The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus
The most common way that the left-right spectrum is conceived—and the basic way it is characterized in the Pew survey—is as state against capital.* Democrats insist that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might pit Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand in a cage match of state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.
The basic set of distinctions on both sides rests on the idea that state and corporation, or political and economic power, can be pulled apart and set against each other. This is, I propose, obviously false, because hierarchies tend to coincide. Let’s call that PHC, or Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence. A corollary of PHC is that resources flow toward political power, and political power flows toward resources; or, the power of state and of capital typically appear in conjunction and are mutually reinforcing.
.. Michel Beaud, in his History of Capitalism, is one of many historians who have found the state connection criterial: “What one in any case should remember is the importance of the state in the birth, the first beginnings of capitalism …. The primary transforming factor is the state. National unity, currency standardization, juridical coherence, military strength and the beginnings of a national economy: all these were created and developed by the state, or with the state as organizing principle.”
.. If you look at the actual procedures employed by a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, you see that they depended fundamentally on state sponsorship and state violence, which such men were in a position to command in virtue of their wealth.
.. If one thought a bit, for example, about the way that government energy policies and private energy concerns are interlocked, one would see less and less sense of distinction. Regulators and corporate lobbyists and congressional staffers are all the same people.
.. The mainstream left is a technocratic elite, with a cult of science and expertise and an ear for the unanimous catchphrase. This is anything but a meritocracy; it an entrenched intergenerational class hierarchy.
.. There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.