Dawn of new political eras in US and France?

WE have employed the labels "left" and "right" so frequently during our contemporary political discourse that some of us assume that those terms may have a timeless quality and that they reflect the clash between two coherent explanations about how society should work. God created the world, then made man and woman, followed by the fashioning of the political right and the political left.

For the record: The labels "left" and "right" were first used during the French Revolution (1789-1799) when members of the National Assembly were divided into the supporters of the ancien regime - including the hereditary monarchy, the French nobility and the Catholic Church - sitting to the right of the president, and those promoting the revolution that aimed to topple the king and the old regime sitting to his left.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Since the French Revolution, we have associated the left with political ideologies that promote justice, equality and enlightenment, and celebrate human rights, progress and religious tolerance, while we identify the right with political movements that cherish custom and tradition, and call for preserving collective identities, such as nationalism and ethnicity, and maintaining law and order.