Where Is the Border between Left and Right?
The left/right spectrum is too one-dimensional, but the idea of a left-liberal-right triangle has yet to gain much traction with the public
"borders / frontiere" by Paolo Cuttitta palestine is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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I sent my recent article on green liberalism to a friend and colleague for some feedback. He made the great point that trying to map liberalism onto a left/right spectrum can be a little one-dimensional. As someone who has blogged about a left/liberal/right triangle, I think this is bang on the money. Unfortunately, though, most people still think in terms of left and right.
If we continue to use the spectrum, just because most people think in those terms, where does the frontier between left and right lie? And where does liberalism fit in with it? Before we get to my answers, I will answer two related questions, which will help set the scene. Where is the frontier between the hard left and the soft left? And where is the frontier between the hard right and the soft right?
Before we get stuck in, I would like to remind you all of the distinction between hedgehogs and foxes, which we have discussed many times before in these parts. Hedgehogs like to base their whole worldview on one single model of reality, which they take to extremes. Members of the hard left and the hard right both tend to be hedgehogs. They will take one idea "(“capitalism is bad” / “capitalism is good”) and run with it. They often end up with extreme positions, like thinking that capitalism is about to collapse or wanting to promote anarcho-capitalism. The people who do this form the base of left-wing and right-wing political movements. They are also swift to deploy conspiracy theories as bodyguards to protect their one-dimensional views from contact with reality.
Narcissistic political leaders are often drawn to the hedgehog-like fringes, since they offer wacky and gimmicky positions that can be defended with utter certainty in opposition, despite being unlikely to yield good results in power. These political entrepreneurs often come to see themselves as the true voice of the real people, ignoring the diversity found in actually existing societies. Academics call this style of politics populism; and - like members of their bases - populist leaders are often drawn to conspiracy theories.
Strangely enough, it is impossible to understand politics in these times of culture wars without the horseshoe theory of politics, which holds that the populist ends of the spectrum have more in common with each other than with liberal-minded moderates supposedly on the same side of the spectrum. Three quick examples should illustrate the point. In the US, populist left-wing anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy would take more votes from Donald Trump to his right than he would from the Democrats, his former party; while in Spain, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is negotiating a coalition deal with a Catalan nationalist party he accused of being far right in the past. I have also discussed how people who identify as far-left anarchists can become vulnerable to far-right propaganda in a previous post.
Both sides of the horseshoe tend to be deeply illiberal. The great liberal insight - that the best societies mostly let ordinary people take their own decisions on how to live their lives - is hated by hedgehogs on both the hard left and the hard right, who tend to have strong opinions on other people’s life choices.
Sensible politicians from left and right want to win elections and govern competently. They tend to be foxes, who are willing to run multiple models in parallel. The main three models in the West are liberal democracy, a market economy and a welfare state, all of which are grounded in the great insight of liberalism. However, there are contradictions between the three that can never be fully resolved, much to the disgust of hedgehogs. Meanwhile, investor-friendly policies can be hard for hedgehogs and dogmatic contrarians on the fringes to understand.
The border between the hard left and the soft left became very noticeable after Hamas raped, slaughtered and kidnapped innocent Israelis last month. The soft left took the sensible view that rape, murder and hostage taking are always wrong, no matter the circumstances. Many on the soft left defended Israel’s right to defend itself, while urging the country not to commit war crimes in Gaza in retaliation.
The hard left, though, has adopted Palestinian nationalism as its own cause, without any reflection on its regressive nature. People on this side of the horseshoe often refuse to accept Israeli sovereignty over a small slither of land in the Middle East. In many cases, their reaction to the atrocities was frankly antisemitic. We expect to find antisemitism on the far right of the horseshoe, but the best way of seeing this form of racism is as a conspiracy theory. Populists and hedgehogs at the tips of the horseshoe tend to be more conspiratorial than moderates, as we mentioned above.
