Contrary to what I imagine appears to be a statement about how everything was better in the 'good old days', I am not intending to bemoan the current state of politics, either here in Britain or around the world (needless to say, I could happily do either of those things). What I have instead been led to wonder is whether we are currently succeeding in correctly labelling people as belonging to the political Left, or, more noticeably, the Right.
Let me explain.
I am currently reading What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel (more of whom in a later post). In it, he posits the following:
"At the time, the financial crisis of 2008 was widely seen as a moral verdict of the uncritical embrace of markets that had prevailed, across the political spectrum, for three decades... The era begin in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it continued in the 1990s, with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good."This made me think quite a lot. When asked in a survey to place myself on a political spectrum, with '1' representing the far left, and 10 being the far right, I tentatively gave myself a '4'. I had always thought that my (now-waning) belief in the market-triumphalist values which have dominated our politics in recent decades and, in Sandel's terms, have transformed us from market economies into market societies, meant that I was in some sense Right-wing. In fact, I'm now not so sure, hence giving myself a score of '4'. But how can this be?
To understand this, I think we need to ask what people think of when they hear the term 'Right wing'. After a bit of searching around the internet (and again, a look at Quora), I found that the same ideas tended to crop up again and again. In general, the Right are regarded as being:
- In favour of a reduction of social welfare
- In favour of a reduction of the role of state-funded healthcare
- Anti-abortion
- Against birth control
- Religious
- Climate sceptics
- Unwilling to stick up for the poor
- Against trades union rights
- In favour of 'trickle-down' economics
- Desirous that the free market be used for everything
- Pro big-business
and so on. Sure enough, very little of this applies to me, and I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way.
The generation of my grandparents would have had no trouble in casting themselves as belonging to the political Right or Left, but things have changed. No longer are we in a position where Left means Socialist, and no longer are we in a position whereby the non-Socialists all sit on the illiberal right.
The Blair-Clinton era injected a thorough dose of conventionally Right Wing market-centric thinking into the forefront of Left Wing policy making. As a result, I suggest that we could have on our hands a very confused generation of voters - the Millennials - who are entering adulthood in an age where the very ethos of our major political parties is open to question, and when we have something of a duty to reconsider the role of market based thinking.
I cautiously diagnose what has happened: people who would naturally sit on the political left (e.g. myself) grew up in a post-Soviet era in which there was no 'natural left'. Even the major Left Wing parties, such as the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, or the Democrats in the United States, were for a time unrecognisable as such. Faced with a choice of the economic Right (in the guise of the rebranded traditional Left Wing) or the economic Right (in the guise of conservatism), we unsurprisingly were happy to accept our market based societies as being the only choice. Then came 2008. The Right and the Left are trying to put some distance between themselves again, and many of us who never had a real decision between Right or Left Wing politics suddenly need to decide which way to go.
Is it surprising that many of us don't know how to politically identify ourselves?
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