Left or right?

Andrew Torre ’13 is from Landgrove, Vt.

In extreme economic circumstances such as those that prevail today, before any remedies can be applied, it must be acknowledged that the economic system has failed. Obviously, if economic misery exists, there must be a system-based cause. This is true whether it’s the collapse of Soviet socialism in the late 1980s or capitalism’s current meltdown.

Once this systemic failure is candidly recognized, it is logical to seek solutions outside the usual functioning of that system. Relative to the way the system formerly worked, any outside-the-system solution would seem “extreme” — and there are only two extremes: left and right. The left would represent a progressive force that opts to move ahead to new — and probably unproven — ground, with the benefit of the majority of society as its goal. In the case of a capitalist collapse, this would no doubt entail moving away from a strictly private-enterprise agenda and giving a greater role to a democratic government.

The right, on the other hand, usually invents an idealistic past that it wants to retreat to — an impossible task, since that past never really existed, and history, by definition, cannot go in reverse. Stuck with no realistic place to move to — and therefore precluding any serious intellectual analysis that might lead to reasonable policy — the right must resort to aberrant positions: xenophobia, racism, distortion, deceit and even violence. The model for this response is Germany in the late 1920s and early 30s. In the throes of the worldwide capitalist depression, and with a strong socialist left pressing the Weimar government, the Nazis invented a glorious Aryan past, attacked the Jews and moved German capitalism into a fascist state.

We are obviously experiencing echoes of that history in the current right-wing response to our economic ills: anti-immigration xenophobia, anti-Muslim racism, attacks on democratic government through anti-government rhetoric, threats of violence and blind support of corporatism. Add to these, regressive legislation — e.g. anti-abortion laws, repeal of gay and other minority protection laws, curtailing social programs such as unemployment benefits, privatizing everything, including education and Social Security and repealing regulations on the corporate world — and you have a complete portrait of the American right today.

You hear all of this from the “extreme” right every day — loud and clear. But you hear very little or nothing from the “extreme” left. That’s because — unlike the 1930s — that left is not organized into a single body, as is the right-wing Tea Party. Nor is the left, unlike the right, lavishly corporate funded. Whatever filters through the mainstream media from the left e.g., MSNBC commentators like Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Keith Olbermann, political comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and economist Paul Krugman is more liberal than “extreme” left. Rather than taking anti-capitalist stands as the old socialist parties did, they are reformers trying to work within the framework of the broken private-enterprise system — just as President Barack Obama has been futilely attempting to do. This moderate or liberal left uses its voice only to denigrate the very vocal extreme right, without offering any solutions outside the system, as an “extreme” left would. There are many left-wing publications astutely analyzing our economic problems and proposing “radical” solutions. But these publications circulate primarily in small segments of academia, rarely finding a larger public audience that might be enlightened by them.

By not making the realistic acknowledgement that the system is broken, the liberals have yielded the field to the extreme right — and it is making the most of it. It nominated for congressional seats the likes of Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Rand Paul and other demagogues whose regressive thinking would have been right at home in the nineteenth century, and who offer absolutely no rational solutions for today’s capitalist crisis.

The more the liberal policies that fail, the stronger the extreme right becomes by denouncing those obvious failures. What little benefit the liberal left has affected through the stimulus package, the health care bill, financial regulations and other half-hearted reforms is dwarfed by the continuing disastrous unemployment rate and a record 43.3 million Americans, living under the poverty level. These are profound systemic failures that only an “extreme” left can address.

Consensus-seekers and middle-of-the-roaders beware. “Moderatism” will not, has not and cannot address the depth of the ills wrought by the new paradigm of global capitalism.