During the Great Moderation, right-wingers were generally economic optimists and left-wingers tended to be economic pessimists.
And unlike Mr Blair, he cannot banish to the sidelines his party's troublesome left-wingers.
But left-wingers have no monopoly on elected autocracy, as Alberto Fujimori showed in Peru in the 1990s.
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In the past, when Ukraine has broken its economic promises, Mr Kuchma has been able to blame left-wingers.
Critics of the Yanni concert, including left-wingers and greens, asked the Supreme Court to stop the concert on environmental grounds.
One answer is that it is not only left-wingers who are indignant.
Mrs Beckett also insisted the election of four left-wingers to Labour's ruling executive committee would not lead to continual sniping at the leadership.
On June 30th Alan Johnson, the home secretary, announced that identity cards, particularly unpopular among left-wingers, would never become compulsory for British citizens.
His views on social-security reform, labour-market flexibility and so on please Christian Democrats more than left-wingers in his own party (let alone Greens).
This has angered many left-wingers, who resent Mr Di Pietro both as a man of the right and as someone fighting allegations of wrongdoing.
As even the left-wingers conceded at the time, he was accurate.
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It was opposed by the liberals (ALDE), left-wingers and the Greens.
The bill to ban foxhunting has (at least in the eyes of the Labour left-wingers who promoted it) set the urban proletariat against the rural landlords.
His successor's first task will be to hold together a disparate parliamentary group, divided between left-wingers and moderates, between vestigial socialist centralism and the Quebec contingent's desire for devolution.
In any event, parliamentarians in Mr Netanyahu's coalition have been hounding human-rights groups, which consist mainly of secular left-wingers who often depend on funds from European governments and charities.
It is deeply split between technocrat reformists and left-wingers loyal to the memory of Omar Torrijos, an earlier dictator who modernised the country in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Most people, including left-wingers, think that Francesco Rutelli, the left's candidate for prime minister, who would be its fourth in five years if the left won, is likeable but lightweight.
Not only does he believe that the movement is experiencing its largest growth since the late 1970s, but he counts among the new converts an increasing number of greens and left-wingers.
The trade unions and his own Social Democratic left-wingers are already squealing about the government's plans to bring an element of private financing to Germany's pay-as-you-go state pensions, while the opposition has pulled out of the negotiations altogether.
And this is obviously reinforced by the reciprocal trend on the left: because most of the inflation doves are on the left, people who are in the habit of disagreeing with left-wingers are discouraged from adopting their arguments on this issue.
But he is noticeably absent from the small battalion of London Labour left-wingers turned loyal Blairites prominent in the city's politics during the 80s but who have since recanted many of their activities of the time to attack their onetime comrade Livingstone.
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