Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today.

It’s one reason the old tend to be conservative. They were born at a fixed slice of the Overton window, which moved left, carrying them right.

> Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today.

1800 is a weird baseline to pick, but even so I’m skeptical.

1900 works too. I was omitting an explicit mention of slavery, but a woman’s right to vote might be a better base.

1900 is even weirder to be honest. The shorter your time scale the more debatable the shift. Since 1800, despite abolition of chattel slavery, slavery has been constitutionally protected as punishment for crimes and along with it came the carceral state. Since 1900 there have been many voting rights expansions, and a continuous program not just to curtail voting rights but to undermine the concept of the validity of elections themselves.

On a short enough scale, the trend line is probably what we’d call “leftward” today. But on a longer scale I don’t think that’s the case. Not that Marx would approve of this appropriation of his analysis (because it wouldn’t support his theory of progress either), but it was a “primitive communism” which came before feudalism and eventually capitalism.