Why the Old Left–Right Divide No Longer Works
A century ago, Michael Oakeshott, Britain’s great skeptic of politics, a grand project, diagnosed a sickness that now afflicts every Western democracy: the confusion between government as referee and government as a crusading force. This sickness has infected the political realignment that is happening around the developed world. Some reach for the Nolan chart in an attempt to diagnose the affliction. Yet the axes of big vs. small government, or social conservatism vs. liberalism, no longer suffice. Many observers, including me, have noted that identity now appears to be the main political aligning issue. However, the picture was incomplete; Oakeshott finishes the painting — and answers one of the most puzzling political questions of the day.
The global realignment around identity was apparent a decade ago, as Britain voted for Brexit, identity-focused political parties wiped out old Christian Democrat parties around Europe, and Donald Trump made America First the focus of his first Presidency. While some political commentators, most notably the New York Times, struggled to fit this phenomenon into the old model that pitted big government versus small government alongside social conservatism and social liberalism, it was clear that didn’t work any longer. Instead, what divided politics was the role of identity and the nation.
To the new conservative, the nation and national identity were paramount. To the new leftist, what was important was either sub-national identity groups (in the US) or supra-national organizations like the EU or international human rights conventions (in Europe and the UK). This explained why new conservatives were suddenly quite friendly to collectivist economic policy or why climate activists started talking the language of the market.
Yet there was something missing. This didn’t quite explain the utter hostility of national conservatives to what they derided as “Conservatism, Inc.” or worse — the network of think tanks and organizations that had achieved things like the conservative remaking of the courts and more. After all, both factions believe strongly in America as a nation. Nor did it explain a similar civil war brewing on the left between progressives and old-style Democrats, including the donor class. In Europe, thanks to the ease of creating new parties, the warfare was open and saw the rise of national identity-focused parties on the right and Green parties on the left that largely swept away the old parties on both sides. The UK, as per usual, was somewhere in between, but recent polling suggests both the Labour and Conservative parties are under existential threat.
The missing element may be provided by Oakeshott. In his account, the rise of the concept of the individual in the late Middle Ages led to a rethinking of the role of the state. Two separate visions developed — one of the state as what Oakeshott calls a “civil association” or societas, the other of the state as an “enterprise association” or universitas. What differentiated them was a radically different way of conceiving political order. The societas was a nomocracy, from the Greek nomos (custom or law), that was governed by general rules of conduct rather than the pursuit of substantive goals. The universitas was a teleocracy, from the Greek telos (end or purpose), that organized society around substantive collective goals, a national purpose, if you will.
So, in the nomocracy, the state’s function is to provide a framework of law in which individuals and associations can pursue their own diverse ends. While in the teleocracy, the state’s function is to advance specific ends, which could be economic regulation to redistribute wealth, industrial policy to promote preferred industries, or moral and cultural policies aimed at instilling virtue.
Oakeshott’s theory was that England had almost uniquely developed a nomocratic structure. As Oakeshott scholar Max Skjonsberg puts it,
English freedom did not spring from any single principle, whether private property, parliamentary government, or even the rule of law, but rather what all the characteristics of English society seemed to point to: “the absence from our society of overwhelming concentrations of power.” In English politics, authority was diffused between past, present and future—in other words, it had a strong traditional component, but not one that dominated all political considerations.
This differed considerably from continental European concepts of the state. For instance, the German concept of Cameralism focused on management of the state as an enterprise, involving all sorts of boards and agencies that would put into practice what the rulers decided.
What appears to have happened is that this historical philosophical divide has become a major factor in world politics. The divide between national conservative and freedom conservative isn’t between nationalist and non-nationalists — as already mentioned, both camps believe strongly in the nation — but between teleocratic and nomocratic visions of the state.
The national conservative generally believes that the state has a unifying purpose, whether it be to promote the interests of the American worker above all else, to preserve American communities by restricting immigration, or to promote the “common good” in morals and the economy. All these are teleocratic ends.
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