Growing up, I remember coming across an old saying. Anybody supporting the left in their twenties has no heart, but anyone supporting them in their forties has no head.
I am obviously headless. I have always tilted leftwards, but over the last fifteen years or so my tendency has moved further and further to the left. Give me Elisabeth Warren over Joe Biden any day.
I suppose part of my leftward drift has come from living in the USA, where I daily witness the greed and emptiness of the right and the negative consequences of their dominance since the Great Wrong Turning in 1980. But I am also far from sure that the old saying works anymore. There has been a gradual swapping over of support between right and left, so that a patriotic, working class, rooted person without a college degree can now be a reliable supporter of the right, while people like me have moved in the opposite direction.
This confusing change is partially explained in a new book about the USA I read this week,Last Best Hope by George Packer. I was initially attracted to the book after an author interview on PBS, in which he started to describe four models of archetypical voters. For all their flaws, I love models, and it seems Mr. Packer does too.
Packer describes his first model as Free America, epitomized by Reagan (and Thatcher to we Brits). Societal responsibility means little beyond creating wealth, and markets with minimal regulation are the engine for that. Freedom comes to embody a desire for everybody else to get out of the way of greedy desires.
The Smart America of Clinton or Obama accepts part of Free America’s diagnosis, while disguising the greed of its adherents behind a cloak of meritocracy. Education and connections yield rewards, and the Smart use their advantages to hoard more and more of the benefits, turning a blind eye with theatrical hand-wringing to those locked out from some opportunities.
Free America flatters to deceive, and Smart America adds condescension to the mix, and the outcome is Trump’s Real America, a land of delusion, nostalgia and revenge. Basic competence and truth are casualties as only the Messiah is deemed credible. The creed speaks of freedom, but the entry fee includes subservience to the demagogue.
The author, plainly a Smart American suffused by guilt, is suitably disdainful about Free and Real peers, but reserves his greatest ire for his fourth model, Just America. The creed here is of original sin, a pit from which nobody born white or wealthy or male or cisgender can escape. Practical solutions are jettisoned on the altar of unending blame.
The models feel just about coherent and explanatory, and tell a story of spiralling dysfunction without an easy way out. The right lost its heart when it became Free, and its soul when it embraced the Real. The left lost its belief when it became Smart and then its head when it moved to Just. But the intelligent of today cannot but try to repel the Real, finding homes where the left has arrived.
As so often, the diagnosis and models are more compelling than the solutions, which read uncomfortably like the Biden agenda. The exit from the spiral lies with rediscovering Equal America, where everybody can feel respected. Journalism, education and activism are positioned as possible weapons, but I will not hold my breath, though the author does suggest that similar crises have been endured before. If his logic about respect is valid, then he and I must agree about the Great Wrong Turning, for that was surely the original sin of the current spiral.
Sadly, the left does not make itself easy to support. I can actually live with the fanatical wokeness of cancel culture: naïve youth has to have its dogma. For me the bigger problem is its shambolic analytical discipline.
Each week I read The Guardian Weekly of the left and The Economist of what remains of the intelligent right. One exudes pessimism, bemoans everything with lazy generalisations about companies that put profits before people and rarely offers any practical solutions. The other has tight and balanced analysis supported by outstanding graphics and does not shirk from brave advocacy. The left may have become Smart, but is often not very smart.
A great example is climate change. To its credit, The Guardian has been banging on about environmental concerns for far longer than most publications and devotes many column inches to the subject. But the analysis is never properly quantified and the solutions seem to involve going back to the dark ages. The Economist was slower to the subject but far more compelling once it found its feet, brimming with data and practical priorities, most recently highlighting methane as a low-hanging opportunity.
Probably the greatest book on Climate Change policy was issued this year, written by Bill Gates. It contains his characteristic wide and dispassionate analysis, and offers a workable blueprint to deal with the crisis. I have hopes that many attendees of the upcoming Glasgow summit will have read the book and arrive ready to drive to implement its ideas.
How did The Guardian review Gates’ book? His content received little attention, in favour of something of an attempt to undermine the author. Somehow it was not acceptable for such prescriptions to come from somebody so rich whose own environmental footprint is so large, what with his yachts and his travel schedule. The review had Just America’s flaws all over it.
Another example is the Amazon project for New York City. The behemoth was planning to invest in Queens, creating maybe hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs if all of the associated activity is considered. As soon as the investment was announced, Just America cast it aside, citing the subsidy the City was offering and the general labour practices of Amazon. Within a week, Amazon had decided to go elsewhere.
Amazon are not the flashiest employer, but they follow the law, pay on time and provide consistent working conditions and more security than many. The people deprived of their new jobs were not Brooklyn hipsters or the sons of the Smart, they were people eking out a living in multiple sweat shops, probably paid below minimum wage in cash and with the women touched up by the boss on a regular basis. Just America and Smart America conspired to make their compatriots poorer, all over defending a questionable principle.
We can do better than that. The left can do better than that, but we languish in lazy out-dated rhetoric rather than trying to address the needs of those we purport to support. We could start by learning from The Economist, starting with metrics. GDP is a wonderful metric for bankers, but a hopeless one for real people. Yet we persist in letting the bankers’ metric be the accepted determinant for human development. Why can the Guardian print a detailed analysis of trends in healthy life expectancy, using country and state comparisons to nail the blame on our Free and Real adversaries? Indeed, how did I observe the 2020 election without hearing a single reference to healthy life expectancy?
I represent the Smart. I can be smug. I make sure my own family have all the unearned advantages on offer. But I don’t accept that I have lost my heart, and I urge my Smart colleagues to promote an agenda to equalise those advantages. Elisabeth Warren I a good role model, but even she could go further.
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