Pre-Politics: Before Left and Right

The Estate

In 1789, the French Estates-General, comprising the clergy, nobility, and commoners, convened at the request of King Louis XVI to address the country's financial problems. King Louis had no choice in this, however, as popular discontent with the governmnet had made itself known, and demands for representation could not be ignored. The Estates-General had last met in 1614, and the pressing crisis that prompted their convening was the monarchy's debt incurred funding the American Revolution, which had nearly bankrupted France.

At the gathering, a modernist reformer and noble, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau (1749-1791; that 91 tells you something) argued that the verification of each person’s credentials should be done by all deputies, signaling the equality of the Estates-General’s three classes. Each member would have an equal vote, rather than the weighted voting that favored the Nobility and the Clergy. Traditionalists opposed this measure, arguing instead that each group of the Estates-General should verify credentials on its own. To save time on verification, they asked the modernists and the traditionalists to move around the room, to the left and the right, to show support for Mirabeau’s proposal.

Over the next few months in the chaotic summer of 1789, which featured the abolition of the separate representation of the three estates, the storming of the Bastille, the Great Fear, the creation of the French National Assembly and then the legislative assembly, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the early summer's convenient sorting into left and right over the matter of verification and credentials became linguistically and visually useful in organizing the assembly and in discussing the factions of government.

Later, in assembly gatherings—to avoid fighting, shouting, and name-calling—people began to sort themselves into opposite sides of the room. On the right sat the aristocrats and the church, while on the left were the representatives of the commons, businessmen, and leading intellectuals.

There are two curious facts about this language. The first is that these terms, left and right, have long outlived the political factions and people associated with them, evolving repeatedly to adapt to new political circumstances. One could travel to France in 1850, America in 1900, Russia in 1950, and China in 2000, and speak of right and left. Rarely has shorthand language shown such capacity to withstand history.

Alongside the peculiar continuity of this language, there is a second, much less obstinate and obscure fact, that even at the time of its birth, there were a few key pre-political fundamentals that both left and right agreed upon, that preceded any talk of “right and left.”

First, the assembly was French. Although nationalism and nation-states were new ideas at the time, the fundamental fact is that, beginning in the 17th century with the Treaty of Westphalia, followed by the territorial continuity of monarchical rule, and then by the rise of the bourgeoisie and literacy, “nations” had come into being. Although people had long felt loyalty to their city, village, or province, the fact remains that language, history, and economic development had favored the growth of what we might call national consciousness. This national sense of being was often restricted to urban centers, the bourgeoisie, and intellectuals. Rarely did “being French” in the modern sense, of loving the French language, weeping at tales of France in trouble, or loving French music, go far out into the countryside. There were huge numbers of poor and rural people who participated in France as it is known today. Still, in 1830 or 1870, one could walk out into the wild lands of Bayonne, Bordeaux, or Valence, and find illiterate people huddled around fires in huts, who spoke something that could not be called French, and who feared witches and reading.

Nonetheless, that the assembly was French, was united by being French, and had a common interest in making sure that the French state was not utterly financially destitute, and that the destitution of the state would be resolved through fair taxes on all, and not merely on the poor, was an absolute fact. That they had inherited the French thing they called the “Estates-General” from centuries ago was also an absolute fact.

Second, the assembly was democratic. The Estates-General was feudal and democratic. Even the conservatives and the right of the assembly’s day believed in democracy insofar as that referred to a consultative process of representative politics. Power was something else. The right did not believe in democratic power but in feudal tradition, which was a consultative tradition, that even predated the absolute power of monarchs, which was more modern than the Estates-General. The Estates-General was established in 1302, though, for the sake of our story, they had last met in 1614, centuries before the French Revolution.

15th-century French artwork depicting the Three Estates, with King Charles VII at centre.

The assembly spoke French, gathered great leaders of France, sought to discuss French business, and to resolve a French question. Their topic was the question of the French monarch in France—which was also the question of the Third Estate and finances—regarding the distribution of political power within a nation. 

