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.

How Extremist Are You?

I just took this opinion survey from CBC, and was a bit surprised to find myself right in the centre among all respondents. You might like to try.

Surprised, because I think Jordan Peterson, for the most part, is speaking common sense, and I think Milo Yiannopoulos is funny and inoffensive. Yet I am reliably told by professors at WLU that they are both just like Hitler.

My ranking might be skewed left by some of the questions. For example:

Agree or disagree: 

Canadians have a unique set of values that set them apart from the rest of the world.

My guess is that, had I answered “strongly agree,” their algorithm would put me over on the right. However, I must strongly disagree. There is no such thing as “Canadian values.” That is an offensive term, as offensive as speaking of “Aryan values.” Values are universal, or they are nothing. If values differ, for example, it would be impossible to objectively judge “Canadian values” as better than any other arbitrary set of values: Nazi values, perhaps. People either have values, or they do not. On the whole, in world terms, I say Canadians are unusually moral people. But that is not the question that the survey asked.

All immigrants can retain their cultural identities without being any less Canadian.

I had to somewhat agree. I suspect the algorithm puts that on the left. But I think it is true. Look, for example, at Leonard Cohen or Mordecai Richler: essential Canadian writers, but also deeply Jewish in their identities. And it is not just Jews who can do it. Dennis T. Patrick Sears is both a deeply Canadian, and a distinctly Irish, writer. There is a way to be both ethnically distinct and entirely Canadian. I has to do with not seeing your particular ethnicity as opposed to and isolated from the mainstream, but as a facet of it. Nothing is more truly Canadian than this tendency. We really are a mosaic, and it is our necessary destiny, thanks to French Canada. It is this tendency to get along and feel united in our diversity that we seem to be losing.

University and college officials should have the right to ban people with extreme views from speaking on campus.

I had to somewhat agree, which probably threw me towards the left again. The issue is religious schools, and the problem is not “extreme views.” There is no such thing, properly speaking, as an “extreme view,” and to the extent that there is, these are the very views you want to hear on a university campus: new and unfamiliar ideas. But a school with a religious charter must have the right to find certain views unacceptable, if they are heresy for that religion. Otherwise there is no meaning to the concept of a “religious school.” So it is necessary for religious freedom to allow such restrictions. Even if not religious, if a school has some statement of principles in its charter, it seems proper too for its officials to prohibit speakers who differ from these principles from using campus facilities. Support for the UN, universal human rights, liberal democracy, for example. Freedom of speech is not thereby infringed, because students have implicitly signed on to those principles by choosing voluntarily to attend the institution.

This would not apply in the recent controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University. There is nothing in WLU's charter or mission statement that would prevent the discussion of any issue current in the wider polis. In this case, the views were simply banned as an exercise of arbitrary power by a group of officials imposing their own views, in a public university.

Road signs across Canada should always be written in both English and French.

I have to strongly agree. This probably got me tagged as on the left. But the one part of Canada where this is not currently true is Quebec. I cannot fathom the attitude of those who object to seeing the other language on a sign or a cereal box. Doing so seems to me to simply fall in the category of common courtesy and neighbourliness. You ought to want to encourage it if only to promote tourism. Who does it harm?

Indigenous Peoples in Canada should be free to govern themselves.

I have to agree again, which again probably puts me on the left. Indigenous people have the same right to govern themselves that everyone has. They do this, in the first place, by participating in Canadian elections. They have the additional right to associate and to set up rules among themselves, just as anyone does by, for example, joining a Rotary Club. This is freedom of association. Nobody should stop them if they so desire. They even have the theoretical right to declare independence and become sovereign, just as we recognize that Quebec has this right. It would be a self-inflicted catastrophe for them if they did, but they have the right.

By the same token—and this is more important, but this question is not asked—every individual Indian equally has the right to walk away from any form of aboriginal government, and not suffer a loss of rights for it. Such associations, within Canada, must be voluntary—freedom of association. This is the pressing issue currently.

Francophones and Anglophones should be able to receive public services in their own language anywhere in Canada.

I had to somewhat agree. They ought to be able to receive services from the federal government in their own language. It seems to me impractical to expect services from provincial and municipal governments in either language where numbers do not warrant it.

On other questions, however, it seems to me I should register as on the right: no, we owe no more to the natives; no, it is not important to have more visible minorities in senior positions; I am “very proud” of Canada's history. No, rich provinces should not share with poor provinces (there is such a thing as moving for work). Yes, the effects of climate change are exaggerated. No there has been no cultural genocide of native people in Canada. No, people who were born male but identify as female should not be allowed to use women's washrooms (at least, not without some objective standard, like a surgical change or a change of status on their birth certificate; but such qualifications were not allowed by the question). No, people should not be allowed to cover their faces for religious reasons when receiving public services—but only because nobody has to cover their face for a religious reason. The claim that Islam does is a scam, and allowing it is only too likely to enable scams. Arab countries do not allow it, and we should not. If any religion did require this, the matter would be different. No quotas for women; quotas for women are discriminatory, as are quotas for “visible minorities.” No, white privilege is not a thing.

I begin to suspect that Canadians as a whole are not nearly as leftist as we are claimed to be, or as our “elites.”