Almost a year ago to the day, The Economist ran a leader ([1], also cited at the bottom of the OP) that described itself as "radical centerist", blatantly "stealing" ideas from both right and left. The surprisingly poor article posted here not only fails to clarify or improve this position, but actually muddies the waters of discourse, because it fails to spell out what it means when it uses terms like "left-wing" and "conservative". These definitions are particular and subtle, and it is worth explaining what The Economist actually means in this article. This is especially true given the international audience of the paper (and HN), where these terms sometimes appear to mean contradictory things.
I won't pretend to be a master political theoretician, so corrections are welcome, but at a high level here is what is going on.
In most of political theory, the spectrum breaks down roughly into two huge types of political party (and yes this is a massive generalization):
* those on the right wing, which are typically fiscally liberal and socially conservative, that is, they believe that companies should behave as they like, but people need to be told how to behave even in their private lives, and
* those on the left wing, which are mainly socially liberal, that is, they believe that the government should tax and regulate more heavily, but that people should be able to do what they like privately.
Across the globe what it means to be "a liberal" is different. In the US, the "liberal" signifier refers to the fact that the person believes that the government should not regulate personal decisions like gay marriage. In France, it is the opposite: the "liberal" signifer refers to the fact that they like less regulation on the markets.
The Economist, simply put, is liberal in the sense that it tends to favor less regulation on both these fronts: it favors legalization of drugs and gay marriage, but also less regulation for markets.
There are of course exceptions (it favors gun regulation for example), but this is basically the position that it has come to call "radical centerism". The magazine is often called libertarian, but only conveniently so -- the gun control exception in particular casts this supposition into doubt, and rather than accept this branding, the editorial staff has evidently decided to pick this new title.
This is probably the right move. For all its flaws, this is something that the article did get right.
> In most of political theory, the spectrum breaks down roughly into two…
As a Ph.D. candidate in a top tier political science program, let me just stop you here and assure you that whatever follows is almost certainly categorically incorrect. Political theory is so wildly diverse that one strains to appreciate the relevance of large chunks of it, but it, without a doubt, does not generally/roughly/approximately break down into the positions of the U.S.'s two major parties.
> I won't pretend to be a master political theoretician, but…
This is kinda like when someone starts a sentence, "I don't want to be an asshole, but…" or "I'm not a racist, but…" or "I don't want to interrupt, but…".
Thanks for the spirited reply, Perceval, but I don't see a place where you justify a disagreement with the substance of my position. What I do see is you bragging about your acceptance to a nice school. Not to belabor the obvious, but lording your supposed superiority over opponents is not a good way to conduct a discussion.
Maybe the first part is going in the direction of a productive discussion -- are you complaining that the split between "right wing" and "left wing" is so general as to lose all salience to the discussion at hand? I assume that can't be your position, because that's pretty obviously wrong.
> lording your supposed superiority over opponents is not a good way to conduct a discussion.
It wasn't really an invitation to discussion.
> the split between "right wing" and "left wing" is so general as to lose all salience
No, the left–right split is just fine for talking about U.S. politics. It becomes more problematic when you begin to include other countries whose political divisions split along different issues.
But it becomes almost totally useless if you try to shoehorn "most of political theory" into two categories based on only two criteria (social, fiscal) that, gosh, just happen to match up with the two present day U.S. political parties.
I don't want to be an asshole, but…instead of prancing around like you actually know something why not correct what you think is "certainly categorically incorrect".
There's no quick fix for this level of misapprehension. You would just have to start at the beginning, Political Theory 101, bust out your copy of Plato's Republic and read your way back to the present.
You've added nothing to this discussion and look like a dick to boot.
Moreover - I usually find that people who know something well should be able to summarize/explain it to laymen. Those who resort to 'Oh, you are so wrong, it would take years of study for you to begin to appreciate how complicated an issue this is' do not.
No, it would take about one semester to begin to understand why two parties representing two branches of the liberal tradition within political theory cannot represent "most of political theory." Just like it would take about a semester of intro level computer science to understand that "most of programming" cannot be reduced to the differences between Obj-C and Java along two criteria (e.g. typing discipline and messages/methods). Anyone who claimed such a thing would be wildly, objectively, prima facie wrong about the history/diversity/breadth of programming—certainly not the top post.
> In most of political theory, the spectrum breaks down roughly into two huge types of political party
I've never, in the course of getting a degree in Political Science and studying it independently thereafter, run into this "theory" anywhere but on libertarian (and usually, specifically, Libertarian Party) propaganda leaflets and sites.
It certainly does not represent "most of political theory" when it comes to "types of political party".
Most traditional cultures have in place laws meant for social control but rarely have centralized mechanisms for economic control. As political opinions drift, it's common for part of the population to stick to what they perceive as traditional values and part to push for something they perceive as better. Movements that catch on tend to be egalitarian. I think this sufficiently encapsulates the monarchist vs revolutionary position that the Economist uses.
Any egalitarian revolutionary pushing for social change will have to address economic advantages that have built up over time, so they tend not to have a laissez-faire attitude toward business. The mechanisms they propose to adjust wealth and power inequalities vary. Even people pushing for less centralized control of the economy fall into this category. Government subsidized monopolies are not free market competition, no matter how much some multinational corporate advertising agencies might push the concept.
