I always feel like a bit of an interloper here. I'm not an American, a fact that will be come abundantly clear in this diary; although I do confess to have been obsessed with the outcome of the last election. That's why I joined up, in fact, to feed my addiction. It wasn't good for my workload, to put it mildly.
In my first DailyKos diary I am going to describe an interaction I had with my Dutch housemate (I'm a Brit). We talked about politics, and the conversation made me think slightly differently about the language we use to describe our positions relative to the mythical 'centre'.
Follow me below the fold for a tale of European leftiness. It's quite long, so if you make it through the whole thing, there may be cookies.
Every week or so my housemate and I like to go out to dinner to a local restaurant, to make a change from cooking or ordering takeaway. A week or so ago we were at a Thai place just down the road when the subject of politics came up. Now, I have always considered myself a little bit of a tree-hugging Guardian-reading sandal-wearing lefty liberal, except without the sandals. My housemate, being Dutch, I expected to fall pretty much in the same area, politics-wise.
We discussed the different electoral systems in the UK and in Holland and, since the US election had just happened, in America as well. In the UK, we have a system similar on the face of it to the US system, in which you vote for the party of your choice in a first-past-the-post election - the candidate with the most votes from each constituency wins. The difference of course is that we don't directly vote for our head of state; the leader of the winning party becomes Prime Minister, who is de facto in charge, but the monarch is still technically the HoS. (For more on the crazy working of the British constitution and electoral system, see this excellent diary by Febble).
In the Netherlands, by contrast, they have a single transferable vote system where you can rank the candidates in the order you want them to win. If your first-choice candidate is eliminated, your second choice candidate is allocated the vote until that candidate is eliminated, and so on. The main outcome, aside from being more complicated, is that you end up with a few main parties and many smaller parties being allocated shares of the vote, so election time is also a time of scrambling around trying to find viable coalition partners in order to form a majority for government, which is mildly entertaining.
Anyway. In the midst of this discussion, my housemate advanced the opinion that I'd seen shot down around here so many times: that the US was a fundamentally conservative country, compared with Europe. Predictably, I challenged him on this, and we had a really interesting discussion about what 'conservative' means in different places around the world.
I started off by trying to lay out my position: that I saw myself as fundamentally left of centre*. He responded by telling me that he saw himself as fundamentally right of centre. I stopped, fork half way to my mouth. Now, I'm a pretty laid-back person, and there's not much that upsets me these days. But I'm still fundamentally tribal, and one thing I can't stand is discussing politics with conservatives. It just makes me so angry! And I'd just found out I was living with one?! Fuck.
"So," I said casually, "what kind of things are you right of centre about?"
We talked about all sorts of things then. Immigration, for one. He complained that people from the Dutch island colonies would move to Holland for a better life and then just live of benefits rather than work. Notwithstanding that maybe the Dutch shouldn't have conquered the islands in the first place (ah, hindsight!) I couldn't find much to disagree with on this point. For me, for a society to work, everyone has to pitch in to make it work. Benefits are there for people who can't do that, for whatever reason.
In fact, I told my housemate, my ideal pipe-dream society would be that everyone got a little bit of money to live on, one that wouldn't allow them to buy luxuries but would enable them to buy food and survive day-to-day. If they wanted anything nice, they would have to work for it. (Please, Kossacks, don't poke holes in my admittedly amateurish attempts at social engineering!) Then my housemate said something that surprised me: he said that that's pretty much what life was like in Holland already, except that benefits were given even to people even if they didn't work. That's what the right-wingers in the Netherlands were trying to fix, he said.
And that's when it hit me. I wasn't left-wing at all. And he wasn't right-wing at all. Because those terms have absolutely no meaning in two societies where the centre is in different places! What we were both describing was a kind of social democratic society, which is left-wing for the UK and right-wing for Holland. The Dutch have Communists represented in their political system after all, whereas Britain is big on Big Finance, or was until recently.
So it turns out we were on common ground after all. And it turns out that, in fact, the US is a fundamentally centre-right country... depending on where you arbitrarily decide the 'centre' is. That's why Freepers think that DailyKos is a radically left-wing website, whereas I think it's a moderately sensible left-wing website, and the Naderites tend to think you're a bunch of corporatist puppets**. Where you decide to place your centre is the main determinant of how left- or right-wing you decide people to be.
This all seems obvious, doesn't it? But it was a real revelation to me. The labels left- and right-wing are meaningless, especially since the terms have changed with the times. The important thing, from my perspective, is building a free and fair society. Freedom and fairness can be opposed, but they don't have to be all the time. With any luck we can get past our ideological labels, enjoy our Thai food, and try to build a better world.
Postscript: My housemate and I have contributed to building harmonious international relations by teaming up in World of Warcraft and killing lots of people from the opposing faction. Baby steps.
*stop complaining, it was our language first!
**I actually have some friends who supported Nader, and that's pretty much their line - sorry if I overgeneralise.