April 2, 2010
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two
Comparisons are nice. You need a minimum of two concepts in order to engage in a comparison.
Like consider the comparison between April and August. April is a small month name with a small number of days. It contains great ideas like April Fools Day, Earth Day, Arbor Day, World Health Day, Buddha’s Birthday, and the likes. April even usually has Easter. April was, according to the great Wikipedia (the font from which all knowledge flows), possibly named after a Goddess, namely Aphrodite. Alternatively it was named after the Greek word for “open” because it represents the beginning of Spring.
In contrast August? Well August is lame. It’s hot, generally unpleasant, and during that month you have to worry about the dreaded impending September and the end of your summer break (if you have one). August is 31 days long. It’s the month in which Hiroshima and Nagisaki were bombed a disastrous day for world history IMO. It was named after some lame Roman Emperor.
So generally I prefer April to August and when given a choice between the two I would always choose April over August. In addition, April comes before August so I don’t have to wait. These are the reasons that this series is being written in April rather than August. That statement, which is a bold faced lie, should be directly compared to the statement that would represent the actual Truth. The Truth being of course that I don’t read my twitter account often enough and I’m not inclined to go back on a plan once begun.
Distinctions are also quite nice. Again without two things, distinguishing things is impossible. You can learn an enormous amount though from drawing clever distinctions. I’ve been thinking a lot about distinctions lately, especially when it comes to Politics.
For example, there are in fact two sides to the Left.
By the “Left” of course I mean what is generally called the Left, which is a hodgepodge of self described or externally described liberals, neo-liberals, progressives, democrats, reformers, activists, war doves, community organizers, anarchists, atheists, socialists, unionists, communists, agnostics, egalitarians, secularists, humanists, anarcho-communists, anarcho-collectivists, statists, marxists, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights activists, market liberals, social libertarians, radicals, greens, multiculturalists, believers in social justice, social welfare, and social well being.
All of those words, it should be noted, barely have any meaning at all. The are so often used and abused and mish mashed that there’s hardly anything coherent left of them.
But in other words, what I mean by “the left” is anyone who approaches politics from a perspective that believes in social change, or systemic change that can be brought about in order to create a more equitable balance of wealth and power. That could mean using mechanisms such as sharing resources in a “commons”, creating fairer rules and regulations, or directly redistributing wealth or managing markets. The means of achieving it could be revolutionary or populist or through legal frameworks or through reforming and empowering the State or whichever powerful institutions exist in the society from the inside out.
Of course this is a huge and disparate group just like any broad classification inevitably will be and you can’t really pin down. The Right is similarly diverse and I can go on and on naming names for them too but I won’t because you’re already bored. Suffice it to say “the right” is generally the group that approaches politics from the perspective of wanting to preserve social order, traditions, rules, and values. Again the means and mechanisms differ. Some on the right think the best way to preserve those traditions and values is to give power into the hands of the people and let them do whatever they want. Others believe the best way is to control State power and roll back destructive changes. Still others believe in encouraging order through compelling institutions such as religions and educational institutions.
The best way to look at the two is that the Left generally says we need to go Forward to get things to the way they ought to be, whereas the Right generally says we have to go Back or more importantly Stop going Forward recklessly in order to get society to a reasonable State. Basically this distinction has served us well for understanding politics since the French Revolution and it remains perfectly relevant today.
But in modern American politics I think we need a new kind of distinction especially for understanding the infighting that has been going on on the Left side of the political spectrum since the inauguration of President Obama. Also, these old formulations don’t really capture well the significance of corporations in modern life because such institutions did not exist or did not have nearly the amount of sway over our daily lives when the old labels were created.
The new distinction I propose is to look not at means or goals but instead to look at who people perceive to be their enemies. That is what is it that each group perceives as being the real problem, the major obstacle standing in the way of their implementing their means and mechanisms or achieving their goals. To me what someone identifies as their major opposition says a lot more about what policies and persons they will support than even their core beliefs will.
So on the Left there are two core perspectives on who “the enemy” happens to be. On the one hand you have the people who perceive the enemy to be “Conservatives and Republicans”. Most notably they perceive their core opponents to be the Republican Party in the United States.