If you want more evidence , please click on this link, which shows hard-left activist Jeremy Corbyn spinning an antisemitic conspiracy theory out of thin air while appearing on the Iranian government’s propaganda channel in 2012. His views on the Jewish community later brought shame and disgrace on the UK Labour Party, which he led to two successive election defeats in 2015 and 2017. He also failed to provide credible opposition to Brexit (a hard-right project) in the referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) in 2016.
On the other side of the horseshoe, the US hard right has mostly been supportive of Trump’s coup attempt, which its members try to rebrand as “legitimate protest.” The soft right in the US Republican Party has been very cowardly in this respect, recently electing Mike Johnson to be House Speaker. He has strongly defended Trump’s conspiracy theories about an allegedly stolen election.
Seen from the perspectives of members of the hard left and the hard right, the soft iteration of their views are weak and wishy washy sellouts. Socialists often hate social democrats, who they think have missed an essential memo about the need to nationalise all heavy industry immediately after winning an election. Meanwhile, Trump supporters are quick to smear conservative critics of his populist coup attempt as “RINOs” (short for “Republicans in name only”).
The situation is genuinely hard for serious politicians from both the soft left and the soft right, who have often come to appreciate the power of devolving decision making to ordinary people as much as possible, listening to experts and running multiple models in parallel as ways to deal with the complexities of the real world. They realise that it is often hard to win an election without the support of the base; and they appreciate that many of the people handing out leaflets will have fairly undiluted and extreme views. They will often pull their punches when it comes to people on the same side of the spectrum, as we saw with mainstream conservatives holding their noses to vote for Johnson to become Speaker and members of the UK soft left making excuses for Corbyn during his time as Labour leader.
When I worked in real-time news (1996 to 2002), I had a couple of beats covering the intersection of politics and markets, first in Spain (1997 to 2000) and then in the UK (2000 and 2001). This gave me the chance to watch two very different politicians give masterclasses on how to handle their bases. In Spain, conservative Prime Minister (PM) José María Aznar mostly governed from the liberal centre and the adjacent centre-right. He made sure the Popular Party (PP) faced no serious competition to its right, so he could fight elections on just one flank to his left.
Aznar would occasionally throw some red meat to his hard-right base, for example, by supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite a strong anti-war consensus in Spain at the time. Many members of the left were utterly convinced Aznar was a dyed-in-the-wool fascist - a simple-minded analysis at a time that his government was steering Spain into the euro and presiding over a booming economy, all while doing away with compulsory military service for young men. He was influenced by liberal economist Friedrich Hayek, a strong defender of free markets.
Aznar won two elections in a row (1996 and 2000). His time in power ended in disgrace as his team spread conspiracy theories about an Al Qaeda attack on commuters in Madrid just before the 2004 election, much to the disgust of ordinary voters. His track record was later further tarnished by a series of corruption scandals, which emerged after he left power. It is worth mentioning that the Socialists and Catalan nationalists have also been hit by corruption scandals with their roots in the boom years between Spain’s entry to the EU in 1986 and the credit crunch that began in 2007/8, with disastrous results for the country’s economy.
GDP per capita in Spain, Max Roser, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Meanwhile, in the UK, Tony Blair won three elections in a row (1997, 2001 and 2005). A member of the soft left, with a strong liberal component to his worldview, his approach to his base was very different to Aznar’s. Instead of throwing red meat to the people who hand out leaflets, he realised that he could win votes from Britain’s many centrists, moderates and floating voters by distancing Labour from the hard left.
Before winning his first election, Blair informally rebranded the party as New Labour and picked a battle with the hard left over Clause IV of the Labour Party Rule Book, which called for common ownership of industry. The hard left never forgave him for what its members saw as a betrayal, which was compounded by his decision to back the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He based this decision on liberal interventionism.
Despite his bad call on Iraq, Blair was able to introduce the minimum wage and increase public spending without spooking the bond market, as well as helping deliver the Good Friday Agreement, ending decades of strife in Northern Ireland. He was influenced by liberal sociologist L.T. Hobhouse, a defender of the welfare state.
