August 31, 2010
The Conservative Left
John Stuart Mill once remarked:
“…the enemies of religious freedom, when hard pressed, occasionally accept this consequence, and say, with Dr. Johnson, that the persecutors of Christianity were in the right; that persecution is an ordeal through which truth ought to pass, and always passes successfully, legal penalties being, in the end, powerless against truth, though sometimes beneficially effective against mischievous errors.”
Mill thought this was nonsense. To assume that an idea or argument would triumph in civil society simply because it is true (or valuable) was complacent and false. Persecution could destroy truth; there was no guarantee that right would overcome might. The counter-measure was to guarantee free expression and the conflict of ideas, without fear of persecution, so as to provide the best chance for true – or valuable - ideas to flourish when they might otherwise be suppressed and lost.
The correlate to Mill’s suspicion is the realisation that victorious ideas – often meaning the ideas we now take for granted – will win not because they were right or the best, but because they had the most powerful backers at crucial junctures of history.
Hence, although the American Founding Fathers were clear that they were setting up a republic and explicitly not a democracy, America now presents itself as the leader of the Free World, membership of which requires express commitment to democratic political arrangements. Indeed, on a day when American troops officially pull out of Iraq, many of that conflict’s apologists will claim that the hundreds of thousands dead are a price worth paying for “democracy in the middle east”.
Somewhere and somehow between 1776 and 2010, democracy went from being a byword for anarchy and disorder to the only legitimate form of government in the world – and the rise of American power is at the heart of that tale.
For better or for worse, we now often assume that democracy must have triumphed in the course of history simply because it was right to triumph. We don’t tend to pause and consider just how slippery a concept “democracy” really is. Nor do we often reflect upon the extent to which democracy’s victory was the direct result of two totalitarian states waging a war of mass attrition 70 years ago. It’s easier not to think about complexities; nicer to assume that if things turned out this way, that was because they deserved – and all is better because they did.
Yet how one thinks about the rightness of a set of ideas will often influence how one thinks about its consequences. For example: if one believes that free-market orientated Thatcherism won the battle of ideas in the 1980s because it was the best option for the country, that perhaps makes the resulting socio-economic inequalities 30 years down the line easier to swallow. By contrast, if the British rightward shift post-1979 is perceived as having more to do with the contingencies of a disorganised and suicidal Labour Party than the absolute superiority of right-wing market ideology, then the victory of Thatcherism may seem rather less ordained, and the consequences rather more open to criticism.
Given the importance and power of ideas regarding what people find acceptable, open to criticism, or positively sacrosanct, it’s unsurprising that battles of ideas are frequently waged by powerful figures. This eye-opening New Yorker article illustrates the extent to which the billionaire oil baron Koch brothers fund and direct right-wing campaigns designed to push anti-government libertarian agendas, whilst co-ordinating covert attacks on the Obama administration. The Tea Party movement brands itself as grass roots, but its string-pullers are a tiny, plutocratic capitalist elite.
And this observation of a Tea Party leader seems entirely correct: “Ideas don’t happen on their own. Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” Certainly. For if truth and veracity are insufficient to secure victory, then ideas will indeed need patrons. And the wealthier, more connected and successfully organised those patrons, the better.
But ideas don’t just need patrons, they also need energy. Passion, commitment, fervent belief and a sense of righteous purpose. The Tea Party movement and the ever-more radical American right clearly has these in abundance – even if it presently lacks control, direction or sanity. But even here in the UK, political energy and dynamism has been – for as long as I’ve been politically aware, at least – the property of the political right (in which I include the rightward drift of New Labour and its liberalising, pro-market reforms and acceptance of the Thatcherite settlement).
The left, when not campaigning (usually with futility) on single issues like the Iraq War or climate change, expends most of its energy fighting a rearguard defence against attacks on the welfare state and the remaining non-marketised areas of society. This rearguard defence is made more difficult by the evident fact that the modern left – following the collapse of even the pretence of a viable socialist alternative post-1989 – has no co-ordinated vision of what to put in place of the dominant right wing advance. As usual, the late, great Tony Judt put it best:
“The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly. Job creation, a more ‘social’ Europe, public infrastructural investment, educations reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial. But nothing binds these policies or proposals together into a common political or moral narrative. The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest. And since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.”
TJ said,
August 31, 2010 at 2:20 pm
So in a sense the left has “won.” If one compares the UK today with the UK of 1850, for example, most of the things a left winger of that period could hope for have either been accomplished (universal education, universal welfare provision, universal healthcare, limits on hours worked, minimum wage etc) or been tried and rejected (public ownership of industry).
Nowadays, as Judt says, left wingers don’t really know what they want, except for (roughly speaking) even more of the same.
The left has made itself redundant in success. Huzzah!
