The left looks at people who are hurting and immediately asks “how can we help them?”
The center looks at hurting people and says “can insiders profit from this?”
The right looks at people who are hurting and says “how can we hurt them more?”
There’s some overlaps between the right and center on this, but the right’s ur-Value is cruelty to the weak and outsiders. If they can make money hurting people, that’s great. The center just wants money. Lots of it. That’s their ur-value. If making money helps or hurts someone, OK.
The left’s ur-value is kindness. They see someone hurting, and they want to help.
The center has a modicum of shame. Being around people who are hurting, like homeless people, bothers their conscience a little bit, so they want them removed from their sight.
The right wants suffering people removed because they see them as losers who deserve what’s happening to them, and weak people deserve to suffer. Hell, make them suffer more till they get their act together.
This is the political spectrum in the West right now. There was a time when the center wanted to help people, from about FDR 76 or so, but those centrists no longer have any significant power. But the center pretends they want to help, and because they at least pretend, they feel entitled to support and votes from the left, even though most of their policies hurt people.
In some ways, the right, with their lack of pretense, is more admirable. They’re monsters and they don’t pretend otherwise, except when it comes to unborn children, whom they immediately abandon once born.
Given that the left has no significant power in most Western states, everything has gotten worse for everyone but the rich and the enforcer class for about three generations now. Until centrists either become humane again, probably out of self-interest, or the left takes power, the downward trend will continue.
Jan Wiklund
I doubt that there IS anything of what you call “left”, Ian.
A political actor has to be organized, otherwise it doesn’t exist. It seems that the only ones that bother about organizing things nowadays are the rentiers. They seem, between them, have organized what is generally called “the centrists” and “the ultra-right”.
There may be some differences between factions of the rentiers, that decide which one of these they support. Probably banking and equity funds support the centrists, while real estate and raw materials, and perhaps platforms, support the ultra-right. But it would require some research to establish the facts.
The direct producers don’t organize anything any longer (as they did roughly 1850-1950), and for that reason don’t get their interests considered. What happens in the world is decided by compromises, but only compromises between the mobilized, says Susan Strange.
Don’t mourn, organize!
Daniil Adamov
Perhaps. (There are other ways to lay out the ur-left-and-right, but this one is no worse than the others, I suppose.)
I must say I don’t see this as an argument in favour of the left, though (perhaps it was not intended as one, of course). There are kinds of “help” that do the “helped” more harm than good. When the Third Republic French were bringing liberty and equality to Africa, many of them were sincerely out to “help”; colonisation was popular among certain sections of the left for a good reason, it was as “helpful” as can be. Progress-minded educators in colonial societies would often “help” the native children by setting them free from their parents. Christopher Hitchens, I have read, genuinely believed that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a great way to “help” Iraqis; he was a neocon by then, but clearly he hadn’t gotten all the Trotsky-worshipping leftism out of his system yet.
There are times when, remembering how my people and my ancestors have fared under a regime of dedicated friends of all humanity, how well they have been “helped”, I feel very glad we don’t have a serious left left in Russia anymore. “Centrists” like Putin aren’t nearly as hazardous to have in power, and I’m not even a fan of Putin. Self-righteous fanatics out to “help” us are more dangerous than plain old opportunistic careerists.
Jefferson Hamilton
Hmm, I think what is called the center has attitudes very similar to what you attribute to the right. Yes, they care about money (but so does the right; they like cruelty but they like money just as much). I think they by and large *also* privately think people deserve their hardships for not being as “smart” or “savvy” as the center-winners, but they believe it’s a bit gauche to say so outright, although they often can’t really help themselves and insinuate it. They may not take enjoyment in the cruelty per se like the hogs on the right do, but they see it as a necessary thing to keep them in their rightful place.
Ian Welsh
Guess it all varies. In Canada the only reason we have universal healthcare is because of a socialist. Last poll I saw had Canadians say he was the greatest Canadian. And by modern standards FDR was a flaming left winger, and without him there’d be no social security or medicare. The NHS was created by Clement Atlee, another flaming left winger by current standards.
But, of course, all ideologies can do harm. I just prefer one whose ur-value isn’t “fuck suffering people.” Maybe it won’t work out, but those who don’t even care to try usually produce even worse results.
someofparts
https://www.fredgao.com/p/rebooting-american-hegemony-a-chinese
From the Inside China website here’s a good analysis of Trump’s thinking about the place of the US in global affairs.
Oakchair
Remember this is the attitude of the people in control of every institution from the banks, to the media, courts, government agencies, health care, universities, google and social media.
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just wants money… how can insiders profit from this?
pretends they want to help, and because they at least pretend, they feel entitled
they want (those hurting) removed from their sight.
———————
Next time you feel your conditioning beckoning you to ignore evidence, follow orders from “experts”, and believe what they dictate, remember whose water you’re being made to carry.
Eric Anderson
Ian i don’t know if you ever read it, but this from Rick Perlstein is a classic. He gets right to the Ur values of the right … but misses the center. I think today his article describes the centrists the best.
Check out, “The Long Con”
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
“Trust me with your life, but not your money or your wife” seems the prevailing attitude.
Feral Finster
The reason there is no “left” worth speaking of is because this is not in the interests of capital at this time. Hence, there is little to gain for the sociopaths who rule over us.
Were there any power in the left, or were the left to get actual power, it would attract sociopaths the way fresh dog shit attracts flies.
