By Peter Kelly.
In October this year a resurgence of the American Tea Party drove the US government to a halt. Thousands of federal employees were sent home on unpaid leave, hundreds of services came to a halt, and park rangers had to break federal law just to search for lost hikers on state property. But this was just round one. Round two was just around the corner – the threat to follow up government shut-down by forcing it to default on its debts and plunge the United States into recession just as it reached recovery.
The Republican Party has been dragged to this point not because it actually wants to do so, but because electoral politics have forced it to. The Tea Party have placed cocked guns against the heads of those more pragmatic members of the American right, threatening that should they oppose the largest political blackmail attempt in American history they will face active Tea Party campaigns and candidates against them in the primaries. Primaries that without the support of the Tea Party they would probably lose.
Threaten your own government with financial collapse, or be torn from your seat in government. Your choice.
This ability of the most radical elements of the Republican Party to coerce more moderate elements into striking a more radical stance makes the entire US right-wing unelectable. The government shutdown completely backfired and yet Republican leaders such as Speaker Boehner were completely unable to back out without giving up their seats to Tea Party primary candidates. Exactly the same thing happened in the 2012 election. On paper Barack Obama faced enough opposition that any moderate Republican candidate should have won. However, every single Republican primary candidate was forced to spend the vast majority of the campaign cycle proving their radical-right credentials. Doing so meant abandoning the moderates and independents of America, and therefore abandoning the election.
Exactly the same thing is presently happening in the UK. Tired with the Conservative Party taking a somewhat moderate line and actually compromising with their Liberal Democrat partners to permit such progressive concepts as equality of marriage to progress – recent times have seen the emergence of the UK’s own Tea Party – UKIP. UKIP effectively destroyedConservative control over the local government landscape in local elections this year by launching campaigns against Conservative candidates who actually supported nearly the same positions as they do. The knock-on effect was the creation of a huge rebel group of right-wing backbenchers in government, who’s rebellions have driven the coalition government to embarrassing defeats to Labour and to made alienating suggestions such as reintroduction of national service and compulsory singing of the national anthem for school children. By driving the Conservatives right UKIP will lose them the centre-ground which won them the 2010 election. By challenging them in their own territories UKIP will destroy the right-wing electorally and so (ironically) making it significantly less likely that any of their own policies will take shape.
The right-wing is not unique to suffer from this infighting crisis. The left is just as plagued, but it faces a very different kind of radical rebel. Rather than forming their own political parties to challenge from further left disenchanted liberals are instead simply not voting at all. Claiming “they’re all as bad as one another” and spending far more time attacking those on their own wing for not being left-wing or liberal enough than attacking those on the right-wing for continuing to propose and drive right-wing policies.
These cynical rebels (generally young, middle-class, educated persons) used to form the leadership of the UK Labour Party and US Democrats, and the mainstay of the voting demographic of the Liberal Democrats. They lash out at the political parties on their own wings for being not angry enough, not radical enough, too white, too male, too rich, and too cautious. They’re elitist, misogynistic and out-of-touch.
Unfortunately however, they’re also the only bulkhead of left-wing liberalism in politics.Starved of votes and support they have struggled for years to impact a far better organised and unified status-quo centre-right in politics which spawned the successive governments of the New Labour and One-Nation Conservative governments in the UK. They have been forced to compromise more than they would want to and give more concessions to the right because their own potential supporters are far more interested in expressing their anger at the whole political elite than supporting making a difference. In this respect the British left have a lot to learn from the American left, who by-and-large continue to rally behind a president whose foreign policy is a great deal more right-wing than they’d like – simply to hold off the significantly more right-wing future which awaits should a Republican sit in the oval office.
This ‘angry-left’ lash out at anything which is seen as reinforcing the oppression of the elite against the weak, even if it’s a huge step better than what came before. Anti-war protesters hate Obama for his drone campaign despite its impact to dramatically reduce the number of civilian casualties in the war on terror and being significantly better overall than boots on the ground. Radical feminists lash out at allies and moderates with as much aggression as they do the truly misogynistic. The British Liberal Democrats have been wholesale abandoned by their supporters for their compromises to their Conservative partners despite their efforts to force an increasingly reactionary party to remain in the political centre. Both governments have been attacked for not doing enough to jeopardise their own finance and services industries in the name of bringing the fat-cat bankers to account – despite their actions to bring more comprehensive regulations to bear whilst also saving their nations from economic collapse. So keen are they to attack the oppressive elites that some will strike unsavoury alliances with far worse just to get a swing in.
The enthusiasm in which those on the right and left go about attacking the more centrist of their own side of the political spectrum could not be more self-defeating. In these relatively stable and peaceful times for the US and Britain no dramatically right or left wing faction is likely to ever control the legislative or executive of either state. The only way to win an election is by one wing of politics seizing control of the centrist, moderate and independent votes, doing so requires some degree of political compromise.
But the radicals of both wings do not understand compromise. The idea of anything less than absolute freedom from federal government interference in personal economics for the right, or anything less than complete dedication to immediate equality of all for the left, is completely alien to them. Anyone who believes in compromise, or whose political opinion lies on some kind of scale, is doomed to be attacked by those on their own wing with far more ferocity than those who are their more natural opponents across the aisle.
If activists on either side of the political spectrum truly believe in furthering their cause, and not just the ability to express their emotion as violently as they see fit, they must learn to compromise. They must learn to lend support to candidates who support some of their positions, if not all; or those who support their causes, but not to the same extent they wish they would. They must learn that small steps in the right direction are better than steps backwards or no steps at all. They must understand that a vote for the party most similar to their perspective is the best way to have that perspective heard and that sometimes tactical voting is better than a vote against your own side. They need to understand the basic psychology which makes explaining things to people and discussing things with them far more effective than shouting at them.
It may not sound like the utopia they want, it may not seem like a big enough leap away from the world which has fueled their fury against the status quo, but it’s a big enough step to matter. It’s a big enough step to be better than nothing at all. Because right now, with friends like these, everyone’s the enemy
