The fundamental problem with the “right-left” dichotomy is that neither is striving to move upwards, forwards, or towards the greater good.

The right is honest, but unemphatic. It is therefore evil in its solipsistic stance towards those it considers “the enemy” and the other, though it succeeds in being warm, empathetic, and protective towards its own, “the friends”.

The left is emphatic, but dishonest. It is therefore hollow and false. Its calls for universalism, cosmopolitanism, and global integrated ethics collapses as its adherents come to realize that it’s snake-oil, and all too often a smokescreen for those in power who wish to sell its nominally compelling brand to a populace yearning for something great to believe in.

But – and we must be careful here – even the notion of going “upwards”, towards a “higher” calling, is also dangerous. This is the dominion of Leo Strauss and of the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato who called for a return to the perfect forms. This is the dominion of Samantha Power and global neoliberal interventionists, who all too often believe that outside enforced morality must trump local concerns. All too often, those on both the left and the right use the notion of a “higher calling” to quash and destroy its enemies, rendering it hopelessly dishonest and unempathetic.

So where does this leave us? Having knocked down the pillars of the fundamental philosophical tenets behind all the major strands of political thought, that leaves us nowhere. Right?

Wrong.

I believe we must have faith.

This is a call for the construction of a better political, not an “ideology” – which all too often fossilizes and crusts over into unthinking dogma, but rather a radical re-evaluation of the realm of possibility, of the possibility of forever-vigilance, and above all, a call for radical genuine truthful empathy – without resort to an “emergency” state of mind, the state of mind that motivated Carl Schmitt’s justification of Hitler’s rise to unquestioned sovereign power, nor Mao Zedong’s philosophical justifications to destroy the elite in his Great Cultural Revolution – both of which wrought evil and destruction in the name of truth and revolutionary idealism. We must avoid the passive death-wishes of Gandhi, and the virile destructive seduction of Churchill. We need to acknowledge and desire the good of all people, without falling into the trap of resorting to the rhetorical lie of saying all people are the same. We need to believe in the intrinsic worth, value, and goodness of each and every person’s personal life narrative, the movies playing in their head, the stories that they contain, without believing that every person must adhere to the same script, the same story, the same universal narrative that’s defined as being “good” by some universal subscription of values. We need to find a way to promote the good of everyone – genuinely. And it may be an impossible task. But we must try.