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Political triangulation.

  
 
ngsq12
07:08 / 12.07.06
I was having a chat with friends last weekend and an interesting thought came up regarding the structure of politics. Excuse me for some, admittedly, dry simplifications...

Let us say that there is this edifice we call the right and the left which stand for two positions of world view - the individual and the collective - respectivly.

Now it is my contention that either of these positions is unworkable on it's own and I think you will agree that there is some mix of the two that people go for. I have heard say that the fight is for the centre but some people are more left than right or vice-versa. They triangulate their position from these two absract positions.
Therefore the dialectic of the left and right, like walking, is mechanism for progress. So a framework has been set up where a possible solution to the problems of the world can develop even though a solution may not be in sight.

Does this sound like a workable argument or am I totally off base here?
 
 
elene
10:46 / 12.07.06
I believe the fight is for control of those people who can save some money, can eventually buy a home, educate their children well and someday retire in some minimum of comfort. This is the modern middle-class. Those above it - Messrs Bush & Cheney, Kerry, Clinton and their peers - are literally best served by your individualist position. Those below it, though they may not realise it, ought to adopt your collectivist position. A majority of people are in the collectivist group. The individualist group is tiny.

Presumably there will be a shift to the left in the USA in the near future because the middle-class is being systematically stripped of its wealth at the moment, and with it its illusory independence. At some stage its members, or former members must surely react to this situation, and, in a move to a more liberal regime (not a more left-wing one) a somewhat poorer middle-class will be restored and again begin to accumulate wealth that will eventually be annexed by the rich in another era of tax-cuts and depressed wages.

One certainly could call this a dialectic, but I doubt its synthesis constitutes progress for anyone but the above mentioned individualists. It's more like milking a cow.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
11:34 / 12.07.06
"Right" and "left" as a dichotomy is a bit meaningless and potentially misleading, IMO, in that it's a conflation of several different "scales" (authoritarian-to-libertarian, individualist-to-collectivist, traditionalist-to-revolutionary, etc) into a single scale, and assuming that everyone who is at the far "left" on any one of these scales is also going to be at the far "left" of all the others, and vice versa with someone who is at the far "right" of any of them, and then trying to fit everyone into a straight-line progression of having to be somewhere between them...

(even the use of the terms "right" and "left" is pretty fucking arbitrary, given that, IIRC, it comes from the sides of the parliamentary building that different parties chose to sit on in France pre-revolution...)

the usual result of this sort of thing is some clumsy attempt to put everyone's ideologies in something approximating a straight line, with communism, socialism, anarchism, etc at one end (but then, which is further to the left? anarchism, as the most idealistically radical, or Stalin/Mao/Khmer Rouge-style comunism, as the most absolutist in its (ostensible) collectivism?) and fascism at the other, with liberalism and conservatism as relatively central points in between... but then, where the hell do (extremely authoritarian and "socially conservative", but anti-hegemonic and anti-capitalist) poor-world religious fundamentalists, or (supposedly "right-wing" economically, but very anti-conservative and anti-social authoritarianism) neo-libertarians go?

The Political Compass is a slight improvement, using 2 fundamental axes (economic "left/right", ie loosely collectivism/individualism, and social libertarianism/authoritarianism), and thus creating 4 possible "extreme" positions (anarchism, Stalin/Mao/etc style "communism", fascism and neo-liberal/"right-libertarianism", going clockwise), but still really a gross over-simplification (2 dimensions better than 1, but one could still theoretically add many other further "dimensions"... modernist vs traditionalist, or "religious" vs "rational", could be other ones... to say nothing of views on gender, embodiment, etc...), and there are still people or groups whose views are demonstrable extremely different, if not diametrically opposed, to each other who would get very similar placings on it (fundamentalist Christians/Jews/Muslims and atheist/evolutionist/racialist nationalists, for example)...

