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.

Libertarianism vs. Feminism

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding regarding the political doctrine currently called Libertarianism. A left-wing friend of mine recently referred to Ayn Rand as the “high priestess of libertarians.” This is certainly wrong, since Rand condemned libertarianism. Another complained of the semi-libertarian Canadian Reform Party, some years ago, that it violated the traditions of Canadian conservatism, and was a foreign import (i.e., from the evil United States). Yet an American friend objects to the libertarians on the grounds that they have no history there, unlike the mainstream Republicans.

Obviously, many people think libertarianism is something new. I am not sure why this seems to them to be a telling, indeed a decisive, criticism; I am not sure what they really mean by this. But the claim is certainly false. Only the name is new. It was coined by HL Mencken in the 1930s, as a new term for the doctrine traditionally called liberalism, because that term had been co-opted by FDR to describe his New Deal. The New Deal was essentially the opposite of liberalism, which had always stressed personal autonomy and limited government.

In other words, libertarianism is simply liberalism. It is the political stance championed by Thomas Jefferson, and, more broadly, the founding assumption behind the US Declaration of Independence. Hardly something foreign to the American experience. In Canada, it is plainly the same political creed held by Laurier, the Clear Grits, Baldwin and Lafontaine, and Joseph Howe; certainly within the Canadian mainstream. In the UK, it is Gladstone’s program. If you doubt this, simply check the policies they campaigned for, the party platforms of the day: smaller government, freer trade, less regulation of our daily lives, no foreign adventures. The consistency of the liberal/libertarian doctrine over time is in fact striking.

Lafontaine and Baldwin.

Far from being new, therefore, this thing currently called “libertarianism” in the US can be traced directly back to the philosophy of John Locke (17th century). He in turn had his clear antecedents among the early Jesuits, who built on St. Thomas Aquinas, who built on some principles clearly stated in the Bible. You don’t see a longer philosophical pedigree for any other political stance.

So why does it seem to so many to be something new and radical? Because in the US, the general public was subjected to a verbal shell game in the 1930s, when a political approach that really was new, the New Deal, was marketed with the euphemism “liberal.” This was done because its proper name was unsalable. The British euphemism of the day was a bit more direct: “labour.” On the continent, it was called “socialism.” But at the time, the proper moniker in current use might even have been “Trotskyism”—that’s what Orwell called his own brand of democratic socialism. Bit of a tough sell in the USA, then or now. So they used, and still used, “liberal” or “progressive” in the US.

This illegitimately appropriated a fake pedigree for social democracy, as if it were the culmination of the ideas of Jefferson and Jackson. At the same time, it left the ideas of Jefferson and Jackson looking like orphans. This may be behind the insistence that libertarianism is something “new.” The modern left does not want to accept the truth that their own pedigree is bogus. But the plain historical fact is that it is. The pedigree of the modern left goes back to Marx.

The influence of American culture is such that the same verbal sleight-of-tongue has confused political terminology elsewhere, although in most of the world even now liberal still means liberal. In Canada, more influenced by the US than anyone, it has led to the myth of the “Red Tories.” 

Last of the red-hot Tories.

There are not now and never have been any “Red Tories.” The “Red Tory” program is simply the Tory program, traditional conservatism, Burkean conservatism, which likes big, paternal government. The non-Red Tories are the traditional liberals, the Clear Grits. There is a reason why, in Laurier’s day, the Liberal party dominated the Prairies, while today, the non-Red Tory Conservatives do. The politics of the West have not changed; only the party programs.

If all of this is clear so far, a further interesting question arises. What caused this major political shift, which seems almost like a switching of roles between left and right? What caused a political philosophy that used to regularly command about 50% popular support, in Canada, the US, and the UK--liberalism--to fall back to a minority movement—libertarianism in the US, the Liberal Democrats in the UK? And in all three countries, at about the same time? The last clearly liberal administration in the US was Calvin Coolidge’s, elected in 1924; although Reagan ran as a liberal, he did not succeed in actually reducing the size of government. The last large-l-Liberal Prime Minister of Britain, Lloyd George, resigned in 1922. In Canada, Mackenzie King went from being a traditional liberal, in his early years in power, to a New Dealer in the 30s. But by that time, he was actually imitating RB Bennett's conservatives in the switch: if the Liberals had not occupied this new turf, the Tories would have.

The obvious answer, and I think the traditional one, is that the Depression changed our perspective on traditional laissez-faire liberalism. John Maynard Keynes's new economics supplanted the traditional liberal economics as a response to this crisis. A re-evaluation of both Keynsian economics and traditional liberalism in light of the stagflation of the Seventies then led to the revival of classic liberalism under Reagan. But this explanation does not really work. Look again at those dates: the shift was already apparent in the 1920s, before the Depression hit. 

In the long run, he's dead.

We may even be reversing cause and effect here.

There is another major political event that seems be be a better contender in explaining the shift. There a sudden doubling of the electorate at about this time in all these countries. It should hardly be surprising if this had some effect. Women got the right to vote in Britain in 1918. No Liberal government has been elected since that date, although they were in power then. Women got the right to vote in the US in 1922. Only one further liberal government, two years later; the re-election of an incumbent. After that, never again, with the possible exception of Reagan.

In Canada, the franchise was extended in 1917. In the very next election, 1921, there was an unprecedented electoral earthquake. A new party, the Progressives, formed only the year before, came from nowhere to win the second-largest number of seats in parliament.

Their program was ideologically mixed: they have traditionally been painted as a regional party representing the West, and an agrarian party. But something obviously had changed. They called for freer trade, a liberal position, but rather more radically, for the nationalization of key industries, notably communications and transportation. They wanted fixed grain shipping rates. In other words, their program was largely socialist. The great majority of the “Progressives” then melded into the Liberal Party, while the more “radical” among them became the CCF/NDP.

There you have it. Men and women are different, and want different things. Men in general want freedom and independence. They want government to stay off their backs, and the right to manage their own affairs. Women in general want to be taken care of. They want security and seek to avoid personal responsibility. No surprise if this is reflected in their voting patterns, and has changed the political landscape.

Prohibition: A good way to raise prices.

The original and overriding “feminist” issue was Prohibition—in itself, whatever its other merits, a major intrusion into daily life. Its failure briefly held back the progress of the “women’s movement,” but by the Sixties feminism was back on track. The personal is again political. And, while serious liberalism could command 50% of an all-male electorate, it manages only about 25% of a mixed male-female electorate.

So what? Don't women have the same right to choose their own government that men do? Surely yes, as a question of natural right. However, this may be a big problem for practical purposes. There may, in the end, be a practical reason why our ancestors so often sought to ban women from the council fires. Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab historian whom Arnold Toynbee has called the founder of the social sciences, collated a great deal of evidence in support of a theory of the rise and fall of civilizations. Civilizations inevitably decline, he theorized, because the burden of government inevitably grows to the point at which it drains the vitality of the state.

Restricting the vote to men only might have been a practical way to slow this decline. Extending it to women might be a good way to hasten the process.

Indeed, it seems clear that Western Civilization as a whole has been in some kind of a funk since about 1918. Another obvious correlation with votes for women...