As the revolutionary author, Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) wrote in What is the Third Estate:  

Chapter One: The Third Estate is a Complete Nation What does a nation need to survive and prosper? It needs private employments and public services. All the different kinds of private employment can be grouped into four classes: 1. Since land and water supply the primary materials for meeting basic human needs, the first class, in logical order, consists of all those families engaged in work on the land. 2. Between the initial sale of these materials and their final consumption or use, a new kind of handiwork, which may be either simple or complex, adds further amounts of additional value to these primary goods. Human industry thus has an ability to perfect the gifts of nature and increase the value of total production by double, tenfold, or a hundredfold. These form the activities of the second class. 3. Between production and consumption—as well as in the different stages of production—stand a mass of intermediate agents, useful to both producers and consumers. These are the merchants and dealers. Merchants, continually comparing variations in needs according to time and place, speculate on the profitability of storage and transportation. Dealers sell either wholesale or retail directly to their customers. This kind of useful activity distinguishes the third class. 4. In addition to these three classes of industrious and useful citizens whose prime concern is with objects of use and consumption, a society also needs different kinds of individual activity and specialized services that are directly useful or agreeable to the person. This fourth class encompasses everything from the most distinguished liberal and scientific professions to the least esteemed domestic services. These are the activities that support society. But who undertakes them? The Third Estate.

The third estate was the commoners, the producers, the useful citizens, who in the new order of France as a nation were not a meaningless group. They were no longer serfs tending the land. They were the army, the church, the lawyers, and everything else, rendering the other Estates—namely, the outdated aristocracy, which no longer fought alone in the era of infantry, and a clergy that had grown from the commons and lesser nobles—useless in merit. Sieyès would have said that the savages of Bordeaux, who could not read, were nonetheless French even if they did not themselves know this. For Sieyès, the illiterate farmers were orphans, abandoned by the state, the tyranny of the aristocracy, and the monarchy.

The question of representation, of the power of the Third Estate, was a national question taken up for the sake of the nation—of the actual people that tilled the fields of France, loaded and cleaned her rifles, harvested her crops, built her churches, sang her songs, fought her wars, and yes, wept for the witches of Bordeaux, and for the ignorance that had sent them to the fire.

This brings us to a critical point. When the Estates-General became the National Assembly, which we can understand as a modern, democratic parliament, they did so to make “politics” possible. The question of state finances was a primary concern of the Third Estate: taxes, power, and representation. To engage in “politics”, they had to resolve a pre-political question: did the demos exist, and did the demos deserve power?

Sieyès spent his life saying yes. He survived the Revolution.

In the Ancien Régime, the demos had no power and was said not to exist at all. After all, were the savages of Bordeaux an ancient Greek demos? The Greeks could read. The work of politics was the work of one man and his select team. What Machiavelli or Aristotle would ask us to call autocracy.

Autocracy is a method of politics. So is democracy. They have different pre-political fundamentals.

In the case of autocrats, to do the work of politics, they had to accomplish certain fundamental tasks: they had to concentrate power in their own hands and prevent power from being in anyone else’s, they had to give privilege, gifts, and money to their allies in power, they had to maintain a monopoly of force, and ally with cultural and social forces to maintain belief in their authority.

In the case of a democracy, the most fundamental pre-political principle is the demos, the people. A people are a group with common interests, language, values, culture, and heritage. Every other task of a democracy—bettering society, providing security, defending rights, and equality before the law—is secondary to the question of the demos. A democracy without a demos is a meaningless system of consultation. Or, in the words of Sieyès, writing about the powerlessness of the Third Estate, “Until now, the Third Estate has never had genuine representatives in the Estates-General. Thus, its political rights are null.” This is the representatives of the Third Estate did not matter, “because they were not elected at all; or because they were not elected by the general membership of the Third Estate of the towns and the rural areas entitled to be represented; or because, since they held privileges, they were not even eligible; the so-called deputies of the Third Estate who put in appearances at past Estates-General had no true mandate from the people.”

A nation was its people, who deserved power.  And for Sieyès, a liberal and left-wing revolutionary, the people are the nation.

The Third Estate thus encompasses everything pertaining to the Nation, and everyone outside the Third Estate cannot be considered to be a member of the Nation. What is the Third Estate? EVERYTHING.

Sieyès could say an illiterate peasant was the demos of Aristotle because he believed in progress, in raising men from mud and dirt, and teaching them to sing about fraternité. Aristocrats did not believe this. They believed that the men of mud were men of mud, deplorable and illiterate, barely able to stand the shaking and quaking of a wheelbarrow, let alone fathom the working of a ship.

Sieyès believed that the third estate was the demos, the common people, bound by an equal and common law. For Sieyès, the existence of the aristocracy—of a group with extra-legal privilege—made the function of the nation impossible. The aristocrats were the ones responsible for the deplorable condition of the men living in mud. So, they had to abolish the aristocracy. The nation was common people, with an equal law and equal treatment, language, history, heritage, and culture:

Whoever has a legal privilege of whatever kind has deserted the common order to form an exception to the common system of law and consequently does not belong to the Third Estate. As has been said, a nation is made one by virtue of a common system of law and a common representation.

The people were deserted because nobles deserted the common treatment of each person.

