My essay - Two Illusions of Freedom - tried to explain why the Left and the Right advance the kinds of arguments that they usually do. What it didn't do, however, was suggest who would belong to the Right, and who to the Left. That's a separate question.

From the point of view of Idle Theory, any society is going to be made up of people with different degrees of idleness. The idlest people will generally be the richest people. They are the "idle rich", even if many of them may be very busy in all sorts of ways. For them, life is a playground. Almost everything they do is something they freely choose to do.

The busiest people are the toiling poor. They may often work long hours on low pay to earn just enough to barely survive. For them life doesn't seem like a playground at all. Much of what they do is driven by necessity.

The rich occupy the world described by neoclassical economics. They tend to believe in free markets and capitalism. They tend also to be small-c conservatives who are quite happy with the status quo. They usually vote Republican/Conservative. They are the Right.

The poor occupy a world which is, for many of them, often best described by Marxism as an 'exploitation system'. It's certainly no playground. They are not content with the status quo, and would like to see a change which brought greater social equality. This isn't something that capitalism delivers, so they'd like to change the rules of the game. Very often they want a state controlled economy. They are the Left.

In Britain the towns and cities grew during the agricultural revolution that began in the 1700s, and saw farm workers replaced by agricultural machinery. This was also the time of machine-smashing Luddites. Unable to find employment on the land, they congregated in the cities in which the continuing industrial revolution employed them as cheap labour in cotton mills and other factories. The people who were left on the depopulated land were the relatively prosperous farmers. It was the agricultural poor who filled up the cities. And so cities were, and still are, made up of largely poor people.

So the cities are full up with people who vote Left. And the depopulated agricultural countryside around the cities is occupied by the Right.

Of course it isn't as black and white as this. There are pockets of poverty in the country, and pockets of wealth in the cities.

There are other additional features. The 'pace of life' in the countryside is relatively slow. People work, but at a leisurely pace. In the cities the pace of life is faster, with all sorts of interruptions. This may accentuate the difference.

Although the countryside is occupied by the Right, it forms a substantial part of the primary leisure-creating economy. It produces food, for one. Also cotton and wool for clothes. Leather for shoes. And although the cities are occupied by the Left, the cities produce a great many luxuries. Which are part of the secondary leisure-using economy. The cities have theatres and cinemas and music and art and fashion clothes and perfume and so on. And that's why city folk tend to be aesthetes with discriminating tastes, while country folk tend to be practical, unpretentious, down-to-earth people. So it's the Left who produce secondary economy luxuries. And the Right who produce primary economy necessities.