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Rethinking Political Spectrums |
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Right, Left, Right, Left…
How often do we think about what political labels really mean?
Previously, where you fell on the political spectrum between Right and Left revolved around one central question: How much control should the government have over the economy? The far Left was defined as Communist (complete control), the far Right as, well, maybe something like laissez-faire capitalism (no government regulation). Fascists were also lumped in with the far Right, for reasons I’ll get to later.
Some have suggested that your political orientations are best determined by your answers to two questions: 1) Are you “socially liberal” or “socially conservative”? and 2) Are you “financially liberal” or “financially conservative”?
The answers to these questions produce a quadrant. Socially and financially liberal? Call yourself a socialist or a leftist Democrat. Socially and financially conservative? Call yourself a Republican. Socially liberal, financially conservative? Libertarian (or moderate Republican) you are. Socially conservative, financially liberal? Call yourself a, well, I don’t know. Maybe a conservative Democrat.
The problem with all these labels is that they mask huge differences even among people who supposedly stand at the same point on the spectrum (or the quadrant). Take two people on the “far Right”: one a businessman who supports Republican financial policies and favors a lock-em-up approach for criminals and drug users, the other a conservative Christian who wants abortion outlawed and the Ten Commandments put into schools. How much do these people have in common beyond a label?
Now take two people on the “far Left”: one cares about animal rights and the situation in Haiti, the other about solving the homelessness problem and switching to renewable energy. How much do they have in common beyond a label?
But if we throw the spectrum out the window, what are we left with?
The first metaphor I considered was just a bag. Grab bag, if you will. Friends laughed when I first mentioned the idea, but it’s not as stupid as it sounds: given how consumerist our society is, it’s no surprise that we “shop around” for our pet issues in politics. On the Left, the fragmentation of the countercultural movement after the Vietnam era left an almost infinite number of causes floating around. The spectrum of causes and issues that exists just within the environmental movement should amply demonstrate my point. On the Right, the supposed unity around economic policies and “family values” issues conceals a significant diversity of perspectives. So maybe we’re just shoppers, stuffing issues and causes into our political napsacks and hauling them around with us.
But the bag metaphor is too individualistic - it doesn’t really capture the differences that exist between groups.
So let’s have a new spectrum. Here’s my proposition: at the Left, put “Social Justice.” At the Right, about three quarters of the way down, put “Status Quo.” All the way to the Right, put “Purification.”
What does all that mean?
Well, the way I see it people on the Left (to varying degrees, as you move left) are interested in building a more just society. Clearly there are extremists, whose idea of a “just society” might not seem that just to the rest of us. But the majority of people who operate at the far Left end of the spectrum are not extremists, and only some of them are Communists.
The desire for social justice is common to many groups, conservative and liberal. However, the Left’s version of social justice, if for clarity’s sake I must narrow it, emphasizes protecting the individual’s legal and human rights while expanding government programs that assist the disadvantaged. The Left’s version of social justice holds that the government, as the formal and legal instrument of popular will, should act to establish quality standards of living, health, and safety for all citizens, while refraining from interfering with their private lives.
These ideas lead some Leftists to embrace economic ideas like Communism and socialism. But for others of us at the far Left, those economic ideas are just that: ideas. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and the focus is on solving the problem. I want to solve homelessness, poverty, drug abuse, social inequality, environmental damage, etc. If massive government spending could help us do that, it’s worth a shot, and it definitely makes more sense to me than continuing to funnel money into our military-industrial complex.
If the Left advocates government spending, that doesn’t mean we should fall into the trap of depicting the Left as “bigger government” and the Right as “smaller government”: so-called small government conservatives like Ronald Reagan have expanded the size of the government, particularly the size of its military. Conservative administrations in America like Reagan’s or George W. Bush’s have also supported greater government incursion into citizens’ private lives, as in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. The division between liberals and conservatives over the size of government is really a dispute over the form and the priorities of a massive government that will inevitably exist.
Does the Leftist vision of social justice hold that private property should be abolished? No, not in my view - it just means the richest country in the world should take care of its own. And if there are other good ways to build a more just society - passing certain laws, supporting activist groups in civil society, etc - I’m willing to experiment with those too.
Some aspects of building a more just society are cultural as well as economic battles - the struggle to promote equality between genders, races, religions, and people of different sexual orientations, for example, is in many ways a cultural rather than economic one. And when it comes to foreign policy, I take the idea of social justice global: to the greatest extent possible, the United States should strive to be a positive force in the world. Does that mean imposing our ideas on other people at the barrel of a gun? No, it doesn’t, and given where we’re at right now I think doing no harm would be a good starting point for our foreign policy.
As we move Right, we find people interested in preserving the status quo: preserving social inequality, preserving “traditional values,” preserving a fixed type of national and cultural identity. This helps to explain the unity of rightwingers on issues as varied as immigration, the military, the environment, and so on: because as much as the Right claims to be “for” issues, in reality they are predominately against change.
