The Political Spectrum

I put my stock in Locke

I have never referred to myself as a “conservative.” I am not. I am a lifelong liberal.

That used to put me on the left of the political spectrum. But now, everything that is not Marxist is considered “right-wing.”

Since Marx has been positively disproven, that more or less means that anyone who is simply lucid is now “right-wing.” Our politics have become that distorted. 

Marx brothers.

There is something deeply symbolic here about the US Democrats rushing to nominate for their presidential candidate someone who is obviously suffering dementia. There is something symbolic about their almost phobic reaction to a seemingly sincere candidate like Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders in favour of an obvious huckster. Honesty and sanity are clear and present dangers.

But liberalism and conservatism are different philosophies, which used to represent the opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Liberalism believes in the political philosophy of John Locke: democracy, equality, human rights. It wants definite limits on government power. It advocates free trade and free markets. The core idea is free choice: man exists to make moral choices, and human dignity accordingly demands that free individual choice must be wherever possible respected. It is generally opposed to foreign entanglements; it does not like the discipline of military culture on principle, and given human equality, other nations need to be free to settle their own affairs. 

Perhaps the founding philosopher of modern conservatism: Edmund Burke.

While not in opposition to this, conservatism has no special interest in democracy, equality, or human rights. It sees the state as an organic entity, like a family. Like a family, it is the duty of the more capable to look after the less capable, as parents might look after children. This rejects equality intrinsically; it means democracy may well also need to be set aside, and human rights. The rights of a child are limited, even if there are more children than adults in the family.

Conservatism sees no formal limits to the power or involvement of the state. The state is there to help as needed, and should do whatever is required. Nevertheless, it would generally prefer non-state solutions. The state is there to preserve and support the culture, and if the culture is healthy, the state has less need to intervene. A healthy culture means a balance of interests, with respect for traditional institutions which have developed organically.

Conservatism believes in an active foreign policy, on the premise that the state has a duty to do its part to preserve international peace, just as neighbours have the duty to look after neighbours. Again, not believing in human equality, it holds that a healthy and a wealthy nation may have a moral obligation to intervene elsewhere to help a less-advantaged population. It prefers favouring local producers over free trade, and sees no problem with government intervening in the market to pursue national interests.

Sometimes modern liberals brand themselves “libertarian.” I do not use this term for myself, because it implies a rigid adherence to liberal principles, and I see good arguments on both sides. In a given situation, I can be persuaded that the conservative policy is better. And there is something intrinsically wrong with being doctrinaire, rather than debating and considering each situation on its merits.

But what does the modern “left” believe? Like conservatives, the Marxist left has no natural interest in either democracy or human rights. Nominally, it sacrifices both to equality. Yet the Marxist concept of “equality” is actually the conservative idea of class difference: that the capable must care for the less capable as if they were children. The “capable” for Marxists meaning the bureaucrats, the professions, or the “vanguard” of intellectuals.

Classical Marxism would and did oppose foreign entanglements, and modern leftists most often do, although inconsistently. Wars exist, in their minds, only to benefit the ruling class. They are supposedly always about “oil,” by which they seem to mean, more specifically, more profits for some oil company. Apparently ordinary people do not need oil, and are oppressed by it.

Marxists not only see no natural limits on the power of the state; Marxists want the state to aggressively appropriate power from all other traditional institutions. This dramatically distinguishes them from either conservatives or liberals. The premise is that all existing traditions exist to perpetuate inequality and buttress the ruling class. Marxists want the state to aggressively destroy the culture as a whole, on the same premise. The classical idea is, of course, that on the rubble a government-free, truly equal society will spontaneously emerge.

This is all rather like a farmer imagining that, if he kills all his livestock and burns all his crops, infinitely better crops and better livestock will spontaneously appear.

Modern Marxists, or at least the modern left, oppose free trade as well. The premise is that free trade helps the rich and harms the poor. This premise seems perfectly arbitrary in Marxist terms, since foreign workers are working class too, and poor people benefit from cheaper manufactures more than the rich, but this is where it stands currently.

And they are aggressively in support of open borders and large-scale immigration, which seems to directly contradict their stance on free trade.

Nevertheless, this contradiction seems less important than the hope that a large influx of people from elsewhere will degrade traditional non-government institutions and traditions, like church, neighbourhood, manners, or family.

I said at the beginning that Marxism has been positively disproven. I do not only mean the conventional argument that everywhere it has been tried it has led to eventual economic stagnation or collapse, and genocide. It has, but that experiment need never have been tried even once. It was already disproven on its own terms before Lenin detrained at the Finland Station.

Marx claimed a scientific basis for his theories. That means they are falsifiable: Marx made certain definite predictions, and if they did not come true, the theory was wrong.

They have not come true.

Marx predicted that over time, a smaller and smaller group of “capitalists” would become wealthier and wealthier, while more and more people would descend to the proletariat, living on wages for manual labour, and this large mass of the population would become poorer and poorer. 

Despite all the Marx-inspired current talk of “income inequality” in the US, this has not happened. The class of people owning the means of production has instead steadily grown, fewer and fewer people are members of the proletariat, and the proletariat itself has become steadily better off.

Marx predicted that the revolution, and the transition to socialism, was a natural evolution, and so would come first to the most industrialized and developed countries. Instead, Marxist revolutions have consistently been in poorer and less developed areas: Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, here and there in Latin America or Africa. And they have tended to collapse into “capitalism” over time. While Marxist parties have had some electoral success in the developed world, it has been hit and miss, and no evolutionary trend seems evident. If anything, their proportion of the popular vote seems in decline. At the same time that Marxism has been growing in influence on the left, the left as a whole seems to have been shrinking. Two words: Jeremy Corbyn.

Marx predicted that, given the intrinsic structural problems in capitalism, over time periodic recessions and depressions would become worse, until the system collapsed. Instead, touching wood, our recessions and depressions have become less severe since the 1930s.

That being so, why is it that Marxism still holds such power over the left, seemingly growing year over year?

I think Marxism thrives as an amoral alternate explanation of society; a trait it shares with that other amoral asteroid-challenged theoretical dinosaur that refuses to lie down and die, Freudianism. If you embrace Marxism, you are free to reject all “bourgeois” moral restraints.

Put it all together, and modern leftism is both a serious mental illness and a dangerous social disease.