Typically, we are told to avoid generalizations. I even caution my students against this most facile of errors. When we examine this directive closely, however, we can see that while we commonly generalize about other animals we are scolded when generalizing about ourselves. All monkeys bite, dogs are friendly, and flies are disgusting. When we say that all long-haired men are hippies, all bald people are skinheads, all suited people are jerks, and all angry drivers are young, we are suddenly scolded and reminded not to generalize.
I would like to generalize a bit. At first, a disclaimer. I have only paid the minimum of attention to the various political parties of Canada and the United States. I have work I am preoccupied with, and that and other concerns prevent me from taking on the amorphous and polarizing topic of left versus right and doing any more than commenting on partially understood trends. Therefore, you need to research my claims—although hopefully for you that means going beyond a quick google search—in order to ascertain what I have said is something you can agree with, or that it might be true. If you are a conservative voter, however, jump instead to the comment section and unleash some partially digested flatulence.
Like many, I find broad trends that indicate a person’s politics. The people who support conservative policies, which are largely aimed at enriching the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the environment, sound fiscal policy, the elderly, and reason, tend to be wealthy themselves. This makes sense, for they have the most to gain from a government which promotes corporate welfare even while it cuts money to social supports.
At first, this doesn’t seem to explain the many living in penury who crow about how the best government is one which tears money from their hands even as it gives it to the moneyed classes. In fact, they are merely the deluded, poorer cousin of the rich. They fawn over wealth and power because they hope that one day they also will become wealthy. “Some day my prince will come,” they sing to themselves when they are alone in their cramped apartment. They share the rich person’s faith and delight in money and deep suspicion of morality and responsibility, and so, hoping that some of the wealth will fall to them, they eagerly leap onto the tattered bandwagon of avarice.
What both of these groups share, and this is passing strange, although when examined perhaps not unexpected, is ignorance. They have a special type of ignorance, however. They are more than just rabid posters on websites whose vitriol combines naturally with tortured grammar; they also have an antipathy to information that runs counter to their views. Like a religious fanatic, they already know the truth, and any attempt to dissuade them using evidence at first confuses, and then angers them.
Overall, the conservative or republican position is clear enough. It is a position that puts money above all else. If the wars are money spinners for the arms dealers who have hijacked your economy since they sold to both sides in the second European war, then they recommend war. If the corporations will lose money from a war, they declaim it and push avidly for peace. Like the swaying crowd in Orwell’s 1984, their opinions are of the most basic sort, easily modified and endlessly plastic.
Traditionally, this has had a particular and perhaps contradictory result. Economically, a country run by the conservatives, who have spent their time in office gutting social programs and enriching their friends, is left bankrupt. Conservatives funnel money away from social programs, ostensibly to save money and pay off debts, but at the end of their tenure the economy is in ruins and people are even more desperate and poverty stricken although the income gap widens considerably and those at the top of the pointless wealth pyramid lick their fat chops in anticipation.
The more liberal or democratic voter is not exactly a polar opposite. Like the conservative, they have gained from a system that reduces others to penury, but unlike their rigid cousins, they hold other values to be important. The more leftist voter is concerned that the statistics and studies are correct: that oppressing the poor, neglecting children and addicts, mistreating the elderly, and abusing those who look or act different than ourselves, will somehow come back to bite us. They note that divisive societies have always crumbled from within and they point to widespread abuses in a system that they vote to revitalize.
The liberals are allowed to take over because the conservatives have bankrupted the system. The conservatives know that the country needs to get back on its feet, but they don’t want their friends blaming them for withdrawing the gravy train, so they let the country be rebuilt by the naïve liberals and then set it up for plunder once again even while they proclaim fiscal responsibility as their fundamental ethic.
The liberals theoretically manage their tenure according to values they have espoused, although the careful eye notes they spend much of their time catering to the swing voter. If unpopular policies have been put in place by their rivals, they promise to dismantle them, although no taxes are ever rescinded and no invasive and quasi-fascist laws are overturned. The liberals divert money from corporations to social programs, try to ensure the country functions in accordance to international law, outlaw abuses in the system and at least pay lip service to stamping out racism. While this is going on the conservatives cry foul. They claim the liberals are destroying the economy even as the liberals struggle under the huge debt conservative spending has always left them. Corporate sponsors and lobby groups begin to simultaneously pressure the incumbents and fund their opposition, hoping to undermine a system which might actually feed the people and revitalize the economy.
While their country teeters between penury and health, a decent standard of living and the fascist state, the dismayed voter looks in vain for a third option. Throttled by the need to protect the society from conservative plundering and liberal sycophancy, the voter finally votes for what had been the far left. The far left, smelling the possibility of brinkmanship like the middle classes can smell the poor, move their party line to the right, and then right again, forcing the other parties to crowd ahead of them just to distinguish themselves. Finally, three parties crowd the right of the curve, each focused on garnering as much of the vote as possible, even while behind the curtain they bow to their corporate masters.
Right and left, and far left, are loose ideologies as much as anything, and although we cannot blame the voter for confusing images of representation with the reality of real governance, we are a long way from José “Pepe” Mujica. Still, we stumble to the polls, scratch our x on a paper that is likely disregarded even as it falls into the box, and hope that this time our candidates will keep their promises. If the past is any indication, however, we have no intention of holding them to what they said in the heady days of campaigning any more than we have of dispensing with them entirely. Like many before us, we will buy the snake oil with the vain hope that this time it will be different, even while tar sands executives rub their sticky hands on the endless cycle of our future. We still never ask whether any of these politicians are truly necessary for the running of a country they show so little interest in running.
