House of Paine article of the History of the Left/Right paradigm

[Mechaman]

http://www.houseofpaine.org/authority.htm

A very interesting article that I feel compelled to share and comment on extensively.

I admit that as a left wing Anarchist there are many points of agreement but also many points of disagreement with some of the comments in this article.  Here are a few things I noticed:

• The author seems to be focusing on the "totalitarian" elements of "liberalism" a lot.
• The article's definition of left vs. right is more about the type of authority and the degree thereof.  Admittedly, I don't disagree with the conclusions.
• The revolutionary nature of early leftists is strongly stressed in opposition to the strong support of established institutions by the right.
• What is notably absent, however, is any mention of race related issues.  In fact, I couldn't even find the word "black" in the article (yes I did a word search).  Slavery is mentioned, but as almost an aside issue of not much importance.  It's almost like the Civil War never happened.
• The author also seems to use very linear logic in regards to the progression of the parties and seems to assume that the political positioning remains constant.
• Not to play a broken record here, but for all of his talk on focusing on the ends for 19th-early 20th century Republicans, he seems to have either ignored or willingly whitewashed the ends for a sizable faction of the Democratic Party and instead focus almost exclusively on the means.

Admittedly, I agreed with a lot of the conclusions the author had about there being "two conservative parties" in the United States presently.  And even more to the point, I do agree even with his conclusion that the farthest left one can get is an anarchistic state with the greatest amount of power distributed to the greatest amount of people.  In no true philosophical sense can one consider the modern American liberal (or the liberals in many other states to be fair) to be on the Left when the solution almost always will be more state control.  The very existence of state power is evidence of societal inequality, as it is only through the existence of a small but powerful elite group that state control can exist and be exerted on the people.  To my mind there is no greater example of this than the influence of corporate money on the two big American parties (thank you Citizens United), which has resulted in the existence of state capitalism and moral supremacy on behalf of the owners.  It is through this lens that I view the trend of Wall Street greed and Soccer Mom Nanny Statism that is common through American "liberalism" to be absolute evidence of their conservatism.
Of note, I cannot but feel a great deal of vindication after reading this:

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The bolded part especially I think is stating a pretty basic truth.  I am not sure I would conclude that "liberals" are to the right of many "conservatives", but the tendency towards elite leaders and elitist policies in the party is more than obvious.  How do you explain, after all, the mentality that Americans should only have political leaders who hold Master degrees at Ivy League colleges?  How do you explain the mentality that the government needs to save failing private banks?  And more to the point, how else do you explain the current bastardization of American liberalism of playing world policeman, supporting political reform that makes most Americans dependent on the insurance industry, and an almost sneering attitude towards people who protest about their civil liberties being violated?  To me this ranks more of the old school 19th century British Imperialism that advocated an international empire based on the idea of "civilizing" the "third world" nations to save them from their savage selves than anything.  Need proof?  Well just open up any random thread in the Politics section and number how many red avatar posts defend the things that I have mentioned openly and go as far as to mock posters for having the audacity to defend stances that would've had 70's liberals foaming at the mouth for starters.

I do realize that the author comes from more of a Classically Liberal mindset and his reference to Rothbard indicates a more libertarian philosophy, but overall I think he is really onto something about modern day liberalism.

However, before I go too far patting the Thomas Paine fan on the back for a well-written article, there are a number of unforgivable historical overlooks committed.  The first and foremost being the almost total exclusion of race-related issues.  Racism was and still is a big factor in this country.  To not even mention it once in an entire article over the historical ideological development of the parties is either extreme or willful ignorance.  I am most shocked that a supposed "liberal" interpretation of American history would omit such a enormous issue, especially given that racism was largely used by conservative elites to disenfranchise or alienate the "uncouth".  Not even the very obvious example of anti-black racism is mentioned (again, the word "black" is not even mentioned once in the entire article) and slavery is mentioned as an almost aside when describing the "Republican Party" as simply "the Whigs with an anti-slavery veneer".  To me he is committing the opposite fallacy that many of this forum's members do, instead of thinking slavery was the only issue he thinks that it was just a side issue.  The fact of the matter is slavery DID happen, racism DID happen, and the politics of the country were drastically affected by it.  It is simply wrong to assume that race only exists in a vacuum compared to other issues.
As I've said before, abolitionism wasn't a solely left wing or liberal enterprise.  Sure, there were many of that era's social conservatives (which you can get an idea of where they stood on issues by some of the article's commentary) who believed in regulating the personal behavior of people to prevent the nation from falling into anarchy and chaos who believed that slavery made black people lazy and sexually immoral.  However, there were also people who were genuinely radical on the issue of race for their time who advanced ideas of racial equality outside of moral expectations.  In any other country this would be any easy thing to compare/contrast with previous political coalitions, but in the US particularly in the late 19th-early 20th century, things become murky as hell.  Many "conservative" Republicans of the time were very much pro-Civil Rights (though I have in the past on many an occasion questioned just how dedicated they were to equality) while many "liberal" Democrats of the time had views on blacks that would be considered cartoonishly racist by today's standards.

