Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“To The Right Of The Muslim Brotherhood”?

19 Comments

WTF does David Ignatius mean by that phrase?

It’s very interesting that one of the groups that supported the coup was the more conservative Salafist group known as the Nour Party to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Does that make any sense at all? What is he saying? That they support lower taxes? Traditional marriage? Smaller government? What?

While “Left” and “Right” aren’t particularly enlightening words in discussion of domestic politics, it’s really stupid to talk about Middle East politics in those terms.

19 thoughts on ““To The Right Of The Muslim Brotherhood”?”

  1. I doubt he even knows what he means Rand. Probably a turn of phrase he swiped off Journolist V2.0.

  3. They probably mean ultra-conservative. But yes this is totally unrelated to characterizing the more common characterization of the left-right axis as command economy vs free market.

      1. In the sense of “reactionary” or “back to the 12th Century”? The Brotherhood just wants to go back to the 13th Century, Party X wants to go back to the Eighth Century? People like Ignatius think of the political spectrum as being oriented on the time axis.

        1. Right. This is why conservative and liberal can be misleading labels. Not all conservatives want to conserve the same things. In a country like the US with a republican tradition and separation of church and state being a conservative is a lot different from being a conservative in a muslim nation where at best they only became nation states after WWII and most of their history since then is composed of military dictatorships.

          I prefer to use more absolute political classifications based on sets of shared values rather than time and space specific attributes like that.

  4. Do I have to explain this?

    We studied “Tale of Two Cities” in high school English. The backstory on that novel was the French Revolution.

    In the runup to the Revolution, the King instituted the Estates General, a kind of toothless legislative body as a sop to the masses, but turning into a focal point of the Revolution that executed the King.

    The Lefties — Jacobins, mainly — sat on the Left. These Lefties would be identified as being Left to this very day. Liberte! Egalite! (sorry, I don’t know how to do the acute accent on the final “e”) Fraternite! Mr. Obama would at least cast his eyes down at a presidential press conference and find some reason not to oppose them.

    The Righties — I guess the aristrocratic caste that supported the Old Order — guess what, sat on the right. Who would have ever thunk that Leftists knew to sit on the Left (OK, OK, it is like Red State and Blue State, kind of an accident of history of where people decided to sit down among their friends). The Righties would be identified as being, dunno, those Country Club Republicans, who don’t seem to be represented on Web sites much. I guess when you are polishing your golf swing, you don’t spend time commenting on Web sites.

    Right doesn’t mean Lockean or Burkean Conservative either. It simply means those sympathetic to the existing or perhaps customary social order. The Lockean or Burkean thing didn’t exist in pre-Revolutionary France (it seems to be largely an Anglosphere thing that doesn’t seem to exist elsewhere in modern times either).

    It is not that the MB isn’t “on the Right”, it is that calling modern day Libertarian/Conservatives/Republicans/TEA Party people “Rightists” is a mild slander, with the idea that only the monied, socially conservative, and perhaps reactionary would like what we are about. But I think that the Left anywhere doesn’t “get” Burkean or Lockeanism and attributes the modern Conservative Movement (OK, OK, Rand is not a Conservative, but you get the idea) to some latent affinity for Old Money.

    I guess the parallel of being “on the Right of the MB” is that you are an ultra Social Con — women wearing ultra modest attire, and apparently in the case of the MB (Brotherhood — Fraternite — that should tell you something) beating on you or worse if you don’t.

    Whoop! Whoop! This is not a drill! Godwin Alert!

    So what about Hitler, was he Left or Right or none-of-the-above? Hitler and other Fascists were/are Statists, but the folks who sat on the right side of the Estates General (were they called Junkers — pronounced Yoonkers — and am I speaking of German minor nobility along with the German capitalist Babbitry of that day?), those people seemed to support Hitler. It wasn’t that Hitler was what they were about, but it was kind of a choice between Hitler and the Communists, and Hitler kind of had a place for the industrialists and the land owners and the moneyed interests in his system that the Communists didn’t. Kind of like the health insurance biz and Silicon Valley supporting Mr. Obama . . .

  5. It’s akin to all those who call the Nazis right-wing. They weren’t, they were of the left, because economic policy is what determines where something fits on the right-left scale.

    The muslim brotherhood paid very little attention to economic policy (the basically ignore it, because their core agenda is imposing sharia law), so there isn’t much to make that determination on. About the only thing I’ve seen mentioned is their “anti-poverty” agenda, which they describe with the leftist claptrap of “social justice”.

    In the main though, I agree, it’s absurd to try applying western right-left descriptors to the situation in Egypt.

  6. It’s an Islamic country. Often criminals and miscreants lose their Right hand to the sword post a court conviction for “X” crime(s). Maybe he said ‘Right’, meaning they still have both hands, thus being the Good Guys.

    Just spit ballin’.

  7. Does that make any sense at all? What is he saying? That they support lower taxes? Traditional marriage? Smaller government? What?

    In this case I think it refers to religious fundamentalism and literalism. We all know that “right” and “left” as political concepts evolved in the French Revolution era, and at that time the right supported hierarchy, tradition, and clericalism — not unlike the Salafists that Ignatius mentions.

    One could argue I suppose that “right-left” shouldn’t refer to religious viewpoints; however, if you were to mention Christian fundamentalists in the US being “to the right of” Lutherans, wouldn’t most of us say that’s generally true?

    1. Yes, but it would also put the Amish on the far, far right. Of course I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see some left wing protesters holding up a sign saying “Al Nour = Amish!” They combine the blissful ignorance of children with the innocence of people on cell block D.

  9. While I appreciate everyone’s efforts to explain the whole left/right thing and occasionally try to apply it, the simple fact is that it makes no more sense to call politics “left” and “right” than it would to start calling people Girondins and Montagnards – certainly not anywhere in the Anglosphere, and probably almost nowhere else in the world, either. The whole “left/right axis” is useless for describing reality. It persists because it’s great for calling people names.

  10. Right wing sometimes seems to mean “more guns”, left wing “less guns”; that seems to be the sense in the original quote.

    1. I was about to disagree with you on a point – that “less guns” should be restated as “less private-sector guns,” but then I remembered that lefties often support public-sector unilateral disarmament – and not just the nuclear variety.

  11. Left and right are entirely useful ways to describe multiparty parliaments. The Nour Party is both figuratively on the far right, that is, even further from the secularists than the Muslim Brotherhood, and literally. That’s where they sit.

      1. It only provides zero information if you insist on being thoroughly ignorant about parliamentary politics in the country in question. If you don’t, where they sit tells you a lot, such as who they might want as as coalition partners and who they wouldn’t.

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