Checking the compass
Thomas Jones says in the Telegraph (reviewing Hitchens’s memoir):
The drift from left to right is hardly unusual, and the causes for his disillusionment with socialism and attraction to liberalism – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, visits to Cuba and Poland under Communism, the pleasures and freedoms of life in the United States – are made plain enough.
I’m not sure that really is a move (or drift) from left to right. That would make displeasure and unfreedom left, and I don’t think that’s accurate. I know, the idea is more that some coercion is worth the price for the sake of more pleasure and freedom (or more something) for everyone, and that does describe part of the left. But still – the right is the party of tradition, and authority, and custom, and religion, and monarchy, and hierarchy. Let’s not forget that. The right is not necessarily or always the party of freedom. In some ways, and not trivial or obscure ones, liberalism is to the left of coercive brands of socialism. Let’s not be “framing” liberalism as right-wing or support for liberalism a move to the right.
… as though there weren’t a *libertarian* socialist tradition, including anarchists and others!
Dan
I find it endless frustrating when people try to fit every political idea onto a single left-right scale. A proper understanding of political ideology would probably have 6 or 7 orthogonal dimensions, and the left-right axis (in a given country at a given time) is a one-dimensional continuum that runs through that more complex space.
A cursory examination of different times and places shows that left and right do not have an eternally consistent meaning. For instance, in New Zealand the positions of the Democrats and Republicans on free trade would be considered extreme left wing, both our major parties (and most of our minor ones) are free traders. But our health system is a British NHS-type system and even France’s health system (which unlike us, has no government-owned hospitals) would be considered extreme right-wing, as not even our furthest-right party in Parliament has advocated selling all government hospitals.
The constant attempt to fit everything into a model of left vs. right (using the left-right axis in your own time and place, naturally) is a sign that the individual in question is hard of thinking.
I agree that left and right don’t have much, if any, philosophical signficance. They do refer to groups or tribes of people with shared ideals, goals, slogans, clichés, tastes, hatreds; and Hitchens took positions which led him to break with the family of the left. There are liberals who belong to the left family (The Nation) and liberals who belong to the right family (The Economist, Reason), and as Dan says, there are even libertarian socialists, such as Chomsky, who certainly belongs to the leftwing tribe.
Since you even titled the post with compass, let me link you to Political Compass, a site where they at least differentiate between economically left/right and an authoritarian/anarchic axis on social issues. I find this distinction helps a lot.
It might not be the worst idea to use authoritarianism as the defining difference between liberal and conservative. The Nazis (right) and Soviets (left) had the same approach to dissent and to the arts. The Nazis vilified “degenerate art” (entartete Kunst) and the Soviets likewise used terms like “formalism” to condemn artistic tendencies they considered unuseful. Antisemitism is another useful diagnostic. Dogmatism is the most salient characteristic, but it’s tricky; the right identifies our values (multicultural, anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-science) as shibboleths, but we’re defined by our exuberant heterodoxy.
It might not be the worst idea to use authoritarianism as the defining difference between liberal and conservative. The Nazis (right) and Soviets (left) had the same approach to dissent and to the arts. The Nazis vilified “degenerate art” (entartete Kunst) and the Soviets likewise used terms like “formalism” to condemn artistic tendencies they considered unuseful. Antisemitism is another useful diagnostic. Dogmatism is the most salient characteristic, but it’s tricky; the right identifies our values (multicultural, anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-science) as shibboleths, but we’re defined by our exuberant heterodoxy.
bad Jim: The thing is a Goldwater Conservative could use economic criteria to link fascism and US liberalism, after all corporatism is probably the best description of the Democrats economic policy, which was the usual economic system for fascist states, including Nazi Germany.
Communism and Fascism are both a long way from the left-right axis as it currently exists in the US, and I can’t help but think people who seem especially keen to pace these ideologies on the left-right scale (say, Jonah Goldberg) are doing so for political, rather than analytical reasons.
The thing is that ‘Liberalism’ is the swearword of choice for those on both left and right – who use it to mean completely contradictory things, differing by place and circumstance, and would have it be a hairsbreadth from communism, fascism AND free-market conservatism, when it suits them. The tragedy of this is that it is in fact ‘liberalism’ which allows people of such diverse views to inhabit a society in which at least some of them are not repeatedly locked up, banned, censored or otherwise prevented from spouting their personal eternal truths. But does the fish understand the water? Evidently not.
Yes. I’m ashamed to say that in my university days I thought of “liberal” as meaning “too nervous to go all the way with exciting radical leftery.” If I could be said to have been thinking at all.
But now – I get really pissed off at the idea that commitment to human rights is to the right of…well, anything. I get pissed off at the implication that it’s kind of cowardly, or temporizing, or for christ’s sake self-indulgent or luxurious. That it’s vaguely related to consumerism – which is the way Madeleine Bunting always talks about it, and which is what this reviewer was implying.
Without human rights you got nuthin. You get Orwell’s boot stamping on a face forever. Orwell’s phrase, not Orwell’s actual boot.
Dave, OB: The reason people of varied ideologies go after liberalism is precisely because of its pluralist sentiments. If you are the sort of person who believes there is only one right way to live, whether a theocrat or a doctrinaire socialist, then all freedom does is give people the right to do things wrong. Just get the right people (i.e. me) in charge and rights are just an obstacle to Utopia / The Kingdom of Heaven.
And in a sense liberalism and consumerism are related, after all getting rid of human rights is pretty much the only way to stamp consumerism out. That and the word consumerist can be used pretty underhandedly. After all it’s generally considered consumerist to buy a large TV, but not to buy organic locally grown fruit and vegetables yet both are fundamentally driven by consumer preferences. More often than not, “consumerist” just means “how dare you have different values to me”.
Dave, OB: The reason people of varied ideologies go after liberalism is precisely because of its pluralist sentiments. If you are the sort of person who believes there is only one right way to live, whether a theocrat or a doctrinaire socialist, then all freedom does is give people the right to do things wrong. Just get the right people (i.e. me) in charge and rights are just an obstacle to Utopia / The Kingdom of Heaven.
And in a sense liberalism and consumerism are related, after all getting rid of human rights is pretty much the only way to stamp consumerism out. That and the word consumerist can be used pretty underhandedly. After all it’s generally considered consumerist to buy a large TV, but not to buy organic locally grown fruit and vegetables yet both are fundamentally driven by consumer preferences. More often than not, “consumerist” just means “how dare you have different values to me”.
Indeed, but most of the people doing the ‘going after’ would be in prison, under a banning order, or dead, if they did NOT live in a liberal society, because they generally hold views iniquitous to the majority of their fellows – or at least to enough of them, were we not all good liberals, that the only way to settle it would be war to the knife.
Actual armed fanatics rarely waste their words on ‘liberalism’, it is the cowards that shelter under its umbrella while scorning, like bitter teenagers, everything it gives them, that infect public discourse with this unwarranted contempt.
John Gray being the classic example of that.