[Mechaman]

So maybe it is on that line of thinking that the author has completely omitted the race issue.  But then again, if that were the case he would've at least done the intellectually honest thing of devoting more than three words to describe just how important abolitionism was to the Republican cause.  At the same time, the white supremacy of southern Democrats is completely ignored.  Methinks that the author is trying to subscribe to a very convenient version of history where there is a left wing party and there is a right wing party and nothing in between.  Methinks he's wrong and is ignoring the possibility that not all coalitions (especially in American history) are necessarily ideologically sound and that the two party system in the US has forced in the past and will continue to force Big Tent alliances.  This was arguably a lot more true of the Democratic Party than it was the Republican Party.  While one could argue that the cultures of Norwegian socialists in Minnesota and Brahmin businessmen in Boston were alike in many ways, it would be very hard to make that same argument between Irish socialists in Butte, Montana and white landowners in South Carolina.  As I noted to TNF once on chat that is because the Republicans have always had, and will continue to have a general overall strategy and theme ("Americanism") while the Democrats in the past and to this day prefer to operate as a cultural coalition that have almost no unifying theme except they are "not Republican".  This might also explain why, ironically, that it is harder for Republicans to connect with non-white minorities, being the party of "100% Americanism" as Teddy Roosevelt once described.
Again, this is an opposite fallacy of what many on the forum make that anti-black racism was the deciding factor of how liberal or conservative someone was.  This guy, by contrast, seems to be operating in a world where race wasn't a significant factor.  Well race was a factor, and on a level much more than even many on this forum give it credit for.  As I have noted in the past, racism against the ethnic working class in the North by Republicans and certain elitist Democrats is almost completely and totally whitewashed in favor of a simple black and white view of the way things went.

So too, is the history of the Republican Party thoroughly whitewashed (author references a historian who erroneously states that the "even the name of the Republican Party is a lie", pray tell what is the point of calling it that then?) beyond all recognition.  The early GOP was a hodgepodge coalition of everyone from former New England Whigs to upper midwest anti-slavery Democrats to former Free Soilers to anti-slavery Know Nothings to German Marxists, etc etc.  Slavery WAS THE ISSUE that united these people together who differed on a great many other issues like trade, currency, and other morality issues.  This account of the Republican Party's formation as merely a successor to the economic nationalist tradition of Hamilton is about the most revisionist claptrap I've come across in a good long while, to say the least.  Does the author seriously believe that the Homestead Act was born out of Hamiltonian influence?

Further, not even the explanation for the Whig Party is satisfactory and leaves much to be desired.  While the Whigs generally were on the more conservative side of the coin, even that is not an entirely honest conclusion on the party.  Certainly by the 1840's the Whigs were more an anti-Democratic Party than they were merely a "conservative" party.  People forget, much like this author, that the Whigs consisted of a wide ideological coalition of people who were united in their opposition to Andrew Jackson than anything.  The party leadership might've been economic nationalists, but the only three Whig presidents we had in action certainly didn't live up to the nationalist label as the author has portrayed.  If anything, the motivation of Whigs to form a party was in response to the activism of the Jackson Era, though the inherent elitism of many Whigs arguably makes them irrevocably conservative compared to their more populist Jackson Democratic counterparts.
Of course, I should also mention that the author quotes George Wallace almost unironically when describing the political system that has existed since the 1930s.  I do agree with him about the inherent conservatism of much of the New Deal (do you guys really think FDR did it with government alone?  I mean come on!) as well as Wilson's own conservative sympathies ("the Fed", lol) that is overlooked by many.  However, a reference to George Wallace in an article that completely omits any mention of blacks or race (interesting fact: if you do a word search for "race" you'll come across those four letters in the word "embrace" three times in the article) or any mention of the white supremacist Jim Crow regimes is pretty suspect.

Point is, I highly doubt that Grover Cleveland was a Left Wing Democrat.

But yeah that is all for now, I'll reread the article later and comment more as time permits.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Interesting post. I'm only a few words into the article and I'm already seeing problems with it. I think Dallas may have linked me to this or something similar to it at some point in the IRC.

Outside of that, regarding the existence of two "conservative" parties, in this case, you are coming from the concept of one who seemingly has a very narrow view of what the "left" constitutes. In today's world, it would be perfectly valid for a socialist or someone of a similar stripe to complain about two right-wing political parties. However, there's the other side of the coin as well. On the right, one who demands absolute compliance to a fringe ideology could just as easily denounce the two major parties as liberal or left-wing. After all, while it could be said that Bill Clinton was a leader in championing neo-liberalism within his party, presidents like Nixon, Reagan, and Bush never truly threatened the nation's welfare state like a "true rightist" might want, nor did they criminalize abortion. From a fringe perspective, it's easy to denounce both parties as being basically similar, since, from that position, neither will give you what you want.