Feral Finster
@Daniil Adamov:
“There are times when, remembering how my people and my ancestors have fared under a regime of dedicated friends of all humanity, how well they have been “helped”, I feel very glad we don’t have a serious left left in Russia anymore. “Centrists” like Putin aren’t nearly as hazardous to have in power, and I’m not even a fan of Putin. Self-righteous fanatics out to “help” us are more dangerous than plain old opportunistic careerists.”
I believe H.L. Mencken wrote something to that effect. For that matter, Celine’s Third Law readeth thusly: “And honest politician is a national catastrophe”.
someofparts
Actually the point about the damage wrought by people of good intentions even holds true in our relations to our non-human companions on this plane. It’s generally a bad idea to encourage feral animals to trust humans too much. For every person who would be kind to them, there is certain to be another who will abuse their trust.
I think the best cure for those inclined to inflict well-intentioned harm on others is to join the ranks of the colonized and maligned themselves.
Why is it that the true left, the socialist-champions-of-the-common good left, only approach the fight as existential when our backs are against the wall? Musk is not only pushing right wing government in the US, he is doing it in over a dozen other countries. Why is it only the right wing that is ruthless and forward-thinking? Why doesn’t every country have an organization like Hezbollah within it’s borders that, without apology and with public support, defends against enemies of the common good with political organizing and armed resistance?
Mary Bennet
By this schema, the Bolsheviks, who I believe did enjoy their cruelties, must have been closet RWs. They were hated by the capitalist countries, not for those cruelties but because they confiscated private wealth.
bruce wilder
Dichotomies of human ambivalence figure in political alignments. The dichotomies can be unitary and polar, but the alignments are more complex, more fractured, more dynamically kaleidoscopic over time.
How people react personally and politically to suffering varies quite a lot, and not over a single one-dimensional continua, nor trapped in a 2×2 “window”, but over intersecting spectra. And, while an individual may be struggling with contradictory feelings in isolation, in community and society attitudes can polarize as individuals align into political groupings and generate or absorb ideologies.
My city and state are infamous for the number of homeless and I see and hear a variety of reactions to their presence on the streets. I feel a variety of feelings myself. Mixed up with the reactions I hear and experience is puzzlement over “the causes” of mass homelessness.
The evolution of political alignments in my lifetime has been instructive to me and it is tangled up with my puzzlement — and the puzzlement of many from my observation — over how the problems of poverty and homelessness can be addressed.
Like several other commenters, I especially wonder what happened to “the Left”. And, I suppose I wonder, too, what happened to “the center” and “the right”.
My city and state, faced with chronic homelessness, has used government (and NGOs formerly known as charities) to “address” the problem. The voters have endorsed additional funding from taxes for these efforts. Both the squalor of “encampments” and the cruelty of clearance policies are visible on the streets and in the news.
My city and state have long been controlled by Democrats, so nominally “the left”. The narrative critique from the Trumpist right is that the Democratic establishment is terminally ineffectual and corrupt. That critique has been joined by the “Abundance” center championed by the execrable Ezra Klein.
I cannot reject that critique. My personal contempt for the soi disant left has been growing for years, as virtue-signalling combined with callous indifference to the interests of the working class and performative contempt for “MAGA”.
I think the long night of the neoliberal soul which the western world has experienced has taken its toll on genuine and effectual caring, in large part by taking away the “effectual” part. A Marxist back in the day had (contradictory) ideas about how the economy was organized and could be organized. A Catholic had other ideas. (I cannot say “fascist” with any hope that a reader will know of the ideas of solidarity and state action however perverted that term represented.)
In general, I despair of the present political alignments in the West producing any kind of responsible governance from the political elites. It is like “caring” in any mode need not apply. “Caring” in some foundational “ur-value” sense is irrelevant to this alignment. Maybe because neoliberalism has erased any sense of integrity or mechanism from our ideologies.
Oakchair
sociopaths
Why doesn’t every country have an organization… without apology and with public support, defends against enemies of the common good?
I especially wonder what happened to “the Left”. And, I suppose I wonder, too, what happened to “the center” and “the right”.
erased any sense of integrity
It is like “caring” in any mode need not apply.
————
Imagine a society where for several generations brain damaging industrial waste was put into the water, every child was injected 70 or so times with heavy metals that accumulate in the brain, the food was bathed in literal poison, and the amount of pills ingested exceeded the servings of fresh veggies consumed.
Scratch that there’s no need to imagine that society. We’re living it. Every single day. Is it any surprise what it’s all become?
bruce wilder
This may seem very off-topic, but for me this experience very much connected in a jarring way with the OP and quite a few of the comments offered above.
I was just on substack browsing and I read the manifesto of one, Joshua Citarella, for a podcast project on YouTube he calls Doomscroll. In a lengthy introduction full of NGO-speak he explains why and how he thinks the social media hive mind can be made to nurture and promote critical thinking and eventually a political consensus favorable to unspecified social democratic ideas and views. I probably shouldn’t say, “unspecified” because he name drops people he has interviewed for his podcast, who I do not recognize. He embeds a Jacobin interview with Adolph Reed as an illustration of what he aspires to for his podcast project. He makes some references to the libertarian ideas of the New Left of the 1960s that I took to be mildly disapproving.
Toward the end, he shifts out of the NGO-speak register to argue the case for a labor populism of the left that recruits among the lower middle and working class, something I have long argued for.
At the very end of the article, this rather jarring bit of brand disclosure appears: