Left right or in between?
What do you think?
From part of an article - @theatlantic.com.
Consider by way of comparison the Soviet system. Nationalizing industry and imposing five-year plans didn’t make society more equal; it just made the Communist Party a committee of capitalists. Communist totalitarianism was a particular and particularly extreme form of the merger of state and capital, but that merger is everywhere. If one thought a bit, for example, about the way that government energy policies and private energy concerns are interlocked, one would see less and less sense of distinction. Regulators and corporate lobbyists and congressional staffers are all the same people.
The idea that free markets are historically distinguished from large, powerful states is an ahistorical ideology shared by the capitalist right and the communist left. We might think of the left-right spectrum as a single ideology rather than a taxonomy of opposites. Thus, the left/right or Democrat/Republican split—which turns American politics into a hyper-repetitive, mechanical set of partisan bromides about free markets versus government programs with egalitarian results—depends on a historical mistake.
The left-right spectrum is often characterized in terms of two extreme poles. One way to see that this is incoherent is that these poles can be defined in mutually incompatible ways. It’s awfully strange that Rand Paul and John McCain belong to the same political party and are generally held to be on the same end of the political spectrum. I'd say they each disagree more profoundly and substantially with the other than either disagrees with Barack Obama, for example. Some of the most historically salient “right-wing” movements are monarchism, fascism, fundamentalism, and libertarianism, which have nothing in common except that they all have reasons to oppose Marxist communism, and vice versa. Yet they also all have similar reasons to oppose one another. Toss in David Brooks Burkeans, security-state neocons, and so on, and you have a miscellany of unrelated positions.
The left pole, meanwhile, could be a stateless society of barter and localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race, gender, and sexuality; or a pervasive welfare state; or a Khmer Rouge reeducation regime. The Nazi Party, Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand capitalists, and redneck gun enthusiasts are all on the same side of the left-right spectrum. So are hacktivists, food-stamp officials, anti-globalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government. It would be hard to come up with a less coherent or less useful way of thinking about politics.
Examining another familiar opposition, between “equality” and “liberty,” produces another cluster of contradictions.
The left holds up “equality” as a fundamental value. The means leftists propose to increase economic equality almost always increase political inequality, because these means consist of larger state programs: more resources and rules, coercion and surveillance in the hands of officials or state contractors, including in welfare-type programs. The welfare state is more pervasive now than it was a century ago, and we now have institutions like compulsory public education. These are achievements of the left, programs they are still trying enhance, but have they actually resulted in more equal societies? Quite the contrary, I believe: They have led to ever-more-frozen hierarchies. The mainstream left is a technocratic elite, with a cult of science and expertise and an ear for the unanimous catchphrase. This is anything but a meritocracy; it an entrenched intergenerational class hierarchy.
Whatever the right is, it runs aground in contradiction similarly in its treatment of its own sacred concept “liberty,” which is hard to hold in solution with opposing gay marriage or marijuana legalization, or with a thousand dimensions of the contemporary surveillance/security state.
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.
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.
* Another way people talk about left and right is in terms of time. Progressives want time to continue to move forward or even want to accelerate it, taking us into a future bright with promise, while conservatives want time to stand still or even run backward to a golden age. Either approach appears to depend on a conception of time as extremely malleable, its pace and direction depending on the outcome of the next election. Putting it gently, the idea that one can retard or accelerate time has a certain ... psychotic quality. Ted Cruz and Rafael Correa, the Taliban and Beyoncé, the “Stone Age” Suruwaha people of the Amazon, and the primetime hosts of MSNBC coincide in time, all moving temporally in the same direction at the same rate, contemporaneously. Among others, they all exist precisely at this moment.
Perhaps progressives (and real reactionaries, if there are any) would say that the idea of halting or hastening time is a sort of shorthand or metaphor. But I think the matter is more complicated. Both sides of the American political spectrum are continuously appealing to American traditions and principles. And one typically "makes progress," to whatever extent one does, by revivifying or reinterpreting existing traditions. Barack Obama engages in this rhetoric no less than Rand Paul. It's never a matter of simply starting afresh, employing no assumptions; both sides are engaged in interpreting and re-applying existing traditions, and both sides are doing that under constantly mutating conditions, so that each reapplication is a new and potentially controversial interpretation. Time is relentless in that sense too.
