There's a lot of rigidity visible in how many people's thinking has remained remarkably unaffected by the virtually unprecedented behavior of the GOP over the past year-plus. The rigidity itself would make an interesting topic to focus on, but it's more like the appetizer as far as I'm concerned, and I want to head straight for the entree: What people should have learned by now about liberals vs. conservatives, the left vs. the right. I've written about this before, how the right/conservatives see politics as war, while the left/liberals see politics as problem-solving. But I'm ready to tackle it again.
To do so, I'd like to step back a bit and take a look at really macro-history, courtesy of Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolutiopn, in a mid-week post, "Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?" It wasn't his purpose to answer the question about the origins of left/right attitudes towards politics for us, but he did so, whether he realized it or not. Here's the crux of the matter:
extended periods of economic growth require that technologies of defense outweigh technologies of predation. They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus. Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.
Building a strong enough state to protect markets from other states is very hard to do; at the same time the built state has to avoid crushing those markets itself. That's a very delicate balance
Of course other things are important. Cowen also cites Britain's geography, and the influence of Christianity, especially as it evolved into Protestantism, some commentators cited the Enlightenment, which Cowen rightly notes came too late to explain how it got started, but is not so far-fetched if one sees it as the tail end of a secularizing, empiricizing and rationalizing triple-play: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. And, of course, the start of the modern information age via the printing press also gets noted in comments.
All these "secondary" explanations are importatnt, of course, but they're secondary in the sense that if predation could not be kept relatively at bay for long enough, none of them would have made a difference. It was the core power dynamic in the passage I quoted above that created the opportunity space in which the other factors could take hold. Without them, the Industrial Revolution wouldn't have happened. But with the core dynamic in place for long enough, it seems arguable that sooner or later good enough social/institutional factors would have enabled the start of the Industrial Revolution.
What's this got to do with left & right, liberal & conservative, you ask? Well, simple: the aristocracy is the core of the right, and it's based on two things: predation and inheritence. The European aristocracy is Europe's warrior class, and their values, outlook, social practices and habits define what it means to be conservative. (This is strongly reflected in the American South as well.) Of course, they aren't alone. But they're at the very core, along with the institutions they have long controlled--most notably, the Catholic Church.
Liberalism primarily evolved out of the city-based "middle classes", based in trade, small-manufacture and the professions--the bourgeoisie, although skilled workers (Tom Paine, anyone?) and even freed slaves (Frederick Douglass) played a part as well. In turn, socialism/social democracy evolved primarily out of the working class, although disaffected members of the bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels, anyone?) played a significant role as well.
The Marxist method of dialectical materialism highlighted the tendency for old forms to persist in new ones, in altered forms via the dynamic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, so there was sensitivity to the fact that the liberal bourgeoisie had more in common with the aristocracy than it generally realized. (Particularly when it took over the functions of running the state, setting up empires, running slave trades, etc.) But in fact, this analytically method actually understates the degree to which all sides tend to reflect one another in various ways, nor does it adequately account for similarities between the proletariat and the aristocracy, such as a tendency toward embodied forms of reason, and a more conflictual view of politics. Still, that does not negate the fact of profound differences in the basic logic of different social groups, nor the fact that generally speaking proletarian politics are to the left of bourgeois politics.
Things got quite a bit more mixed up in America, what with the lack of a national aristocracy, the presence of both an indigenous population to be predated and the imported slave population as a product of predation, and the post-Civil War emergence of monopoly capitalists whose essential logic was much more predatory than earlier capitalists had been, as well as the complex politics of race, ethnicity and region. But the last half century has been a period in which America's political parties--and its politics more generally--has become more aligned along traditional left/right divides--though some new forms were developed to facilitate this.
The hitch is that neo-liberalism has one foot on each side of the divide. This goes all the way back to some of the earliest implicit aspects of liberalism, and how its logic was involved a detachment from the concrete world that conservative ideology regarded as unquestionable. Among other things, this detachment, presented in positive terms as autonomy and impartial rationality, allowed liberals to talk in terms of universal rights, and yet to restrict those rights to a limited set of rights-holders, based on the argument that only those who were materially independent could actually exercise those rights of their own volition. (The classic discussion of this is found in C.B. MacPherson's Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke.)
This is how so-called "universal" rights came to be a kind of limited property that provided the bourgeoisie--not to mention white males--with a form of oligarchic power quite at odds with the liberal spirit of egalitarian market mediations as well as universal consent. On a macro-scale, it also explains how centuries of injustice, with continuing consequences to this very day, such as massive debts owed by "developing" nations, can simply be regarded as unexceptional aspects of business-as-usual.
As conservatives quickly and adroitly capitalized on racial resentment in the aftermath of watershed civil rights advances, the often embodied logic of the struggles themselves was increasingly marginalized in terms of an abstract rights-based discourse that over time was increasingly submerged into an evolving techno-elitist discourse which was the "natural" language of neoliberalism, a viewpoint that sees liberation as an individual--not a group--struggle, the end purpose of which is to develop oneself on the model of a capitalist enterprise, as opposed to being a citizen of a democratic republic, whose being cannot be defined except in a process of engagement with others on a multitude of fronts and levels, from the personal to the world historical.
This may all sound very abstract, but it shows itself over and over again in very concrete ways. It explains, for example, why Obama can be puzzled by the enthusiasm shown for the public option, while seeing no big deal in switching from opposing to supporting an individual mandate. It also explains why Obama so readily identifies with the plight of multimillionare and billionaire bankers, despite occasional rhetorical forays to the contrary. (They are, after all, possessive individuals, just like the rest of us.) And why he sees no real imperative to reinstate New Deal-style regulations (properly updated, of course) that could have prevented the financial meltdown. Neoliberals are constitutionally blind to the fact that there is no ideal free market for the biggest winners in the corporate capitalist order. They may well see this fact if forced to stare directly at it, but as soon as it's out of sight, it's out of mind, because it so fundamentally contradicts their basic framework of assumptions. The kinds of restrictions they see as adequate--the only kinds they can really feel comfortable with--are by definition incapable of doing what is required because their conceptual framework is fundamentally individualistic, while the problem is systemic--a word that to them reeks of socialism, if not the Gulags.
And, of course, they are fundamentally not that different from neoconservatives when push comes to shove in the war-fighting department. (All hail the God who is Patreas!) They just pay a lot more attention to efficient and effective details. But neoliberals would never dream of considering--much less being bothered by--the fundamental question of war's essential predatory nature, and the fact that this alone is enough to ensure eternal "terrorism" (i.e. asymmetrical resistance).
So, when it comes to endless war, it's quite clear that the neoliberals are far closer to the neoconservatives than they are to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
There's little wonder, then, why the neoliberals are constantly trying to make nice with the right, despite any signs of reciprocation. On one level, their entire orientation comes out of a long history of productive problem-solving, which works best when everyone gets along. On another level, they've always had a rather comfortable cushion that comes from the unacknowledged fruits of sharing in the conservatives fruits of predation--often, when push comes to shove, fruits of predation on those who appear to be their base, or their allies.
STATE BLOGS
