The goal of political science is to find good methods of governance, not just to divide the world 50/50 to achieve balance.
The Right I define as the liberalism of the founding fathers and the enlightenment, but only the good party of that: individual rights, s government of laws and policies without personal or collective privilege.
Being right is an achievement.
This is obviously true of I’m talking about getting all the answers right on a test It SHOULD also be true for any political science or political thought. I’m going to make the bold and outlandish claim here for the first time: the political right SHOULD MEAN ideas that are right about political science qua political science. There should be a right way to govern, or all knowledge is a blind scratching for grub. Somewhere, somehow there must be a better and a worse in politics, and the only way to attempt that is to define the scope of what might be called “the proper role of government”.
One must understand the purpose of an egocentric coordinate system like left and right when applied to moral/ethical/political judgment.
It’s not to find the median between two extremities. It’s to separate the very large number of bad choices from the very small number of good ones.
To know what a thing is it is helpful to know what a thing isn’t.
Whenever learning what a thing is, a learner improves his understanding by looking at various entitities and saying “Is this the thing”
For instance, when learning the color green, a person will look around at the things around them and see if they can spot a green thing. This means they are seing many things and filtering out the not-green.
This is particularly important with higher-level abstractions such as rights. Higher-level abstractions are abstractions based on abstractions. The color green is a lower-level abstraction which is directly observable and learned by providing examples. Higher-level abstractions, such as “color” or “hue” are built on prior abstractions such as “green” or “golden”. Higher-level abstractions are therefor more dificult to trace to their basis in reality. They can easily become detached when sufficient care is not applied.
In the case of rights, which is among the highest-level abstractions, people have made many errors.
There are a wide veriety of counter-examples to a rational concept of rights. A person, whether from lack of care or mallicious intent, can formulate a wide veriety of absurdities as their ideal formulation of rights. Here are a few:
As we can see, these misformulations have occured throughout history and right up until this very moment. They will likely still be possible in any untrained person at any moment in the future.
Higher-level abstractions are easily subverted if diligence is not constantly applied.
The profound hazzard is that each one of this misformulations of rights can be use to violate real rights.
If a person or a group of people decide to put the Earth’s cherrished ideals as the definition of what is good and right, they will act acording to that corrupt reasoning and violate the actual rights of actual persons and humans without limit.
We have as proof many examples from the past of peaople putting the “rights” of the king, the nation, the state, the blood, and many so-called pagan deities above the rights of individual humans, and of them slaughtering those humans as a direct result. Many tragic less-than-lethal rights violations also occurred in larger numbers and were often direct precursors to the slaughter.
This is a non-trivial thinking problem.