Reader Mike McG sent me Crispin Sartwell's Atlantic article "The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus" I agree with much of what Sartwell says, and I like his point that we should stop thinking from the Left or the Right, and start thinking about the Left and the Right.
If we understand Left-Right in its most basic sense, the Left is identified with the modern Liberal project in Europe to disrupt and displace the old customary society defined by crown and altar. By the end of WWI it was clear to anybody that the Left had won that fight. The Right after that became identified with fascist or 'authoritarian' political systems, and the far Left with Revolutionary Socialist regimes like those of Russia and Mexico and later in China and Cuba.
Since 1989, this distinction has become irrelevant because there is no extreme Left anywhere that matters, and the extreme Right has become associated primarily with jingoism and fundamentalist religious extremists. So if the essence of the Left is open-ended disruption that embraces the destruction of traditional beliefs and ways of life, then free-market capitalism is the only robust force left standing that performs this disruptive Left function.
The Left-Right distinction since 1989 is more confusing than clarifying because Left and Right since then have mainly to do with cultural values rather than with economic policy. Insofar as there is a Left left in the 19th-Century sense, its influence is mainly in the cultural sphere where it pushes for its anti-traditional-values politics–abortion, gay marriage, gun control, marijuana legalization. This program has been embraced by most people who think of themselves as free-market capitalists. And since this anti-traditional values program has been so successful since the 1960s, it has caused a backlash among American traditionalists whose sense of right and wrong is deeply embedded in the vestigial customary culture that the cultural Left sees as so oppressively constraining. Those on the Right who embrace both free-market capitalism and the preservation of traditional values are incoherent.
The cultural Left has been so effective precisely because most of those who compose the power and economic elite endorse that "liberal", anti-traditional program. The cultural elite and the economic elite are heirs of the classic 19th-century liberals in that they could not care less about the way capitalism destroys the old traditional ways of life. That's the price of progress. They think of modernization as a necessary, positive step in every country's development, and that free-market capitalism is the engine for everyone's becoming wealthier and healthier, and that traditional values and ways of life are the primary obstacle preventing a better, more prosperous life for the immiserated poor in the undeveloped countries. These neoliberal elites sincerely believe they are the real Progressives, and as such the real Left.
For this elite, it's all about disruption, change, transformation. And so if there is a Left and Right that defines our political economic discourse now, it could be argued that the Left comprises those who embrace unconstrained capitalism and technological advancement as the creative-destructive engine of history, and the Right those who resist it. Some like fundamentalist Muslims and Christians are at the far-Right extreme, but couldn't it be argued that anybody who wants to restrain capitalist disruption is on the Right? What about Occupy? What about anti-growth environmentalists? What about anti-transhuman humanists?
Couldn't it be argued that you are on the conservative Right now if you resist or want to restrain progress if by progress we mean whatever capitalism and open-ended technological development bring us? Some kind of realignment is called for here, and I'm with Sartwell in questioning whether Left and Right are helpful categories in any effort to promote that. So that's why I'm proposing as an alternative–Red and Blue, the Red party of Radical Irresponsibie Unconstraint, and and the Blue Party of Responsible Evolutionary Restraint.
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Near the end of his article, Sartwell says
Milton Friedman and Vlad Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Augusto Pinochet: They may well have disagreed about this and that. But they have agreed, or said they did, that the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and vice versa. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position.
I would say in a new alignment that Blues are not about pitting government against capital, but about finding the balance between them within a framework defined by the principle of subsidiarity. This is a conservative idea; it's a very Blue idea. Subsidiarity correlates with social democracy. The development of the social democracies in the West is the great success story that came out of the chaos of disruptive change that wracked the 19th Century and the first half of the twentieth. I believe that sooner or later the countries, like the U.S and U.K. that that lost social democracy to the Neoliberal ideologues since the late 70s will once again find their way back to it, not for ideological reasons, but for very Blue pragmatic reasons: It makes the best kind of political and economic sense.
Sartwell also makes this point near the end of his article:
This spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power and wealth. There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.
Sartwell is right to point out that the iron law of oligarchy operates along the whole spectrum, from the extreme Left to the extreme Right, and everywhere in between, from local street gangs to PTAs. Ruling cliques always emerge in every social configuration regardless of their political commitments or lack of them. But it's wrong to think we can get along without hierarchy. This is where I think movements like Occupy are a silly.
The key is to find balance, and the principle of subsidiarity should be our guide in organizing relations vertically in a way that finds the correct balance between top and bottom. I'd argue that It's the key to the Red-Blue realignment we need so badly now because subsidiarity doesn't fit neatly into conventional ideas of Conservative or Liberal. Small-government conservatives like it because of its bias toward local sovereignty, and Liberals like it because it allows for interventions by higher levels of the hierarchy when the lower levels lack the resources or competency to deal with extraordinary or intractable problems.
For those unfamiliar with the term, subsidiarity acknowledges the necessity of hierarchy, but insists that higher levels in a hierarchy exist to serve and support the lower levels. In this sense if flips the idea of hierarchy on its head. We see this principle in action all the time, whether we call it subsidiarity or not–for instance, when a disaster overwhelms the resources of city, the state government comes in to support it, and if it overwhelms the resources of the state, the federal government steps in. It wants as few constraints as possible at the bottom, but to allow for judicious constraints from the top when the situation calls for it.
The principle of subsidiarity provides the framework for resisting government overreach, and I've used it to make my case against top-down education reforms like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now the Common Core State Standards. The vast majority of schools in the U.S. are doing just fine. There are some school districts or schools within those districts that don't have the resources to adequately provide for the educational development of the children in their care. They require extra resources and interventions from outside, but this can be done in targeted ways without disrupting the whole system the way these federal top-down programs do.
Insisting on some national standard is silly and non-productive. It serves the needs of bureaucrats, not the needs children and their families. It's a prime example of top-down over-reach. And it's interesting that both progressives and conservatives are opposing this overreach because it points to where there is common ground for realignment. For more on this see "Governing Principles for the Development of Local Humanistic Learning Communities."
The point is that subsidiarity provides a political framework that seeks a balance–it's not either/or, either anarchic libertarianism or oppressive top-down centralization. In the last 200 years we have learned that neither of those work well, and it's just a matter of time until once again we find the balance that my grandfather's generation found in the 30s when they were forced to abandon ideology focused on what worked and what didn't.
See also "Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism I" or click on the 'Subsidiarity" tag below.
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