The Triad
It could be useful to think of contemporary Australian, and probably US, politics in terms of a triad:
(Currently Pro-corporate) Right
Cultural Conservative
Democratic Left.
Using a triad rather than a set of binaries helps us to avoid seeing these factions as opposites. They all share things with each other, can move from one position to another, and ally with one another.
In brief:
The (pro-corporate) Right support established wealth and power. They consider that the powerful are virtuous, and justified in that power, by virtue of that power and wealth. Given that the main contemporary power resides in the corporate sector they tend to support that sector and its justification within so-called ‘free markets.
Cultural conservatives support what they see as traditional culture, and traditional power relations.
The Democratic left supports ‘the people’, against entrenched power and entrenched ‘irrational’ culture. They tend to see themselves as the supreme judges of what is entrenched.
In more detail:
The Right tends to attack the rights, incomes and conditions of ordinary people in order to support established power and hierarchy.
Power must be maintained, and society geared towards providing the best conditions for the powerful to do their stuff (whatever that is; make money, use violence, own land, spout theology etc.), as that is supposedly best for everyone. They are anti-democratic at heart.
They oppose any kind of benefits for the poor, which are not a form of charity which requires genuflection towards the rich, or other elite, and hence reinforces the power system. To them mutual obligation means the obligation of the poor not to accept help that costs the elite anything, or for the poor not to challenge the elites.
They also oppose to any traditional culture or set of values, which acts to restrain the power they support which, as stated above, in our society is the corporate sector.
They encourage culture wars to maintain separation between conservatives and the left, and use conservative respect for established power to persuade conservatives that they are both on the same side.
If contemporary rightists have a religion it tends to assume that wealth is God’s reward for virtue and faith, and that a person’s prime responsibility is for their own salvation and then, perhaps, their family’s.
The main problem the right face is that they know they are right. They think all information is PR and you make it correct by PR, will and effort, or sleight of hand. They are extremely good at sales and marketing in an economic system in which false advertising and hype is normal. They tend to think any counter evidence is evidence of bias, and must also be made up. The problem for them is that eventually reality cannot be denied, and bites everyone, including them.
Conservatives tend to be suspicious of innovation.
Nowadays, living in corporate capitalism, innovation occurs all the time, destroying traditional culture and place, so life is difficult for them.
Capitalism also tends to reduce all value and virtue to money. This often seems fundamentally wrong to conservatives.
While tending to support single authorities, conservatives can also like a balance of social powers to act as restraints. Thus they can support professional organisations, teaching organisation, religious organisations, business organisations, military organisations and conservation organisations having input into government. Whoever is the ‘King’ should have loyal and fearless advisers.
They also tend to think that power involves responsibility towards both the established rules and laws of government and to the ruled. The rulers should cultivate noblisse oblige, protection for the ruled, charity, justice and so on. Ideally while everyone should know their place, there should be mutual respect. Mutual obligation is not one sided.
Religion is often considered vitally important in cultivating virtue, generosity, judgement, content with one’s place and is supposed to act as a restraint on human selfishness.
Cultural conservatives tend to like traditional boundaries for gender, profession, task and so on, especially when tied into religion.
They often consider that traditional culture carries a wisdom, which cannot be easily summarised intellectually, and that breaking traditional culture and its mores carries unsuspected dangers. This can lead them to support functional ignorance, as new knowledge might be dangerously mistaken.
They are strongly suspicious of people for being different, and can team up to put down any difference, thus limiting a culture’s range of potentially constructive responses. This is a weakness.
Another weakness is thinking that by allying with established corporate power, primarily against the left, they are defending cultural wisdom against difference, and that this gives them real power. In other words they often think that established power must inherently be virtuous and conservative. What they eventually discover is that if they get in the way of money making, or whatever the right’s hype of the moment is, then they will be over-ridden completely.
More on conservative philosophy here
The Democratic Left tends to be suspicious of everything that oppresses, or could oppress, people and which only has backing in tradition or raw power. They tend to think that what seems like arbitrary power and culture should be destroyed.
For them ordinary people are as wise as anyone else and should be supported in their efforts to better themselves. People should not be ignored or suffer simply because they are poor or outcast – this is unjust.
The problem for the left is that revolutionary leftists, if the revolution succeeds, become the new rightists. They support the new forms of established power and run roughshod over those who oppose them.
On the other hand, moderate leftists tend to accommodate to the power of the right, and thus end up cautiously supporting oppression to receive funding. They may also accept established power relations in return for what appears to be the ability to moderate that power. This position can achieve something, but without them encouraging another set of power bases, they cannot hold the achievement. This is clear from Hawke and Keating in Australia, Blair in the UK and Obama in the US.
Leftists are often conservative; they don’t want to reduce every virtue and value to money, they tend to like balance of powers, and they often support the achievements of the past which have now been swept away by the Right: for example the Menzies idea that social insurance was a right, and that people should not be humiliated or harassed for accepting it, or the idea that workers form a valuable community rather than a disposable resource. They also tend to support environmental conservation and oppose destruction of land and place.
Their main problem is the tendency to want to overthrow traditional culture rather than improve it. This is one reason, that ‘modern art’ holds so little popular appeal; much of it only rebels. Conservatives are probably correct that culture holds some evolutionary adaptive organisations, but that it may well need to change as circumstances change.
Leftists are easily persuaded that conservatives support harm for the marginalised, are racist, sexist, superstitious and stupid – which helps drive the culture wars, started by the Right, and which tends to throw them on the mercies of the right.
Consequences
The point of all this is to suggest that there is perhaps as much commonality between left and conservatives as there is between conservatives and the right, or the right and the left. There is room to be flexible. However allying with the right is likely to prove disastrous for the other two sides, partly because the right has no respect for reality, only wealth. Both the left and conservatives have weaknesses which sabotage them, but which have a chance of being corrected by the other.
Historically it could be argued that the successful 19th and early 20th century reform movements, that lead to public education and protection against misfortune for the working class, arose through an alliance through the democratic left and the conservatives both recognizing that unconstrained capitalism was destroying traditional life, interconnections and responsibilities. That this economic system was demeaning the working men and women of the country, and that it was Christian to try and help people live lives which were not full of abject misery and poverty.
This alliance was largely successful, despite obvious frictions. It is not impossible that a similar movement against the corruption of public life through money and the destruction of land, water and air could motivate another successful alliance.
The only thing that seems guaranteed, is that if the Right remains dominating, then everything will end badly.
Tags: economics, knowledge, mentalities, narrative, religion
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