A version of this essay first appeared in July 2014. It was inspired by Crispin Sartwell's Atlantic article "The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus". This post expands on it and supplements recent posts about how the postmodern cultural left, whether it realizes it or not, is a form of cultural Neoliberalism. It argues that Neoliberalism is the perfect ideology for the postmodern milieu that dominates American cultural and economic institutions and that the cultural Left, populated in large part by Aspen Institute Liberals, fits too comfortably with economic Neoliberalism.
This type of cosmopolitan Liberal, beyond a certain callow noblesse oblige, has no genuine interest in the worldview of most ordinary white, black, and brown Americans, which they perceive as primitively steeped in traditional values. If the meritocratic careerists in elite American cultural and economic institution grew up with theses values, they shed them when they realized that success in their careers depended on losing them. If Tim Miller's book tells the story about how conservatives become acculturated into a radical right political ecosphere, Anand Giridharadas's book talks about a similar phenomenon on the cultural Left. Both are toxic for a functioning democracy.
If we understand Left-Right in its most basic sense, the Left is identified with the modern Liberal project in Europe to disrupt and displace the old customary society defined by crown and altar. By the end of WWI it was clear to anybody that the Left had won that fight. The Right after that became identified with fascist or 'authoritarian' political systems, and the far Left with Revolutionary Socialist regimes like those of Russia and Mexico and later in China and Cuba.
Since 1989, this distinction has become irrelevant because there is no extreme Left anywhere that matters, and the extreme Right has become associated primarily with jingoism and fundamentalist religious extremists. So if the essence of the Left is open-ended disruption that embraces the destruction of traditional beliefs and ways of life, then free-market capitalism is the only robust force left standing that performs this disruptive Left function.
The Left-Right distinction since 1989 is more confusing than clarifying because Left and Right since then have mainly to do with cultural values rather than with economic policy and wealth distribution. Insofar as there is a Left left in the 19th-Century sense, its influence is mainly in the cultural sphere where it pushes for its anti-traditional-values politics--abortion, LBGTQ+ issues, gun control, marijuana legalization. This program has been embraced by most people who think of themselves as free-market capitalists. And since this anti-traditional values program has been so successful since the 1960s, it has caused a backlash among American traditionalists whose sense of right and wrong is deeply embedded in the vestigial customary culture that the cultural Left sees as so oppressively constraining. Those on the Right who embrace both free-market capitalism and the preservation of traditional values are incoherent.
The cultural Left has been so effective precisely because most of those who compose the power and economic elite endorse that "liberal", anti-traditional program. The cultural elite and the economic elite are heirs of the classic 19th-century liberals in that they could not care less about the way capitalism destroys the old traditional ways of life. That's the price of progress. They think of modernization as a necessary, positive step in every country's development, and that free-market capitalism is the engine for everyone's becoming wealthier and healthier, and that traditional values and ways of life are the primary obstacle preventing a better, more prosperous life for the immiserated poor in the undeveloped countries. These neoliberal elites sincerely believe they are the real Progressives, and as such the real Left.
For this elite, it's all about disruption, change, transformation. And so if there is a Left and Right that defines our political economic discourse now, it could be argued that the Left comprises those who embrace unconstrained capitalism and technological advancement as the creative-destructive engine of history, and the Right those who resist it. Some like fundamentalist Muslims and Christians are at the far-Right extreme, but couldn't it be argued that anybody who wants to restrain capitalist disruption is on the Right? What about Occupy? What about anti-growth environmentalists? What about anti-transhuman humanists?
Couldn't it be argued that you are on the conservative Right now if you resist or want to restrain progress if by progress we mean whatever capitalism and open-ended technological development bring us? Some kind of realignment is called for here, and I'm with Sartwell in questioning whether Left and Right are helpful categories in any effort to promote that. So that's why I'm proposing as an alternative--Red and Blue, the Red party of Radical Irresponsibie Unconstraint, and and the Blue Party of Responsible Evolutionary Restraint.
Near the end of his article, Sartwell says
Milton Friedman and Vlad Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Augusto Pinochet: They may well have disagreed about this and that. But they have agreed, or said they did, that the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and vice versa. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position.
I would say in a new alignment that Blues are not about pitting government against capital, but about finding the balance between them within a framework defined by the principle of subsidiarity. This is a conservative idea; it's a very Blue idea. Subsidiarity correlates with social democracy. The development of the social democracies in the West is the great success story that came out of the chaos of disruptive change that wracked the 19th Century and the first half of the twentieth. I believe that sooner or later the countries, like the U.S and U.K. that that lost social democracy to the Neoliberal ideologues since the late 70s will once again find their way back to it, not for ideological reasons, but for very Blue pragmatic reasons: It makes the best kind of political and economic sense.
Sartwell also makes this point near the end of his article:
This spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power and wealth. There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.
Sartwell is right to point out that the iron law of oligarchy operates along the whole spectrum, from the extreme Left to the extreme Right, and everywhere in between, from local street gangs to PTAs. Ruling cliques always emerge in every social configuration regardless of their political commitments or lack of them. But it's wrong to think we can get along without hierarchy. This is where I think movements like Occupy are a silly.
The key is to find balance, and the principle of subsidiarity should be our guide in organizing relations vertically in a way that finds the correct balance between top and bottom. I'd argue that It's the key to the Red-Blue realignment we need so badly now because subsidiarity doesn't fit neatly into conventional ideas of Conservative or Liberal. Small-government conservatives like it because of its bias toward local sovereignty, and Liberals like it because it allows for interventions by higher levels of the hierarchy when the lower levels lack the resources or competency to deal with extraordinary or intractable problems.
