Thus writes Gideon Rachman, the international affairs editorialist of the Financial Times of London in a new piece: How Iraq and climate change threw the right into disarray. Actually, I don't want to mock him too much, because he makes a number of good points (about the right being utterly in the wrong today), but rather encourage him to go even further in his thoughts (and admit that the right was wrong before and that this is precisely what caused today's problems)...
From 1979 to 2004, the right won the battle of ideas in the western world. Conservatives triumphed because they got the two big issues of the era right: they were in favour of free markets and against communism. But now the right is in disarray because it has found itself on the wrong side of the two dominating issues in contemporary western politics: global warming and the Iraq war.
The right "won" the battle of ideas in that these ideas now permeate our thoughts and our "common wisdom", which does not mean that their ideas were 'right', as he claims, but that they were followed. And they lead us 'right' to the failures on Iraq and global warming. Recognising that the right is wrong on Iraq and global warming is a good step, but the linkage with the earlier ideas it pushed must be made more strongly.
In 2003, the kind of people going on anti-war marches – or warning of impending climate doom – looked to many right-wingers like the same people who had been wrong about everything else for the past 25 years. They were the people warning the world was running out of oil in the 1970s; who opposed privatisation in the 1980s and marched against the first Gulf war in 1991. They were the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament crowd; the "East Germany has solved the housing problem" crowd; the "we are all going to die of mad-cow disease" crowd. They were earnest men in cardigans and fierce women in sensible shoes.
The thought that these people could be right about anything was frankly intolerable. But, in fact, they were right about two things: global warming and Iraq.
Hmmm... It's not clear how "these people" have been wrong on any of the topics. Perpetuating the idea that they are is part of the success of the right, but does not make it so.
We are running out of oil, still pretty much in the timeframe identified in the 70s; Privatisation has a mixed record, to say the least; nuclear disarmement is still deemd a priority by all, even as they behave in ways that make things worse; mad-cow disease was a symptom of our runaway agro-industrial complex, which is still more or less intact. There's a lot of nuance to be brought to all these topics, and "these people" got a number of things right and do not deserve the contempt thrown at them by Rachman.
Global warming poses a fundamental challenge to the- right’s faith in markets. It is, as Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, puts it "the world’s biggest market failure".
Worse, most of the proposed remedies for global warming involve things the right traditionally abhors. There is global governance in the form of monster international accords such as the Kyoto treaty. There are restrictions on individual liberty as the clamour grows to tax people out of their cars and off their cheap flights. There is a new emphasis on localism as opposed to globalisation. There is also a backlash against the idea that faster economic growth is always desirable or sustainable.
Yeah. Global warming essentially proves that all the "successes" of the past 25 years that the right trumpets were not really so - they created the appearance of "success" (growth) by ignoring externalities, and dumping costs on others or on the future. Well, these costs are beginning to be paid now, and that bill rightly belongs to those that initiated it, i.e. the right-wing ideologues of the past 25 years that have tried to eliminate all forms of regulation and internalisation of costs by companies and individuals. They did not succeed in full, but they created a mindset which makes it harder to impose regulation, seen as a bad thing. Well, reality differs and is making us pay the price.
And freedom to get stuff or to do stuff cheaply, without compensating others for the cost of your actions on them, is not a recognised right. Cheap flights and cheap gas are the result of looting (of countries and/or of limited resources), not of any kind of natural right.
We are paying today the bill of the past years of right wing indulgence. That's what this means. Not just that the solutions go against the precepts of the right, but that they are needed because the precepts of the right made things worse. They did not create wealth. They looted.
The Iraq debacle also cuts away at the intellectual and moral self-confidence of the right. The Reagan-Thatcher approach to the world was founded on an unapologetic belief in military strength and an unhesitant confidence in the moral superiority of western democracy. When the cold war was won in 1989, the right embraced an exuberant universalism. The cheering crowds in Prague and the Baltic states – and even the martyred students of Tiananmen Square – seemed like clinching evidence that all men do indeed desire the same things, and that a western formula for freedom and prosperity is infinitely exportable.
It was the confidence born of victory in the cold war that created the confidence to invade Iraq. Failure there threatens to undermine the moral certainty bequeathed to the right by Mrs Thatcher and Reagan, as well as the belief in the efficacy of military force and the exportability of western democracy.
The cold war was never won by military power, but by soft power. The right learnt the absolute wrong lesson. You do not "export" democracy. At best, you can help the locals conquer it from their rulers, by showing an exemple. You don't invade them and kill them to make them free. Never worked, never will.
this makes it sound as if the only role left for the Anglo-American right is to roll over and capitulate. But that is far too gloomy. In this new ideological era, conservatives have two obvious tasks – one defensive and one offensive.
The defensive role is to guard against over-reaction to the emerging consensus on global warming and Iraq. The right was not wrong to spot its old anti-capitalist, anti-western foes in the coalitions that first latched on to these issues. There are radical voices that will try to use global warming to create a world in which nobody takes a cheap flight again – and in which globalisation is put into reverse. It will be up to the right to show that growth and greenery can be reconciled. Similarly, the Iraq catastrophe is great news for anti-Americans in Europe and isolationists in the US. Conservatives need to hold the line against both.
But the right can do a lot more than mere damage control. Many of the most important ideas of the Reagan-Thatcher era – privatisation, trade union reform, the re-thinking of the welfare state – were developed in opposition to the intellectual consensus of the 1960s and 1970s. After a long period of intellectual hegemony, a period in ideological opposition might be just what the Anglo-American right needs.
"Growth and greenery can be reconciled" when you accept that growth within a finite system is impossible, and you define growth as a qualitative process rather than a quantitative. Which means either measuring and valueing things completely differently, or stopping to focus only on the monetary world.
Cheap flights (just like cheap gas) are nothing but cheap - they have a price, which the flyers are not paying right now, but dumping on all of us, and on our children. What is this but the basest kind of selfishness? This is essentially theft of the resources of others. How can that be reconciled with "markets"? Is looting an acceptable behavior?
What Gideon Rachman is advocating is essentially to let the left rebuild our civilisation now that it's become hard again to plunder it safely, and use the time to invent new ways to loot what will have been established during that period.
Which shows once again that the right was never "right" in the first place: they are parasites, with a talent to capture wealth or value once it's been created and recognised by the left. They are plunderers and thieves.
How do we discredit them for more than just one lifetime, so that they do not come back again in 70 years? How do we change the Kondratieff cycle?