OpenLeft: a response

Over at the OpenLeft website, various worthies are asked the question “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?”. Various others have weighed in; I’d like to go through some of the comments people made and then have a go myself.

Polly Toynbee
Sunder Katwala
Jon Cruddas
James Purnell
Dave Cole

Polly Toynbee Original

To live on the left is to live optimistically, believing in progress despite set backs, hoping despite frequent disappointment, urging progress against right wing nostalgia for illusory “better yesterdays”.

No, that’s Whigishness and defining ‘the left’ as ‘not the right’ is a counsel of despair.

Life on the left means trusting that the better side of human nature can prevail against selfishness and greed.

Actually, I think the right would say that, too. They’d say it’s because of that – say, charitable giving – that we don’t need as much social protection.

Good argument can always persuade enough people to see that a more socially just society is in everyone’s best interests.

Assertion. I’d say there are plenty of good arguments that wouldn’t convince the Taxpayers’ Alliance who would probably say that a more socially just society is one where the state doesn’t interfere.

Life on the left means an instinctive defence of the underdog against the over-privileged, rooting for the have-nots against the power of the have-yachts.

There are no right-wing Yeovil Town fans?

To be a social democrat is to understand the value of good government as the best expression of collective social success against rampant anti-state individualism.

That’s about being a social democrat, not about being on the left. You could say that social democrats are a part of the left, but I don’t think anyone would define them as being all the left.

Paying taxes towards good government is not a ‘burden’ but the most communitarian thing we do – and it buys the good life, all the things we care most for, such as health, education, safety and a pleasing environment. Yet we are wary too of any government’s potential for stifling freedoms and crushing individual initiative, seeking that delicate balance between liberty and equality. The right regards freedom to seize unjust rewards as party of human nature. The left resists all claim of “nature” as justification for winner takes all, eat-what-you-kill capitalism, while understanding the dynamic power of well-regulated markets.

But the Christian left might use a claim of nature for other political purposes. I’m willing to be convinced – it wouldn’t take that much, in all honesty – that Bentham was correct when he said that natural rights were nonsense on stilts. If we’re going to go for that, great, but we’re not going to take all the left with us.

Life on the left is a perpetual journey where definitions of social justice shift with the times. Social democrats have no ultimate egalitarian end-game, only the constant pursuit of better, fairer, kinder, more honest, more democratic ways to live together.

I don’t think the right would say that they are going for worse, harsher, less honest, less democratic ways to live together. Unless you are going to define the good life – and, hell, I remember having discussions about that in my first year undergrad classes on Plato and we still don’t agree – and by doing so demonstrate that there is no left.

Sunder Katwala Original

That we are for a fairer and more equal society.

Sorry, Sunder, but, unless you define fairness and equality, that sentence has no meaning.

Any successful left is a broad church, not a narrow sect. To be ‘left’ is to be part of a political conversation both about what equality and fairness mean and how we try to bring it about.

I would say that the right consider themselves part of that conversation; they’re talking to and hearing from different people and have different ideas about what is fair and equal, but they still think about it.

Each generation of the left needs to engage with perennial questions about our ends and how we translate them into practice: ‘equality of what?’, ‘how much equality is fair?’, ‘how do we narrow the gaps which matter most?’ and ‘how do we persuade people in a democratic society?’ so that we mobilise the movements and coalitions which can make change happen.

We so nearly get an answer there, but then we fall back into platitudes. We are told what some of the questions are that might help us to define this nebulous concept, but are not given any answers unless we consider leftness to be a focus on process. While that is valuable, it is not the whole story

I think it is still the value of equality which separates the broad left from most of the democratic right. We have a philosophical difference with the ideas-based ‘less government is always best’ right about what freedom and autonomy substantively mean. And we believe that freedom, rather than privilege, depends on our all sharing it. We can also now show that a fundamental anti-government fails the evidence test: wealth and opportunity have become more concentrated, and is too often in denial about climate change and failed states.

Tell the anarchists that. Sunder talks about using the state in a good way, whereas they, who might agree with him on some aims and methods, would see the state as necessarily corrupt and corrupting.

Some on the right may now accept a moral argument for equal life chances – in which case, we need to persuade them of the scale of change that demands. But very few voices yet acknowledge the evidence that inequality, and relative position, matters, though we should welcome those who do.

This smacks again of definition by what the left isn’t. That doesn’t narrow the term down enough to be useful.

We should respect the traditions and ideas of political opponents on the democratic right. The conservative tradition represents one significant strand in our society, defending established institutions and articulating the interests of those who benefit most from the way things are. (Though conservatives might not want change; they do often show a talent for living with change if others can bring it about). I expect the Conservative Party to be motivated primarily by those conservative ends and instincts, and so to be a force for conservatism rather than progress. I imagine most conservatives feel the same.