For those unfamiliar with the term, subsidiarity acknowledges the necessity of hierarchy, but insists that higher levels in a hierarchy exist to serve and support the lower levels. In this sense if flips the idea of hierarchy on its head. We see this principle in action all the time, whether we call it subsidiarity or not--for instance, when a disaster overwhelms the resources of city, the state government comes in to support it, and if it overwhelms the resources of the state, the federal government steps in. It wants as few constraints as possible at the bottom, but to allow for judicious constraints from the top when the situation calls for it.
The principle of subsidiarity provides the framework for resisting government overreach, and I've used it to make my case against top-down education reforms like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now the Common Core State Standards. The vast majority of schools in the U.S. are doing just fine. There are some school districts or schools within those districts that don't have the resources to adequately provide for the educational development of the children in their care. They require extra resources and interventions from outside, but this can be done in targeted ways without disrupting the whole system the way these federal top-down programs do.
Insisting on some national standard is silly and non-productive. It serves the needs of bureaucrats, not the needs children and their families. It's a prime example of top-down over-reach. And it's interesting that both progressives and conservatives are opposing this overreach because it points to where there is common ground for realignment. For more on this see "Governing Principles for the Development of Local Humanistic Learning Communities."
The point is that subsidiarity provides a political framework that seeks a balance--it's not either/or, either anarchic libertarianism or oppressive top-down centralization. In the last 200 years we have learned that neither of those work well, and it's just a matter of time until once again we find the balance that my grandfather's generation found in the 30s when they were forced to abandon ideology and to focus on what worked and what didn't.
See also "Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism I" or click on the 'Subsidiarity" tag below.
[End of excerpt.]
I would add that in the same way that traditionalist conservatives who are also free-market capitalists are intellectually incoherent, so are those on the postmodern cultural Left who are anti-capitalist. Both are captured by an eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too logic that tries to assert values that are contradicted by the nihilism of their presuppositions. They are like the person who says that he does not believe in human freedom, but chooses to live as if he were free. Or they're like the jewel thief who justifies his larcenies as his personal social justice program to redistribute wealth. "Laws against theft reinforce the existing power dominance of the wealthy elite," argues the thief, "and so they must be transgressed. Ecrasez l'infame." These arguments might have a superficial cleverness, but they are fundamentally silly. And while people might make such assertions in perfect sincerity, they are incoherent and intellectually dishonest.
It's quite possible to believe your own propaganda. Look how many did on J6. But there can be no society that moves toward true Justice unless a majority of the people in it are inspired by Justice as a transcendental. I think most normal people have experienced Justice in this transcendent sense, even if they wouldn't call it a transcendental. That's why the interpretive frame is so important--it determines the limits of what can be believed which in turn determines the limits of what one imagines as possible to be positively achieved.
Am I saying that there is no substance to the social justice program of the cultural Left? I'd say only to the degree that it aligns with our deeply felt intuitions about justice as a transcendental, and despite the logic of its arguments, their program overlaps with causes that are truly just. As I argued the other day, gay marriage is broadly accepted not because it's transgressive but because most people recognize its inherent justice. It stretches a traditional norm without abolishing it. But most of the arguments that I hear coming from those folks are rhetorically ineffective, if not downright alienating, because they don't draw on the inspiration of justice but rather on some head-trippy theory that revels in its transgressivity that nobody with any sense finds persuasive. The justice in anybody's cause can only be advanced by appealing to the innate feeling for justice that all decent humans possess.
I would also add to my critique of Sartwell's critique of verticality, that it's not the verticality that's the problem, but the distance between the top and the bottom. The most creative, talented people should rise into positions of leadership, but they don't all have to become billionaires. When you have a company for instance where the highest paid workers make 350 times more than the lowest paid workers, something is deeply out of balance and requires the kind of intervention that subsidiarist social democracies can effect. That kind of intervention is incomprehensible to and so vigorously resisted by Libertarian and Neoliberal ideology because neither has a robust feeling for justice as a transcendental.
As I said earlier in the week, Democratic economic policies would be popular on Main Street if they were proposed by anybody other than Democrats, so maybe the solution is for cultural values centrist party with center Left economic policies in the subsidiarist vein described above to emerge as an alternative. I also wrote that the Dems of the 2020s might be the Whigs of the 1850s, so I was interested to hear toward the end of Charlie Syke's podcast yesterday David Jolly describe the program for Serve America Movement, (SAM) for which he is the executive director.
Now I'm to the left of both Sykes and Jolly, both Never-Trumper former Republicans, but I like both men because they are reasonable pragmatists who are committed to American democracy. They are not culture-war ideologues. They want to solve problems, and they understand that the current party system is incapable of solving practical problems because one has become dominated by delusional crackpots, and the other by an elite postmodern Neoliberalism that most ordinary Americans find alienating. So it seems obvious that some kind of alternative has to emerge that represents where most Americans are in their cultural values--flexibly traditionalist--and so can draw on that majority to develop a coalition from the center Left and center Right that can get something done. This seems to be what Jolly's SAM intends to be, and while I have no idea whether it has the legs to succeed--probably not--something like it might if the Dems fail this year and in '24.
At this point, even if the Dems win in the next two cycles, they won't do it decisively, which means we'll just keep limping along in this politically impotent bardo state. A part of me wonders if it wouldn't be better in the long run if the GOP would win in the short run so everyone can wake up to how truly awful they are. Only then will most Americans be motivated to embrace a new party that is culturally Normie, and center Left on policy. I've retained some hope that the Dems could be that party, but I'm becoming increasingly persuaded that their having been tainted, if not captured, by cultural and economic Neoliberalism since the 90s means that they've lost most ordinary Americans for good.