions. The political noun is rubbish at this point.

The term has been perverted through long use of a certain type, namely to denote the competitor to the leftist using the therm. This competitor could be law-and-order societies stamping down on the leftist's goal of disorder or violent revolution. Or it could be a another leftist organization competing for power with that of the speaker. It could be some people whom the leftist has targeted for plunder.

It is in these ways a speaker-relative term (where the speaker is a leftist.) What semantic connection it may have had to conservatism is now well trodden under by ambiguity. It's a severe ambiguity, with occasional incoherence between "my competitor" and "conservative." It puts Hitler in with the set of conservatives, which demonstrates that its shared meaning is absurd. It is now a semantically broken term and may as well be abandoned.