Hmm, this piqued my curiosity a bit. The confidence with which you said it made me wonder if I'd been misusing the term "fiscal conservative" all these years, but after some (extremely brief) research I think I was right all along: Fiscal conservatives seek to reduce taxes and regulation[0]. But that would reduce your entire comment to basically "right wing" == "conservative" && "left wing" == "liberal". Am I missing something? (Very honest question--I'd love to learn something here.)
EDIT: Err, it seems the Wikipedia article I cited is more focused around the idea of reducing government expenditures rather than necessarily reducing taxation or regulation, although it does seem to suggest that fiscal conservatives are more likely to reduce government in general (assuming a deficit isn't already present). Anyway, it doesn't seem to match up with the parent comment.
The short answer to whether that is a good phrase to be using is that it depends on where you are. Outside of the wind tunnel of American politics, "liberal" tends to mean that many liberties are afforded you, with the implication being that you have fewer regulations and rules. But in America, liberalism is not merely a factual description of how encumbered $SOME_ENTITY is, it's also seen as an ideology that stands in opposition to conservatism. So it's a bit overloaded. If you're living in America, you probably haven't been using it wrong, per se.
That said, I have no degree in political science. So, WTF do I know. Here is your grain of salt. You're probably right though that I should not use "fiscally conservative" as the opposite of "fiscally liberal", because they are not really opposites.
I'm not sure you're on the right (ha!) track here: saying the right wing want to tell people how to behave goes against pretty much everything I know about politics: right wing people want to ban abortion sure, but they also want to allow people to own guns, not have to pay for health care (in the US, a country I'm not from), not pay taxes etc,
There is only one simple explanation of "left" and "right" that I've ever really liked (even though it's only partial), which is this: the right want equal opportunity, the left want equal outcomes. That is to say, the right believe that everyone should be taxed the same (equal opportunity), whereas the left want rich people to be taxed more and poor people to be taxed less, since taxes affect the poor more / the rich can take more taxes before it hurts them (equal outcome).
Regardless, as Perceval says below, it's kind of hard / impossible to boil these concepts down to something simple or even sided, since we're talking about people, and people don't usually fit into into nice clean boxes.
To say that the right want equal opportunity is dead wrong. Anyone who wants to do away with estate tax clearly has no care for equal opportunity. As I have said before, I would be a libertarian 100% if we could have a 100% estate tax and devote 100% of the proceeds to education. A true meritocracy (or as close as I think we could get). IMHO Conservatives would be against this because it would allow their kids to fail, and liberals would be against it because it would allow accountability for the the people coming from nothing.
So I'm not American, and so have no idea what you're talking about. Estate tax seems to be something to do with taxing wills? Regardless, doing away with any kind of tax would be equal opportunity, because it's being gotten rid of for everyone. When I say equal opportunity I mean: "presume that everyone is exactly like me: how should I behave?". E.g., "Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they should be taxed less than me (or me more than them), we should be taxed the same".
hackula1 means this: If one child is born to the family of a billionaire, and another child is born to a poor unwed teen mother, then in what meaningful way can it be said that those two children have "equal opportunity"? Even if the billionare's child is a lazy fuckup, he/she still stands to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and so will never have to want for anything. Even if the teenager's child works hard, without access to nurturing child care, education, books, etc., the odds are stacked against that child leading a happy and successful life, much less becoming a millionaire.
The only way to make it truly be the case that those two children succeed or fail in life due to their own qualities and choices -- "equal opportunity" -- would be to take the billionaire's money and spend it equally on nurturing and educating the two children. (In the US, the "estate tax" is a tax on inheritance, that is, it's our society deciding how good or bad it is if a child can inherit all or some of a parent's fortune.)
> The Economist, simply put, is liberal in the sense that it tends to favor less regulation on both these fronts: it favors legalization of drugs and gay marriage, but also less regulation for markets.
I think it's more of an aversion to fiat currency, than an obsession with the gold standard. The jury is still out on that one, we haven't even broken the century mark on that.
I won't pretend to be a master political theoretician, so corrections are welcome, but at a high level here is what is going on.
In most of political theory, the spectrum breaks down roughly into two huge types of political party (and yes this is a massive generalization):
* those on the right wing, which are typically fiscally liberal and socially conservative, that is, they believe that companies should behave as they like, but people need to be told how to behave even in their private lives, and
* those on the left wing, which are mainly socially liberal, that is, they believe that the government should tax and regulate more heavily, but that people should be able to do what they like privately.
Across the globe what it means to be "a liberal" is different. In the US, the "liberal" signifier refers to the fact that the person believes that the government should not regulate personal decisions like gay marriage. In France, it is the opposite: the "liberal" signifer refers to the fact that they like less regulation on the markets.
The Economist, simply put, is liberal in the sense that it tends to favor less regulation on both these fronts: it favors legalization of drugs and gay marriage, but also less regulation for markets.
There are of course exceptions (it favors gun regulation for example), but this is basically the position that it has come to call "radical centerism". The magazine is often called libertarian, but only conveniently so -- the gun control exception in particular casts this supposition into doubt, and rather than accept this branding, the editorial staff has evidently decided to pick this new title.
This is probably the right move. For all its flaws, this is something that the article did get right.
[1] http://www.economist.com/node/21564556