Taylor Lewis — The Shift: From Liberal-Conservative to Globalist-Nationalist

Taylor Lewis explores the contrast between globalism and nationalism from a nationalist point of view.

Nationalism is usually considered to be a rightist point of view, and internationalism a leftist one. However, economic liberalism led to global capitalism so establishments of both the parties of the right and left favored globalism and international institutions that accommodated transnational corporatism.

The election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the resurgence of nationalists parties in Europe, collectively called "populism," has changed that political dynamic and pitted nationalists against globalists.

The American Thinker
The Shift: From Liberal-Conservative to Globalist-Nationalist

Taylor Lewis

Chris Dillow — The centralizing-decentralizing axis

Here’s a theory: one of the most important, yet under-rated, divisions in politics is that between centralizers and decentralizers.

This isn’t quite the same as the authoritarian-libertarian axis used by Political Compass, or Haidt’s liberty-oppression axis. For one thing, the axis I have in mind is often an instrumental one – it’s about how our values are best achieved – rather than one of values themselves. For another, some centralizers can be quite libertarian: some Blairites, for example, favour strong central political leadership and yet are socially libertarian. And for yet another, some forms of central organization can be freely entered into.

And it’s certainly not the same as the left-right axis. For example, Seamus Milne and left-libertarians are both on the left, but on opposite sides of the centralizer-decentralizer axis. And that subset of right-libertarians who are sincere and consistent are on the same side of this axis as we left-libertarians, whereas securocrats such as Theresa May are on the opposite.

Here are some examples of the centralizer-decentralizer axis:

Stumbling and Mumbling
The centralizing-decentralizing axis
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Scott Alexander — A Thrive/Survive Theory Of The Political Spectrum

I admitted in my last post on Reaction that I devoted insufficient space to the question of why society does seem to be drifting gradually leftward. And I now realize that in order to critique the Reactionary worldview effectively we’re going to have to go there.

The easiest answer would be “because we retroactively define leftism as the direction that society went”. But this is not true. Communism is very leftist, but society eventually decided not to go that way. It seems fair to say that there are certain areas where society did not go to the left, like in the growth of free trade and the gradual lowering of tax rates, but upon realizing this we don’t feel the slightest urge to redefine “low tax rates” as leftist.

So what is leftism? For that matter, what is rightism?

Any theory of these two ideas would have to explain at least the following data points:

1) Why do both ideologies combine seemingly unrelated political ideas? For example, why do people who want laissez-faire free trade empirically also prefer a strong military and oppose gay marriage? Why do people who want to help the environment also support feminism and dislike school vouchers?

2) Why do the two ideologies seem broadly stable across different times and cultures, such that it’s relatively easy to point out the Tories as further right than the Whigs, or ancient Athens as further left than ancient Sparta? For that matter, why do they seem to correspond to certain neural patterns in the brain, such that neurologists can determine your political beliefs with 83% accuracy by examining brain structure alone?

3) Why do these basically political ideas correlate so well with moral, aesthetic, and religious preferences?

4) The original question: how come, given enough time and left to itself, leftism seems to usually win out over rightism, pushing the Overton window a bit forward until there’s a new leftism and rightism?

I have a hypothesis that explains most of this, but first let me go through some proposed alternatives.

Slate Star Codex

A Thrive/Survive Theory Of The Political Spectrum

Scott Alexander

ht Random in the comments

John Carney — Prospects for a New Left-Right Economic Coalition

Mike Konczal's most recent Wonkblog column focuses in on the potential pitfalls facing any attempt to put reformist libertarians and reformist liberals together into what Michael Lind has been describing as a coalition against rentiers—people who receive a substantial portion of their income from property or securities.

One problem Konczal anticipates is that the conservative side of the coalition has too narrow of a view of the problem....

What conservatives had to learn was that the government wasn't on their side. It wasn't going to aid them in enriching their goals—it would always be used to pursue special interests often inimical to conservative purposes. 

This isn't a lesson many reformist liberals have yet learned. They still imagine that government programs will aid them in reaching their goals—instead of mainly serving to further enrich the wealthy, entrench the powerful and stymie upward economic mobility.

In my more hopeful moments, however, I still believe someday they may learn this lesson.

CNBC NetNet
Prospects for a New Left-Right Economic Coalition
John Carney | Senior Editor

Like Konczal said.

I think the fundamental difference may be that liberals assume that good government is possible and conservatives assume it is not. I'd say that history tends to bear conservatives out, as would Karl Marx, for example. As soon as one acknowledges the fact that sociologists have established beyond the shadow of a doubt, that is, that a society of any complexity evinces a class structure and class interests, then power enters the mix and politics is based on power. Mainstream economists suppress this. See Michael Perelman, The Power of Economics v. the Economics of Power.

Traditional liberals and conservatives fall on the authoritarian side of the political compass and support hierarchical organization, which includes government based on the military model. 

Liberals favor a large socially activist government that supports liberal causes (constituencies) and issues. Conservatives favor a strong socially and politically activist government that supports conservative causes (constituencies) and issues. Both operate on the basis of conflicting ideology and moral value structure.

Those who fall on the libertarian side of the political compass on the left and right support consensual organization based on the team model. The ideology of right Libertarians is based on radical individualism with voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit, and the ideology of left libertarians is oriented toward the integration of liberty, equality, and community (outside the US called "solidarity"). 

The libertarian view is supported politically in the US by Libertarians and Objectivists (Tea Party). There is no clearly defined left libertarian faction in the US at present other than at the fringes of politics. However, the fringe is becoming increasingly significant owing to economic conditions and the level of cronyism and political corruption affecting the US economy and US politics.

The political compass is a four quadrant matrix of potential preference on which which individuals place themselves based on answers to the test's questions. While it is a simplistic way to represent the complexity of preferences, it does fall into the way that we talk of political preference in the US presently, so in that sense it is a useful device.

Getting agreement across the four quadrants would be difficult enough without class structure and class and interests and the mechanics of power that go along with this. Very few are talking about this, however, other than Marxists and Marxians. The few others that are talking about it are the anthropologists, sociologists, evolutionary theorists, and cognitive scientists, but this is not penetrating public awareness very much yet.