I tried to post this last night, but the blog wasn't playing nice. This actually dovetails nicely with Jason's "What is a Progressive?" post.

David Graeber:

Right and Left political perspectives are founded, above all, on different assumptions about the ultimate realities of power. The Right is rooted in a political ontology of violence, where being realistic means taking into account the forces of destruction. In reply the Left has consistently proposed variations on a political ontology of the imagination, in which the forces that are seen as the ultimate realities that need to be taken into account are those (forces of production, creativity...) that bring things into being.

I think this makes a ton of sense (the rest of the essay builds upon this thesis, and it's very much worth reading). Just look at the kind of projects those on the right and the left embark on; the kind of rhetoric they use, and the methods they use for attaining their goals.

It also speaks to the divide over the perennial "Human Nature" question. Those on the left tend to talk about production when they talk about economics; those on the right tend to talk about consumption (at its core a destructive act). Even left and right conceptions of revolution are cast in those terms: the Workers' General Strike versus the Military Coup.

This violence/imagination construct also helps us trace the connection those in the artistic community have traditionally had with the left. Graeber writes:

If artistic avant gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other's languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and, could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like "all power to the imagination" [a popular slogan from the May 1968 uprising in France] expresses the very quintessence of the Left.