If the centralization of power is the pre-political requirement for an autocracy to function, what is the most foundational pre-political question for our system of government, a democracy?

A demos: a people, in Aristotle’s mind, a common people bound by interest, and implicitly, a shared history, language, and culture.

Now, Aristotle was writing with a few other questions in mind—the question of the Achaemenid Empire, which was both autocratic and more diverse than the Greek city-states, being an empire; and the question of Europeans and Asians, whom Aristotle believed were inferior to the Greeks. Like Sieyès, Aristotle sought to empower the demos. That was his political goal. This is not Aristotle worship—the opposite; he has many silly ideas that are convincing if you don’t think about them.

For example, Aristotle suggests that democracy is the best form of government because it is the most moderate, not governed by the petty whims of Asian Kings or as anarchic as the disorganized masses of European tribes. This is a truth buried in a lie. A useful one, particular to his time and place, where the Greek citizens had a restricted, elite citizenry, and feared the Achaemenids. In the Greek world, much of life was about metaphysical opposites, so Aristotle contrasted rule of the base whims of the Asian tyrant with the vile freedom of European barbarians. The Greeks, however, had the right mixture of liberty and tyranny, intelligence and courage, to rule themselves in a way no others could.

One can detect the patriotic fervor of this idea.

What Aristotle is saying about value is that democracy has an implicit pre-political requirement: a more or less homogeneous group of common people bound by their interests, language, culture, and customs, that, with shared customs and rights, would check autocracy and mass mob anarchy. Democracy was not the best because the Greeks were considered the most virtuous and moderate, but because the common interests of each person would restrain extremism. Common interests are, by nature, moderate interests, because extreme interests—of small ethnic groups or the rich—are peculiar, non-standard, abnormal interests. What Aristotle really meant was democracy was the best form of government because it was best for the existing citizens of Greece, who could make smart choices together, coming to conclusions, that naturally—because extremism is always a minority project—would be rejected via citizens restraining each other, in what is called, juridical defense. That's not a silly idea; that's a fundamental principle of law and the social contract. Though Aristotle, like many philosophers, has strange ideas, this one is not a strange idea. This one is a fundamental principle of democracy that will always be relevant.

For Aristotle, liberty was guaranteed by democracy because citizens are equal; they have a shared incentive to check autocracy and tyranny, to maintain law and order, and to preserve their system of government, which is passed down to their children, who will also be citizens. Equal rights is a system of shared juridical defense. This was also true for Machiavelli’s understanding of democracy. And this is true for Sieyès's assault on aristocracy, which was an attack on privilege in the name of defending the real need for pre-political common interests to give the Third Estate a voice. If the aristocracy existed, then they would have an interest in defending their privilege, and thus there would be no common interest, no common law, no nation, and thus no power for the third estate.

At the time, Sieyès was a radical left-wing figure. This was liberal, even revolutionary. At the time, the right stood for something other than democracy. On one side stood the power of shoemakers, the other the King, and they went to war. Sieyès won.

And Demos

Shri Thanedar is a Democratic Representative and is a co-sponsor of the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2023, which would reform America’s “obsolete” immigration system. The Act would provide asylum seekers with a path to citizenship and would establish refugee processing centers in other countries. He is also a great supporter of Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, because Shri Thanedar is a Hindu immigrant to the United States.

This has quite upset a lot of Muslims, who hate Narendra Modi. This has also put Shri Thanedar at odds with other members of the Democratic Party, such as Zohran Mamdani, who dislikes Modi because his father was from Gujarat. He inherited an ethnic and religious feud from his non-American father.

Lots of people will say that he is running for a “city we can live in,” but this is obviously untrue. His policies will make the city more expensive, as he will welcome many more people without building a sufficient number of new homes, and will raise prices for those who do not have their rent frozen. We also know this is untrue because much of the campaign had to do with Israel and Palestine. Unlike Rashida Tlaib, who cares about Palestine because she is Palestinian, Mamdani cares because he is a Muslim. He is from India and Jamaica, and the only thing that ties him to Palestine is Islam. His victory is clearly a millennial-leftist plebiscite and revolt on the direction of the Democratic Party—nothing more, nothing less. Mamdani, like Tlaib, is mostly in politics for Palestine. Tlaib asked the government to recognize the “Nakba" because she is Palestinian.

This puts her in the good company of Ilhan Omar, who is in politics for Somalia. What unites Mamdani, Thanedar, Omar, and Tlaib is that they are from countries whose fate is determined by the United States. Palestine, for obvious reasons, Somalia, because the U.S. has financial and military power over Ethiopia and Somalia, and has intervened militarily before, and India, because the state requires friendly relations with the U.S. for economic and geostrategic reasons, eyeing neighboring China and wary of America’s friendly relationship with Pakistan.

