(no subject)

[barking_iguana]

Written elsewhere, responding to recurrent nonsense about how the Right is really about more freedom and the Left less. I don't think I'm telling anyone here anything new, but maybe you'll find some of the points useful in your own dealings with the clueless, even if the whole is a little rambly.

DavePat wrote:

See this again is how low we have sunk. Left and right were pure political ideolog terms. The more right you were the more you believed in individual freedom and worth, the more left the more you tended to government can do it for you!...

I wrote:

DavePat, you are rewriting history (or, more likely, uncritically accepting others' rewriting of history) to suit your propaganda needs. Right and Left were originally anything but an axis with individual freedom on the right. It was the arrangement of seating in the French legislature.

The extreme right wanted to restore the old order. That meant no freedom for those outside small, interlocking ruling elites. Those who claimed the extreme Left seats wanted to overthrow all aspects of the old order. That also had the effect of eliminating freedom, because only a runaway state had the power to so radically and rapidly remake the admittedly (by most) awful old order.

Those who saw that the policies of the extreme Left would not accomplish their goals could dispute that who should really have been considered most Left. There was nos such dispute on the Right. The Right was and always has been epitomized by those who wish to vest unfettered power in the traditional elites of their country, whether they be theocrats, plutocrats, militarists, or titled nobility.

For a little over a century, the plutocrats have couched their arguments in terms of individual freedom. For most of that time, few people outside the plutocratic circles themselves bought such nonsense. But in the last thirty years, disingenuous cadres of pro-plutocrats styling themselves Libertarians have recruited many who have never stopped to consider that private (or governmental, or any) control of natural resources is only accomplished by force and maintained by force and therefore the exact nature of control over those resources and their fruits in inherently political.

The traditional European discipline of Political Economy provides a coherent framework to examine such issues. The latter American absolute division between Political Science and Economics does little but obscure the underlying reality, at the behest of those who wield power but wish to remain unconsidered.

Further, any notion of the Right as protectors of freedom completely ignores the clerical component of the Right. Until 60 years ago, at least as many defenders of individual liberty would term themselves conservative as liberal (in the American senses of those words). That is no longer the case. As the clerics have reasserted themselves as a central part of the conservative movement, it has become very rare to find someone like Charles Evans Hughes or William Howard Taft who will defend freedom from the conservative side.

The Left, drawing its values from the Enlightenment, has always been on the one hand hostile to arbitrary power of any kind, whether by the Church, the Army, the gentry and their corporate descendants, of civil officials. On the other hand the Left has also always been drawn to notions of a fairly run, powerful state that can effectively free people from such arbitrary power.

Even prior to my lifetime, those who distrusted any such 'vanguardist' state had been growing in preponderance in the American Left for generations. Reaction to the Nixon Administration decisively tipped the balance in the direction it was already heading, and the behavior of the national Republican Party since then has only solidified the American Left's wariness of incursions into individual liberty.

Those who see "property rights" as naturally completely divorced from the political force that created the property may fail to see how anti-discrimination laws are less of an abridgment of individual rights than refusing to allow some groups to participate in the full economy would be. That's the pseudo-libertarian's myopia, not a neglect of freedom on the part of the Left. The same goes for reasonable restrictions (NOT commercial eminent domain, regardless of its constitutionality) on uses of property that harm the public by taking advantage of what economists call "externalities," in which (for example environmental) costs are socialized while profit remains private.

And so just as it has become hard to find defenders of freedom among the conservatives, it has become hard to find anyone active on the left who does NOT support individual freedom. (Non-ideological party hacks on either side should not be counted for these purposes. I'm only considering those who are active in politics or influencing politics chiefly out a sense of right and wrong, not those are just following their vocation and choose their positions entirely out of convenience.)