Sunday Philosophy: Left Versus Right

Today’s post was inspired by the following video:

This video, in turn, was probably inspired by Part 1 of The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World.  The gist of the chapter in the book and the first part of the video is that the common understanding of “left” versus “right” is that it pits Communism and Socialism on one end of the political spectrum versus fascism and dictatorships on the other.  The problem here is that totalitarianism is the end result for both sides.  A more useful spectrum, as both sources point out, would be totalitarianism in all forms on the left versus no government—anarchy—on the right.

Communism, Nazism and Fascism are all authoritarian forms of government

One of the ways the common misunderstanding came about was due to rivalry between Germany and the USSR during World War II.  The Nazis were Socialists.  The Russians were Socialists.  They were both authoritarian, murderous regimes that stripped natural rights from individuals in favor of centralizing power in the state.  Philosophically, they were no different, but they both had the goal of controlling Europe.  The rivalry was about which nation would achieve control, not about how they would rule or the treatment of individual rights.  Casting the Nazis on one end of the political spectrum and the Communists on the other end was a clever way of distorting the issue and presenting a false choice.

The fact is that new deal progressives were fans of both.  They admired the central management, the consolidation of control in the hands of intellectuals, and the power of the cults of personality that were built up around Josef Stalin and Benito “Men are tired of liberty” Moussolini in particular.

Progressives and liberals have used this false interpretation of the spectrum with great success.  They cast big-government Democrats in the US as a happy-face, “were here to help” form of government that’s just looking out for the little guy.  They’re supposedly just left-of-center moderates who want just enough socialism to keep the disaffected and forgotten safe from the greedy capitalists.  On the other end, they cast Republicans as Hitler-like fascists, without bothering to actually define fascism.  Along with that came all the baggage that went along with Nazism:  racism, anti-semitism, and jack-booted thuggery that terrorized people with the idea that government enforcers could break down your doors at night and arrest you if you were doing something that wasn’t approved of.  In fact, this interpretation couldn’t be any further from the truth.

The Founders Were Right Wingers

The spirit of the American revolution was built around the idea that people should be governed not by a centralized authority, but by a diverse, distributed form of government.  (Actually, that’s a massive oversimplification, but it suits the general thinking of the political leadership of the time.)  The first political framework that developed, the Articles of Confederation, clearly was an experiment that erred on the side of implementing as weak of a centralized government as possible—there was a ingrained mistrust of government authority.  Under the Articles, the federal government was able to pass legislation, but had no power to enforce it.  The federal government could not levy taxes, and could only request funding from the states (the states tended to not comply with those requests).  It had no power to regulate interstate commerce, so all lawmaking was left up to the states and there was no process for standardizing anything on a national basis.

The eventual development of the Constitution was basically an acknowledgement that the government set in place under the Articles was completely unworkable, and that the federal government had to be granted some power and authority.  But even then, the founders continued to carefully to limit that authority as much as possible.  The ninth and tenth amendments illustrate the idea that, when in doubt, the government should err on the side of individual rights, and that the federal government should defer to states in all cases except when its power and authority were specifically called out in the Constitution.

“Right Wingers” Are Continuing the Founders’ Legacy

So where does that leave us today?  Today’s leftists bristle at the the restrictions placed on the government by the Constitution.  The New Deal was an all-out assault on our founding principles, and its principle advocates believed that they could deliver a more “efficient” government if elite academic “dictators” (sort of like Barack Obama’s czars) were able to implement policy and “manage” the economy without oversight or approval.  FDR outright rejected the idea of limited government, and launched us down the road to socialism through Social Security.  He set out to undermine and nationalize private industries, particular utility companies.  He enforced price controls, production limits and set up the Federal Reserve System. 

The marginalization of the Constitution continues to this day, with a noble personage no less than Al Gore famously describing the Constitution as a “living, breathing document,” the implication being that nothing that’s written in it is set in stone, and whatever it says should be reinterpreted at the whims and fancies of the political elites of the day.  Barack Obama has whined that the Supreme Court hasn’t broken us free from the “essential constraints in the Constitution” and that issues of redistribution of wealth and “economic justice” haven’t been interpreted into the Constitution yet.  So you have the left wanting to expand the role of the federal government and centralize control of the country in Washington, DC, in spite of the essential Constitutional restrictions.

People on the political right, then, are the ones who believe in the timelessness of the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution, who believe in restoring limited government, and believe in inalienable individual rights as opposed to surrendering personal responsibility to centralize authoritarianism.  The Republican party and its leadership, however, are not the font of conservative thought or the motor behind the advancement of the philosophy, as the Democrat party is for its constituents’ ideas.  Rather, the Republican leadership rarely seems to have a coherent agenda or message.

Instead, the motor of conservative thought and action lies, as it always has, with the people, who to this day still hold certain truths to be self-evident.  People who believe that that we are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights are the ones who must stand up and lead, and not ever consent to being ruled.  The government is simply a body.  We must be its thinking, sensing, acting brain.