April 12, 2012 7:16 pm
The bogus distinction between left and right
In the French presidential elections, François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, who advocates a 75 per cent marginal tax rate, is clearly on the left. But he has been threatened by an opponent further to the left: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an ex-Trotskyite who has pledged to end globalisation and who trades on suspicions that Mr Hollande, like François Mitterrand before him, will renege on his commitments. Nicolas Sarkozy, the sitting president, often gives the impression that he will say anything to retain office. Nevertheless, he can without abuse of language be described as to the right of these particular contenders.
Clearly there is a range of issues – and personalities – that it still makes sense to describe in left-versus-right terms. But there are many for which it does not. Is an interventionist foreign policy in the spirit of the late US Democrat senator Henry Jackson, designed to promote so-called democracy abroad, a leftwing or rightwing attitude? And what is one to say of Richard Cobden, the great English Liberal statesman, who wrote in 1847, “how much unnecessary solicitude and alarm England devotes to the affairs of foreign countries; with how little knowledge we enter upon the task of regulating the concerns of other people; and how much better we might employ our energies in improving matters at home”?
In some sense, both these men were centre-left. But such a classification covers huge differences more important to human welfare than the conventional left-right arguments on economic matters. I would instinctively prefer David Miliband to his brother Ed as leader of the UK Labour opposition; but my doubt is that he might be nearer to Jackson than to Cobden.
I once wrote a book entitled "Left or Right, the Bogus Dilemma", which was quite widely discussed but not much read. I remarked that the left-right distinction had its origins in the seating of the French States-General after the 1789 Revolution, when the nobility took the place of honour on the king’s right, while the ordinary members of the “third estate” sat on the king’s left. The issues had nothing to do with the embryonic capitalism of the period. In the 19th century the French left were above all else republicans and became closely identified with anti-clericalism and later with opposition to the anti-Semitism that came to the fore in the Dreyfus affair. As a result of such events, the highly bourgeois Parti Radical Socialiste insisted it was on the left until the eve of the second world war.
.
In the UK’s 1923 general election, which brought the first Labour government to office, the main issue was the defence of free trade, on which Labour sided with the Liberals. The association of the left with personal and political freedom, antimilitarism, religious tolerance and general civilised values helps explain why as late as the 1940s and 1950s there were merchant bankers in London and Paris who did not regard themselves as on the right.
However, the enthusiasm with which socialist parties in 1914 voted for their governments’ war budgets – or later when the “socialist” government of Guy Mollet fought to retain French Algeria – suggests a good deal of wishful thinking.
The usual argument against the spectrum concept is that it put Hitler and Stalin at the right and left extremes, when in fact they had far more in common than either had with middle-of-the-road politicians. My main contention remains that the concept of a left-right spectrum, on which any politically interested person can be placed, obscures more than it illuminates. It muffles important issues and erects barriers between those who should be allies.
To take a topical example, it is mostly politicians on the far left or far right who think the eurozone detrimental to the welfare of its inhabitants and want to dismantle it. Does their political designation make them wrong? And to come to more domestic matters: I suppose that Keynesian opposition to UK prime minister David Cameron’s commitment to eliminate the Budget deficit counts as centre or slightly left of centre. But it is far more radical than the knee-jerk Labour concentration on distributional issues.
.
Today the left is best defined by instinctive hostility to capitalism and a hatred of “inequality” (coupled with a peculiar penchant for subsidised manufacturing). It makes all the difference in the world, however, whether this hatred is motivated by a desire to raise living standards for the less well-off, or by envy of those at the top. In many ways left and right are just two tribes. The left, at least until the emergence of Vladimir Putin, had a soft spot for Russia and the right for China.
And I dare not discuss the left’s present hatred of Israel and the alliances of convenience sometimes made with Islamic extremists.
Nevertheless, I become infuriated when those who take a more laisser faire attitude to these questions are described as “to the right of Genghis Khan”. And my main grouse against the US “Republican right” is that it gives competitive capitalism a bad name by associating it with religious intolerance, a chauvinistic foreign policy and a punitive tendency.
.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario