Confessing Evangelical

In this week's Spectator, Anthony Kenny writes on The end of left and right as a useful form of political analysis or (self-)identification. As Kenny writes:

Is Osama bin Laden left-wing or right-wing? How about Robert Mugabe? Who has a more left-wing approach to women's sexuality: Pope John Paul or Hustler magazine? Consider Fidel Castro. He persecutes homosexuals crushes trade unions, forbids democratic elections, executes opponents and criminals, is a billionaire in a country of very poor people and has decreed that a member of his family shall succeed him in power. Is Castro left-wing or right-wing? Explain your answer.

Kenny describes the left/right distinction as "the great intellectual curse of the French Revolution, which has crippled political thought for more than two centuries", and "an infantile notion that replaced rational argument with a playground division into two gangs who understood nothing clearly except how much they hated each other".

He then spends the bulk of his article "grinding out the illogic of 'left' and 'right'":

What is the meaning of "He is to the right of Attila the Hun"? Was Attila right-wing because he was violent and cruel? Lenin was more violent and cruel. Is Lenin to the right of Attila the Hun?...

Are regimes left-wing or right-wing when the economy is heavily controlled by the state, such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Castro?s Cuba and apartheid South Africa? Is it left-wing or right-wing to believe in free trade, like Adam Smith and Karl Marx?...

Is internationalism more right-wing than nationalism? Internationalist people and organisations include Adam Smith, Coca Cola, Karl Marx, McDonald's, Trotsky, Microsoft, the United Nations, Toyota and the World Trade Organisation. Those opposed to internationalism include Hitler, the anti-globalisation demonstrators, Verwoerd, Stalin and Naomi Klein...

How about attitudes towards the weak and the strong? Does the left or the right protect the strong but not the weak? Take the extreme examples of each - an unborn baby and an adult murderer. Is it very right-wing to allow the killing of the innocent baby but not the killing of the guilty adult?

Would you classify as left or right the Englishman in the last century who urged a massive increase in public spending and made the most radical proposal for a national health scheme that Britain had ever seen? I refer, of course, to Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader.

You get the idea.

After arguing that the "magnificently paradoxical" George W Bush may turn out to be the man who can finally "smash the silly consensus of political division", Kenny continues:

It would be so fruitful if we could scrap phoney political divisions and look at real ones. The most important real one is between those who believe in a lot of state control and those who believe in a little.

An accurate term for the former is "socialist". On one socialist extreme are the communists and National Socialists (Tweedledum and Tweedledee). On the other are the Social Democrats, such as the British Labour party.

An accurate term for those who believe in minimal state control is "liberal". Liberals put liberty as the highest political good and believe in equal opportunities and limited government. Liberals are suspicious of power; socialists admire it. (In America, "liberal" means "socialist".)

Kenny also points out that "the term 'conservative' is much more complicated and deserves thoughtful investigation.", which is something on which I have blogged myself previously. And the term "liberal" is not without its problems. But setting that aside, it was the distinction between the basic philosophies that Kenny describes as "socialist" and "liberal" that interested me. That certainly seems to capture the fundamental point of difference, a point which I develop further in the second post on this topic, below.