The terms "Left" and "Right" are starting to lose all meaning in Israel and other democratic countries worldwide. They explain political fractions by dividing them based on their rival ideologies: the Right is synonymous with "capital," it aims to promote social equality through the cultivation of a welfare state, the Left is synonymous with "Labor," and its goal is to promote the creative expression of the individual by decreasing the state's involvement.
The terms are broad, and the difference between the two is not always clear. The Right served the workers too. The Left didn't seek to undo the free market economy. Both used to be committed to freedom and equality. The difference between the two lay in how each fraction dealt with the contradictions between the two values.
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But today, the definitions of "Left" and "Right" are useless in understanding politics in modern democratic countries. The line between the two is getting increasingly blurry.
Nobody has described the Israeli political arena according to the socioeconomic understanding of "Left" and "Right" for a long time. The Israeli Labor party transformed into an upper-middle-class movement that has very little support among blue-collar workers, the poor, and the less educated.
The Labor party has virtually disappeared from the political map, and all its successors share the same sociopolitical background: the leader is someone from the upper-middle class, with good education and close ties with the affluent. This is why the Center-Left parties in Israel cannot best the Likud even when its leader faces criminal charges. This disonance is the root cause of the country's political crisis.
The terms "Left" and "Right" used to be handy when describing the political arena in Europe and the United States until the 1990s. However, the Left gradually became more associated with the upper-middle class, and the Right started gaining support from the working class due to the adjustments it made to its political and ideological positions to better fit the interests and values of blue-collar workers.
The fact that a Boris Johnson-led Conservative party won in distinctly working-class counties in the north of the UK in 2019 is a clear example of this. Nothing of this sort had happened in Britain for decades. The Right clearly presented that it was in favor of Brexit, of halting immigration and restoring national sovereignty over the economy. It, therefore, received the support of all those affected by the globalist policies of the previous administration.
This is what happened when Donald Trump became president of the United States in 2016, and all the more so when he was defeated in the recent US elections. Trump's decrees made the Republican Party more popular in the eyes of Hispanics, blacks, and other fringe voters.
Even if the coronavirus brings down Johnson, as it has brought down Trump, there appears to be a fundamental change in the politics of the democratic world, and the division into "Left" and "Right" no longer makes sense.
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