What do you think?
From part of an article - @theatlantic.com.
The idea that free markets are historically distinguished from large, powerful states is an ahistorical ideology shared by the capitalist right and the communist left. We might think of the left-right spectrum as a single ideology rather than a taxonomy of opposites. Thus, the left/right or Democrat/Republican split—which turns American politics into a hyper-repetitive, mechanical set of partisan bromides about free markets versus government programs with egalitarian results—depends on a historical mistake.
The left-right spectrum is often characterized in terms of two extreme poles. One way to see that this is incoherent is that these poles can be defined in mutually incompatible ways. It’s awfully strange that Rand Paul and John McCain belong to the same political party and are generally held to be on the same end of the political spectrum. I'd say they each disagree more profoundly and substantially with the other than either disagrees with Barack Obama, for example. Some of the most historically salient “right-wing” movements are monarchism, fascism, fundamentalism, and libertarianism, which have nothing in common except that they all have reasons to oppose Marxist communism, and vice versa. Yet they also all have similar reasons to oppose one another. Toss in David Brooks Burkeans, security-state neocons, and so on, and you have a miscellany of unrelated positions.
The left pole, meanwhile, could be a stateless society of barter and localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race, gender, and sexuality; or a pervasive welfare state; or a Khmer Rouge reeducation regime. The Nazi Party, Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand capitalists, and redneck gun enthusiasts are all on the same side of the left-right spectrum. So are hacktivists, food-stamp officials, anti-globalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government. It would be hard to come up with a less coherent or less useful way of thinking about politics.
Examining another familiar opposition, between “equality” and “liberty,” produces another cluster of contradictions.
The left holds up “equality” as a fundamental value. The means leftists propose to increase economic equality almost always increase political inequality, because these means consist of larger state programs: more resources and rules, coercion and surveillance in the hands of officials or state contractors, including in welfare-type programs. The welfare state is more pervasive now than it was a century ago, and we now have institutions like compulsory public education. These are achievements of the left, programs they are still trying enhance, but have they actually resulted in more equal societies? Quite the contrary, I believe: They have led to ever-more-frozen hierarchies. The mainstream left is a technocratic elite, with a cult of science and expertise and an ear for the unanimous catchphrase. This is anything but a meritocracy; it an entrenched intergenerational class hierarchy.
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.
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.
* Another way people talk about left and right is in terms of time. Progressives want time to continue to move forward or even want to accelerate it, taking us into a future bright with promise, while conservatives want time to stand still or even run backward to a golden age. Either approach appears to depend on a conception of time as extremely malleable, its pace and direction depending on the outcome of the next election. Putting it gently, the idea that one can retard or accelerate time has a certain ... psychotic quality. Ted Cruz and Rafael Correa, the Taliban and Beyoncé, the “Stone Age” Suruwaha people of the Amazon, and the primetime hosts of MSNBC coincide in time, all moving temporally in the same direction at the same rate, contemporaneously. Among others, they all exist precisely at this moment.
Perhaps progressives (and real reactionaries, if there are any) would say that the idea of halting or hastening time is a sort of shorthand or metaphor. But I think the matter is more complicated. Both sides of the American political spectrum are continuously appealing to American traditions and principles. And one typically "makes progress," to whatever extent one does, by revivifying or reinterpreting existing traditions. Barack Obama engages in this rhetoric no less than Rand Paul. It's never a matter of simply starting afresh, employing no assumptions; both sides are engaged in interpreting and re-applying existing traditions, and both sides are doing that under constantly mutating conditions, so that each reapplication is a new and potentially controversial interpretation. Time is relentless in that sense too.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College. He writes regularly at Eye of the Storm and is the author of the forthcoming collection How to Escape.
No comments:
Post a Comment