Any argument about authoritarian politics, can depend on how you define left and right wing.
Usually the Right are those people who defend the established power relations and hierarchies, and the Left are those that challenge them by supporting people who have been declared outsiders or unworthy. While Conservatives also tend to support established power relations, it can be useful to distinguish conservatism from contemporary neoliberalism, as Conservatives may be skeptical of the benefits of unconstrained capitalism, and the radical transformations it brings. However, this distinction is not really maintained in this piece, even though it is politically vital…. See: Conservatism as philosophy and the posts referred to there.
The usual story is that the terms came into use during the period around the French Revolution when, in the National Assembly, the supporters of the King and aristocracy sat on the President (or presiding officer’s), right and the anti-royalist anti-aristocratic supporters of the revolution sat on his left.
In keeping with this tradition, those called ‘The Left’ in the English speaking world, tend to fight for workers’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, minority race rights, refugee rights and so on, and the Right tends to fight against such rights, to declare that outsiders are dangerous and to increase the rights of the current dominant groups of capitalists and wealthy people. By supporting established power relations, the Right can also claim to be conservative – but sometimes by over-intensifying the powers of the dominant elite, it can end up destroying what it is supposed to be conserving.
While it is a customary piece of blather that Hitler and Mussolini where left wing, they opposed the left and were heavily supported by the right and the established hierarchies (capitalists, militarists, and so on); they opposed workers democracy, even in principal, and subordinated everything to the nation state, and the established hierarchy. They started persecuting and killing those they defined as dangerous but inferior outsiders (Jews, gypsies, gays, communists, pacifists, disabled people, etc). Eventually they started to replace the established hierarchy with their own. They were not ever pretending to be libertarian capitalists, of course, but that does not mean they were socialists.
Even nowadays (after it is quite clear what Nazism actually stood for), the mainstream Right seems happier working with, or excusing, neo-nazis and white supremacists, than they do working with or excusing anti-fascists who are trying to defend people against violence. This may not just be because both support hierarchies, but because the Right know there is a large chance the neo-fascists and white supremacists will vote for them.
Anyway, the problem for the left is quite obvious. Leftists aim for an overthrow of established powers; however should they achieve this by revolution, they usually have to impose an order, because the old hierarchy does not give in, other states may support the old hierarchy, they might still need a police force or national guard and so on. The French Revolution faced the threat of firstly the King subverting its aims, then the aristocracy some of whom fled and tried to persuade neighbouring states to invade, and the Church which was trying to preserve its aristocratic allies and their property, by stirring up counter-revolution among the peasantry. Austria, Prussia, Holland, Spain and England all opposed the Revolutionaries, at least partly to stop the idea of anti-hierarchy from spreading, and some of them engaged in open warfare against France. Similarly, the Russians faced deniable invading armies after the revolution who allied with the so called White Russians (who naturally persecuted inferiors), which left them on a war footing even after leaving WWI (which given the country could not afford war was a severe problem).
In imposing their new order, the left tends to become ‘rightists’ supporters of their new hierarchy, oppressors of those that challenge them, and so on. This direction gets reinforced when opportunistic authoritarians succeed in taking over “because it is necessary”, as did Stalin in Russia.
So the left revolution is so busy defending itself that it usually fails to be revolutionary or liberatory. This is a problem, because the regime justifies itself in terms of delivering freedom for ordinary people, when it is probably not doing that at all. People eventually notice the failure, and the best they give the regime is resigned and unenthusiastic tolerance.
Rightist revolutions are usually less troublesome for the winners. Being at home with the existing hierarchies, the right can use them and then fade them out gradually if they so choose. They can support traditional modes of ordering, usually with the same personnel, while making them more intense or militarised. They can free up people, in their old ‘policing’ jobs, to be more aggressive in supporting the establishment and persecuting outsiders – which is usually not very difficult. Their main risk is trying to gain legitimacy by demonstrating their military superiority over inferior types. This can increase problems, if they eventually encounter a better armed less tired force, or supply lines get stretched beyond the capacity to support them. To some extent this happened with the Righteous who supported the second Iraq War in the name of the New American Century, or of maintaining US dominance and oil supplies. However, if they stay within National Borders and pacify and celebrate existing powers, like Franco did in Spain with the support of the Church and the old aristocracy, they can be stable for quite a long while. Mussolini could probably have survived a lot longer than he did, but he went against his original suspicions of Hitler and joined with him in a series of unnecessary, unpopular (with the Italian people) and weakening wars.
This implies support for authority, can become a form of corruption. The Church in Spain for example, might have thought that supporting Franco was support for Spanish values and Church authority, and would lead to salvation for most of Spain, but they learnt to ignore torture and maltreatment of victims, and quite a lot of other Christian values as part of that support. Similarly, people on the right who support free markets as a form of liberty, and who gain power, tend to end up supporting the capitalist elite (because they have money) and end up supporting crony capitalism, state capture, anti-union laws, anti-protest laws and so on, because opposition to these pro-capitalist moves promotes inhibition of the market. They deliver liberty for the capitalist elite, rather than for ordinary people. This arrangement can also be quite stable for a while, although it might be looking precarious at the moment.
There is an argument that neoliberalism (lots of talk of free markets with state support for Capitalist elites) was first tried out in the dictatorship in Chili, and promoted by Hayek and Friedman. It is a complex argument and a lot of neoliberals object to this characterisation, but it rarely seems they are particularly interested in a democracy that threatens capitalist domination, whatever the people might want.
In terms of the Toynbee cycle, both left and right revolutions are trying to solve perceived major challenges to the social order. The Rightist revolution in the contemporary English speaking world quite possibly originated in dealing with the “crisis of democracy“; the fact that the non-revolutionary left had succeeded to such an extent that the elites where threatened by:
- minorities who now insisted they had a right to self governance, and to overturn the traditions (sexism, genderism, racism etc) which had held them down,
- the steadily increasing wages of the lower class, and State based social support, which gave them prosperity, freedom to participate in government, lack of fear of unemployment and disobedience to bosses, and
- the growing success of the environmental movement which threatened wealthy high polluters, environmental destruction for profit, nuclear power and the fossil fuel industry.
To the Right these collective factors promised chaos, and led to the campaign to make markets the supreme virtue and reinforce corporate dominance, while pretending to bring people a lack of governmental interference, or rather a lack of governmental support and an alienation from participation in their own self-government.
This movement has had the probably unintended consequence of accelerating and protecting environmental destruction, and the resultant destabilizing of world orders – which is likely to become a complete destructive crisis in the next ten to twenty years.
The Russian Left faced the problems of a decaying aristocratic government and a small comfortable middle class, both of whom could not see the growing unrest among the peasantry and workers who were seeing the country fall apart, with them being asked to take the burdens. There was also protest against a war that few really believed was in Russia’s interests, and Russia’s lack of an industrial base with which to produce modern armaments. While the Russians did solve the problem of Industrialisation in a very short time, it would be ignorant to deny this came at a great cost.
So, the answer to the question is complicated.
I’d say that by definition the vast majority of authoritarian states are right-wing, but they may not have started out that way, or intended to be so, they just become that way to defend themselves against the disorder that eventuated.
Tags: neoliberalism, politics
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
Leave a comment