Progressives, reactionaries, and the nature of the modern world

[starroute]

I've been reading up on right-wing ideology the last week, in an attempt to find out where things have gone so wrong. I've discovered two things that seem particularly significant:

1) Outside of the free market types, right-wing ideology consists mainly of classic conspiracy theory -- hysterical fears of a one-world government run by people they find alien and frightening in the name of values they don't accept or understand.

2) This right-wing nightmare is basically nothing more than a mirror-universe version of the old progressive utopian dreams of a century ago, but turned inside out and presented as an intolerable threat to everything that is good and holy.

Those utopian dreams are at the heart of today's great political divide, although the left generally doesn't realize it. So it's important for us to understand where those dreams came from, what role they have played, and why the right fears them so much.

Utopianism was the central myth of the extended era of modernization which transformed first Europe and then the rest of the world between about 1500 and 1950. As the world started to change and old institutions began to fall away, it occurred to far-thinking people that it might be possible to eliminate, or at least offset, many of the root causes of human suffering: poverty, disease, ignorance, superstition, oppression, war. They began by writing visionary proposals -- often in the form of novels -- for a cleaner, brighter, more enlightened world in which everyone had their basic needs met and no one was mistreated.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, with much of the utopian agenda on its way to fulfillment, a second set of objectives got added to the wish list. Most of these additional goals had to do with bringing everyone into the embrace of the new progressive society, including groups that were often discriminated against or demonized -- blacks and other ethnic minorities, women, gays and other sexual non-conformists. The rest involved tackling certain problems created by modernization -- pollution, despoiling of the countryside -- and extending the utopian vision beyond the human sphere and into the natural world as well.

But a couple of funny things happened on the way to utopia. One was that round about 1965, the left itself started to lose faith in the progressive dream. For all the reforms that had been enacted, the world as a whole didn't seem any saner or more peaceful. And the methods used in the name of reform often had a certain high-handed or even totalitarian air about them or, at the very least, seemed to do more harm than good to the people in whose name they were enacted.

The hippie and anti-war movements of the late 60's were as much a reaction against classic progressivism as anything else. It was the left, not the right, that first made "liberal" a dirty word. And both movements drove a wedge between the old social issue progressives of the unions and the Democractic Party and the new race-sex-and-gender progressives of the counterculture.

The other was that the right began to demonize the utopian dream more and more insistantly. Ever since the French Revolution, conservatives had been afraid of the potentials of radical utopianism, but the dividing line was most often rich vs. poor or bosses vs. workers. However, after 1965, these old class conflicts were replaced by a contention between those who like the changes that have occurred over the last few centuries and want to see more of them and those who fear change and want the world to go back to the way it was in 1500.

Over the last three decades, the forces of reaction have been in the ascendant, while progressive forces -- hopelessly divided since the 60's between the Old Left and the New Left and beset by doubts about their own goals and methods -- have floundered helplessly.

It's a fine mess we've gotten ourselves into.

The best advice I can give is for all of us to step back and look at the broader picture. The reality here is the process of modernization itself -- an inevitable and irreversible change in the way things get produced and used and traded around and in the social relationships that go along along with those means of production and ownership.

Everything else, whether progressive dreams or reactionary nightmares, is just tale-spinning -- limited human attempts to get a handle on events that are too big for us to readily understand. All the utopian dreamers of the 19th century couldn't force the modern world to be precisely the Utopia they wanted. All the conservative hopes of turning the world back to the Middle Ages won't stop the tide.

What we need to do most is to take a clear-eyed look at the world we are actually living in. Once we've done that, we can start think about the potentials of that world for good and ill, and then work at projecting a new vision that will inspire the dreamers, calm the fears of the doubters, and suggest useful work that we can all put our hands to.

[JaneDoughnut]

1. Good ideas.

Good observation about conspiracy theories on the right. I've always found it interesting that some of us (like myself... and Albert Einstein) actually desire a one-world government, and others are frightened by the possibility and actively working against it. It's important to realize we are operating on different sets of assumptions, and you can never communicate with the other side of the divide if you don't take note of that.

[Squeech]

2. Maybe

Couple points:

(1) I don't think utopian thinkers are all that influential. (There was the obvious counterexample of Marx, but I see him as a framework upon which Lenin and his allies hung their revolution.) I think most people have internalized that the best is the enemy of the good and are way more comfortable with incremental change.

(2) Winger projection is unquestionably a force to be reckoned with. In your example, you portray the anti-utopians fearing the powers of a world government unleashed. I think that's what they really want-- except that theirs would not be an enlightened classical-liberal managerial state that would take care of its citizens and help them achieve, it'd be a corporate feudalism in league with the Church. (Kinda like how their forefathers of the last generation used to blame everything on the Soviets, as if a superpower that could barely even brew enough vodka for export was nevertheless capable of pulling strings all over the Third World-- while in the meantime the CIA was toppling legitimate governments from Mossadegh to Allende. Talk of what they fear is how they telegraph their actions, since hypocrisy is woven into the very fiber of their being.)