Why isn’t maintaining the Status Quo at the center? Because the center, as I see it, cautiously accepts the need for some slow change. The real conservatives are the ones who actively attempt to entrench the Status Quo - not the status quo of culture, but the real Status Quo of corporate power, antidemocratic electoral processes, the concentration of instruments of power such as the media into fewer and fewer hands, and institutional mechanisms that enforce social inequality.
As we move to the extreme Right, we find people who want to go “beyond” the status quo to make sure that only certain types of people can participate in society. On the extreme Right we find groups who want “purity”: purity for white people, purity for straight people, purity for certain religious groups, purity for certain languages, etc. This explains why we usually call fascists far Right, regardless of what their economic ideas are.
So, what does all this mean for progressives?
I think that redefining the political spectrum helps us to know better where we stand and what we stand for. That, in turn, will help us to counter conservatives’ arguments and present ourselves more effectively to centrists. For example, the phrase “family values,” despite the disgusting hypocrisy of many of its self-styled representatives, is a genius slogan because no one is against family values - only against specific definitions of that phrase. Progressives need not only to co-opt such phrases (we, after all, are the true proponents of strengthening America’s families), but also to promote our own. We can start with phrases like “a more just society.” Who doesn’t want that?
Taking another look at the political spectrum should also give us some optimism. The defenders of the status quo may look strong at any given moment - and sometimes it seems that the real examinations of social inequality in our society have come only in moments of crisis. But on the cultural level, at least, progressive forces seem to win out more than they lose. Birth control is readily available in most of America now. A broader spectrum of people participate in public life, not just white male property owners. Conservatives are fighting bitterly to exclude gay people, to erect barriers against immigrants of different cultural backgrounds - but I believe they will lose these battles as they have lost others. If human societies are by nature dynamic, defenders of the status quo are at an inherent disadvantage.
On a final note, I ran these ideas by some of my peers here at The Seminal before publishing them. lgs asked where libertarians would fall on the spectrum of status quo to social justice, and that’s a difficult question to answer. Honestly, I think they might fall out all along the spectrum according to their individual beliefs - libertarians seem like a more diverse group than others, ideologically. Broadly speaking, despite their conservatism on financial matters I would still place them to the Left of Republicans because of their opinions on personal liberty, which is a major component of social justice. The question, no matter how you answer it, cuts to the heart of the matter: no spectrum will be perfect, and no spectrum can capture the people whose views take a little from column A and a little from column B.
For his part, J-Ro flipped the script by asking whether we might not be better off rethinking the political spectrum as a conveyor belt moving us toward that more just society. In this view, centrists move along with the belt, Leftists try to hurry it along, and the Right tries to stop it or, in the extreme, reverse it. This dynamism helps capture the ways in which societies change and groups contest change.
What do you think?
I like the conveyor belt idea, being that’s it not static and brings a nice picture to one’s mind — conservatives sweating, grunting, cursing, and straining against that conveyor belt, liberals trying to push it along, making sure the gears keep spinning, and centrists watching the progress or lack thereof, making non-committal statements.
For me, however, there’s a problem with labeling one vision as realizing a “more just society.” Pro-lifers will tell you they want a more just society, one that respects the life of unborn fetuses. Are they wrong? If you’re a pro-lifer, no they aren’t. If you’re a pro-choicer, then yes they are. By founding a spectrum on those grounds, you ensure that only the left could and would use it. Doesn’t seem that handy in that case.
Perhaps a better spectrum would be a three-dimensional cube that involves the quadrants you depict above, but takes them three dimensionally. So, along the Y axis we deal with social liberalism / conservatism, along the X axis with financial liberalism / conservatism, and along the Z axis we put another quality that political scientists and theorists agree upon. That way we can all carry around a rubic’s cube and point to the exact square that we fall within, and have political parties that cater to each square, or blocks of squares.
Creating political spectrums is, of course, in itself a political exercise. My political spectrum definitely includes some implicit praise for the Left and some implicit criticism of the Right. In defense of that, I’ll say that it was mostly intended as a tool to help Leftists better understand themselves, and to help give people on the far Left a language other than Communist/Socialist language that they can use to articulate their politics without sounding marginal. A lot of people who quietly work for social justice in homeless shelters and other non-governmental service agencies would also strenuously object to my politicization of the concept of social justice.
Nothing can be said about a political spectrum that will satisfy everyone, or anyone. But given that the terms Left and Right, liberal and conservative, are still in use, we need to think through what the spectrum means to some extent if we are to use it effectively.
I must say, at times the grab bag seems to make more sense, as people’s political ideology is rarely intellectually consistant. However, I do like the definitions proposed here, which to me get more to the heart of the words. True conservatives (and this would eliminate many so called social conservatives or values voters) are against change. They conserve the status quo. Real liberals are for change in a myriad of different ways. That kind of spectrum seems to make a bit more sense to me.