Mick Hume has me worried, not for the first time. If I want to be gently scared, much rather a challenging column than a horror film (generally much less alarming than, and approximately as soporific as, the Shopping Channel).
He is describing Spiked!’s political position:-
We stand on the left as it was originally named, after those who stood on that side of the National Assembly during the French Revolution to champion reason, science, liberty and the secular values of the Enlightenment. We don’t want to return to the past, but to see those gains of humanity defended and developed in the changing context of the twenty-first century.
Well that certainly sounds attractive. Except for the word “left”. I have been defining myself as right-wing, by default, for 30 years. Any adherence to policies promoting human freedom (from atheisim to legalising cannabis to banning torture) out the conventional Left have always seemed to me adventitious, adopted only as markers of difference from reactionary traditionalists, not springing from principle. The basic principle, of subordinating individual lives to wiser-than-thou ruling class—and catering to the velleity of the mob—was always repulsive. Better identify, then, with the limited, pessimistic, ambition of the Right and find both a space to live and scope for pragmatic arguments for liberty.
The truth is, of course, the Left-Right division never made sense. It ought to be politics for the simple-minded, who can think only in one dimension. But everywhere serious, bright people are mentally enslaved by it.
My guess is Mr Hume has had a mirror of my experience: he has thought of himself as opposed to repulsive “right-wing” things throughout his life, and therefore is comfortable being Left, which I could never be. An acquaintance on The Salisbury Review once described me as having gone so far right to have come out the other side and being “practically a communist”—but I don’t feel it. Red flags (red ties even, Mr Bush) make me shudder.
The truth is, of course, that the rationalists on Spiked! and the rationalists on Samizdata are both too sentimental to abandon the political labels they have had imposed on them and have grown up with. A bit of explicit redefinition of those terms, which we indulge ourselves with, will not help us.
The point of politics, and therefore of political labels, is not to explain the world, but change it. Meanwhile the utterly unsentimental are doing just that, by appeal to popular sentiment, and by changing the language implicitly. They do not worry about coherence or clarity of definition, because social reality is defined in institutional power, and in the popular stories that make up “common sense”. It is not what we call ourselves that matters. It is what other people call us—and whether they can be persuaded to notice us at all.
Wanted: A new banner.
The terms “left” and “right” wing originate from where people sat in the French National Assembly after the Revolution.
The more you favoured the King, the further to the right you sat.
The Libertarians sat on the extreme left.
The terms “left” and “right” wing are wholly discredited. I usually prefer “radical”.
I have for at least two years I have felt uncomfortable describing myself as right wing, lest I be tarred with the same brush as the authoritarian, moralising, big government creepy crawlies who may also hail from the right. Trouble is, if I describe myself as “classically liberal”, most people don’t have a clue what I’m going on about. Then when I explain what classical liberalism’s about, and how it’s definitely not a left-wing position, they say “oh, so you’re right-wing”. Back to square one.
The best communication is that which is understandable to its target. So if I’m not sure how savvy the person I’m addressing is, I’ll use “right wing”, then qualify it to get as close to my perspective as possible.
But the term “right wing” is not really suitable at all.
As a person who calls myself a libertarian, I have to say I agree with ‘Spiked!’ considerably more than most conservative blogs these days. You’re right, ‘left and right’ is redundant in the modern political landscape.
Nothing will beat Jerome Tucille’s description of Rothbard and his followers in 1969 as comprising “the moderate anarchist center”.
My views can best be described as those leaning moderately towards and twirling around the outer rim of the event horizon of the super massive black hole at the center of this universe on this dimensional plane.
http://www.zod2008.com
Bastiat sat on the left of the National Assembly – but that was decades after the French Revolution.
I can not think of any libertarians in the National Assembly in the French Revolution – the people there tended to favour fiat money, plundering and murder (whereever they sat).
Although, of course, most of the National Assembly where either dead (killed by other revolultionaries) or fled within a few years of the start of the French Revolution.
