Frankly, "extreme left" seems far off. But I also find personally that whatever "left" and "right" mean nowadays cannot be extrapolated past 20 years or so. Pri

Frankly, "extreme left" seems far off. But I also find personally that whatever "left" and "right" mean nowadays cannot be extrapolated past 20 years or so. Prior to the 20th century, otherwise "right-wing" governments were perfectly comfortable with pursing interventionist policies, because "right-wing" back then meant pretty much "whatever will keep the monarch in power", and entailed a respect for tradition. Bismarck, for example, didn't see any problem in creating the first social welfare system in the world so long as it politically undermined the socialists and it made the monarchy popular [0]. The overwhelmingly mercantilist policies of the Ancien Régime, seeking to impose price regulations in order to improve it's trade balance or to keep the monarch popular (one of the possible causes of the French Revolution was the havoc created by the deregulation of the grain market by the classical liberal Turgot [1]), is another example. It's only during the 20th century that the left-right distinction seems to have mapped itself onto overwhelmingly economic rather than cultural issues. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_War