Hi @yintercept :-) Thanks for the detailed overview of history. The problem is, you're not correcting anything I've said. I never said that Louis XVI called the National Assembly (that would be incorrect after all). What I did say is this: "The divide between the political left and right was made quite literally during the French Revolution; supporters of the king sat to the right of the president of the National Assembly and supporters of the revolution sat to his left." Which is 100% correct. The French Revolution is a subject all by itself and took 10 years. Leaving the old in favor of the new, evolving from highly centralized power towards more decentralized power, conservatism versus progressivism; this has always been the defining difference between the political left and right since political left and right became a thing in the summer of 1789 in France.

Furthermore, politics has always been defined by class struggle. The three estates you mention, Clergy, Nobility and Commoners, represented that class struggle; the Commoners, who represented 98% of the population, could be outvoted 2 to 1 by the Nobility and Clergy who represented the remaining tiny part. There's a whole lot of very interesting things to say about the reasons why Louis XVI called the États Généraux, something that hadn't been done since 1614 (two of the main reasons were to address the national debt and repair his severely damaged popularity), and about the Jacobins, who ultimately refused for a long time to abolish slavery (the Jacobins weren't perfect by a long shot), but all that doesn't take away anything from what I've said here.

Maybe it's easier to speak of "conservative" and "progressive" instead of "right" and "left", but the latter originated in France in the summer of 1789; that's all I said. I appreciate the effort and time you took to supposedly refute that single sentence in this post, but it's been to no avail. If the aim of this response is to paint leftism in a bad light, you may have succeeded with people who aren't aware of world history. But let me say this: those in power have never relinquished their hold on it voluntarily. The road forward has always been marked with struggle, protest, revolution and, yes, violence. It took a civil war in America for Pete's sake. And it should be common knowledge that the Whigs were the abolitionists, and the Southern Democrats were pro-slavery. That's the tired old argument from right-wingers when they try to paint themselves as progressives.

I'll try to briefly explain the evolution of the Democrats and Republicans. The Republican Party was formed by Whigs, Democrats and other politicians who broke free from their party affiliation, and was defined by the North; anti-slavery, for industry and big business and for civil rights. The Democratic south held conservative, agrarian-oriented, anti-big-business values. After the civil war, in which the Democratic south fought for detachment from the United States, the Republican Party became more and more oriented towards economic growth, industry, and big business in Northern states; they became the party of the new industrialist class, the new nobility, so to speak. This caused the Republicans being blamed for the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression; enter the reign of F.D.R. (D), and the progressive New Deal. That's when many southern Democrats switched to the GOP. The moral being that no matter how you like to paint them and no matter how you like to interpret history, the GOP is and always has been representative of the new nobility, be it southern slaveholders or northern big industrialists.

By concentrating on just one sentence you've also failed to recognize the main point of this post, which is about the concentration of power, and how the political right has always fought for the preservation of the centuries old status quo. It doesn't matter of the wealth is concentrated through the divine right of kings, land-ownership under feudalism or the private ownership of the means of production under capitalism; the political right, the conservatives have always favored that classical class-division. They've always been opposed to the decentralization of wealth and power, to democracy, something that's maybe best demonstrated by the modern GOP.

I'll leave it here. Thanks again for the detailed response; for what it's worth, I always like to see people take the time and effort to come up with a sensible response.