Left and Right: Part V

To get better handle on the differences between left and right, I highly recommend the recent book by Dennis Prager: Still the Best Hope. It is available on Amazon: 

One of the deeper insights that Prager offers is that Leftism is really a kind of Ersatz religion.  In the history of Western Society since the Enlightenment, leftist utopianism has tended to fill the vacuum left once religion is out of the picture.  His thesis is that religion is a basic part of our wiring and satisfies a basic human need for meaning.  Thus, when religion is absent, political utopianism will often takes its place.

Prager cites Hillary Clinton's expression "the politics of meaning" which she used as First Lady of the United States.  He points out that this phrase, while highly meaningful to the left, was meaningless to conservatives.  The reason is that conservatives do not look to politics to get their meaning, but many on the left do in fact.  Thus, politics is for many on the left their de facto religion.

Left and Right: Part IV

Without a doubt we have seen over the last 4-6 years a trend toward increasing size and power of US government at the hands of the Democratic Party.   While most of the country was feeling the pinch of an economic downturn in late 2008 and throughout 2009, the Washington, D.C. was one of the few areas that showed an increase in the number of jobs, and these jobs were those of federal workers.
The powerful public employees unions, especially the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), lobbied the Democratic-controlled Congress and the White House to obtain a nearly $1,000,000,000,000 dollar stimulus package much of which went to create or save SEIU jobs or jobs represented by other public service employees unions.  In the run up to passage of this stimulus act,  the most frequent visitor to the White House was none other than Andy Stern, then President of the SEIU.

The SEIU is a major donor to the Democratic Party, and it is clear that President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were engage in political payback.  If you go to the SEIU website you will see that the positions taken there are indistinguishable from the positions represented on the website.

Labor unions in the US have a long history of being very leftist and favoring big government.  But the prospect of government employees being unionized scared even the likes of left-leaning President Franklin D. Roosevelt and AFL-CIO President George Meany! See FDR Warned Us.     

President Obama, in defending his stimulus package, would often state a metric  "created or saved XXX jobs."  It seems that in light of how much of the stimulus went in to preserving or creating new unionized government jobs, the emphasis would clearly be on the "saved" aspect.  He did indeed save lots of government jobs, for which the SEIU will generously thank him this re-election season, but his creation record was very poor, even for a creator of government jobs.

Nonetheless, the point of this post is that the Democrats have done their utmost in the last few years to grow the size of government and with it the size of the national debt.  Because of this, most people would clearly label the Democrat party the left-wing party, even though they probably don't all mean to say that it is extremely left-wing as was the Communist party.  But government which tends toward totalitarianism is always a cause for alarm.

Left and Right: Part III

Although there are very few extremists on the left who openly advocate direct and immediate anarchy, the Marxist theory does in fact claim that the utopia to be brought about by the "dictatorship of the proletariat” should ultimately consist in an anarchist state in which the citizens, having been molded into good behavior (i.e., "politically correct" behavior) by the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, now act in a fully responsible and kind manner toward each other. There will be complete harmony and no inequality. But, as mentioned above, Marxist societies have never achieved any state remotely resembling such a utopia.

The primary reason for the failure of Marxist societies is their unreal approach to human nature and economics.  The goal of equality is simply unrealistic because people simply are not equal.  Some are taller than others.  Some are more intelligent.  Some are stronger.   Some are more caring towards others.  Some are more selfish than others.   These are facts of life that one has to deal with.  

In terms of economics, capitalistic systems tend to reward those who work hard and invest their capital wisely.  In Marxist societies all incentive to work hard is eliminated and there are no opportunities to invest.  Thus workers are treated as robots who do not personally benefit by working harder unless they climb the ladder through political correctness.  Thus even in Marxist societies there was a way to get ahead materially through the political machine that allowed you to oppress others if you were politically correct enough.  The members of the Politburo, the most clever and ruthless among the Communists, managed to acquire perks not available to the average citizen.  Thus Communism not only failed to achieve the desired classless society but in fact created (at least) two classes -- party insiders and everyone else.  The party insiders had power and wealth to some degree.  There was indeed equality in the other class, the outsider class, but this was the equality of poverty and powerlessness.

Every left wing utopian movement since the French Revolution if left unchecked has tended to produce this kind of two-class society: Government bureaucrats and those who work for them, i.e., the rest of society.

Thus, one can see from this that one should be very wary of left-wing utopianism in all its forms.  You know a tree by its fruits and the fruits of left-wing utopianism are rotten indeed.

Left and Right: Part II

As mentioned in the last post,  the two world views differ essentially with regards to the perceived role and ideal size of government.   The difference is this:  People on the left tend to envision a larger role for government than those on the right, who tend to favor more limited government. This gives rise, naturally, to a whole spectrum of positions on this topic.

