i've been working on the political theory chapter of entanglements: a system of philosophy. probably won't surprise you that i am again undertaking the destruction of the left-right way of conceiving the political spectrum, which i do assert is one of the most grotesque conceptual messes ever inflicted on human populations. so i'll pull out some paragraphs, some of which started as blog entries anyway.
it's reached the point that i don't see how people ever used this way of thinking about politics, which is crazily and obviously incoherent and also practically disastrous. its ubiquity is proportional to its ridiculousness and i think if you start to actually look at it rather than from it, you'll agree with me.
The left-right spectrum, since it is linear and not infinite, can be characterized in terms two extreme poles. One way to see that the thing is incoherent is that these poles can be defined in a number of mutually incompatible ways. So, for example, in the 1930s it was was totalitarian communism as against fascism. It is odd that the left could define the right pole as fascist one minute, laissez-faire the next. I don't doubt that you can make them identical by some conniption-fit of dialectical materialism or something, but of course then you're just writing fiction, as usual. The left pole could be an stateless society of barter and localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race, gender, and sexuality; or a giant Pentagon-style welfare state; or a Khmer-Rouge re-education regime. And I think that, bewildered by the endless jive that is the left-right spectrum, people sort of endorse all these serially or simultaneously. But it also strikes me that the incoherence is a bit hard to miss.
It's possible to tell a coherent history of how the left/right spectrum arose, but I don't think there is any way to make it make sense conceptually. One possibility, which of course arises from the left, which I think is who invented the left/right spectrum, is that the left and the right want time to run at different rates or even in different directions. This would just make them both insane, I think, and I've already messed with these ideas in discussing 'reactionary progressivism.' Also, if progressives are people who want the pace of time to increase, they are also claiming the ability to foretell the future. It's going to be the future they want. Of course even if our fate was a world welfare state or something, that wouldn't show that the result was desirable. Claiming to read the direction of history is a characteristic derangement of many people, but even if people could do this, that something is in the future doesn't show it's good without some sort of extremely anti-naturalistic conception of human beings. Perhaps God is guiding us to redemption. Otherwise, it's a mess down here. Even if it's a Darwinian mess, that doesn't entail any sort of progress by any standard: natural selection will love our extinction as much as our triumph.
I'd replace left and right with up and down. There are two political philosophies: hierarchical and anti-hierarchical, statist and anarchist, totalitarian/squishy totalitarian and resistant. But whereas the squishy-totalitarian side funnels into a single situation - a frozen economic and political and knowledge hierarchy - the anarchist side is thousands upon thousands of possibilities, as many as there are possible voluntary arrangements: a million mutant communities. Don't think of it as single thing, think of it as all possibilities but one.
The Nazi Party, Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand go-go capitalists, neo-conservative militarists, redneck beer swillers, and evangelical christians are all on the same side in your conceptuality. So are hacktivists, food-stamp officials, anti-globalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government. For heaven's sake, drop it and start again.
Now on the up/down spectrum, the Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, monopoly capitalism, the Communist Party, and American liberals are on the same side, some more extremely or mildly than others. I am a lot more comfortable with that, and I think it's more plausible. I hope that offends you. It ought to make yuou reflect. But of course any linear account is awfully simplistic.
