Week 5: CIVIC Lesson
Why I find the left-right spectrum to not only be unhelpful, but counter-productive.
Regular readers would be aware of my complete disdain for the left-right spectrum. I think it’s a useless way of both describing and understanding politics, and one that compounds many of our current political problems (groupism). Yet, while I often make snide remarks about it, I haven’t really explained in detail why it is so terrible.
This week The Atlantic published piece by David Brooks titled Chicken Littles Are Ruining America. In it Brooks identifies a serious problem – the relentless negativity of our current era, the social (and political) power gained from promoting cynicism and suspicion, and the “hostile solidarity” that now drives our the way we interact with like-minds.
The subject matter and argument is one I’m sympathetic to, but throughout the piece Brooks uses a lazy stylistic device that, frankly, infuriates me. Alongside using the terms “liberal”, “progressive” and “left” interchangeably (which is lunacy), Brooks relies heavily on arguing “While this is happening on the left….this is happening on the right”. It’s a common device used by those who are trying to approach a subject matter in an objective way. But I fundamentally reject the idea that politics is a game of “both sides”. And there are far more sophisticated ways to build an argument (something a writer as experienced as Brooks should know).
The problem is this is how most people who are heavily engaged in politics think. So it is a mental map that writers feel the need to appeal to. But in doing so they only reinforce this mental map. Rather than challenge its merit. (Ironically, I think those less engaged in politics are often able to see ideas more clearly, as they have less prior assumptions and less “team spirit”).
Politics is a complex web of numerous intersecting and overlapping forces. These forces exist outside of political parties, but are attempted to be harnessed by them. Political parties are narrative-focused entities, rather than entities that advance a consistent set of policies. Yet these narratives are usually in service of a wider ideology.
However, here we need to recognise the distinction between ideology and philosophy. Ideology is a grab-bag of ideas – or a subscription package – sold with a narrative to try to make this package seem coherent. Philosophy is the attempt to find a consistent set of ideas. They are often polar opposites as approaches to politics.
As broad ideologies, what we call left and right are so riddled with internal contradictions that they are effectively useless for understanding or advancing a consistent set of ideas or policies. Alongside these internal contradictions, there are also often great shifts in interest groups – or political cleavages – that means what was considered left or right 30 years ago doesn’t resemble how we use those terms today.
Or who considers themselves to be aligned with these terms. In the United States the majority of the wealthiest electorates are now held by the Democratic Party. An odd occurrence for what we traditionally understand as “left-wing” (NIMBYism being the primary expression of this shift). This is something that is noticeable in other countries too.
Because of this I have set myself a writing rule to never use the terms left and right (except to explain how terrible these terms are). A rule like this forces me to think a lot harder about what I am writing about, and find ways to explain things in a more thorough and coherent manner.
Simply labelling something left or right is only an argument to people who have a strong emotional attachment to these terms. And who want arguments to be a form of group therapy – to know which team to be on – rather than truly examine and comprehend an issue.
Alongside this rule, I have developed a framework that I use in my approach to writing. A way to filter an issue through a new lenses that can avoid the left-right spectrum and instead try to provide more interesting and thorough explanations and analysis.
I’ve called this framework CIVIC - - Culture, Ideas, Values, Interests, Cognition (cognition is a substitute for psychology, just to make the acronym a neat one). It may not encompass all the competing forces that comprise the way societies operate, but it’s a starting to point to build a new mental map for understanding and describing politics.
Yet as our brains are trained to think of politics as a binary there are a few other mental maps we can create to train ourselves away from left and right. We can instead think in terms of authoritarianism and liberalism (actual liberalism, not the American usage), or stabilising and destabilising forces, or post-modernist and evidence-based. These binaries cut across left and right and encourage us to think with a little more clarity about a specific issue.
Of course, I am under no illusions that I won’t be getting very far standing in front of the entirety of the Western world, pointing my finger, and stating that common political terminology is wrong and stupid. Partly this is because our political psychology is team-based, rather than ideas or outcomes based. We value group solidarity over merit, and negative partisanship is an incredibly powerful emotional force. We like a world of goodies and baddies. Yet this is a self-reinforcing system – one that keeps us bound to terminology that lacks clarity, and one that prevents us from actually pursuing positive outcomes.
This Week’s Reading:
Australia Day: A National Impasse
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“After another three decades, January 26 has become a day of major protests, clownish culture warring, and general ambivalence. A day of national unity it is not. This year, the day began with a statue of Captain James Cook in Melbourne being cut off at the knees, and ended with a group of Neo-Nazis parading through the streets of Sydney. In the weeks prior, the leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton, urged consumers to boycott a major supermarket chain due to the company’s decision to not stock Australia Day merchandise.
Attempting to ride a pair of supermarket-bought Australian flag flip-flops into the prime minister’s office is gauche even by Australian standards. But it does, in its own way, symbolise what is at the core of the contest over Australia Day: The lack of emotional security Australia has about itself, and the absurd public huffing that results from this. Waving around cheap Chinese-made paraphernalia as both national symbols and as a threat to those not falling in line isn’t the sign of national confidence Dutton may have thought it was.”
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“Of course, it is not only Australians’ sense of themselves that is integral to whether the country has successfully integrated itself into its neighbourhood, but whether neighbouring countries perceive Australia to be an Asian country. It is here that K-Pop’s Australian contingent can be highly influential. They present a new representation of what it means to be Australian and a reframing of traditional conceptions of the country.
