Left, right, and center
I knew almost from the moment I first heard of Substack that I wanted to do something here, but I had one or two false starts until I figured out how I wanted to do it. What I settled on was leaving matters open to discussing as wide a variety of subjects as possible. I wanted to set down the written version of all the different places my mind goes when I've got no one to talk to. Or, when I had someone to talk to, the weird conversations we would have because I cannot just limit myself to talking about the weather or whatever the Kardashians or the Kansas City Chiefs are up to this week. I mean, okay, if you've got a new angle on either, I guess that's all right. Most people don't have a new angle on either. Give me something I can sink my cerebral dentata into. Jeez.
So if you think this Substack is weird, that's probably why.
There was this time when I was living with my daughter's father that I finally hit on something that made sense to me about the political scene. This came after reading Dr. Jane Clare Jones's writings about, among other things, leftism being political materialism. What that means is that leftism addresses reality as it is, the observable and measurable bits, and describes the political relationships and effects it finds there. If you've ever read anything by Marx and actually understood it then you have seen this in action, though often Marx would veer off past the material into the ideal, and the ideal is what Marx's more powerful followers latched onto, which is the broad foundational reason that the Soviet Union failed. That bit isn't Jones. It's me. But Dr. Jones would probably agree.
Wait. What? Never mind. Moving on now.
Previous to this I had held to the Libertarian Party's axes of political alignment. If you don't know what that is either, think back to school if you ever learned plotting to a graph in math class. You had a vertical line and a horizontal line in the graph that you used to measure where a point was located. Right? One line was labeled X and the other was labeled Y. Each line is called an axis, and the plural (more than one) of axis is axes. Are axes? Either way. There you go. Anyway, one axis -- let's say the X axis -- is left-right. The other axis -- let's say the Y axis -- is authoritarianism versus libertarianism. I hope you know what those words mean. I'm veering off on tangents too much already. Google is your friend, otherwise. I haven't decided whether I still think this model of political alignment is accurate, but I think it's helpful for people who don't want to ask the more difficult questions.
Getting back to Dr. Jones's definition of leftism, that led me to wondering how you would define right-wing political alignment. Or rightism? I think I've used that term before. It's a pretty good word. I wish it would go into wider use. (I don't think all rightists are fascists, for one thing.) And then it hit me, because if you're going to stay with the idea of a political binary, what's the opposite of materialism?
"Religion?" you may be asking.
Yeah, I don't like that. That kinda stinks. I think religion is one way the opposite of materialism can manifest, but not everyone with rightist inclinations is religious. Thinking they're all religious is what allows them to sneak up on us and take over everything without firing a shot. Let's not do that.
Another way to arrive at this answer: If you are taking a materialist stance on the issues, what are you saying about those issues? You are saying, "This is the way things are. This is what I'm looking at right now." So what's the opposite of that?
Rush Limbaugh put it best in the title of his first book. Ready? Here goes: The Way Things Ought To Be.
I mentioned this already, and you missed it: Idealism. Aiming for the ideal.
Another way to put it is that rightism is about story or myth. I don't mean lie, though lies definitely fall into this category. I mean myth or story in the Joseph Campbell sense. If you have ever observed Republicans saying Support our troops because they fight for our freedom or Vote for M. T. Chowderhead because he supports American values or Americans are the leaders of the free world, you have seen this in action. These sorts of declarations don’t really map to anything in the real world except possibly, occasionally, by accident.
If you understand these things about left and right then you begin to comprehend that left and right are not parties. You also better understand why both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have been more to the left and more to the right at different times in their respective histories. I need to impress upon you that these labels describe patterns of political thought and behavior. That can happen anywhere. Having a party platform doesn't prevent it.
You also need to understand that no person is 100% leftist or rightist. We're all a mix of both and we can ping-pong back and forth between the two depending on various factors. I see this in the feminist movement sometimes, for instance; activists will argue that we should have legal abortion because women Have A Right To Choose. Well, that's fine, but it's not sufficient because all the opposition has to do is argue that we only have as much right to choose as the law allows. But the law can't negate the medical risk to women if abortion is banned. We should have stuck with that argument. We might be a lot better off now.
Another example from the other direction is Republicans being against so-called "trans medicine" because it hurts kids. Some Republicans really do look at it that way and guess what? That's a left-wing stance if you can cite valid medical and statistical data to back up your argument. Think about that next time a genderdork accuses you of being a Trump voter because you don't want your fifteen-year-old's healthy boobs chopped off or for her to suffer osteoporosis by the time she's twenty. And maybe if Republicans understood that leftism does NOT mean being for an imaginary story about people changing sex when people can't actually change sex, they might look at leftism a lot more kindly. That'd be nice for a change.
I think the reason rightism survives and is so successful is because one of the traits of the human species is a love of story and myth. We explained the world with story before we learned to articulate and catalog what science is. People with less education still rely heavily on story because that's what they know. I don't see this changing for a long time. If ever.
Once I had sorted all this out in my own mind and chatted about it some with my daughter's father, one of us asked the question: So what's centrism?
Oh, GOOD one. I was stumped. Matt came up with an answer (I hate him, which probably isn't healthy, but I can give credit where it's due): "What about pragmatism?"
I really liked that answer at the time. I am not sure I would use it now, though I suppose it would do in a pinch. I think it's more like this: a centrist is someone who can balance the human love for story with the human need for facts, and who prefers to take that approach in politics. I guess you could still call that pragmatic but I feel like pragmatic adds an extra element of... cynicism? I don't know. Jury's still out on this one for me.
I am not sure how many people can actually meet my definition of centrism, anyway. What I see more often are people who benefit more from a rightist approach but don't want to admit it. So: today's Democrats, then. Because the identity BS they're peddling is just another kind of story. Demographics are one thing; they're part of the foundation of leftist thinking. "I am because I say so" goes well beyond that and straight into the manure pile.
I will say this, though: I'm a little bit done with people who rant about "far leftists." First off, the behavior they're usually complaining about is rightist. Second off, exactly how bad would it be if we had a political movement that insisted on engaging only with reality? I'm not sure we could actually accomplish that because sooner or later people drag their egos into the political arena and start saying that things are reality when actually they're only that person's interpretation of reality to suit the person's own bias. But if we could do it, wouldn't that be an improvement over all the bullshit we have to shovel now just to get the public's basic needs met?
In other words: Stop bleating at me about "American values" unless yours include keeping bridges in good repair, women alive and healthy, and children fed.