As for “left” and “right”. Well as ardent collectivists like Hitler are described as “right wing” (becouse the National Socialists sat on the right hand side of the German Parlaiment), but ardent collectivists like Lenin, or Mao are described as “left wing”.
I prefer “voluntarist” (someone who believes in civil “voluntary” interaction) – but just “libertarian” will do.
I agree that the terms “left” and “right” are not useful.
I Think today a better split than Left Right is collectivist/individualist but this then splits into classic left and right, with the statist being split into who benefits from their control, and a sizable chunk of so called freedom lovers only wantimng to grant limited freedoms. A broad brush
Right wing statists tend to want only economic freedoms (and only to a limited scale)
The left only the “personel” freedoms they will allow.
I have taken to dropping the Whig / Classical liberal banner because people have no idea what I am on about and seem to latch onto the modern meaning of Liberal, or class me as a right winger if I have the patience to explain.
Before the last election I answered one of the silly left right quizzes on the net, and despite putting down that I believe in free movement of people (immigration), free trade found myself lumped on the extreme right wing with Stephen Pollard and the BNP
Ever considered ‘libertarian’ & ‘statist’. These seem to fit more closely what the groups concerned actually believe (& puts Tony Blair’s bunch in their correct corner)
It seems to me that there are multiple dimensions to the political philosophy of most thinking people. Left vs right has survived because it is a useful short-hand representation of political positions, particularly in the era of soundbite politics.
On the other hand, if we want to represent more information, we need to represent more information. We will never eliminate the use of this shorthand, so we should try to modify the shorthand to allow useful and accurate representation of positions.
Here’s a stab at extending the shorthand…
There is the traditional pro-market vs anti market dimension. (I think this is normally what is referred to by the right-vs-left thing. It would be foolish to abandon this. Any new shorthand has to include it)
There is pro-big-government vs anti-big-government (I’m going to call this south (big g) vs north (small g).)
There is socially liberal vs socially conservative. This is a bit more blurred, but refers to items like drug prohibition, abortion and divorce. I’m going to call this west vs east.
So, in this shorthand, I’m a right-north-westerner.
I agree with Dominic’s suggestion that we go with “Libertarian” and “Statist.”
Being American, I’m doubly frustrated by this because here “liberal” means only “Democrat,” which is about the last thing I would describe myself as. The old “classical liberal” sense is almost completely vanished. So I’ve made it a point of calling leftists “leftists” in discussions rather than using the more traditional “liberal.” But of course – this is an exercise in futility. If the vast majority of the population uses “liberal” to mean “leftist,” then that’s what it means. And anyway – as Guy points out, my aversion to “leftists” is really pretty knee-jerk anyway. In fact, there are beliefs on both the left and the right that are repulsive such that nitpicking about which is worse is just that: nitpicking.
Dominic’s labels “libertarian” and “statist” seem like a workable solution. Arguments in favor of them:
(1) People seem to naturally think in dichotomies, so if we’re going to replace the old labels we might as well replace them with another two-label system, at least for now.
(2) We all have a clear place to stand on this scale. Indeed – I think it would clear up confusion about some things (for example – that “extremist” policies always lead to disaster – an idea that comes from misleadingly putting Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler on opposite ends of the political spectrum).
(3) We don’t have to tweak the language any. No need to monkey with terms people are comfortable with to get our point across since “statist” and “libertarian” mean pretty much what we use them to mean among the general population already.
Kieran Barry: you’ve found yourself a convert – I think I’ll adopt the same shorthand as you and also call myself a right-north-westerner!
Thanks Mike. Welcome to the right north-west!
Of course, the value of any system is based on the size of the network using it, and is normally measured by the square of the number of users.
We now have a value of 4.
Do we need an extra dimension of authoritarian vs citizen’s rights for issues like the ID cards bill? If we use “lower vs upper”, I’d then be an upper-right north-westerner.
And have I chosen the right categories?
