ok here's an op-ed version of my anti-leftright thang:
Ditch the Left-Right Spectrum
By Crispin Sartwell
The left-right spectrum is the means by which we habitually understand political positions and the politicians who advocate them: as, say, progressive, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary. I propose that this way of thinking about the terrain is incoherent and that it makes little sense of political realities.
Ron Paul is often described as a ‘rock-ribbed conservative’ or as being on the right-wing edge of the Republican Party. Rick Santorum is described the same way. Paul favors maximum individual liberty and a small military dedicated to defending our own borders. Santorum favors legal enforcement of religious morality and a very large and active military with a worldwide presence.
Now, these positions are approximately as opposite as they can be, and in a number of respects both Santorum and Paul are (slightly) closer to President Obama than they are to one another. Any taxonomy of political positions that throws them into the same category is, to put it mildly, inadequate.
The left-right spectrum as a way of accounting for the political terrain originates in the struggle between communism and fascism in early twentieth-century Europe. These ideologies regarded themselves as opposites, and the left-right taxonomy was invented in part to express their self-image as being located at far-distant ends of political space.
Retrospectively, we can see that what the positions had in common was at least as massive as their differences. Even if their rhetoric was almost wholly distinct, the realities they created were strikingly similar: totalitarian systems that in a number of cases pursued policies of ethnic cleansing or genocide, massive systems of detention, confiscations and command economies. They endorsed regimes of total censorship enshrouded in total secrecy, cults of personality dedicated to achieving liberation through extremely thorough oppression.
Obama and Mitt Romney are both raising massive amounts of money from Wall Street, and they would both (like previous presidents of both parties), put the American economy into the hands of once and future Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup executives. Whomever is elected (other than Paul), you can bet that the federal government will grow every year, and in roughly the same ways. And so on.
In many respects, watching them attack one another – harshly and continuously - is merely puzzling. Whatever the disagreement is about, it doesn’t seem to be about fundamentally different political or economic visions.
And in contemporary American politics, not only are the left and right much closer than they think they are, but both mainstream liberalism and mainstream conservativism are incoherent positions.
The right falls apart around the notion of liberty. Santorum, like many a conservative, bases his whole political posture on the American tradition of freedom and individual rights. Then he asserts and that the government ought to be able to tell you whom to marry or what you can ingest or how you can be permitted to reproduce.
The left falls apart around the notion of equality, which it proposes to pursue by a continuous growth and multiplication of government bureaucracies and the resources they command. In other words, the basic idea is to enhance equality by an ever-more pervasive and extreme hierarchy of power.
So distorting is the left/right lens that Paul – easily the most consistent of contemporary mainstream American political figures – is himself regarded as incoherent by the left and by the right. That, I propose, is because each is an intellectually random farrago of mutually incompatible doctrines.
Perhaps consistency is not really what we need in practical politics. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are politicians, not logicians, and it will be said that we want practical solutions to real problems, not some sort of abstract philosophical rigor. However, contradictions are impossible to realize in reality, and the success of conservatism or of liberalism would also be the destruction of its underlying principles and motivations, just as was the case for communism and fascism. Every victory for either is also its own defeat.
At any rate, I propose that the American left and the right are social formations or affinity groups or demographic segments rather than political positions. They are like, and are related to, matters such as your region and race, where you went to school, whether you live in an urban or suburban or rural context, what car you drive, where you shop. The left and the right are social groups enforcing the identities of their adherents through peer pressure embodied in their mechanical rhetorics.
Of course, we’ve accounted for our politics in terms of left and right for so long that it is hard to imagine another structure. But we had better start working one out, if we want to understand politics in this election cycle, or even if we just want our own political positions to make sense.
Crispin Sartwell teaches political science and philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.
my mom got me a subscription to the new yorker as a gift. i've never loved the mag cause i'm not very interested in poetry or 'literary' fiction, and i find the whole sort of irritatingly middle-brow, like: let's pretend to be intellectuals when we're actually just uppermiddleclass wannabes. plus also i would say that within the writerworld it's kind of irritatingly peckingorderish (man i'm in portmanteaumode this evening). the whole publishing world is ordered into this incredible hierarchy of prestige, with all these supposed artistes trying to claw to the tiny summit. i actually think the cause of literature would be well-served by the destruction of the high-end nyc publishing world as a whole, which is one way to see that intellectual property should cease. (on the other hand, i really dig the criticism at the back.)
but what i really object to is the excruciatingly conventional politics: just a constant rehearsal of leftish cliches delivered in the absolute knowledge that every single reader agrees on every single thing. well, the last thing you want to do is belong to a group like that: the thinking is over at that point.
the perfect embodiment of this is hendrick hertzberg. i'd rather read, or perhaps eat, beige wall-to-wall carpeting. here he is this week on ron paul, and really it's as though a whole demographic wrote this. it did. "Paul, whose batty-grandpa personality and oddball melange of pacifism, anarcho-libertarian radicalism, and crackpot economics attracts and equally eccentric congeries of Tea Partiers and bong partiers, has done Romney no discernible harm." again, so befuddled is hertzberg with the wackily incoherent yet utterly unimaginative ideology of his set, that he cannot recognize even rudimentary logical consistency when it slaps him silly.