Paul Sagar said,
August 31, 2010 at 2:21 pm
I wouldn’t say Huzzah!, as many of those successes are being steadily reversed.
Witness the Tory assault on the NHS currently taking place, albeit very quietly indeed. There’s a good chance massive chunks of the NHS will be privatised within 5 years at this rate.
donpaskini said,
August 31, 2010 at 4:18 pm
“But even here in the UK, political energy and dynamism has been – for as long as I’ve been politically aware, at least – the property of the political right (in which I include the rightward drift of New Labour and its liberalising, pro-market reforms and acceptance of the Thatcherite settlement).”
Don’t agree with this at all. From LGBT rights to Make Poverty History to Stop the War to animal welfare to child poverty to disability rights to civil liberties, lefties have led some very energetic and dynamic campaigns over the last few years which have helped to shape the current political consensus.
RA said,
August 31, 2010 at 8:07 pm
I largely agree with you that the acceptance of ideas can depend on a wide range of contingent and/or material factors. It is a huge mistake (perhaps most often committed by academics) to simply assume the inherent rightness of a particular position or argument will automatically yield social change. At the same time however, I believe it’s equally crucial to avoid giving a monocausal account of why ideas become accepted (e.g., simply because of their allignment with the economic interests of a particular set of interests). I also think it’s important to acknowledge that while the dissemination of political ideas and paradigms always depends to some extent on the existing institutional and interest framework, this does not automatically mean that ideational variables lack causal power altogether (yes, I know you will probably disapprove of the c-word there). A really good collection you might enjoy on this issue in political economy is The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, edited by Peter A Hall.
Finally, I am not really sure it’s entirely fair to suggest that energy or dynamism can solely be claimed by the right or left. I agree with Don that the left has led some energetic political campaigns that are not simply reactions to right-wing advances. Additionally, for all of the attention the Tea Party people may be getting, they equally lack a coordinated vision of what their own political success would mean (aside from some abstract conception of “less government”). Indeed, one of the criticisms of the conservative movement by conservative intellectuals is thatit seems incapable of producing any new ideas.
Paul Sagar said,
August 31, 2010 at 11:27 pm
RA,
I have no qualms with your first paragraph (of course ideas have motivational force on their own – it’s just often that this isn’t enough)
As regards the energy point, I think you and Don are focusing on a different level to me. Sure, the left has run interesting and important campaigns on the issues Don notes (though even here I tend to think more is devoted to resisting the right than outright building). But the point I’m driving at is that none of it is held together by a comprehensive vision. The right, by contrast, generally does have something like a comprehensive vision: to reduce the size and scope of the aspects of the state that restrict business and benefit the working classes, to privatize, and to promote the market. And the right is winning, hands down – not least because it rallies around these simple aims and is getting better at making them happen.
Ronald Collinson said,
September 1, 2010 at 1:12 am
As a lifelong and very conservative Conservative, I found that this post really brought a smile to my face, although for arguably perverse reasons.
I’ve been suffering some ideological angst recently, having found myself since the formation of the Coalition agreeing with much [although by no means all] of the Labour Party’s statements in opposition.
But this shouldn’t be very surprising, really – conservatism is much easier in opposition than in government, and, conversely, opposition encourages conservatim [so I agree that it would be an impressive achievement for the intellectual left in the Labour Party to come up with an alternative programme]. Conservatism is inevitably the doctrine of the vulnerable – that is to say, those who are threatened by events. It leaps to the defence of any threatened person or institution. And given a government of a neo-liberal, reformist bent with an ideological state-cutting agenda, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that conservatives and those who support the welfare state would find themselves allies.
That’s not all there is to it – moving from ideology to institutions, I think there is something intrinsically conservative about much of the Labour Party [and indeed the welfare state - I refer you back to the quotation from Judt that you gave last week]. There’s a new-ish book by Martin Pugh [Speak For Britain!, if I recall correctly] that describes Labour as ‘Britain’s other conservative party’. Without going that far, it makes sense that a party which has drawn much of its strength from the weightiness of demands inspired by real physical need and suffering, should when those needs are satisfied become conservative.
This is obviously not to claim that nobody in the UK labours under conditions of real material deprivation. But that deprivation is never as great, and it is not nearly so widespread. And consequently, no longer required to fill the emptiness in their stomachs, they lose the fire in their bellies – most people stop caring and try instead to protect what they have. This is, I think, an understandable human trait and one that it is fruitless to decry.
But as TJ hinted earlier, from the point of view of these people at least, the ‘left’ has won. That presents a problem for the Labour Party, although not I think an intractable one; I think you underestimate the extent to which fighting for one’s way of life can invest one with energy and a sense of political purpose. But that is a conservative energy. The greater problem, then, is not for the Labour Party itself – which if you’re right about the effect of cuts and shrinking the state will always rise to power when the Conservatives fail – but for the progressive left, which must somehow find a way of improving life for the minority who are still really badly off.