It’s funny, only the other day I was only thinking how inadequate the Left / Right shorthand is for describing a person’s political opinions. One problem is that the terms have no absolute value, but seem to apply to one mind-set in one country and the opposite mind-set in a different one. For example in the early 1990’s the die-hard communists in Russia, who were intent upon stopping the process of liberalisation which was just beginning, were described on the BBC as “Right Wing” i.e conservative in that they wanted to conserve the status quo. I always had my suspicions that the BBC just wanted to associate the word conservative with the baddies, and by implication tarnish the image of the Conservative Party in Britain.
A much better (although still inadequate) framework for understanding is this: http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/questionnaire.php which differentiates between economic and social freedoms.
The problem is that the media, and I suspect many others, like labels. They allow them to nurture their prejudices – thus Right Wing (in Britain at least) is now a pejorative term associated with racists and bigots, who find their political voice within socialist i.e. left wing (economically) parties like the BNP.
If, in the context of Mr Hume’s article the term “right” does mean the “etablishment” “the ruling class”, call them what you will, I can see what he’s getting at, http://www.oncemore.co.uk/2005/10/labour_forever.html – sadly we’re going to be stuck with this lot for a very long time, and, if opposition to the established order is left wing, whether in 18th century France , 20th century Russia or 21st century Britain then maybe he’s right and we on the right are the new left.
But what would you call a communist from Carlisle?
Having grown up in Apartheid South Africa the term ‘right wing’ makes me shudder with revulsion – even though I might be described as such for certain of my Libertarian viewpoints.
Funny thing was that in SA, the right wing Nats were big into Govt intervention (huge civil service) and the lefties were less so (excluding their communist allies).
I regard the neo-lib/libertarian and neo-con alliance to be an unholy one.
Your Carlisle communist would be a geographical north-westerner.
He would be a political lower-left-south-easterner.
I think we should certainly distinguish between right wing and conservative. They’re not the same – although I’d have a harder time describing the differences.
Rob makes a good point. “Right wing” is now a term of abuse approximately akin to baby-killing. This is odd given that the “right” have won all the important arguments. Actually, it’s not that odd given the extreme street-cred of failure.
Anyway, fair or not, “right-wingers” need to take a leaf out New Labour’s book and find a new word for their beliefs. Tony is living proof that words are important in gaining votes. The key is to use the language of the Guardianistas – it completely unnerves them. Post-war communist dictatorships were not called “The Communist Dictatorship of X” they were reassuringly named “The People’s Republic of X”.
I suggest the following –
i) liberals (vs authoritarians)
ii) radicals (vs conventionists)
iii) progressives (vs the establishment)
Oh, and the name Conservative would have to be changed too. Possible suggestions would be –
i) The Enterprise party
ii) The Workers’ Party
iii) The Freedom Party
iv) Liberty
May I strongly advise you take a peek at a friend’s blog:
(Link)
While seriously academic in tone, he nevertheless provides a substantive, data-driven means by which freedom is given its own axis, equally important to the ideals of egalitarianism and order.
Back in November last year I wrote about some of these issues, without reaching any firm conclusion.
My argument, when I get it straight, is that broadly we place ourselves politically, and I guess morally too, with reference to a whole complex of dimensions, which are personal, messy and not properly distinct one from another. Left and Right are external categories and when we describe ourselves in that way we are attempting to map that internal self image into a common language. There will be an inevitable conflict between that internal image and the common language.
Someone has mentioned the Political Compass but there is another attempt at the Political Survey
Nolan Chart
Don’t know about you, but I’m a disestablishmentarian in the classical sense of opposing an official state religion. Could we use this term to apply to all things statist, state-education, state-medical services, state-welfare etc?
The great thing though is that you could call statists antidisestablishmentarians, and we’d already have a great slogan “Down with the Establishment, Vote Disestblishment Now!”. Now that would really mess with the socialists.
I sort of like “individualist” versus “collectivist.” (perhaps “FREE” v. “BORG?”)