On the extreme left are totalitarian Marxists, who believe that government must have total power over its citizens in order to force the transformation of society into their vision of utopia, a vision based on an egalitarian view of society, i.e., a society in which there is no inequality with regards to rights and possessions. 

A number of nations have tried this approach to governing and the results have not been very successful. The Soviet Union was established by a leftist revolution in October 1917 and lasted until 1991. It was without a doubt a very totalitarian state in which the citizens enjoyed very few freedoms and millions of those who were opposed to or were perceived to be opposed to the regime were systematically murdered or sent off to prison labor camps. Despite its exercise for 74 years of unlimited, authoritarian government power over every aspect of  its citizens' lives, the Soviet regime failed to bring about anything resembling the utopia that Marx predicted.

 

On the other hand, folks on the extreme right tend to be very libertarian and favor a very limited form of government that has no claim at all on a person’s property.  Government intrusion of all kinds is abhorred.  The emphasis here is generally on economics with libertarians preferring that the government stay out of commerce altogether and generally not get involved in the private lives of citizens. They generally acknowledge, however, that a certain limited form of government is necessary in order to "ensure domestic tranquility" and to protect a nation (i.e. via armed forces such as police and armies) from enemies domestic and foreign. Thus, they tend not to be anarchists in the sense of preferring no laws and no government whatsoever.

Some would like to claim that the Nazis of Hitler's Germany and the Fascists of Mussolini's Italy are the prime example of right wing extremism.  However, this assertion is factually incorrect.  Both Nazi and Fascist regimes were totalitarian in nature, giving supreme power to the state.  In fact, the full name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany.  It is true that Nazi appealed more to nationalist sentiments than did the more internationalist Communists, and it is also true that the Nazis allowed some limited private property ownership.  But without a date Nazis and Fascists did not advocate a limited role for government.  They were more like the Communists in their basic beliefs about the role of government.  Their utopian visions for the end game may have been different, but their means and methods were quite similar.

Thus, when viewed from the aspect of the role of government and the limitations put on government, the left / right distinction comes down to the distinction -- at the extremes -- between total government and no government.   Total government that acknowledges no rights of the individual has always been a failure in history.  They have never endured.  The 20th century saw the annihilation of over 200 million people as an outcome of several experiments in totalitarian government.  On the other hand, it can be argued that the extreme right wing solution of no government at all is also failure, being nearly impossible to implement because human beings are social animals in need of each other and naturally gravitate to form social units such as the family, towns, cities, states, nations and so on.  Extreme laissez-faire economics without regulation has usually resulted in some groups (the wealthy) exploiting others (the less wealthy).  It is no more desirable than extreme left wing approaches to total government.

Left and Right: Part I

This series of posts comes at the request of some friends who wish to have a dialogue to help clarify the distinction made in politics between right and left, and between the Republican and Democratic parties. There is way too much spin doctoring in the media and online, and it is thus sometimes hard to get a grasp what the real differences are, indeed to determine if there are in fact any real differences at all between these two parties. It is sometimes asserted that the distinctions between left and right, liberal and conservative, blue states and red states, Republican and Democrat are overly simplistic. It is also asserted in tandem with this that a voter should simply choose a candidate based on his/her stands on certain issues that are important to the voter, or perhaps simply based on “feelings,” and to avoid being too rigidly tied ideologically to a particular party or party platform.  It is also sometimes asserted that the two parties are simply beholden to different special interests and are basically pandering to these constituencies. 

 

I will try to show in this series of posts that there is indeed a real, clearly discernible and fundamental difference in the world views underlying the distinction between right and left, and that Republican and Democratic parties are clearly different with regards to these views. I will also argue that one of the parties is by far more guilty of the sort of special interest pandering indicated above and that one of the parties is actively in the process of trying to  purge itself of its special interest ties.  In this regard, I will attempt to share that there has been a real awakening in America with regards to political values and their relation to impending economic disaster, and that business as usual within the parties is no longer an option.

Obama is no Clinton

Article by Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot, comparing and contrasting Bill Clinton's conciliatory, common sense approach to business with the doctrinaire, antipathetic, left-wing approach of Barack Obama.

The Winds of War: 1967 and 2012

Charles Krauthammer is showing the obvious parallels between May of 1967 and June of 2012.  Israel may attack Iran in June.  Or they may wait until October or November, after the American election.  But they may not be able to wait, since the Iranians are proceeding with full speed to develop their nuclear capability and want to do so while there is still a wimp in the White House, a wimp too busy pandering to his favorite splinter groups and too inept to understand what is happening on the wider international front.