Left-right polarity is also seen in historical Islam (9/11 is not a product of Islam, but of Western revolutionary nationalism with a thin Islamic veneer), as well as even more divergent histories (eg, classical Korea). I have no doubt that if there are intelligent, gregarious aliens anywhere in the galaxy, they divide themselves into revolutionaries and conservatives.
There are only three ways of ruling a country. Aristotle, who had access to the histories of hundreds if not thousands of classical city-states whose annals are now of course lost, described them: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy.
Monarchy is the null hypothesis. The vast majority of historical governments have been primarily monarchical, often with some admixture of aristocracy. Pure aristocracy is much rarer. Democracy is difficult to even define (most nominal democracies, certainly including ours, are in fact aristocratic), extremely rare if it does exist, and commonly associated (as in the Greek case) with national if not civilizational decay in the near future.
An example of thinking about causality would be the French decision to cede Saint-Domingue its independence. Critics (inherently conservative) of this decision would postulate one kind of future for the new Haiti; proponents (inherently revolutionary) would postulate quite another. Of course, at the time this or any similar such decision had large numbers of very eloquent critics and proponents; so their arguments are easily discovered, if not obvious already.
(Or if you'd prefer to think in terms of Cabrini-Green, it's really not difficult to imagine what Elizabethan intellectuals would make of Cabrini-Green.)
Obviously, this historiographic practice accords with the basic scientific principle of judging an experiment by criteria established in advance.
It's a shame most people don't decide what historical ideologies are "discredited" by a rigorous and objective standard such as this. Instead, the standard is the inevitable one: the winner is always right. This is the simple, yet remarkably practical, basis on which our supposedly rational faith in the Enlightenment rests.