Having mapped out the territory, we can now return to the question in the headline. Although there is often some overlap between the soft right and the soft left in terms of basic policy and openness to liberal ideas, we can see a clear difference when it comes to choice of allies. Aznar supported some regressive measures to keep Spanish nationalists happy to his right; while Blair used much of his political capital to support a robust welfare state, which should have kept the hard left happy in theory, even if it didn’t in practice (the hard left will alway prefer ideological purity in opposition to compromises in power).
I believe that dealmaking and tribal affinity define the border between left and right. This makes it hard to place true liberals on the spectrum, who can be seen as left-leaning or right-leaning depending on the deals they cut. This point also explains why anti-left narratives can act as a far-right rabbit hole for liberals, who are worried about the hard left’s wariness about the power of markets.
Toxic politics in Spain
Understanding the importance of dealmaking and tribalism also explains why Spanish politics is quite so toxic at the moment. Right-wing Catalan and Basque nationalists are treated as honourable members of the left-wing alliance, which makes it unacceptable to anti-nationalists like myself. At the same time, the PP is much too keen on cutting deals with hard-right party Vox, which includes many Spanish nationalists. This also makes it wildly unattractive. The strange death of a centrist liberal party means that people who are interested in genuine liberal centrism in Spain have no place to go at the moment, other than by becoming floating voters.
Unfortunately, nationalism is toxic for societies. The European project is much more important than old-fashioned generalisations about big blocks of humanity. In theory, true centrists and liberals should be able to support deals across the soft left and the soft right, while marginalising illiberal extremists, populists and nationalists at the ends of the horseshoe. I have suggested a system of patriotic abstentions to get Spain closer to this position, but - as they say in Spanish - please sit down while you wait.
Sadly, we will probably have to wait for a few years for the situation to improve in Spain. I expect Sánchez will be able to form a new coalition, but it will never be very stable. His nationalist and populist allies will continue to ask for democratic backsliding measures in return for keeping him in power. The Catalan separatists’ long-term strategic aim is to weaken the democratic guardrails to improve the odds for their next economically illiterate self-coup attempt. Meanwhile, Sánchez’s decision to include radical separatists caught with bomb-making material in his emerging amnesty deal is chilling news for all residents in Catalonia who took a public stand against the excesses of the independence movement, including me.
At the same time, Sánchez’s allies on the hard left seem determined to ruin the economy with wacky and illiberal anti-markets proposals ranging from windfall taxes on profits that haven’t been generated yet to reducing the working week in a country that has always struggled to be as productive as its neighbours to the north. I wouldn’t place any bets on the Spanish soft left fighting to take back the Socialist Party from Sánchez’s populist-adjacent position any time soon.
Sadly, the PP needs to get much better at defining the rules of engagement as it struggles to contain Vox (its ally in a number of regional deals) for it to stand any chance of replacing Sánchez’s government with a more centrist proposition in the years ahead.
If you ever want to waste an afternoon on social media, I recommend expressing a strong opinion on social media about whether or not Vox should be considered constitutionalist. On the one hand, the Spanish hard-right party has sworn to defend the 1978 Constitution against separatists. On the other hand, half its manifesto proposals involve completely rewriting the Constitution. Its defenders say it will only do this via constitutional means, which would basically be impossible in such a fragmented political scene. This raises the question of why it is so important to pitch ideas that are never going to fly.
Vox’s confusion on constitutional issues suggests a way forward for PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo (or whoever succeeds him if the PP decides to look for a fresh face during its next stint in opposition). Every time Feijóo (or his successor) speaks in public, he (or maybe she in the future) should hammer the point that the PP is a constitutionalist party and will only talk to potential allies about policies that fit within the 1978 Constitution.
Feijóo (or his successor as PP leader) should also address the LGBT community directly and tell its members and allies that the centre-right party is fully committed to Article 14 of the Constitution, which defends all Spaniards from personal discrimination. One of Vox’s many wacky ideas is banning gay couples from adopting children; and the party often sends discriminatory messages to appeal to the neo-masculine and ultra-Catholic voters, who make up its base.
