I've spent much of the morning

 

listening to a left-wing political philosopher named Vivek Chibber.

He's got me thinking in broad ideological terms about the nature of the current Left and about my own position within the broader spectrum.

So my first question this morning is, if Marxist Hegelianism gives us the tension between capitalism and socialism allegedly resulting in communism, why instead cannot the desired resulting synthesis be regulatory capitalism, aka "social democracy"?

Marx believed in Hegel's notion of thesis > antithesis > synthesis as applied to the material world of capitalism.

For Marx the thesis was capitalism, the antithesis was socialism, and the synthesis was communism.

I find a more sensible synthesis between right-wing neo-liberal capitalism and uptight authoritarian socialism would be regulatory capitalism of the type that we have throughout the West today with necessary modifications according to national conditions and culture.

We do not need revolution in the West, but a rational and compassionate balance between free market capitalism and its regulation in order to promote the general well-being.

It is this tension which stands at the very center of our politics.

What I often tell people is that the central political tensions in the West today are neatly expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The primary tension between the Left and Right is the tension between the government's obligation to promote the general welfare in constant tension with the blessings of liberty.

The Left leans toward the former, while the Right leans toward the latter, but both are necessary to a well-functioning society.

We need capitalism, not socialism, because it promotes an expanding economy and creative entrepeneurship, but it must be regulated so that regular people also benefit from that expanding economy, have universal access to health care, worker safety, and a curb on the capitalist tendency toward unjust exploitation.

Chibber reminds us that socialists claim their political ideology comes directly from the seventeenth-century Enlightenment because it applies Enlightenment Rationalism to the social world of politics and human relations.

Certainly traditional liberalism is a manifestation of the Enlightenment as it gave us capitalism, democracy, freedom of speech and, thus, the US Constitution, itself.

The difference is that at the core of the Enlightenment is the belief in the autonomy of the individual, while the core of socialism is not the individual, but the collective good.

In the contemporary West, most conservatives acknowledge the need to promote the general welfare and most leftists acknowledge the need for individual liberty, which is part of the reason that they support a woman's right to choose an abortion.

Right and Left on the contemporary scene are not nearly so mutually exclusive as we like to think.

Further, too much emphasis on individual liberty allows individual authoritarians to run amuck, while too much emphasis on the collective well-being ultimately deterioriates into state authoritarianism.