This is the bigger proportion of the Left in the United States these days. They see the Right as being far more dangerous to their agenda than any other force. This side was greatly strengthened by the Presidency of George W. Bush which the Left generally considered to be utterly disastrous. Hence the rallying cry of these kinds of Leftists is a kind of a “never again” call. To them it is imperative that the left do everything within their power to ensure that there is never again another President like George W. Bush. Often they make the argument that even weak democratic policies are enormously better than what would happen if we had another eight years of Bush.
The other side of the Left sees things very differently. For them, the enemy really isn’t the Republican Party though they certainly also tend to agree that the Republican party has been really bad for the country over the last decade and more. For them though the core problem is Concentrated Corporate Power. In their minds corporations are inherently dangerous and totalitarian and have very little if any accountability to the people and to the society. They see the modern era as being an era of societies being dominated by conetrated wealth and power being funneled into the hands of a few mega-corporations run by just a handful of people with a legal and willful mandate to do earn money no matter the cost to themselves and the society.
This latter group is far more likely to criticize the Democrats even if there is a Democratic President. Because to them, there is a chance that said President might well be as much a slave to concentrated corporate power as any Republican. The Democrats could just be the kinder gentler face of the Corporate hegemony ruling this nation and indeed the world.
Now generally this division isn’t exclusive. Many of the people who see republicans as the core problem also recognize the problems of concentrated corporate power and many of the people who see concentrated corporate power as the problem are also no fan of the Republican party.
BUT the division is very instructive whenever there is a major controversey amongst the “Left” position. One of the most recent of those was of course the controversey over Health Care Reform. The first side of the left saw even a very conservative plan to achieve real liberal aims would be much better if implemented by a Left Wing President, not only because they believed he would implement it better than a right wing President is likely to do, but also because passing that bill would likely enhance that Left-wing President’s chance of getting re-elected and similarly enhance the likelihood of other progressives making it into positions of Public Office. For them the real disaster would be NOT passing any Health Care Reform Bill at all in which case they believed the conservative forces would be able to use it to destroy the Obama Presidency and wipe out Democratic leads in the House and the Senate.
In contrast, side 2 of the left saw the bill as a “sell-out” precisely because it seemed like in many ways to them a bill barely different than what they could have gotten out of a Republican President and which would strengthen and empower corporate industry, in particular the same industries that helped CAUSE the Health Care crises in their minds. So to them the #hcr bill might be better than nothing since it does achieve a progressive goal of covering more people, but if it is, then it’s just BARELY better than nothing. And they feared it might even be WORSE than the status quo because it makes the REAL fight, that is the fight against concentrated corporate power that much harder.
There are lots of other conflicts between these two groups and often people exist somewhere on a continuum between these two extremes. For example at the end of the health care reform debate only the furthest to side 2 remained opposed to the health care reform bill and even some of them started to doubt their position. The argument that letting the republicans win would be worse was very compelling for a lot of people. And it’s hard for compassionate people who share the same core goals of progress through change to really turn down anything that promises to help provide health care to millions of people in need even if they can rationally see the problems with the approach.
Likewise in 2000 a lot of the side 2 group supported Nader but by 2004 very very few remained so far into the side 2 component of the Left that they were still willing to accept the risk of supporting a Nader run for President.
Personally, I lean significantly more toward side 2, though I do have critiques of both sides.
IT should be noted that a very similar distinction to this can be drawn on the RIGHT as well. There are people on the right who perceive their core opponent to be Democrats, Liberals, and Leftists who want to change things in destructive ways. Whereas there are other people on the right who see the core of the problem being Concentrated Government Power which interferes with our liberties. This is a huge conflict in the Republican party RIGHT NOW in that there are battles between the old guard that supported Bush and Cheney who are trying to retain as much of their influence and power, and the newer Ron Paullites who are growing massively in popularity in the conservative movement. Each side is trying to utilize generic popular outrage to their advantage against the other and major popular figures like Palin and Romney are trying to tow the line cowtowing to both groups.
Anyways distinctions are useful things when it comes to grasping the nature of politics as it is in all things. Perhaps I will talk more about them tomorrow.
