There is No Left, and No Right

Daniel Johnson stands poised to launch Standpoint, an exciting new magazine that will defend and celebrate Western civilization while challenging multiculturalism and political correctness. The magazine is not right wing or anything. In fact Johnson insists that 'since 9/11 at the latest, the world's changed beyond recognition. The old left/right categories don't work any more'.

This is a tune we have heard before. In Reagan's 'A Time for Choosing' speech in 1964 the Great Communicator had this to say:

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down - up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order - or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Not left or right, but up or down. Up being the right way to go, naturally.

(Candidate Kang updated Reagan's rhetoric with his stirring call for a new direction in American politics; 'we must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom'.)

Anyhow, does anyone have any earlier examples of this end of left and right tune? As always, there are no points for a Hitler reference.