Just before the 2016 federal election, the ABC released Vote Compass, a digital tool promising to match you with your ideal party. Use it and you’d only be reminded that there was no ideal party with which you could be matched. Bit like online dating, really: a predictable array of those you just know will screw you badly and/or hurt your feelings.
(May be based on a true story.)
Throughout the West, we swipe left on major parties or we settle for the one we dislike the least. For a voting majority, wages are stagnant and social services have been diminished by programs of austerity or privatisation, but major party policy is yet to address this turn. Western voters move to racism or to far better ideas of revolt; they move to barbarism or to socialism, as they have before. Still. Those big parties keep their economic ideas in the middle’s disastrous extreme.
Click to enlarge. Image credit: Quiggledeedee
A stark illustration of the difference many voters no longer see has been forced upon the Bundestag. Not so long ago, the coalition between Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the social democrats of the SDP would have been unthinkable. Now, those parties voters see as indistinguishable must become indistinguishable in order to survive.
Our prominent commentators say, “there is no difference between left and right anymore”. What they mean is that there is no difference between the major parties. If there is no enduring difference between these political categories for people, how do we account for the rise of Mélenchon, the mouth of Milo Yiannopoulos or the unstatesmanlike heap of luncheon meat that is President Donald Trump? How do we explain US high school kids giving their lunch breaks to the work of Karl Marx?
There are teenagers who can articulate the difference between the categories of left and right better than centrist politicians and journalists. Perhaps because their futures are looking so bad, they must believe that true difference can still exist. They know that any liberal, no matter how publicly kind they are to their rainbow coalition, are always right in private.
For many of us older folks, this distinction has been forgotten. Left has come to mean “Emma Alberici objectively describes outcome in liberal democracies of corporate tax cuts over time”. Neoliberal has come to mean, “anything I don’t like”. And I have come to be very annoyed with a political language that is not so much fluid as it is gaseous.
Ergo, above, a basic political matrix for the visual reference of the ABC editorial department, and below, some examples of both good and misleading usage. You are invited to make additions. You may find the experience less disappointing than Vote Compass.
October 2017: In Bloomberg, Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein pronounces Trump “Marxist”. Incorrect. Trump’s economic policy is in the US tradition of the past 40 years: award contracts to large private firms, reduce taxes on large private firms, invade nations to stimulate own spending on large private firms, fill cabinet with former and future executives of large private firms. Sunstein also calls Russia “Marxist”. Also incorrect. Vlad Putin may have nationalised Russian oil. This doesn’t make him Vlad Lenin.
April 2013: UK Prime Minister David Cameron pays tribute to Margaret Thatcher after her death with the declaration “We are all Thatcherites now.” Correct. The overwhelming majority of Western politicians do continue to hold with Thatcher’s economic principles. These are neoliberal, see following.
April 2016: George Monbiot writes, “Neoliberalism’s triumph … reflects the failure of the left.” Correct and incorrect. Monbiot’s account of the neoliberal era is pretty good — he helpfully points the reader to Hayek, whose work, The Constitution of Liberty, Margaret Thatcher is said to have thrown down upon a Tory table with the words, “This is what we believe now”. We are all Thatcherites now. However, Monbiot is not entirely correct when he says the “left” was not ready with a riposte after the global financial crisis as they were ready, he writes, with Keynesianism in the time of the Great Depression.
George! Two things. First, Keynes, as well you know, was not “left”. He was simply very keen on saving capitalism. The Western left was keen on smashing it, or perhaps popping off to the USSR whose then-thriving economy was not hit by the events of 1929. Second, the left does have a plan. It goes like this (1) wrest control of state (2) assume ownership of all private property through state mechanisms (3) check everyone is feeling okay at regular intervals/provide the leisure, innovation and abundance produced by the age of capitalism to all (4) join international comrades, watch state wither away, presto, communism AKA dictatorship by the people. (5) Don’t be Stalin, avoid things like World War II. (Warning: method can take up to a century.) It is incorrect not to see the sense in this excellent plan. It is correct to read these last statements as indicative of my political bias.