I tend to describe myself as a libertarian socialist, which is an older usage of libertarian than the curent one and has the merit of winding almost everyone up nicely.
(by the way your anti-spambot system is playing up again…)
I have to see if I can get LeoTest to post the actual test up on his blog. The protocol he came up with makes the Nolan Test look retarded by comparison (though it’s nowhere near as fast to take.)
And are you a vegetarian carnivore as well?
Perry:
perhaps he’s a Christian atheist as well….
No one’s mentioned “objectivist” vs. “mystic”. And where the heck are the anabaptists and Hussites?
Russ raises a very good point about multidimensional systems: you want to be sure your axes are independent. The fun is deciding what sort of independent. Logical independence may mean many of your (hyper-quadrants) are very sparsely populated, even when the axes mark ideas that are important in political theory. A lot of attempts to do this have little rigour, logical or statistical, and poor inventory design. (It seems odd that this sort of thing fell out of favour in the social sciences just as modern computing was making the number-crunching straightforward.)
A quasi-empirical model driven by where most people are, or are assumed to be (or are comfortable being), is more or less what I’m objecting to here. But it need not be collapsed to one dimension. Hans Eysenck claimed to have two orthogonal axes: Conservatism-Radicalism and Toughminded-Tendermindedness with questionnaires to detect those attributes, shown to produce uncorrelated results.
Which raises another interesting question, again illustrated by my and Mr Hume’s often similar politics, differently self-described. Are views on political questions driven by personality factors? Is there an interaction between analysis and attitude we need to take into account?
There’s also the question of scale. How do we know how far apart we might be along such dimensions, let alone in the space they span? What would the metric measure?
Here’s a good essay by Rothbard that outlines how the meaning of left and right has changed over time.
He says modern “leftists” are terribly confused, because they seek liberal ends via conservative means.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard33.html
And nobody’s offered a new banner 🙁
“Do we need an extra dimension of authoritarian vs citizen’s rights for issues like the ID cards bill? If we use “lower vs upper”, I’d then be an upper-right north-westerner.
Mmmm I reckon your big-government – anti-big-government dimension covers that sort of thing. I’ll stick with right-north-westerner, though sadly I see our value is still only four!
Guy: “right-north-westerners”? I particularly like the ‘ers’ suffix denoting a group of people rather than the mere abstract idea(s) a la ‘libertarians’.
This point made by Rob is the essential problem with using “left” and “right” – it means the meaning of the terms is purely derived from knowledge (or opinion) of history and culture, whereas Dominic’s suggestion of “statist” and “libertarian” very blatantly and simply refer to two things which undoubtedly exist to their varying extents independently of anyone’s particular knowledge or view of history or culture – and indeed these two particular things are the things that are the crux of the debate: state and liberty.
A new banner? After the pro-War extreme left hit upon “Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR”, I think we are best off conceding the game. I can’t think of anything half as good as that.
I quite like Perry’s “social individualist” tag that he sometimes uses because it actually captures the elements involved. I am a “libertarian” who recognises we do not and should not live in atomised isolation from each other. I also think social pressures and contraints will protect me better than violence imposed state contraints in many, many instances.
Also, it has the virtue of reclaiming the word “social” from the socialists, who are people who really don’t want anything to be “social” at all.
Anna: yeah, true – but doesn’t sound as good!
Rewriting history I see – libertarian as a term was used by socialists long before its current usage became common. Just because you don’t like doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
Try reading Bakunin and Kropotkin.
What a term meant in the 1890s is almost completely irrelevant to what it means today. The history of a term is interesting to be sure, but it is not a reliable guide to present usage.
“Socialist libertarian” is an oxymoron under the current uses of those terms. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
I suggest you have a look at a wonderful new tool called an Internet Search Engine – or even a good library if such still exsitis in your area – where you will find lots of people using the term rather later than 1890.
I suggest you avail yourself of a similar tool and familiarize yourself with the term “standard usage.” Just because you and your friends think there is such a thing as “libertarian socialism” doesn’t make it true for the general population.