In this way, the soft power that South Korea gains from K-Pop is not simply a one way street. There is a soft power circulation taking place, where fans of K-Pop groups with Australian members are becoming interested in Australia as they seek to learn more about the artists they love. Given the global popularity of K-Pop, these artists are doing much of the heavy lifting in enhancing Australia’s international influence.”
How Shrinking Populations Fuel Divisive Politics
Amanda Taub & Lauren Leatherby – New York Times
“"The process, she said, goes something like this: As areas depopulate, the state tends to pull back its services from the region. Schools close because there are fewer children. Trains and bus lines get canceled, or are less frequent. Hospitals shut down. It is a local version of the kind of strain that aging countries will face on a national level if there are fewer workers to support more retirees.
That makes life more difficult in practical ways, she said, but there is also a psychological effect: People feel neglected and undervalued by the political elite.
Far-right parties “are very good at detecting the problem and playing on the grievances of voters who live in these areas,” she said. But these parties don’t offer realistic solutions to the problems of demographic decline. Instead, they scapegoat immigrants, blaming asylum-seekers and other foreigners for the region’s problems.
That creates a vicious cycle in which the problems of depopulation end up fuelling political parties whose policies actually make depopulation harder to combat — a doom loop from which it can be difficult to escape.”
The Two-Parent Privilege Is Real
Justin Vassallo – The Liberal Patriot
“As Kearney stresses, the decline in marriage among the less-educated and low-income is not something that can be solved through simplistic pro-marriage rhetoric or the anachronistic initiatives favoured by social conservatives. In fact, the interrelated social problems exacerbated by falling marriage rates have become entrenched over time: poor, unsafe neighbourhoods; budget-constrained public schools; single-mothers bereft of strong networks, good wages, and child support payments; absentee fathers; the dearth of “marriageable” men; addiction; and boys deprived of sound role models—these and other factors have created “a vicious cycle” that, Kearney warns, “we may not be able to reverse.” Any attempt to do so requires an honest assessment of how two-parent homes usually lead to better outcomes but also a clear-eyed view of how and why marriage norms have eroded in the last few decades.
Rather than be overly prescriptive, Kearney aims to tease out the relationship between economic insecurity and the class-basis of declining marriage rates and clarify the stakes for American society. Only by understanding how structural shifts in the U.S. economy have lessened the desirability and perceived benefits of marriage among the non-college-educated, she suggests, can we begin to think holistically about the kind of policies and concrete investments that would reduce inequality between families. Such policies may in time strengthen—without any regressive or suffocating cultural pressure—the marriageability of men and women whose skills and interests don’t readily conform to the expectations of today’s economy.”
Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad
Tyler Austin Harper – The Atlantic
“The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that, since at least the late 20th century, Western societies have been defined by “a generalised culture of ‘authenticity,’ or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfilment, ‘do their own thing.’” Taylor describes a phenomenon that’s all too easy to recognise in today’s pop psychology and the maundering of wellness influencers, but his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimising authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.
We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth. This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires. We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfilment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfilment must always increase.”
The Perils Of An Enormous Social World
Brian Klass – The Garden of Forking Paths
“In 1942, the sociologist Herbert Hyman put this shift into a theory, noting that humans have variable expectations of their conception of self, depending on the reference category that they use for comparison. A decade later, Leon Festinger solidified these ideas more formally with social comparison theory.
Later, sociologists noted that there were upward social comparisons (in which we look at those who we think are better than us and either feel bad or strive to be better) and downward social comparisons, in which we look at those who are worse off than us, and often feel comforted. (Cancer patients experiencing horrific symptoms may feel grateful if they end up beating the odds, because their universe of comparison isn’t everyone in the world who’s healthy, but all other cancer patients).
These ideas are related to the concept of horizontal inequality, in which some of the richest people on Earth can somehow internalise a feeling of being comparatively poor, simply because their friends are richer than they are.
Modern social comparison isn’t just larger; it’s also constant. We are bombarded by unceasing reminders of where we stand not just on economic hierarchies, but social ones. We may look our best, only to see someone who looks better online, creating standards of comparison that are unattainable, elusive, and often, depressing.”
Arancha González Laya & Camille Grand et al – Foreign Affairs
“Trump may well be more antagonistic to Europe and European values in a second term, dramatically increasing the risks to the continent’s security and aggravating its existing difficulties. A reelected Trump would be completely unchained from the old, pro-democracy Republican establishment. He would likely surround himself with loyal administrators who do not challenge him. Moreover, the world has grown accustomed to his outrageous statements and decisions, making individual transgressions feel less shocking and less crucial to resist.
For decades, the deepening of democracy in Europe has been tied to U.S. influence. As recently as 2021, the Biden administration stepped up to defend freedom of the press in Poland by convincing the Polish president to veto a controversial media bill that would restrict who could own local broadcasters. If he gets a second term, Trump may well seek to further weaken democratic institutions in the United States, including the Department of Justice, and foment general disdain for the rule of law. This would embolden populists and Euroskeptic parties. The first Trump presidency already taught Europeans how a U.S. president’s political support for populists can practically endanger European unity.”
I know next to nothing about this artist and song. But due to listening to a fair amount of Italo-Disco the algorithm has provided me with this genre-adjacent gem.
Left and right are more like messy coalitions. They're not for understanding issues, they're for contesting power.
The Civic framework is neat for this civic minded reader. Complexity and nuance is usually more accurate and more interesting.