Having very clear red lines, based on the 1978 Constitution, would help the PP’S position with Spain’s liberals, centrists and moderates, as well as with disappointed Socialists and floating voters. This should get it closer to a majority in the next election as Sánchez continues to govern with nationalists who are widely hated outside their autonomous communities (as well as by many voters within them).
The PP won the July elections, with 137 seats. This was better than 89 seats in 2019, but fell short of pollsters’ expectations, as some voters got cold feet about a likely deal with Vox. Parties need 176 for a majority. Sánchez’s Socialists came second with 121 seats, but the party has more potential allies, including hard-left party Sumar (31). Vox came third with 33.
The PP’s strategy should be based on seeking a majority in the next election by holding the liberal middle ground abandoned by the Socialists. Even if this is too difficult in a fragmented scene, the closer the party gets to 176 seats, the better its bargaining position would be in the post-election horse trading.
Also, making it very clear that the PP rejects Vox’s wacky and unconstitutional proposals, such as doing away with Spain’s 17 autonomous communities, would make it much easier for the conservative party to seek allies elsewhere, most notably the centre-right Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which won five seats in July. The PNV is much more reality-based than Junts in Catalonia, which is in talks with the Socialists. The PNV’s decision to back Sánchez’s vote of no confidence in former PM Mariano Rajoy in 2018 was a killer blow for the PP at the time.
Meanwhile, regionalists from the Canary Islands, Navarra and Galicia won a seat each in July and could just as easily do deals with the PP as with the Socialists. In other words, getting into the high 160s or low 170s next time around might just be enough for the conservatives to govern without leaning on the Spanish national populists of Vox, even if the PP fails to get 176 seats. Even getting into the low 160s makes a Vox abstention more likely than a coalition deal.
For liberals, the big advantage of a PP victory in the mid to late 2020s is that it would force Spain’s Socialists to change tack. Sánchez’s flirtation with nationalism represents a betrayal of the party’s decades-long commitment to constitutionalism. The centre-left party should try and win elections by fighting the PP for the liberal centre ground instead of getting mediocre results and then cutting deals that many voters see as being much too sleazy.
Luckily, the situation is much better in the UK. Keir Starmer, who took over as Labour leader from Corbyn in 2020, has gradually moved to the soft left from the hard left over the course of his adult life. He now strongly supports economic growth from the left (a position very similar to the one I plug in this blog week in and week out). He is much more interested in holding the centre ground and winning elections than Sánchez is in Spain. Starmer enjoys a staggering lead in the opinion polls and is almost certain to lead Labour to victory in the next election, barring wildly unpredictable events in the run up to January 2025.
"Keir Starmer visit to Paris, France - 18 Sep 2023" by keir.starmer.mp is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The UK’s ruling Conservative Party has largely discredited itself with moderate voters by embracing wacky hard-right ideas like Brexit, which was based on a hedgehog-like analysis that failed to translate well into the messy and complex real world. Brexit has probably cost the UK 2% to 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) so far, which might not sound much, but is fairly shocking when you think that leaving the EU was meant to unleash wild growth instead of applying the brakes to the economy.
Starmer’s position is also helped by a corruption scandal engulfing the hedgehogs of the Scottish National Party (SNP) north of the border. Scotland was traditionally part of Labour’s heartland until the SNP tore it from the party’s hands in 2007.
However, Starmer’s relationship with his former comrades of the hard left are not without tensions. He has strongly defended Israel’s right to self-defence after Hamas’ atrocities and has declined to back calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, much to the disgust of the people on the hard left who have adopted Palestinian nationalism as their pet cause. It is also worth mentioning that Starmer is raising his children in the Jewish faith of his wife, Victoria. Members of his extended family live in Israel.
This week’s column has been critical of the hard left, the hard right and nationalists who support Catalan and Scottish independence, as well as the UK’s exit from the EU and the destruction of the state of Israel. Members of all these movements often see critical thinking about some of their wackier ideas as completely unacceptable, which makes their supporters very irritating on the internet. The comments are closed. See you next week!
Further Reading
The City & the City: A Novel by China Miélville
The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott
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