Climate, technology and chaos Blog

This post makes use of the political triad (Right, Conservative, Left) proposed in a previous post.

What seems clear is, that over the last 40 years of the Pro-Corporate Right (and its talk of ‘markets’) being dominant, ‘ordinary people’ have been marginalised from political and economic processes. Median wages have stagnated, share of wealth has declined, housing has become largely unaffordable, social services have become persecutory, developers can over-ride locals with impunity, people’s objections are largely ignored, and so on. Yet we are all are surrounded by displays of great wealth and squander. Over these last 40 years, the Right has engineered massive change to benefit the wealthy, to break any ties of obligation the wealthy have to any other portion of society, and to break any checks and balances the system had developed. They have succeeded in that aim, to a greater degree than they probably thought possible, yet they appear to want to continue that path until the end of the world.

Both Conservatives and the Left are unhappy with this result. However, rather than blame their own attempts at allying with the power of the Right, they both blame the other.

Conservatives wonder why minorities are supposed to get priority when white workers are loosing out, and the Left saying “white privilege”, while true, is not an answer; everyone should feel they are advancing together. They will never feel that under the Right, because, to the Right, wages are a cost and ordinary people are a potential obstruction; both should be eliminated no matter what hardships that brings. Today, hard working people can hold two jobs and still only just support their families. The current system is failing everyone.

Conservatives are suspicious about climate change as, so far, all the big changes put forward by the Right have not benefitted any ordinary people. It is reasonable to suspect that if climate change is dealt with in the normal way, it will hurt people yet again – that is how things work nowadays. If the left makes dealing with climate, a matter of capitalism as usual, then this is probably going to be true. If they make it a matter of challenging capitalism, then they also face problems of gaining support as it is unclear how change will be carried out.

Conservatives generally fear that if they break with their support of the Right, then they will completely loose influence, or they try and convince themselves that they will eventually win over the Right, but all that happens is that they become corrupt and throw conservation aside. They may need to remember that there is no compromise between God and Mammon. Wealth is not ‘the good’.

The Left tends to blame the supposed stupidity, racism and small mindedness of Conservatives for their failure. The apparent inability of Labor to analyse its failings in the last election, and the number of Labor supporters apparently blaming the Greens is extraordinary. The Greens did not lose Labor’s election, Labor did.

But again, this ‘stupid’ attack on Conservatives misses the reality, that ordinary people are resentful of their decline in power, income and position, and are suspicious of grand plans and experts who have harmed them (remember all those experts who said free markets would benefit everyone?). That the Left also attempted to ally with the Right, does not help here. As is the case with conservatives, the alliance only ends in corruption, and support for plutocracy not democracy. The whole point of Left existence is lost.

I’m not denying that Conservatives and the Left have real disagreements, what I am suggesting is that those disagreements are not more severe than the disagreements they both have with the Right. The Right is good at lying, making false promises, and running the other two sides against each other, so distrust is easily stirred. However, if either Conservatives or the Left wish to survive, then they have to ally with each other. There is no future for either of them if they don’t – at best we will get more of the same. However, 40 years of Right dominance, show that it is much more likely that things will get far worse for the rest of us if we allow things to continue as they are. There is no chance anything will spontaneously recover.

Tags: Disinformation, economics, free markets, narrative

This entry was posted on May 26, 2019 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.