Recently I read a news story purporting to give the results of a statistical study of the politically motivated violence in recent generations.  I am resisting the temptation to comment on the timing.

The upshot was that for several generations, the great majority of instances of politically motivated violence were motivated by right-wing or conservative ideologies, with incidents of left-wing violence becoming a majority only in the last few years.

Such exercises in counting on fingers are worthless.  Terms like “right” and “left” have some usefulness in limited contexts in which all sides use the terms the same way.  The problem is that since they have no universally agreed-upon definitions, it is far too difficult to manipulate them.

During the Jim Crow years, segregationists were part of the New Deal alliance, which might reasonably be viewed as making them part of the left.  They engaged in plenty of violence.  But we are required to call them conservatives because, after all, they were segregationists.  Segregation was bad and old, and everything bad and old is conservative, don’t you know?

By most definitions, communists are part of the left, not the right.  But the die-hard communists who resisted the breakup of communism in the Soviet Union were called conservatives because they wanted to conserve – well, communism.

Monarchists are called right-wing, and Stalinists are called left-wing.  Yet what was Stalin but a tyrannical monarch by another name?

Socialists are considered part of the left, and Adolph Hitler’s party were called National Socialists – Nazis, for short -- because they accepted the tenets of revolutionary socialism, but rejected the internationalism of other socialists.  Although they wanted to smash institutions, not conserve them, today we unhesitatingly classify them as conservatives -- because, golly, they were extreme racists, so they just had to be conservatives.

The ideology of Italian Fascism was a totalitarian confection made up of nationalism mixed with what most of us would call left-wing ideologies such as socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism.  But we call it right-wing, because, after all, it was a new kind of leftism, which broke with the old kind.

Surveying this terminological chaos, we misunderstand our own confusion, saying “Isn’t it amazing that the extreme right is so much like the extreme left!”  But in many cases, so called extreme right-wingers are varieties of what used to be called extreme left-wingers.  We’ve merely changed the definitions.