All of these people are, of course, in favor of large amounts of immigration. They believe in granting citizenship to asylum seekers, they think ICE is a fascist organization, and understand that if Somalis, Palestinians, and Indians can’t have a great life in their home country, it’s quite nice to let them come—like all these people did—to the U.S.A. instead.

As an aside, what separates contemporary waves of migration from prior waves is the speed, scale, and new technologies that animate against assimilation. Things are not happening as they once did, and this is due to observable political, social, and economic reasons.

Now, this is not a Democratic problem. One could discuss Elon Musk’s love of H-1B tech worker visas or Vivek Ramaswamy’s explicit attacks on American culture. All of these people love to say the immigration system is “broken,” which is really code for “the immigration system is restricted.” This is because the demos, the American people, want less immigration.

The impact is that they hold positions on foreign affairs issues because of their ethnicity and religion. That is the impact. That is highly unusual in a democracy, as the demos is supposed to be united by common interests, which are not the interests of foreign peoples and their land disputes. Regardless of whether they are right or left on issues such as housing or healthcare, they hold certain views that are deeply ingrained and unlikely to change; they hold these views as strongly as anyone would expect them to. Expecting a wealthy Hindu Indian to hate Modi is like expecting Elon Musk to love modern South Africa. There is no “right” or “left” here. There is only a minority interest. Vivek travels around Ohio with a wealthy Indian doctor, and Ilhan’s most organized supporters are Somalis.

This means that democracy’s pre-political foundation —the common interests of people, of the demos —is undermined through two things.

First, an American demos can debate a stance on Somalia and Ethiopia. There can be left and right-wing positions on issues like Somalia and Ethiopia. A Somali and an Ethiopian will not debate Somalia and Ethiopia; there will be no left or right stances, there will only be the facts of ethnicity. You will never convince Rashida Tlaib that Israel is an American ally. You will never convince Shri Thanedar that Modi is not a hero.

So, why debate America’s stance on India or Pakistan when there are members of Congress who have a religious loyalty to Modi, or have inherited revenge against Modi? Why debate the H-1B visa policy with someone who believes that his group of ethnic minority immigrants are spiritually and culturally healthier than Americans?

The issue is not that people are of a different race or religion; the issue is that they have a political interest in shaping America towards certain political goals that are in the interests of other countries. Our nation, which has become a haven for those fleeing their own declining countries, is used as a refuge from their collapsing societies, and they seek power in the government to change American policy to better aid them, even as our nation's global hegemony declines. What else is Rashida Tlaib doing in Congress? What do you think Afghans ask the American government to do about the Taliban? There are a huge number of minority interest lobbies in D.C., minorities of the super wealthy, and ethnic and religious groups: Venezuelans, Iranians, Georgians, Indians, Palestinians, Muslims, the list goes on and on. They all want America to fight wars for them, or to allow them to come to America, or for money and foreign aid. They all want to be the next Israel. They have told me this directly.

Empires are poweful. Empires in decline are easy to manipulate. The most human thing in the world to do as a weak people who have lost their land is to go to a declining Empire to beg for aid and salvation. I remember a meeting no more than a year ago, where a black Sudanese mayor told me how his family was sniped, and all he wanted was American help. But we can't help him, because the U.A.E is funding the Arabs in Sudan, who are genociding black Africans, and we need the U.A.E as an ally to Israel. So, the Sudanese will be slaughtered because the U.A.E. is an ally. Who rules Sudan depends on Israel and Palestine. And so on, and to India and Pakistan as well. The postcolonial geopolitical clash of Christian Africa and India against Arabs and Islam is played out not in Africa or Asia, but in Washington, D.C., as the anglosphere's first proxy war.

The wars of foreign countries are here, in our Congress, our government, because we are an empire and that is where people go. They want wheat and legions. Congressional egos sate their parched throats on tears.

This is not, of course, the only thing that any of these people or groups do. They are, after all, normal people. One can discuss Omar’s healthcare policy or Tlaib’s housing stance, but to pretend that they have no foreign policy stance based on their ethnic motivation, and no kinship ties that are upstream of all their other views, is absurd. Omar and Ilhan want free healthcare and housing, Vivek wants more H-1Bs. This helps their people, poor economic migrants, and rich South Asians, respectively.

This is also not at all, in any way, right-wing. This is, as Sieyès would see it, a liberal, even a leftist issue. I know enough to know that things do not function properly when foreign land disputes, such as those between Israel and Palestine, or India and Pakistan, or the Shah and Khomeini, or Sudan and the U.A.E., come here.