Of course, I feel that the Conservative Party should be doing that as well. for reasons that I can’t go into without making this comment even more absurdly long. But as the Conservative Party is so far gone in neo-liberalism that only a minority appear to have noticed that it isn’t acting in a remotely conservative way, I don’t think there’s much hope of that in the near future.
Ronald Collinson said,
September 1, 2010 at 1:13 am
PS: I know you’ve been vastly unimpressed with Philip Blond, apparently with good reason. Have you ever read anything by Simone Weil? I think you’d find her a much more impressive voice coming from the same general direction.
RA said,
September 1, 2010 at 7:43 am
I suppose our disagreement then might stem from US vs. UK politics, as I’m not really sure the right has been getting any better at enacting policies based on those principles on this side of the Atlantic. Arguably the clearest instance of this during the Bush years was social security privatization, an idea near the top of the conservative agenda that gained no real traction. The left by contrast was able to mobilize enough support to pass a national healthcare bill, which though very problematic, is still a considerable domestic policy reform.
donpaskini said,
September 1, 2010 at 9:29 am
“The right, by contrast, generally does have something like a comprehensive vision: to reduce the size and scope of the aspects of the state that restrict business and benefit the working classes, to privatize, and to promote the market.”
That’s not a very comprehensive description of what “the right” wants to do, though. Many people on the right also want, to take a few examples, to save the traditional family, to stop multiculturalism and mass immigration, or to protect our security by overthrowing governments which support Islamist terrorism, and would regard any of those aims as at least as important than removing anti-business regulations.
I could argue that the Left has a vision, which is about a strong and active state working to reduce poverty, end discrimination, create jobs, improve key public services and fight crime, underpinned by an ambition to support the weak and powerless against the strong and powerful. This isn’t a totally comprehensive list of things which lefties believe (any more than your project is a comprehensive list of things which right-wingers believe), but most lefties would support all of those aims, and there has been pretty significant progress on all over the past few years.
John Meredith said,
September 1, 2010 at 12:13 pm
“Job creation, a more ‘social’ Europe, public infrastructural investment, educations reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial. But nothing binds these policies or proposals together into a common political or moral narrative. ”
Well quite. It is interesting too that the policy priorities that Judt identifies as distinctively ‘left’ would sit just as comfortably in a Thatcherite Tory manifesto. Sadly, the left in the UK has become associated not so much with campaigning for social transformation but with a kind of endless self-pitying whine. ‘Everything is shit, nothing ever gets better, join us’ is not a very inspiring message.
claude said,
September 2, 2010 at 1:25 pm
TJ writes that “the left has made itself redundant in success” and that all old leftist ideals have now turned into reality.
But I can only assume his personal work circumstances are quite fortunate. The past 30 years have seen a spectacular reversal of many achievements in terms of labour legislation in particular.
We have witnessed the galloping rise of labour casualisation, temping and widespread job insecurity, which is a major major issue and a massive defeat for the left, especially given that the subject is no longer talked about -especially in the UK.
Many workplace guarantees that were almost taken for granted until the 1970s have gone. People can be sacked on a whim, certainly much easier than what went on during our parents’ generation.
Directly linked with the above there’s the retreat of unionism.
Inequality has soared non-stop over the past 30 years, both under Tory and Labour administrations.
Levels of taxation too. Take a look.
ad said,
September 2, 2010 at 9:28 pm
“Somewhere and somehow between 1776 and 2010, democracy went from being a byword for anarchy and disorder to the only legitimate form of government in the world”
Democracy would seem to require a mass media in order to work. I imagine the mass media is much larger, and transmits far more information, than it did in 1776.
So perhaps democracy has just become a much better idea since 1776.
(And even if you regard monarchy as another form of legitimate government, Saddams rule did not pass that test – he could hardly claim to be the heir of the rightful ruling house.)
Paul Sagar said,
September 2, 2010 at 10:45 pm
ad,
The rise of the media may very well be an important part of the story. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison fell out quite badly after writing the Federalist papers, over their respective views of the printed press, and the important, power and proper role of “public opinion” in the American Republic as it grew into something like the system we recognise today.
However, my point is really that you’ll find few Americans – or people anywhere else – who don’t espouse the belief that the American founding was a thoroughly democratic affair born of a resistance to British imperial despotism. The truth, however, is that democracy had stuff all to do with the American founding, whatever the subsequent legitimation myths may say.
As for Saddam, i’m not sure what that’s got to do with anything, really.
Carl P said,
September 3, 2010 at 11:14 am
yes exactly – alas http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/08/26/the-parity-of-leftists-and-conservatives/