"The left won the war of culture; the right won everything else."
- Unknown, 37th Bockember ZZX3
Despite my best attempts to find the original source of this quote, I have not been able to do so. To be sure it does sound like a truism which can not be falsified (which is often what lies at the heart of a good proverb) and yet contained within it, are ill-defined terms which allows the audience to read what they like into it.
The first and most obvious problem is the question of what 'the left' and 'the right' are; which itself varies from person to person, even then most people only have a vague notion of what they mean, even then it's internally inconsistent.
My go to is the instrument of the political compass¹, which is a useful tool in at least framing the question and almost immediately you can tell whether or not people are prepared to bother to consider this to be a thing which can be attempted to be described with semi-empirical terms or whether they are content to play in the nebulous land of rhetoric. But first, a history lesson.
The first iteration of what the left and the right are, happened in France where you had Royalists and Republicans on opposite sides of the parliament chamber. That isn't particularly useful as you can have monied interests on both sides of the chamber and given that most of the people who didn't hold lands and none of the women had the franchise, whatever definition this happened to generate is not exactly applicable to the vast majority of the people.
It is only after the rise of the reformists, the chartists, the suffragettes, and the trade union movement, that the idea that the question of who should get to control the economy begins to make any sense at all. Marx and Engels' 'Communist Manifesto' is essentially trying to make the point that workers should own the business enterprises that they work for and that taken to its logical end, that everything should be held as a collective. Whether or not you agree with that is up for question but the absolutely unquestionable thing that that work did more than anything else was to provide the framework for having a really important central discussion in economics.
Economics asks the basic questions of: What to produce? How much to produce? Who should this be produced for? And the question which comes out of the Communist Manifesto: Who should have control?
That question of who should have control over what in the economy is the entire basis for the left/right argument in economics. It is generally accepted that as far as economics is concerned that some authority owning literally everything¹ is the definition of 'the left' and authority owning nothing at all is the definition of 'the right'.
It should be therefore logical that there is a myriad of nuance between those two points and that what really lies between the left and right is a spectrum of points and a spectrum of opinions for all of those points. Anyone who tries to convince you that this is purely a black and white issue is nothing more than an ideologue.
The thing is that at some point in the past, the definitions of words started to go skewiff. The United States in particular, uses the words 'conservative' and 'liberal' which actually take their labels from the names of the two big political parties in Britain of the late 1800's; which have nothing to do with economics at all. 'Conservative' in principle means to keep things roughly as they are and to accept change slowly (by conserving the status quo); whereas 'liberalism' was about opening up the mechanisms of government to the masses. That explains why in Britain why there was both a Labour Party and a Liberal Party and why in the United States, there has never been a Labor Party.
This has hinted at what the other spectrum which the political compass describes is. Specifically this is the question of what degree of control that the government should have on people's lives. If everything should be controlled by a sole authority then you have pure authoritarianism². If everything should be controlled by individuals themselves then you have pure libertarianism.
Now having explained all of that by way of background, it should be apparent that a lot of people who you are having a discussion with about what is left and what is right, have mentally turned the axes 45° or are playing with some other left/right spectrum. This is made all the more complicated when the person whom you are having a discussion with, has some notion of what left and right are, that doesn't fit with any real consistent system at all. You can further complicate that the person is merely using the term as a term of abuse, rather than having any sensible discussion. There is at least one columnist that I read regularly who appears to use the term 'the left' for anything that they don't like.
If I am going to lay my cards on the table then personally, I am nominally left of centre economically because I think that all infrastructure and very large club goods should be owned by the government. That includes hospitals, schools, roads, the police, military, judiciary, all property registers, the water, gas, electric, sewerage, telephonic and telephony (which includes the structure needed to run the internet) services, and all central regulatory authorities which are there to keep things fair and safe.
The reason for this is that I think that it has been comprehensively proven time and time again that private entities who run things for private motives are inherently selfish, which results in worse outcomes for the general public. By the same token, I think that where you have nominally fungible services or entities that sell things where the optimal sharing group is small,
I am also pretty centrist culturally because I think that government should leave people well enough alone, expect when their actions begin to harm others, and even then I am idiosyncratic.
As for the left winning the war on culture and the right winning everything else, I think that that should be viewed through that lens.
The nature of the internet means that people can view almost whatever they like, without very many gatekeepers. As for arguments which are thrown up by some members of the commentariat that people can't say what they want to on university campuses or in schools, they seem very spurious to me. Whenever you do hear of people wanting to assert their right to free speech (which is by definition a libertarian idea), then you are far more likely to hear of people with authoritarian preferences using violence to shut it down, rather than libertarians using violence.
Media companies generally will sell whatever it takes to make a profit, either by selling the media itself or selling the advertising space. Again the basic economic questions rear their heads.
The criticisms usually levelled at state media groups is that they are biased, despite repeated studies which show the opposite. It should come as no surprise that it is usually authoritarian concerns who are making those complaints. The criticisms which are usually levelled at private media groups is that they are too authoritarian; which is mostly true when looking at news and editorial biases but not at all true when looking at media which is designed as pure entertainment.
Sky News is very heavily biased in an economically rightist direction and this is combined with very heavy authoritarian tendencies but Fox 8 is ridiculously culturally libertarian. In that respect, the left won the culture war but the right won everything else, even on Fox's networks.
It might have been true that for a while, the economic left was winning but only as far as the provision of services which the economic right either saw as unprofitable or that they couldn't deliver because the capital cost was too massive. Even while a US President was crowing about the death of Communism on the dismal side of the Iron Curtain, the left was in the middle of losing the economic war in the West. Across the Anglosphere, public assets were being privatised for peanuts and labour conditions were being smashed in the process. To claim that the left won the economic war, is bordering on openly lying (which has actually become acceptable anyway, in the past decade).
For the right to claim that there is some leftist globalist agenda is also bordering on openly lying because those global instruments don't even have the power to raise even so much as a mild grumble when the military of a global superpower unilaterally explodes a foreign leader that they don't like. There could be a complaint about a nation state like China but I don't know how you can simultaneously claim that a conspiracy exists when the entity in question is aloof from it.
¹https://www.politicalcompass.org
²As a description, in the Bible, God owns the entire universe and has total ultimate authority; which technically makes him an Absolute Autocratic Leftist; which using that as a descriptor also makes many Christians apoplectic when you explain this.
No comments:
Post a Comment