Comments on: Center-Right Nation?

By: AlanDownunder

AlanDownunder — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:39:43 +0000

A nation that persists in being centre right over time will inevitably become batshit crazy right.
Case in point: USA.

By: socialrepublican

socialrepublican — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:39:54 +0000

‘soc1al1sts’

One of those just shat in your bed….alas you were too busy eying up the Social Liberals

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:55:31 +0000

Oh no, I feel sorry for them only as I’d feel sorry for anyone. They are losing their party and they don’t all seem to know it yet.

The problem for the rest of us is so long as they can convince people the following makes sense: “America is a center-right country, therefore the far-right must always be in power, and must always get its way even when it’s not in power.”

By: Ted

Ted — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:30:40 +0000

bianca

Even worse has been the denial of the word “liberal” to the true liberals, while lavishing it on soc1al1sts and campus speech commissars

By: Henri Vieuxtemps

Henri Vieuxtemps — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:20:35 +0000

@60, it all depends on how you define “common good” and “individual rights”.

By: S. Turner

S. Turner — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:08:03 +0000

Doesn’t ‘centre right’ mean right of centre ? If centre is half way between left and right (perfectly balancing the common good and individual rights), doesn’t this mean a ‘centre right’ nation will be one which tends to enact and whose citizens tend to comply with policies that moderately favour the rights of individuals (right) even when doing so moderately damages the common good (left)? Thus, ever so moderately disturbing the perfect balance noted above?

By: bert

bert — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:00:28 +0000

Oh dear, still bristling? I don’t think I’m being remotely silly. At issue was where the religious right comes from. The roots of southern baptist evangelism are far more scots-irish presbyterianism than patrician anglicanism. There’s more to the religious right than just that, of course (Catholic and Mormon input has been particularly important in recent times). But it was at the heart of the Bush variant.

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:43:49 +0000

Back on topic:
The huge story over the past fifty-sixty years has been the denial of the label “conservative” to large numbers of people who justly had considered themselves conservative and center-right, so it’s not surprising that when someone says “America is a center-right nation,” no one really knows what it means.

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:43:29 +0000

burt,
Don’t be silly. The Southern planters knew themselves as Cavaliers, traditionalist Anglicans. Seriously, I think the Scots-Irish were smaller scale, salt of the earth types, and IIRC they could only afford to buy slaves after they’d built up some cash the hard way. I doubt they had much influence on the culture of the larger planters.

Re your @26, the Southern slaveowners defended their relationship with labor as based on personal, almost familial relationships; opposing their way of life to the contract based system common in the North, arguing that “wage slavery” is wrong but actual slavery is not. Sounds pretty conservative to me but it’s easy to see how it could be attractive to the left.

This aspect of Southern conservatism persisted after the Second World War and is still influential and is still universally recognized as a conservative, traditional, even reactionary philosophy, but again was also attractive to the left even when not presenting itself as simply the only tradition available.

The slave economy was at least as expansionist as the northern factory system: arguably more so, as most of what both north and south exported was small farmers, not industry. The slaveowners saw it as a personal affront that they could not cross state lines for travel or to purchase property without giving up some of their putative rights, and used federalism to compel northern states opposed to slavery to defend their putative property rights nationwide. In this sense they were absolutely expansionist.

But I see phoebesmother says otherwise and she probably has better research available to her than I do.

Anyway, as far as both central and local government go, I’d guess a big part of the difference is that the north has a civic republican tradition that the south largely lacks, and this maps poorly to right/left by anyone’s definitions.

By: Fatty2cent

Fatty2cent — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:45:05 +0000

The people who say that we are a center-right nation are just perpetuating a myth that is force fed by elites. Politicians cite this little ditty all the time and use it as an excuse to oppose or promote a certain idea, or take a position, based on appealing to some imagined center-right ideal. It then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Our nation’s policies end up being center-right, yet no real person ends up being happy about the outcome. Then our politicians stand up on the hill circle-jerking each other as if they did something wonderful for our nifty center-right nation, and everyone else wishes that they took a distinctive left or distinctive right position. Saying we are center-right and legislating as if we are center-right only benefits the people who profit from center-right policies, so ask yourself “cui bono?”, who benefits from the center-right myth… because it is not the average citizen.

By: bert

bert — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:28:32 +0000

By the way, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ date back to 1789 or so.
It’d be a mistake to limit them to post-industrial politics.

By: bert

bert — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:19:41 +0000

I think Bianca’s American.
I’ll readily confess to being merely an interested outsider, though.
My comments about the Confederacy were intended to make exactly your point about the usefulness of ‘left’ and ‘right’. A Southern secessionist would typically be seen as right wing. So would a rapacious Northern industrialist. You need something else – perhaps a marxist analysis about successive phases of capitalism – to understand their conflict. I’m sure there’s a better example out there that would make the same point, but the Civil War was the one I came up with.

By: phoebesmother

phoebesmother — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:23:14 +0000

Americans such as myself are struck by how very generalized a picture Europeans have of United States history. 13 colonies, 13 religious and cultural histories, 13 geographies, 13 politics. I’m not sure how appropriate the modern concepts of Right and Left are before the Civil War and the expansion of corporate capitalism. American national history is distorted by slavery and its disparate impact on the states and by the differences in the cultures of the Native American populations that each area confronted. Other distortions arose from the states-based rules for male suffrage and the differential impacts of immigrations on areas of the country.
@26: the South, rather, the Southern elites were not defending “labor-intensive agriculture against expansionist Yankee capitalism”; they were defending slave-based cash crop agriculture in which slaves were arguably more “capital” than “labor” (but I’m no economist). This part of the agricultural sector represented about a quarter of the population, probably roughly the proportion of “Yankee capitalists.” The geographic feature of the Appalachian mountain chain cleaved this intensive cash cropping region from the rest of each Southern state.
@49: Government land grants affected South Carolina’s rice growing regions but not so much other states. I’m not sure I’d say Southern plantation owners turned themselves into “English aristocrats”; they were more like colonial planter elites in Africa and Asia and just as invested in global markets (including the North).

By: Turgut

Turgut — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:25:05 +0000

Was America to the center-right during the Bush II years, or was it just right-right?

By: Turgut

Turgut — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:19:52 +0000

@46
The US was founded by those fleeing England’s established state religion.

Do tell! But how does that explain the more modern phenomenon I was describing? Unless of course you mean to suggest that Bible Belt is politically or culturally similar to the Puritans (which would explain why the evangelical right so often agitates, like the Puritans of Boston did, to jail persons that fell into the sin of avarice by daring to “sell as dear as they can, and buy as cheap as they can”). And I still don’t see why England’s spooky “established state religion” keeps coming up- it’s not as if they are on the gov’t dole these days nor exert any real political power, and the Star Chamber has been out of commission for some time now. Certainly the Church of England is no more state-sponsored than those churches in the US that don’t pay taxes.