Op-ed in The Hill: “Forward Party seems designed to bore and repel”

Yesterday (August 18, 2022), I had a new opinion piece run in The Hill. I wanted to share a longer version of that piece here at The Peaceful Revolutionist:

Earlier this summer, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Republican governor of New Jersey Christine Todd Whitman announced the creation of a new political party. Vaguely-defined by design and explicitly “centrist,” the new Forward Party seems designed to bore and repel Americans. It’s hard to imagine a more uninspired message than the Forward Party’s noncommittal non-message. A bland rewarming of last century’s elite consensus is exactly what our political conversation does not need.

But the party’s tagline—“Not left. Not right. FORWARD.”—is interesting insofar as it seems to present a challenge to both the left and the right. The conceptual validity of the left-right political spectrum is today virtually never questioned by anyone on any side of any debate. Whatever we think when we’re debating politics, almost all of us accept the categories and definitions provided by the left-right paradigm, quite in spite of the fact that those categories and definitions are never discussed or subjected to serious scrutiny. This intellectual laziness produces a host of strange, confusing, counterintuitive results. 

The left-right framework in use today famously (perhaps infamously) finds its origins in the National Assembly of France, the short-lived representative body of the Revolution, in which defenders of the crown occupied the right side, with generally anti-royalist and liberal (in the classical sense) groups sitting on the left side. Though we continue to use this left-vs-right shorthand today, it has become confused beyond redemption and totally incapable of telling us anything important about our current politics. 

No one has explained this better than philosopher Crispin Sartwell, whose prescription is “to try to confront both sides with the fact that their positions are incoherent,” showing that, whatever their cultural or identitarian differences, the left-right divide certainly doesn’t represent “a clash between different political ideas.” This may be difficult for Americans to confront, given the importance we place on these cultural identities and tribes. Several insights from both empirical evidence and political theory demonstrate the left-right spectrum’s inadequacy, incoherence, and lack of predictive or explanatory power—its total inability to tell us anything important about what’s actually going on in our social, political, and economic worlds.

One of the most important, though under-appreciated, social facts of modernity and its institutions is the positive correlation between the size and power of government and the size and power of business corporations. While partisans of both the left and the right carry on the quasi-religious pretense that corporate power and state power are at odds with one another, in the real world, they hold each other up, working together to create a coercive system of monolithic institutions in which the individual is powerless and alienated. If we bring the tools and techniques of critical theory to the history of the modern corporation, we find that the first corporations were created by governments specifically and explicitly as vehicles of anti-competitive, inegalitarian privilege. This practice never went away. Indeed, as a number of left-wing revisionist historians have demonstrated, even when governments seemed to be reining in the power of large corporations, they were often serving that power, intentionally or otherwise, by laying the groundwork for industry consolidation and monopolization.

Such observations square with the empirical picture of the corporate economy, as we find that the most highly consolidated industries are some of the mostly regulated and controlled by government bodies. The left-right framework doesn’t even attempt to explain this—and it can’t, because its categories are inconsistent with observable reality. The right needs to believe that corporate power is the result of a market process, that big business has simply out-competed and out-performed the rest of the field. The left needs to believe that government is just the expression of our shared faith in the common good, promoting abstract values like justice and equality. Neither of these narratives have much of anything to do with the history of the modern world, a history in which government and corporate elites have always been the very same people, moving through shared halls of power to create (not conspiratorially, but just as a matter of course) a system of land and resource theft and monopoly for their own benefit. If this sounds cynical to you, you may be a victim of ideology—either left or right. 

Anarchists have always been uniquely positioned to challenge and deconstruct the historically accidental and incoherent left-right spectrum, because our ideas are based on radical, anti-authoritarian critiques of some of modernity’s key social practices and institutional features. Our critique of capitalism, for example, is that it is not libertarian, or representative of either a meritocracy or a just economy of legitimate market exchange. Likewise, our critique of the state is that it is not and never was instituted to safeguard the common good or protect the rights of citizens. This is a very different critique than those we get from Republicans and Democrats—even from Greens and Libertarians; it’s a critique that extends the currently fashionable analysis of privilege to the very foundations of our social and economic practices and institutions. Yes, we want to talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, but we also want to talk about the social phenomena that no one has ever been able to discuss in the United States: the role of monopoly capitalism in creating the crisis of poverty and social alienation, and the role of the state in creating coercive systems of hierarchy and domination. We can’t have honest conversations about other forms of privilege without talking seriously about these.

Americans don’t need intentionally bland centrists to create a new political party, advancing minor tweaks to the existing moderate consensus; instead, we need deep, structural changes, and a new way of thinking about the social and political paradigm of state monopoly capitalism. Whether we call this left or right is beside the point. The question itself is an outmoded distraction from the substantive questions we need to be asking and thus an impediment to real progress and change.