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Could left and right-wing politics be replaced by up and down-wing?

Voters don’t really know which way is up in politics at the moment (Picture: AFP)

Politics is a tricky business.

Under 10% of British people think Westminster functions ‘well’.

Less than half of people think a change of electoral system would help, according to YouGov, and new parties wouldn’t make it better either.

So maybe we need to rethink politics altogether?

Modern political views are divided very simply into three distinct categories: Left, Centre and Right.

The Left values a bigger role for governments, the Right values the individual and a smaller role for the state and the Centre is somewhere in-between.

In the UK, Labour, The SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party are on the Left; Change UK and Lib Dems in the Centre; Conservatives, The Brexit Party and Ukip on the Right.

But it didn’t used to be that way.

The idea of the Left and Right started during the French Revolution in the 18th century. When the Legislative Assembly was set up in 1791, the innovators were sat on the Left, moderates in the Centre and the ‘conscientious defenders of the constitution’ sat on the Right.

It wasn’t about the size of the state but how much the state should change the country or keep it the same.

Now, some are saying that the way left and right-wing politics has progressed isn’t working:

‘Parliamentary politics and the usual kind of ways in which we think about politics is falling apart,’ Prof Steve Fuller, of the department of sociology, University of Warwick, tells Metro.co.uk.

‘People under 40 are disaffected, they don’t vote, they don’t understand with the Right/Left distinction, they don’t think it stands for anything meaningful.

‘Let’s face it. It’s not actually working as we would like it to be.’

With left and right-wing definitions ‘falling apart’ as some see it, ‘solutions’ to how to fix ‘broken politics’ are coming thick and fast.

One of them is to actually rotate the whole left/right idea of politics by 90 degrees and start referring to it as ‘up-wing’ and ‘down-wing’.

But even what is meant by these terms are not yet agreed by experts.

‘I’m trying to turn the poles of politics around,’ Prof Fuller says.

Prof Fuller’s version of Up and Down takes us back to the change vs stability disagreements in the politics of the 18th century.

‘The upwinger perspective is very much about human progress – space travel, technology, all sorts… It’s not just science fiction,’ he says.

‘The downwingers are the opposite. They think all these [technological developments] will lead to the downfall of humans.’

But this definition isn’t the only way it’s being considered:

‘A vertical ordering [of politics] would rather resemble pre-modern perspectives – feudal societies that embrace hierarchy and pyramids of authority,’ Jonathan White, professor in politics at the LSE, tells Metro.co.uk.

Elon Musk might end up becoming the up-wingers’ poster boy (Picture: AP)

‘If this way of seeing politics catches on again, it will presumably be because some group wants to position itself as an undisputable authority – at the “top” – and/or another group wants to present itself as challenging such authority from “below”.

‘One does see something of this today, when politics is cast as a clash between technocrats [the technically-skilled elites] and populists.

‘I think the imagery of “above” technocrats and “below” populists often is implied here.’

So why isn’t Left and Right working?

Is it because while voters are becoming increasingly used to millions of songs to listen to, millions of videos to watch and near-infinite fast fashion to choose, they are only given limited ways of seeing politics?

‘The crisis in Left and Right isn’t just that people can’t tell the difference between the two sides because they’re so close but also because the younger generation do not see their issues or their concerns very easily represented or mapped onto the Right/Left distinction,’ says Prof Fuller.

‘Things like the environment, the future of science and technology like the way [the internet] is radically changing our lives are not part of the conventional politics of Left or Right.

‘They’re kind of there in the periphery but they’re not very central to it.’

But Prof White believes that the current Left/Right ways to describe politics still has a lot of value:

‘Conceiving politics in horizontal, Left/Right terms has something democratic about it, whereas a vertical ordering points to politics as the clash of between different varieties of authoritarianism,’ he says.

‘Those who deny the significance of the Left/Right divide [often] want to defend the status quo and delegitimise challenges to it.

‘As the saying goes, when someone questions the relevance of the Left/Right divide, they’re probably not on the Left.’

The end of polarised politics has been talked about for generations. As Prof White has noted, experts of European democracy were talking about the end of Left/Right politics in the 1950s and 60s as parties moved towards the centre.

Tony Blair’s vision for New Labour was to bring the centre towards Labour policies while bringing the party’s policies towards the centre.

Yet the recent rise of populism shows that polarising views – whether up, down, left or right – have come back to the foreground.

So who would the key upwingers be?

‘The upwinger mentality is embodied by the Silicon Valley crowd,’ Prof Fuller says.

‘It’s a new form of capitalism focusing on change [rather than fossil fuels]. You have to look at people like Elon Musk. He wants to send spaceships to other planets, settling people there, upload consciousness [to the web] and they are experimenting with change, some small, some  transcendental.’

The difficulty of understanding the two differing definitions of up/down wing politics shows how little mainstream attention the ideas are getting.

Just ‘rotating’ the axis of politics wouldn’t remove some of the existing problems of politics.

Two options rather than a full list of choices means that a wide variety of views would have to be labelled under the same umbrella.

But there is something that is happening in global politics that needs a name behind it.

‘I would be surprised if “up-wing” and “down-wing” catch on – these terms don’t have much pedigree [but] other terms might,’ Prof White says.

‘Think of how politicians in some countries like to describe the political landscape as divided between “patriots” and “globalists”.

‘Both Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen [in France]  have adopted some of this – one might see this as another kind of vertical ordering of society, extending into the international sphere, and again supplanting the Left/Right divide.

‘Or Leave and Remain – the underlying metaphor is perhaps along the lines of outside/inside.’

The idea of being an outsider has been used around the world – Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage – with a lot of success.

And that leaves a gap for something that people can get behind.

‘My students very often don’t understand what the Left/Right distinction means,’ Prof Fuller says.

‘But the second I mention up and down, they understand exactly.’

Whatever the terms are – Inside/Outside, Up/Down, Patriots/Globalists or anything else – voters are looking for something that works for them.

Right now, it’s not working for over 80% of people.

If neither a new electoral system nor new parties could fix it, some experts think pushing all of politics over on its side just might.

The Future Of Everything

This piece is part of Metro.co.uk's series The Future Of Everything.

From OBEs to CEOs, professors to futurologists, economists to social theorists, politicians to multi-award winning academics, we think we've got the future covered, away from the doom mongering or easy Minority Report references.

Every weekday, we're explaining what's likely (or not likely) to happen.

Talk to us using the hashtag #futureofeverything  If you think you can predict the future better than we can or you think there's something we should cover we might have missed, get in touch: hey@metro.co.uk or Alex.Hudson@metro.co.uk

Read every Future Of Everything story so far

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