The boat careers down a river, explains my mate, crashing first into the Left bank and then swinging wildly over to the Right bank, lurching like a drunk downstream, damaging itself as it goes. Why, oh why, can't the boat be steered down the Centre, availing itself of the Left and Right banks to give it its position? The political compass, as Xlbrl mentioned, is heavily flawed in its illogical questions and assumptions behind them but more interesting is the spread of opinion. A couple of people have been surprised by their position but it's no surprise for me.
Every person who could be seen as Left-liberal whom I know, for example,
Jams O'Donnell whom I'd imagine doesn't give himself any labels at all, is motivated by care and concern for other people, humanity, the iniquity of big corporations and what is seen as the ills of capitalism. People like Jams support good causes, e.g. supporting the protesters in Iran. Look at my sidebar - I'm with him in all of this.
Jams will be offended by the next word "political naivety". No fully functioning adult would accept such an epithet but
look at his blog - it's hardly political. It's one of the best blogs in the sphere but it's not political, except in its concern for good. Many mothers would find themselves in this camp also. Good feminists would too, in the sense of those who saw inequalities and wanted them righted. The young would echo Jams' concerns - against discrimination against people on the basis of race, colour and creed - all good stuff which I support too.
Those of us on the Centre-right don't disagree with the human concerns - a glance through this blog shows what it's concerned with but in our insistence on "incentive" as the motivating force for all change, this is often interpreted as "self-serving greed".
However, what the Centre-right also sees is the political force lurking behind the do-good Left-liberalism and that force is Socialism, which aligns itself with all the "feelgood" causes in a bundle, in a package deal, like the Chinese bundle The Three Truths, The Six Evils and so on and yet it is anything but benign.
It was not for nothing that The International was composed.
This malignant force, which is no more nor less than the age old evil popping up in the French Revolution, in Theosophy, in the CFR [supposedly Right wing but not at all because Right wing is patriotic] in the Rothschilds and in places people would have thought were the exact opposite, in Brown's government with the international push for a new world currency - these things are so far away from the motivation of the Left-liberal. I've put many quotes on this blog which are direct admissions from this force as to what it is about. Read Quigley for a start.
Many who call themselves socialist [small s] would therefore be offended by the anti-socialist rhetoric of ours, thinking that they themselves are being attacked and maligned. No, not a bit of it - I know your motivation and though you don't mind the epithet socialist, meaning someone concerned with the social wellbeing of society and policies which ensure fair distriubtion of opportunity and compassionate concerns, this is not what I'm referring to.
I'm referring to the Socialist - different other animal.
This force promotes human misery and because it is so ancient, it knows full well what these policies produce. It is, by definition, malcontented, is hellbent on reducing the population of the world and reducing them to misery in the meantime, under the unsustainable banner of a New World Order. For goodness sake - Bush Snr actually had it written into the certificates soldiers received after the Gulf War.
The Left-liberal does not concern himself with these things because he is focussed on the social concerns, the social networking, the pleasant and worthy side. I know just how Jams and Calum would have answered those policial compass questions - compassionately, for fellow human beings. Hence the position on the chart.
If I was to say to Jams and
Calum that they support totalitarianism, they'd catch their breath, narrow their eyes and click out of this blog for the last time. That's why I'm not saying that. But the Left-liberal cause IS a hijacked cause, just as conservative libertarianism has been hijacked by the forces of societal breakdown whose main target is the Christian model of the family and the forces of big business, which brings us round to the same forces which lurk behind the Left-liberals who voted in Obama and the Rightwing MIC who voted in Bush.
No one gets it - there is a third force in all of this, subtle but playing merry havoc with our understanding of one another - I call this force Them.
There are three political forces - Left, Right and Them.Apolitical Left-liberal people who support compassionate causes are not sufficiently into the history of politics for to see who is actually aligned with the Left - the totalitarians themselves, people such as Brown and Blair who hijacked Labour. I'd ask the Left-liberal to stop for one moment and see where all the equality legislation, all the Health and Safety, all of it is actually leading, in reality. Look at the CCTVs and the restrictions on movement now, on the inability of anyone to defend himself in his own home, in the reduction of police and their change in role to that of the enemy, e.g. with a Brazilian electrician.