OK in some cases "left" and "right" can be a useful shorthand, since most people (although this may vary very widely from country to country) think they know roughly what "left-wing" and "rtight-wing" mean, and would be able to categorise views on most issues into (crudely) "left-wing" and "right-wing" positions, but IMO the terms are very problematic... rather than use such relatively arbitrary points to "triangulate" my views (which are, for reference, broadly anarchist/communist/"left-libertarian"), I think i'd prefer to have a workable understanding of all (or as many as possible of) the major ideological "poles"/"axes" (poleaxes? ) in order to define myself amongst/against...
 
 
Lurid Archive
13:57 / 12.07.06
I'm really suspicious of the idea that a balanced middle ground is what all reasonable people should get behind, and only extremists argue with. At what point did thinking some ideas are largely wrong become suspect?

Added to that, this kind of middle ground approach to issues often involves a rather contentious framing of the debate in order to produce desired conclusions. The is, more or less, the way that New Labour, Blair and advocates of the Third way have argued, and I've never much liked it (though the claim to reasonableness, and the way that seemed to resonate is rather interesting).

When we are talking about politics, you have to be somewhat short sighted to really get behind this idea of "the dialectic of the left and right" as a "mechanism for progress". Centre grounds aren't constant, either through history or geographically. Path dependence, cultural difference and economic realities, amongst other things, have a great influence on where the mainstream political debate takes place. Certainly, in a democratic country, one expects progress to consist of a series of messy compromises, but that says nothing about general trends and directions, and certainly nothing about our principles and ideals.
 
 
ngsq12
20:36 / 12.07.06
I am being one-dimensional with my model but the oscilation probably occurs with higher dimensional models that take in to account other factors, like that political compass.

Like a worldline in some political phase space.

Principles and ideals change as well within this progress. That progress was accompanied by a shift from left to right and back again over decades so some oscillation between the extremes. The greater the oscillations the more violent the turmoil (it seems). This would call for a competition towards the centre, perhaps to prevent these kinds of political swings of a revolutionary nature.

Whenever revolutions occur, people get strung up, whether they deserved it or not.
 
 
Herald of the Yellow Sun
01:57 / 17.07.06
Whenever revolutions occur, people get strung up, whether they deserved it or not.

Whenever revolutions don't occur, people get bombed, kidnapped, shot, tortured, imprisoned, conquered, marginalized, silenced and conscripted, whether they deserve it or not.

The idea of the middle ground as being the best option I see as sort of a luxury for us in the first world, because we don't feel first-hand the majority of the murderous results of imperialist governments and corporations in the rest of the world. As stated in the first post, the left and right are abstract positions, and envisioning an infinitely long rod that goes as far as the eye can see in both directions, it's easy to see that one's perspective of "left" and "right" depends on where one stands, as well as how far one can see to either side, how tolerant of difference that person is, etc. Also, there is the fact that one's view of left and right is not just internal--it is shaped by the state, the economy, the press, and the opinion of friends and family, which are also affected by the state et al. In other words, the political leaders, media giants and upper class have great power in shaping political outlook, in presenting what right and left mean, and thus where the middle is.

In the US, the "left" is often associated with "big government, while "right" means "small government," while in my mind those associations are at the least untrue, if not the opposite of the truth. The argument for the center is little more than an argument for disempowerment and conformity, because of who largely determines what the center is.

Much respect is reserved for those free-thinking moderates who have the intelligence not to follow the radical demands of the far left and the far right. In other words, the sheep who have the intelligence not to try to flee the shepherd. In reality, the moderates are loved by the state and the corporate elite, because they compromise, mediate, and don't try to effect major change.

I do love the wording of "political triangulation" as what I find to be a self-incriminating description of what's wrong with this idea. Triangulation is how GPS works. There's two satellites, and there's you. It knows where the two satellites are, and it knows how far you are away from them, and thus it knows where you are. The real factor at work isn't so much you walking around with your little screen--it's those two chunks of metal in space. Those two chunks of metal which are not fixed in place, and someone put them there, and someone is controlling where they go. The same way, political triangulation allows you to find your decent self in relation to those abstract, unthinkably repugnant entities of the far left and far right. But like somebody puts those satellites in the sky, somebody puts those ideas of the left and right in place, and it probably wasn't you.
 
  
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