My apologies if this has been covered before, but I'm taking a break from gardening / yard work and have been looking through a few old posts here just for fun. ☺️
One of the comments seen fairly often, even in "signatures," is that gotcha" verse from the Bible about "left" and "right" and why the "left" is wrong and the the "right" is, well... right Ecclesiastes 10:2
"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left."
I could make a comment about the rest of the verses in that chapter but this isnt a Bible study. It's about history, and how "left" & "right" came to be associated with liberal and conservative.
Turns out that left and right began as actual directions, referring to seating positions in the 1789 French National Assembly, the governing body formed after the French Revolution and the beheadings of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.
"Relative to the viewpoint of the speaker (chair) of this assembly, to the right were seated nobility and more high-ranking religious leaders. To the left were seated commoners and less powerful clergy. The right-hand side (called le côté droit in French) became associated with more reactionary views (more pro-aristocracy) and the left-hand side (le côté gauche) with more radical views (more pro-middle class)."
Left and right, as political adjectives, are recorded in English in the 1790's."
https://www.dictionary.com/e/leftright/1790's... So, LONG before the Democrat-left, Republican-right side of the aisle in the US Congress(which also depends on how you look at it, from the back of the aisle or the front). Democrats and Republicans as separate parties didn't even exist until long after 1790, and up until the mid 1820's the labels were combined. The Democratic-Republican party collapsed by 1824 and Martin VanBuren formed the Democratic Party in 1828 in support of war hero Andrew Jackson's candidacy for the presidency.
The Republican party came a few decades later. And, as many here often love to point out, for many decades after it came into being, the GOP was the more progressive, LIBERAL party in the US.
It interested me to realize that in post-Revolutionary France those representing the rich & elite were on the right from the SPEAKER's POV with the poorer folk & less important on the left, in our Congress today... the positions and views are reversed.
The DEMS are on the right from the SPEAKER'S POV, the Republicans on the left (wrong) side.
Don't know what the takeaway is from all this - but I found it all fascinating.