A (not so) short primer on political parties

 

Man, it seems that (again!) there was something wrong with my forecast for the USA presidential election: I dismissed too cavalierly the possibility of a major kerfuffle between the major parties about who had won, and a full blown constitutional crisis, along the lines presented in the Atlantic article by Barton Gellman that I did link. As of today (Friday, three days after the vote took place), we still don’t know the result (so at least it is clear that there is no “blue wave”, and that the support for Trump was once more dramatically underestimated in the polls, no matter how much the pollsters said they had learned and adjusted after 2016), and the current president has, true to form, already declared that he has won the election and that all further count should be stopped (not recount this time, like in Florida in 2000, but simple original, honest-to-God vote counting, as counting all the votes, legitimate or not, may endanger his “win”). If you were a Russian or a Chinese operative wanting to weaken the USA and to obliterate every remnant of influence it may still exert in the international arena you could not have engineered a more favorable outcome for your intentions…

Be it as it may, the one thing I believe I got right is that what this sorry soap opera confirms is that the cycle of US supremacy in international affairs is over, and this kind of drama just highlights it. Regardless of who finally gets to the White House, who would look, in the next four years (or in the next forty, for what it’s worth) to Washington for approval, inspiration, legitimacy or even financing? a country that spends an inordinate amount of time in a seemingly never-ending electoral campaign, that after such endless electioneering is mercifully ended, cannot agree on who has won the most votes because it uses some ballot counting processes that would look more in place in the XVIII century than in the XXI, that in the meantime cannot decide on what kind of help or mere economic relief its citizens need in the midst of a pandemic (a pandemic on which it can’t even agree on how to slow down because every imaginable measure has been politicized and rejected beforehand by a half of the population only because it has been embraced by the other half) the likes of which have not been experienced in a lifetime, where half of the electorate is ready to reelect a patently unfit, corrupt buffoon whose only merit (in their eyes, not mine!) is to make their shared opponents foam at the mouth? Not many, for sure, so I won’t dwell more in their unremarkable fate (all decadences look alike, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I have a more exalted one to look at when I want to ponder how mutable the fortunes of the world are, and how swift the fall from grace can seem).

What I want to dwell on, instead, is how their main political parties evolved in the last couple of centuries until they ended as a dead weight around the neck of the social body, beyond possible salvation, and how those in the rest of the world maybe moving in a similar direction, and thus similarly fated to end in the same undesirable place. I will start by remembering my readers that political organizations are groups of people with pre-defined roles (and limited freedom of action, as those roles constrain their choices of what they can publicly do) that share a common goal, namely the improvement of the group they self-identify with. That improvement typically takes the form of a zero-sum game, as it requires that said group takes control of a higher percentage of the “social product” (it is not necessary at this point to get in more detail of what the social product consists in: depending on the type of society it can be honor, recognition by other groups, voting rights, increased possession of material goods, freedom to engage in certain socially sanctioned activities, ability to dictate to others what they should listen, or see, or think, and whatnot). An interesting case is posed by people with multiple allegiances, belonging to multiple political organizations that may pursue potentially conflicting goals, but we will leave that case aside for the moment and deal with it towards the end of this post (or in the next one).

As I have mentioned in other places, durable and still recognizable political organizations in the modern sense appear in our civilization in the eve of the French Revolution. Before that we had the ur-political group, the family, and the nation state, and little in-between (other than some fleeting alliance of families like the Ghibellines and Guelphs of northern Italy I mentioned in a previous post). The French Revolution is considered a pivotal moment in (the Western) world history because for the first time, then, we see distinct groups of people becoming conscious of their common interests outside the family and within the nation, to be pursued separately and mostly in opposition to other similar groups. And because one of said groups (that initially identified themselves as the “third state”, formed by all those that were non-priest and non-noble, but that in the end was formed essentially by the urban bourgeoisie) was wildly successful, achieving not only its initial goals of getting a say in how the realm was managed (specially, and closest to its commercial heart, how taxes were levied) but getting a monopoly of power that would last actually to our present days, any other attempt at configuring political identities, popular movements and parties claiming to further the particular interests of a certain segment of the population have tended to follow the template set by the delegates of the National Constituent Convention (where the delegates of the mentioned third state, representatives of the majority, were seated at the left of the tribune, whilst the ones for the nobility and the church seated at the right).