The second problem is that people want power and what it takes to maintain minority power is minority privilege. That is natural. Certain systems of politics have certain pre-political requirements that restrain this. In a democracy, that is juridical defense. The common people, the demos, collectively do not benefit if one group gains too much power, and so restrain them through the law and justice system. Things stop working if there are a lot of minority interests, as the interests of a minority are extreme and not shared by the people. To overcome the juridical defense of the majority—which animates against extremism—minorities that want power must establish for themselves special privileges or rights, which allow them to escape the moderating influence of juridical defense and advance minority, extremist goals. They establish a state of exception via privilege.

For example, the system of juridical defense, a critical, pre-political fact of common equality in the United States, has been undermined by the notion that certain “privileged groups” possess power, and this can only be resolved through race-based privileges in tax policy and admissions for other groups. This, in turn, silences the majority and undemocratically provides a minority with symbolic and rhetorical power they can wield over the majority. All parties engage in this, as the tools of rhetoric that are used in this effort—positionality, appeals to emotion (patriotic, humanistic)—have no party affiliation. The same process is evident in the mythology surrounding tech billionaires, who are portrayed as exceptional individuals beyond the bounds of law, akin to nobles, and therefore deserving of special, extra-legal, and financial privileges. The mythology frees them from the normal exercise of democratic constraints on power.

In all societies there are oligarchies and elites—it is better when they are more representative of people than less so—and every time a congressional or political seat is taken up by someone like Omar, Mamdani, Ramaswamy, or Musk, the whole demos suffers because the elites are further from the whole demos and represent minority interests. Every billionaire donor does the same, only not formally and directly in the public square, except on rare occasions by abnormal people.

These groups create for themselves a system of privilege because they need this to advance extreme agendas, and need to maintain the notion that they are somehow especially capable of ruling the majority. Ilhan is not the child of an elite Somali family that was overthrown and so fled to America; she is a badass black Muslim woman breaking the glass ceiling, a brave and bold member of the squad. Musk is not a South African nepo baby; he is taking us to Mars. Minorities easily rule majorities because individuals of the majority stand against the organized minority. Once in power, they establish a system of privileges to maintain their power. This may describe the rule of France by Louis XVI, the Manchu conquest of Han China, and Ilhan Omar’s victory in Saint Paul. Sometimes, because our democracy is still partially functioning, the demos wins, like when they elected Trump in 2024 or voted against Elon Musk in Wisconsin.

To speak of the “demos” is not silly, abstract, or theoretical. Near their end, big empires were looted. People came from all around to steal gold and treasure and make kingdoms for themselves. At the end of Rome, the military was gone, and the incapable and insulated leadership had fled. So, things were looted, stolen, and taken—as things were taken, looted, and stolen from Versailles, though auctions were more common. The Han of the Ming were conquered by the Manchu Qing. Things do happen in history, and our times are no better, no worse, and no different than any other time. Democracy has been lost and won and lost, and seldom did the people who ended democracy admit they were doing so.

I prefer the democratic system of government because I believe it is the best. Democracy can die from many things, but the surest death is minority interests and privilege—which go together—as aristocrats, ancient and modern, and of which there are many, many types, of money power and ethnic power (some aristocrats in France were aristocrats because they possessed land, others, because of their Frankish blood) are generally bad at ruling, are extreme and unrestrained.

Sieyès had the privilege of surviving the French Revolution. I do not think he would have survived ours.

And “left” and “right” won’t survive ours either. Because what do left and right mean in a blood feud?

All that matters is blood, the blood of Gujaratis, like the French aristocrats' blood of Charlemagne. The demos have left and right, victory and defeat, a common culture, and an interest in being more than blood. As terms, left and right are now little more than detritus, used like the Romans in 477 used the word “Senate” to refer to a band of old men fleeing over hills, or how Louis XVI used the term “Estates-General” to refer to a meaningless gathering of people without power that had not met for nearly 200 years.

The Enlightenment was driven by the idea that people were more than just blood; they were a nation, and could be proud of this, could rule themselves and govern wisely, be raised from the ignorance of blood and the poverty of dirt to a higher joie de vivre which they would maintian and defend together. To speak of the “demos” is not silly, abstract, or theoretical, and to speak of their joy is not either. To reach a finer way of life and living, certain pre-political foundations must be secured. People must behave a certain way to make power work a certain way. If power stops working this way, people do not make life better, but instead, everything becomes a proxy war, a moral question of land somewhere else and other people, of aristocracy and elites. Elites will always exist, yet we once had bettter ones.

When Rome fell, there was a Senate; when the absolute monarch reigned, there was an Estates-General. When Mamdani won, there was a left.