I shall possibly continue reading now.

[Cassius]

An interesting article; however, it seems (correct me if I'm wrong) that the author is coming at this subject from that libertarian 'everything can be collapsed into tyranny versus liberty' standpoint, which I think is rather simplistic. After all, what are those two things to be directed towards. It's quite conceivable that you can have an authoritarian government which seeks to smash how society has traditionally been structured, whilst on the other hand you can have a 'libertarian' (weak) government which stands aside and allows for the continued dominance of powerful forces that have traditionally ruled over society. For example, the feudal system, to a very large extent, was not upheld by central governments, but rather by individual landowners. The state in the feudal era wasn't particularly 'authoritarian' (which does not neccessarily make it good) because it was so weak and had so few resources to draw upon.

Thus, one can't neccessarily collapse the left-right division into an 'authoritarian vs libertarian' axis, because that a) ignores the purposes of a certain type of government and b) ignores the practical realities on the ground. Just a thought.

[Mechaman]

An interesting article; however, it seems (correct me if I'm wrong) that the author is coming at this subject from that libertarian 'everything can be collapsed into tyranny versus liberty' standpoint, which I think is rather simplistic. After all, what are those two things to be directed towards. It's quite conceivable that you can have an authoritarian government which seeks to smash how society has traditionally been structured, whilst on the other hand you can have a 'libertarian' (weak) government which stands aside and allows for the continued dominance of powerful forces that have traditionally ruled over society. For example, the feudal system, to a very large extent, was not upheld by central governments, but rather by individual landowners. The state in the feudal era wasn't particularly 'authoritarian' (which does not neccessarily make it good) because it was so weak and had so few resources to draw upon.

Thus, one can't neccessarily collapse the left-right division into an 'authoritarian vs libertarian' axis, because that a) ignores the purposes of a certain type of government and b) ignores the practical realities on the ground. Just a thought.

True.

As I noted he had a more strict American libertarian viewpoint on the matter of power than anything.  I am a bit more, well Marxist in thought.  I for one believe the "non-coercion" principle is pretty much garbage and that in some instances the use of force is necessary to achieve objectives.

Of course, strict doctrinaire libs would argue that is statism, but their philosophical beliefs don't give room to combat the scourge of corporations (and arguably many of them see no harm from such institutions).  More to the point, contrary to the beliefs of Anarcho-Capitalists, capitalism can only exist when the state is present and actively supporting it.

So what would I do?  I don't know, but a TNF post is a pretty good start.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

An interesting article; however, it seems (correct me if I'm wrong) that the author is coming at this subject from that libertarian 'everything can be collapsed into tyranny versus liberty' standpoint, which I think is rather simplistic. After all, what are those two things to be directed towards. It's quite conceivable that you can have an authoritarian government which seeks to smash how society has traditionally been structured, whilst on the other hand you can have a 'libertarian' (weak) government which stands aside and allows for the continued dominance of powerful forces that have traditionally ruled over society. For example, the feudal system, to a very large extent, was not upheld by central governments, but rather by individual landowners. The state in the feudal era wasn't particularly 'authoritarian' (which does not neccessarily make it good) because it was so weak and had so few resources to draw upon.

Thus, one can't neccessarily collapse the left-right division into an 'authoritarian vs libertarian' axis, because that a) ignores the purposes of a certain type of government and b) ignores the practical realities on the ground. Just a thought.

True.

As I noted he had a more strict American libertarian viewpoint on the matter of power than anything.  I am a bit more, well Marxist in thought.  I for one believe the "non-coercion" principle is pretty much garbage and that in some instances the use of force is necessary to achieve objectives.

Of course, strict doctrinaire libs would argue that is statism, but their philosophical beliefs don't give room to combat the scourge of corporations (and arguably many of them see no harm from such institutions).  More to the point, contrary to the beliefs of Anarcho-Capitalists, capitalism can only exist when the state is present and actively supporting it.

So what would I do?  I don't know, but a TNF post is a pretty good start.

The argument posed by the article, overall, seems to take classical liberalism, brand it as "true liberalism", and subsequently brand its only opposite as conservatism. This ignores a broader left-right spectrum that places liberalism between conservatism and socialism, which seems to be how it is traditionally taught, at least by my recollection of Intro to Poli Sci. While it's an interesting take, it is ultimately irrelevant/unfeasible.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

This is rather obvious, but for reference. Also, I kinda f#cked up which side to put modern left and right on, but I was going off a mental image, a "vision", if you will.