Is the Conservative Party the totality of the right? Are there no libertarians, no Thatcherites? While Sunder & I might agree that the conservative tradition has the function of “articulating the interests of those who benefit most from the way things are”, I suspect Conservatives would say that there positions help the life chances of the disadvantaged more than heavy-handed stateism.

Jon Cruddas Original

The most important philosophical insight that defines the left is the recognition that real freedom requires not just the absence of constraint but also the opportunity and capacity to act. This is not so much the dividing line between socialists and non-socialists as the dividing line within the liberal tradition. It is the distinction between Manchester School liberalism and the more developed strands of liberal thought articulated by Hobhouse, Keynes and Beveridge in Britain and FDR in America.

Along with social democrats and socialists, progressive liberals understand that equal liberty cannot co-exist with high levels of poverty and wide inequalities of wealth. This is because the capacities required to take part in society on an equal basis are socially defined and relative rather than abstract and fixed. Broadly speaking, the left appreciates that the pursuit of meaningful equality of opportunity cannot be detached from considerations of wealth distribution.

I think Jon Cruddas’ is the best answer given so far. “Real freedom requires not just the absence of constraint but also the opportunity and capacity to act” is something I could really get behind. However, Jon talks about socialists, social democrats, progressive liberals and not the left. The high quality of his answer shows the poverty of the question and its premise.

James Purnell Original

I’ve tried to do this without creating a right-wing straw man against which to define myself. Many goals are shared between political traditions – such as freedom or equality before the law – although the priorities we give them and the methods by which we pursue them differ.

Not just that; there are disagreements, including within what would be called the left, about what freedom and equality mean.

But below are some differences which I think are about direction, not just priority:

First, the Right tolerates inequalities that the Left hates. I’m on the Left because I worry about inequalities of capability – some people have it very easy in our society, others far too hard. The goal of policy should be to correct these inequalities in power. This is partly but not only about redistribution of income.

There are, as James doubtless knows, many people who would say that the language of equality of opportunity, as opposed to equality of outcome, puts him on the right.

Second, I believe that governments succeed more often than they fail. People on the Right are more sceptical of government’s effectiveness. The Right also worry that more government means less community or individual action: we think that government helps communities be more active and individuals more powerful.

The left is not necessarily statist and the right is not necessarily anti-statist. Indeed, these are relative, as someone of James’ (or many others!) version of the left would say there was too much state in the USSR while a right-winger might say there was not enough in Afghanistan.

Third, I’m utopian. People on the Left tend to have a vision of what society could be like, and believe it’s the role of democracy to try to make that a reality. People on the Right are more likely to value the status quo, believing it represents the tested wisdom of previous generations.

Actually, I think the right often harks back to a golden age that it seeks to recreate. Utopia means ‘no place’; More’s little joke was that Utopia, the non-existent, is a homonym in English of Eutopia, the good place. I feel we should deal with what we can – yes, with regard to the future – and recognise that the best is a shifting goal.

Dave Cole

I couldn’t give a fig whether I am ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’; I would rather do what I think is appropriate. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are meaningless in current political discourse as they are relative to the user’s position, non-exclusive, change over time and are far too large.

The term left wing could include the BNP, the SWP, George Galloway, black bloccers and James Purnell.
The term right wing could include the BNP, UKIP, Edward Heath, Andrew Rosindell and James Purnell.

If I have to give my political positions a nomenclature, I will give them one that doesn’t tie me into a crescent where far left and far right meet at the top. We’ve all see the political compass; even that is over-simplifying things. Two people could both be in (say) the top left corner (“left authoritarian”), you could end up there for nationalist, religious reasons or internationalists, atheist reasons and have very different approaches to politics and society.

This is not just a semantic question.

If we say that Labour are the left wing party of Britain, we mistakely give British politics immutability and tie it down into arguments that are not necessarily relevant to the modern world, and so on and so forth. If we want to exclude communists from the left and fascists from the right, we need a justification. Any such justification will also exclude others that would be otherwise in one of those groupings.

The terms left and right wing oversimplify and have neither predictive nor descriptive value. They don’t tell us where we’re going or where we came from, bring people in that we don’t want and exclude people we shouldn’t. They suggest we need fixed coalition by putting in place a philosophical floor that must be crossed. They imply that anything that isn’t the other is the good.

Let us call ourselves socialists, social democrats, progressive liberals, anarchists, communists and various people against nasty things; let us stop pretending that there is an overarching theme that unites us all.

xD.

PS – I have written on whether the BNP can be reasonably considered left or right wing here.

Update: Chris Dillow weighs in with a useful contribution.