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It is often said that the traditional division of parliaments into “left” and “right,” beyond its historical origins in the French Revolution, is due to the need for modern societies to make maximum freedom and maximum equality compatible.

In a free society, factual inequalities can never be completely eradicated, since the social game, precisely because it is free, will necessarily generate differences in outcomes. Similarly, in a society of citizens with equal rights, not all limitations on freedom can be eliminated, although they must always obey the need to ensure that everyone is equally free. For this reason, policies of equal opportunity and policies of expanding freedoms, although circumstantial in their intensity and application, are structurally necessary. And although it is also customary to identify “left-wing” parties with equality policies and “right-wing” parties with freedom policies, history has shown that this rule cannot be generalized, as we have often seen the right defend equality before the law and the left defend civil liberties.

As John Rawls demonstrated, if it is necessary to add the principle of fraternity to these two principles (freedom and equality), it is because, where men are freely equal and equally free to choose their life project, their beliefs, or their tastes, the only thing that sustains coexistence and social ties is the law, and no one would accept a law that would abandon them if fortune turned against them because they had become old, lame, poor, or sick.

When Ortega y Gasset wrote that “being on the left is, like being on the right, one of the infinite ways in which man can choose to be an idiot,” the “idiocy” he was referring to is that suffered by those who are not content to vote freely for the left or the right according to their own criteria and situation, but instead align themselves with one of the two sides for life, as a believer in a religion of salvation would do, because they consider it intrinsically superior to the other, thereby denying the equality of citizens on the other side (whom they consider intellectually or morally inferior) and also questioning their freedom. But this “idiocy” would not have become so important without the........

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