Since then we have had, in all the West, two main parties: one purporting to represent “the majority of the population”, only not any majority, but specifically the one with less means and less wealth, and another one representing the “richest ones”. Let us call them, adhering to extended usage, “progressives” and “conservatives”, and try to clarify a bit more what sets them apart, in terms of who they are, how they can identify themselves (and distinguish from the other parties) and how they necessarily formulate their goals of increased power/ recognition/ wealth:

·         Progressives, as we have defined them, are marked by two features. They represent more than half of the populace, and that segment has to include the poorest ones. In different historical moments they have tried to extend their reach towards higher incomes (an extreme has been reached recently with the claim, coined by the recently deceased David Graeber, for whom I have a lot of sympathy, of being the “99%”, and thus excluding only the richer 1%), and the identification factor tends to overlap with the professional activity of its members (as the latter determines to a great extent the position within the social hierarchy). This party is then the natural home of peasants (specially landless ones: sharecroppers in UK, métagers in France, temporeros in Spain, etc.), industrial workers, apprentices, maidservants, small shopkeepers, low-level public servants, etc. As they earn less than the national average, they understandably tend to favor redistribution, the more of it there is the better (as for them as a group it is a net gain: the more it is taken from the higher earners and given to them in the form of direct transfers, subsidies, unemployment, healthcare and social security the more resources they have for leading more fulfilling lives), enacted usually by progressive taxation (that taxes at increasingly higher margins the higher income brackets). However, and equally understandably, that redistribution “from without” (tax more those that belong to the upper classes, who constitute this party’s “other”) stops at the group’s frontier, and becomes an ideal of solidarity within it. Nietzsche’s vitriolic “morals” could be construed as a denunciation of such solidarity (that he denounced as “slave mentality” in the usual friendly and equanimous tone he used with anybody he didn’t like -essentially everybody ever…). They identify themselves by their “unsophisticated” tastes in entertainment (“lowbrow” culture, as what has been called “highbrow” was revealed by Pierre Bourdieu and the like to be a coded and costly way to identify who belonged to the higher classes), which they construe as being more “natural”, more “wholesome” and “authentic” than the stilted, contrived, rootless and artificial cosmopolitanism of the elites.

·         Conservatives, on the other hand, cannot claim to represent a majority, as what singles them out is precisely the fact that they are “better off” (have more means at their disposal, more assets, more instruction, more influence, more status) than the average citizen (although some weird statistical distribution of wealth or income could be imagined in which the median took a value well above the average, and thus more than half the people could have “more than average” of the positional goods of which there is a limited supply, in real life normally the opposite is the case). That was not a problem at all in the old times, where such state of affairs could be maintained indefinitely by sheer force (as the ability to exert force was highly correlated with wealth and riches, so the rich ones were also the powerful ones, and could count with superior manpower -and later on, firepower- to keep the masses on their place), but with the advent of representative democracy (that has inched, slowly and haltingly, but surefootedly, towards the principle of “one person, one vote”) it has been much more tricky to operate and sustain. As we advanced in one of the posts on the USA elections, referring to the Republican party, there have been essentially two strategies open to them (and of course, both have been used extensively):

a)       “Divide and conquer”, splitting the opposition in two and disenfranchising as many as possible of those, and thus having only to extend the population you fight for to something in the vicinity of a 30-40% of the total. This is the path followed in Europe, where conservatives have successfully reached power many times with a 40% of the vote, as the remaining 60% was more or less evenly split between social democrats and communists (depending on the laws for converting the percentage of the vote into representatives, it may further require more imaginative alliances). It has to be noted that 40% of the vote could be cast by roughly a 25-30% of the total population, if abstention was high enough.

b)      “Obfuscate”, but as the latest USA presidential elections show, governing a majority of the population having the interests of only a minority of it in mind is a difficult exercise of tightrope walking, and the smallest failure may spell doom (in the form of loss of power to the majority, which would then enact the dreaded confiscation/ redistribution). A better alternative is to try to convince said majority that your positions, devised to benefit primarily those that are better off, are magically beneficial to everybody, including the poorer and worst-off parts of the polity. Something that was given intellectual legitimacy by John Rawls (that formulated what he called the “difference principle”, according to which the only deviations from equality that are morally admissible are those that would make the least advantaged members of society better off) and then was bastardized (hence the term I used for naming this strategy instead of “creating more wealth” of “enhancing the collective welfare”) in bullshitty theories like trickle-down economics (popularized in the motto “a rising tide lifts all boats”, that conveniently forgets that the big yachts tend to be lifted much more than the modest dinghies)