November 2016: The Guardian prints the phrase “testosterone left” to describe — I think — all men who would have preferred candidate Bernie Sanders to candidate Hillary Clinton, a woman who offered a “structurally radical framework,” lol.“Testosterone left” is not really incorrect but does refer to imaginary people.
February 2018: Silicon Valley is described as “left-leaning” in The Australian. The emerging centre for finance and the home to companies that “friend” the neoliberal nationalist Narendra Modi is about as left-leaning as these italics: Incorrect.
Often: Mark Latham is very keen on the word “left”. He may have accidentally applied it correctly at one point, but his custom is to be incorrect. Items he has mistaken for left include Tracey Spicer. Incorrect. Feminism for the one percent is simply neoliberalism and/or classical liberalism in a nice frock. (For correct definition of neoliberalism, see Monbiot above. For incorrect version of classical liberalism, see Tom Switzer or Tim Wilson, neither of whom seems to have read the bit of Adam Smith that says unpleasant things about the rentier class.)
For persons who are openly Marxist, he has begun to use the term “Bernie”. Incorrect. Bernie is a social democrat — a term correctly applied by Wayne Swan to himself. Bernie Sanders says he is a socialist. This is incorrect. What is correct is that I have asked Mr Latham twice if I could interview him for the Crikey Up Yours series, and he has twice said no. I believe he considers this publication too leftist for his taste. This is both correct and incorrect, depending on which bit of us you are reading.
Finally. It is incorrect to call Emma Alberici left, left-leaning, socialist, stupid, Marxist, naïve, deluded, economically illiterate, confused or any of the things she was called for correctly stating that low taxation of big firms had not been shown to offer benefit to workers. However, it may be correct to say her empirical account is consistent with Keynesian theory. Which, as we have reminded George, is not now and never will be left.
Can we add the mainstream press referring to Prof Jordan Petersen as “alt-right”?
A belief you can only hold if you have never read anything he has actually said or are intentionally misinterpreting his position for political ends.
Sure. I saw a better description of him recently. “The dumb person’s intellectual.” We’ll call him that.
I’m in two minds about him. An awful lot of what he says makes sense, but his obsession with cultural Marxism reeks of someone who hasn’t left a university campus in an awfully long time. After all, who would be stupid enough to fall for Marxism these days?
JP makes an awful lot of money by saying that which may well make sense to the “Alt-right”.
We can add to the list anyone who calls “cultural Marxism” Marxism
Craig, you are an idiot
Hmm, interesting point you make, Jf. On the one hand, you haven’t presented a counter-argument to anything Craig said. But on the other hand, you did call him an idiot. Tell me, how was your time as president of the Yale Debating Club?
Funny story, I was reading Crikey’s moderation guidelines, in which those commenting are asked to “keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming,” and to “play the ball not the person.”
Lol JQ good on ya mate, why do fans of that parasite Peterson insist on invading every conversation about almost anything demanding that people treat him “fairly”. He is trash, and not worth Helen Razer’s time. He is quite clearly a charlatan cashing in on the emerging anti-“SJW” industry. While promoting fairly boring social conservatism, he has somehow managed to parade himself as an intellectual rebel, railing against the supposed evils of PC culture, a culture he attributes to a bizarre conspiracy theory around “postmodernism/Marxism/Cultural Marxism”. The fact that he conflates all these is hilarious and pretty much tells you all you need to know about how irrelevant his “ideas” are. And while we’re at it anyone who uses “Cultural Marxism” unironically is either a deranged anti-Semite or a useful idiot.
Woah there! A deranged anti-Semite for using the term cultural Marxism unironically? How do you possibly explain that? Got anti-Antisemitism on the mind?
