I’ve often said that left and right are both important in any political system (or any other system). Too much order (conservatism) and you get rigidity and an inability to react to changed circumstances. Too much innovation and change and the system looses integrity and tends to overreact to situations and the solutions often become worse than the bad shit we want to change. The French and Russian revolutions point so some of these sorts of problems. But in our system the left/right duality is all confused. The right wants change the left wants to hold on to the status-quo and in some areas the situation is reversed. But today the populist right has descended into lunacy and the left has been living in a world of illusions.
The chief illusion is this: that we live in a society that is, more or less, as described by the system we learn about in government class. In short, even the left in America believes in “American Exceptionalism” that somehow the plots we observe in Shakespeare’s plays or read about in history most graphically in Livy’s history or the history of the late Roman Republic or the machinations that were a deep part of European history over the centuries just don’t happen in America.