Regardless of the strategy best adapted to each social condition and historical moment, what all conservative parties share is a set of goals favorable to their constituency, centered around placing limits to (or right away eliminating) redistribution, allowing the wealthier to retain their wealth (which requires that differences in wealth are not only allowed or grudgingly put up with, but legitimized, even glamorized as inherently virtuous and desirable). That is, they really cannot aspire to increase their share of the social product, as they already own most of it, so their goal is the maintenance of the status quo, and derived from such maintenance, the justification of the traditions and ideologies that produced it (the more remote in the past the better), be that justification economic, religious, or identitarian (more on that in a moment). Such ideology has crystalized of late in a general disdain for the state and its administration, seen as a machine for siphoning resources from those who have them (the rich) to those who do not (everybody else). Thus, the legislative movement of conservative parties everywhere is towards less state machinery, less government capabilities and less institutions that can check private individuals’ decisions (which has the twofold benefit of making the state less able to redistribute wealth and of justifying further reductions in taxes, a strategy known in the USA as “starve the beast”), and thus towards ever increasing “deregulation” (not because they specially love unregulated markets; the rich love markets regulated just enough to extract monopoly rents from them, only once that has been achieved they prefer a hands off approach from government so they can maximize their gains even more).

So for about the last two hundred years in the West those two sensibilities/ sets of goals have animated the two main political parties (although they sometimes have fragmented due to personal enmities between some of their leaders, corruption of the entrenched ones that drove a significant portion of the electorate away from them or the local irruption of some niche issue that attracted the attention of enough voters), occupying between them most of the space between the nation-state and the family, and presenting themselves as the only alternatives for those willing to consecrate part of their time (or their resources) to the improvement of the lot in life of the group they identified with by adopting a role in them (be it as mere voter, a not very demanding role, but with implications on how they see the world far beyond what the very modest time commitment may suggest, or as an active organizer or leader). Thus, this could be a first level analysis of the political landscape of every Western nation, were it not for a glaring omission that we should now address: nationalism.

Nationalism means a bunch of different things to different people. To some it is the source of all evil and bad things that happened in the XX century and to others a virtuous quality that any properly born and bred citizen should exhibit in his public life. From our perspective, a political organization is nationalist when it intends to represent all the people that share a common nationality, and has as its ultimate goal the improvement of the lot of said people. If the play between nations in the international arena is understood as zero-sum, such improvement would necessary come at the expense of other nations (others groups of self-identified peoples) and we would be talking of “aggressive” nationalism, bent on the extraction of resources from other countries by force, on occupation of foreign lands if needs be to better exploit them and to right away conquer additional “vital space” for its citizens (lebensraum), like the one practiced by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, Colonial France, Imperialist UK… If the identification of who actually belongs to the nation is done in some restrictive way, in order to single out some group within the legal citizens of the nation-state as being the “real” nation, we would be talking of “exclusionary” nationalism, like again the one of Nazi Germany before WWII (that excluded the Jews and, to a certain extent, the communists) or the one of white supremacists in the USA of today (that would exclude blacks, Hispanics and supposedly other racial minorities that got too uppity some of which, in practice, may be more tolerated). Both of those nationalisms are seen as morally repugnant by a majority of educated people nowadays… in the West, as in Asia there is not one but two rising powers that owe a part of its current success to having harnessed the power of a nationalism presented in benign terms as the only outlet for the political participation of its enormous population: both China and India (the first to a more advanced degree than the second) present the currently ruling parties (Chinese Communist Party and Bharatiya Janata -Indian’s People Party) as the sole “proper” way of participating in a collective endeavor and help other people like you get a better life. as such parties purport to represent the whole of society, they leave no legitimate space to try to organize and fight for better conditions for only a subset of it (in China that attempt would be illegal, while in India, still a functioning democracy with a rich history of progressive and conservative parties going back to its independence, it is still legal, albeit the governing majority is trying to at least delegitimize it, although it has so far fallen short of attempting to forbid it).

What we do have in the West (or at least in Europe) is a number of regionalist parties pretending to represent “the whole nation” in small geographic areas that do not constitute an administratively independent nation (Catalonia, Corsica, Wallonia, Scotland) and that typically take advantage of their ability to represent at least a percentage of the population of the territories on which they operate to exact advantages from “national” parties (traditional conservative or progressive ones) in exchange for their parliamentary support, that can be at times pivotal to keep them in power.

I will have more to say about those “small nationalists”, and about the degeneration of both progressive and conservative parties, in a next post on this topic, as this one has already exceeded my self-imposed limits on verbosity…