I’m a mite confused by what you mean. Surely useful idiots would be people welcoming of (cultural) Marxist ideas such as the embrace of equality of outcome over equality of opportunity, not those who argue against it. Y’know, like journalists who enthusiastically extol the virtues of Communist propaganda (from each according…) throughout the West. The only problem not addressed is exactly who decides what constitutes “ability” and “needs.” It’s worth thinking about this while considering MzRaz’s “(5) Don’t be Stalin” caveat, which I think might be better expressed as “(5) once you have achieved (1-4): the wresting of control from individuals and vesting it in the state, don’t be murdered by Stalin.”
JQ, you are obviously unaware of the origins of the meme “Cultural Marxism”. Look it up. It’s a gross right wing conspiracy, that has quite obvious anti-Semitic undertones.Also you’ve ripped that Stalin shit straight from one of Peterson’s shitty lectures, how much of a fan boy are you? Any ideas of your own?
Well I’m glad I looked up the origins of the meme, Jf, though it made for unpleasant reading. The more one knows.
Did I rip from Peterson the suggestion that the bigger problem might not be not being Stalin but the creation of a system where the individual is subservient to the state, thus enabling a Stalin (or Mao or Pol Pot or Castro, etc.) to emerge and wield murderous control? It seems a fairly logical and unoriginal question. But you’re right, I likely don’t have an original thought in my head and for all you know could be an ignorant ideologue who is certain he has all the answers. Why not offer your thoughts on the don’t be Stalin/(again) create a system enabling Stalin question?
Well Craig, great ideas reverberate down the ages, particularly when they address things like want, justice, social inequality, exploitation and repression. A couple of millennia ago a bloke stood on a hill and spoke to a crowd of the disinherited of his vision for a better world, saying amongst other things, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled”.
Fast forward to the 19th century and the bloke whose vision for a better world included the words “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Alas, all great ideas are ultimately submerged by those great human realities of greed and selfishness. But great ideas reverberate on regardless.
Spot on. JP is a cretin
You have a good dose of Hilary in you Helen with that comment.
Looks, yes. You’re right. It does reek of intellectual snobbery. However, so does JP. So I sort of feel okay about repeating the quote.
There is really not much of substance in that stuff. Rather, the appearance of it. It might have been better to say that he was the Alain de Botton for nativists.
Helen, I’d be interested to read your take on Prof Peterson in a more detailed piece. I think you might find that his stated views are misrepresented in the press. A good question to ask would be why is that?
I will still say that he’s a thicko, though, JQ.
That’s the bloke who explains the meaning of “milkshake duck “
Nice article, though we’re going to need to do a bit better than the ‘Left’ plan you’ve laid out (basically re-run the Bolshevik seizure of power and hope it works out OK this time). More immediately, why the hell has Turnbull been put in the libertarian half of the social scale? Surely we should stop buying the line that he’s a libertarian progressive hamstrung by his Faustian pact with Dutton, Morrison et al. His responses to Scott McIntyre re ANZAC Day, and now to Emma Alberici re tax, were visceral and authentic. His instincts are to censor and suppress those who challenge the right, economically OR culturally.
It is difficult to fit such a big head in the correct part of the quadrant, is why.
And, who can say what is an “authentic” response and what isn’t, and does it matter? There are those who say that Trump is not as racist as he appears. It doesn’t matter. But, anyhoo. It was a fun graphic my mate made, and we’ll never get a sight gag right.
To get the revolution right, we’d probably need a bit more than a sentence. Let me describe it in a paragraph next week? 🙂
Excellent Helen
Good article – I saw the chart and identified it as a re-work of ‘How to Chart Your Political Position’ from Decades of Decision by Barry Jones, where he pointed out that H J Eysenck in ‘Sense and Nonsense in Psychology’ devised that self plotting process. The point of all this is that there are too many people that just use the term ‘leftist’ for political ends.
Thanks, Bob. And I don’t know the Barry book. I’ll have a gander.
great article again Helen. I recently read your ‘Propaganda’, it is fantastic. Keep sticking it to them comrade