Who does the Left-liberal blame?
Being apolitical, he accepts the conventional wisdom that it is financial elite capitalism's global recession and the policies of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan which are to blame, without allocating any discredit to how the government itself has actually
used this recession to further its agenda. He'll accept that Blair told porkies about going into Iraq but won't go to the next step - that Blair not only told porkies but is aligned with the international totalitarians, the Bilderbergers being one arm of that.
Even the Rightwinger switches out at this word and communication is lost.
It's impossible to reason with the Left-liberal because he has a picture in his/her mind's eye of a soft panacea and does not want to see the evil lurking behind and utilizing that panacea - that third force, Them, which I keep rabbiting on about. It's impossible to reason with the Centre-right in its City gent form, its economist form, whose focus is what the markets are up to. He can't see it either.
It's the oldest trick in the book - to erode a civil liberty, get the population to support a popular cause, e.g. equality and tolerance and bring in the legislation on the back of that. If the government were to promise to free up the markets, with a couple of other minor little bits of legislation attached, many on the right would go along with it, not overly concerned with the couple of other minor bits of legislation. It's the oldest trick in the book.
The Left liberal looks across at the Right and judges by the "niceness" of the person. So someone like
Mark Wadsworth, for example, is pretty forthrigh; so am I when I get a head of steam up. We seem unpleasant when we're angry and it's true we are angry about the state of things. The Left liberal sees the corruption in Westminster and joins us in decrying that but in general, sees us as lacking compassion, even subscribing to a cold, dog-eat-dog philosophy of free market economics which would leave the poor and disadvantaged destitute.
I know this because I was of the Left and have these feelings inside too. That's why Jams and I get on so well, except for aspects of political philosophy. If you zoom round the Rightwing blogs, they do write in a pretty
gruff manner, which immediately excludes many women who judge by a person's manner and we are our own worst enemies that way if we hope to get the Left-liberal to see the light. We concern ourselves with truths which don't concern the Left - that you
must have a strong productive sector in the economy first before there's any talk of redistributing wealth, that the economic structure of the country must be functioning properly before anything else is addressed.
Mark would see himself as just as compassionate as anyone though and if you look through his countless proposals for getting things right for the country, you can see it behind the words. But we get p---ed off by things and we say them on the blogs, which moves the blog away from being "feelgood" and thus we create two camps of bloggers.
We are into small government and reduced bureaucracy but the Left sees this as wanting to take away jobs in the public sector, taking away people's bread and butter. We don't have good PR on the Right, whereas the Left has a slick PR campaign behind them - Them.
Why does government money find its way into the most ridiculous areas, completely unproductive and ideological, e.g. anti-discrimination watchdogs? Even by their own standards, the Left should concede that that money would be better spent on education and health.
Look at the NHS and how much of the people's resources go into bureaucracy and executive salaries. Jobs, jobs, jobs, say the the Left - there must be jobs. Yes, says the Centre-right, we must have jobs but not by borrowing ourselves into penury and supporting everyone on the tax-payer, when we should be getting production going, reducing the ridiculous tick-box, NVQ mentality which marginalizes much of the talent in the country and actually getting people back to work which actually exists.
At the moment the work simply does not exist.
Why can't the Left-liberal see that?
We obviously have a communication problem and the Centre-right's intensity, even in this post, is unpleasant to the Left-liberal. The trouble is, "easy-going" in this current situation is closing the eyes to what needs to be done. We all want that fully-employed society where everyone feels valued and we are tolerant and caring - both sides want that - but the third force which is working to prevent that and to destabilize society for a global political agenda - Them - is not being recognized for what they are doing to both sides of party politics.
The Left and Right need to combine against that third force and reject totalitarian/authoritarian positions on both their parts. Let's be of the Centre, not of the Left or Right.
Look, how can I put it? My mate has a model, an analogy:
The boat careers down a river, crashing first into the Left bank and then swinging wildly over to the Right bank, lurching like a drunk downstream, damaging itself as it goes. Why, oh why, can't the boat be steered down the Centre, availing itself of the Left and Right banks to give it its position?
Further reading:
Pro-Liberi: Root Cause of our Ills for the governmental cause of the ills.