The Left is analagous to a religion. It is a religious without a God or Theos – an atheistic religion. But it has a central ideology and a set of social networks and institutions that pledge adherence to that ideology.
As with all religions, the practice of the institutions can diverge sharply from the official ideology. The luxury of the 14th century Catholic Church was a long way from the ascetic poverty found in the Gospels. Similiarly, the elitism of Harvard is somewhat incongruous with the egalitarian and democratic ideology promoted by the leftist professors.
The central ideology of leftism centers around equality, personal freedom, egalitarianism, and anti-hierarchy. You’ll find this ideology described in the writings of Rousseau to the wrtings of Chomsky.
The institutions and social networks of the left evolved out of the reformation and Calvinist protestanism (which preached bottom up control of congregrations rather that opposed the top down hierarchy of both the Catholic and Anglican churches). You can trace this development from Locke and Rouseaou, Roundheads, and the Puritan dissenters, through their offshoot in the New World, the revolutionaries in Boston, the unitarians and utopians of the New World, through to the campus leftwing movements incubated in the unitarian universities. In short – the left is the institutional social network centered out of Harvard University.
The right-wing, in practice, consists of the assortment of people and institutions that opposed the current left. Since the left is anti-hierarchy, the right wing institutions tend to be hierarchical – such as the Catholic Church, military, and corporations.
“Right-liberatarians” oppose subordination, but only when the control and subordination is at the hands of the state. “Left-libartarians” oppose control by both the state and private actors. It follows that in order to prevent private domination the poor need money – if you have no money you have to submit to wage contract and to being bossed by an overseer. If a left-libertarian believes in using force or the state to redstribute wealth from the rich to the poor with the goal of eliminating private domination, then left-libertarianism becomes straight up leftism.
My own brand of “right-wing” is that I believe in “order”. I am not opposed to egalitarianism or personal freedom, but I belive that liberty follows from order. What does “order” mean? The shortest definition is that “promises are kept.” If I have property rights to my home or factory or store, those rights are clear and will not be arbitrariliy taken away. I can walk down the street without threat of violence. If I get a marriage contract that is a promise for permanent union, culture and institutions ensure there is a high probability that the union will in fact be permanent. Disputes have clear institutions for resolving them. There is government in place to lay down ordinances where people may infringe on each other – such as forcing noisy bars to close at a certain time, or preventing someone from opening a garbage dump next to my house, and even enforces rules against public vulgarity.
The second part of my right-wing beliefs is that I believe that hierarchy is a necessary evil. Modern civilization requires large organizations. Organizing a army that defeat invading barbarians and protect the property of civilized people requires organization and hierarchy. Operating an automobile factory, an offshore oil platform, a chip fabrication plant or gas power plant requires coordination of dozens or hundreds of people. Based on the physics of the machinery, there is a minimal size of a plant. Now maybe someday we can all have home based replicators.
Please note that being “pro-hierarchy” does not mean that I am pro-top-down-micromanagement. Most arguments against hierarchy are really arguments against micromanagement. In the ideal hierarchy, lower level managers and employees have very broad ownership and control of their area of discretion, and their superior mainly provides overall accountability, not day-to-day orders.
Many mainstream progressive will have no problems with the above statements. What then makes me righ wing? While modern mainstream progressive ideology allows for some amount of order and hierarchy, on certain issues, if you advocate the “more order” and less egalitarianism position, you are branded a heretic, ejected from the left-wing movement, and considered a right wing person that must be defeated.
My three most pro-order right wing beliefs are:
a) in crime ridden major cities such as Philadelphia, the police new more power to constantly patrol neighborhoods and to stop people and find guns.
b) In return for recieving government benefits, single mothers should be required to live with their children in convent-like institutions under the watchful eye of a master and matron, with curfews and strick behavior rules.
c) School teachers need more powers to discpline students, including corporal punishment.
And my most anti-egalitarian beliefs are:
d) We invest too much money in education, if a student is innately smart they will learn a subject effectively from dirt cheap books, if the student is innately dull, no amount of one-on-one teacher time will allow them to master the subject at a competitive level. ( I do think that duller students could be raised to at least adequate level on many subjects if cheap, but high quality teaching methods were more common, such as computer programs that would produce drills with difficulty levels adjusted by past results)
e) Universal suffrage electionocracy is a lousy government, and would best be replaced with a form of government that was more aristocratic and more hierarchical.
th ]is the way that we often percieve the things the way is the future
The “right” should aspire to be the faction of ordered liberty.
True reactionaries will protest that order and liberty are really synonyms, and that I’m being needlessly wordy. They are correct. I use both words to make the phrase more appealing to the non-initiated.
Left is the faction of anarcho-tyranny
