Part Four: politics of the entire world, I guess
Haha, no, not really. I know a lot more about the Anglosphere West (NZ, Aus, USA, UK etc.) than the rest of the world. Most of your debates will take place in that context, for the following reasons:
Debaters draw on what they know. NZ is right in front of us. The US dominates political news and social discourse on social media.
Debates should be set in a context all the speakers can understand, or you’re in trouble, because of the “risk” factor I discussed in Part Two: if the other team don’t know enough to engage with your context, everything gets messy.
Also because a judge may penalise your argument for being nigh incomprehensible if it’s premised on an in-depth deconstruction of how the relative rice productivity of the Mekong Delta informs colonial dynamics in the Vietnamese highlands. (This dynamic will turn on you at university internationals, where, because of this principle, you shouldn’t use in-depth New Zealand examples that are unfairly inaccessible to debaters from India to Malaysia.)
For all these reasons, motions set in specific national or regional contexts also tend towards the Anglosphere West.
I will give the best basic overview I can to politics outside of the Western liberal democracies, but that’ll come later. I’ve decided it’s best to split up the coming articles in order to ensure each is more manageable. Instead of the planned five parts, the Hitchhiker’s Guide will now have eight parts. Part Four, which you’re reading right now, consists of an overall explanation of political views and trends on the left and right from an Anglocentric perspective and with a heavy focus on the political economy.
In future articles, we’ll then progress into Part Five, which will take apart and examine what motivates political actors on each side of the aisle. Part Six is all about going over the facts of what the current New Zealand political landscape consists of. Finally, Part Seven will zoom out again and point to some hotspots and counterexamples from the wider world outside the West. The focus of Parts Four to Seven is informing you about the world, not debate tips. There are way too many ways for this information to factor into a plethora of motions to go over them all. This is intended as content to revise if you want to feel prepared to construct a case when a politics motion comes up, or just out of interest to read and think about in your own time. At long last, we’ll get to Part Eight, where my practical example of prepping for a debate and giving a speech will conclude our lessons.
Explaining What the Left and the Right Believe Today By Looking At The Social and Economic Histories of the Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z
I’m starting us off after the Great Depression (which kicked off 95 years ago). Go any further back than that and in many ways it’s an alien planet. Let’s set the scene:
Colonialism is approaching its zenith - European colonial empires claim rule over almost 5/6ths of the world, yet that comes with heavy costs
Democracy is slowly spreading as the old monarchies fall or give us most of their powers, though at this time democracy is mainly a competition between the conservative parties of the old elites (e.g nobles, clergy) and the liberal parties of the new middle-class (e.g business, artisans); most male workers and farmers have little sway, never mind women or ethnic minorities
Citizens are demanding more from their governments after the sacrifices of World War One
I’m focusing heavily on economics in this article because so much of politics is “how do we spend the government budget” and “how do we interact with the economy?” The two key measures of economic growth are GDP (how much stuff a country makes) and unemployment. From 1929 onwards, GDP plummeted while unemployment skyrocketed.
The old ways of letting business as usual continue were seen to have failed. A bank crash had caused all this and just waiting out the storm didn’t seem to be working - if people are earning less, they have less to spend, so businesses make less money, so they lay off employees and cut wages, and around and around it goes. The political Overton Window moved to the left: massive government action was now in vogue.
A lasting rule of politics is that the state of the economy is usually the number one factor in an election result. If voters think the economy is doing well, they will reelect the government; if they think it's doing badly, they'll boot them out. Thanks to the Great Depression, governments fell around the world. Their replacements established staples of public spending like superannuation (pensions) and universal healthcare that last to this day. These ensured that people who could not afford to look after themselves were looked after by the state. Of course, all of this required money, which meant not only do we have all these nice public services, we also all have to pay taxes.
While the focus of this article is not on finance, it’s worth mentioning that, historically, states went bankrupt all the time. However, across the West and elsewhere, banking reform commenced in the 30s set off a decades-long process of stabilising international finance. This means that, when states have a deficit (they spend more than they earn from tax etc.) rather than a surplus (the opposite), they can reliably borrow to make up the difference. This is how the USA owes $34 trillion without going bankrupt: they get lots of money on the cheap from creditors who trust that they will keep paying interest.
The boomers are the generation born after World War Two. They grew up with an unprecedented standard of living. Many people (predominantly white men, in the West) could cheaply afford their own housing and access tertiary education. A growing slice of the non-elite public possessed higher education and stable living situations. This gave them the time and interest to pursue social issues - women’s rights, anti-war rallies against Vietnam, civil rights for racial minorities, and environmentalism, to name a few. (This wave was most prominent during the 60s and 70s, but you can see its seeds into the 80s - the Springbok Tour and anti-nuclear protests, for instance.)
Taken together, these political foundations of our modern era form the two axes by which we can most easily measure the political views and positions of people and parties. Allow me two asides. One, yes, I’m cribbing from the Political Compass here. As mentioned in Part III, the Political Compass can be a useful tool to visualise positioning. However, the people who run the site are very obviously very left-wing. Just take a look through their assessments of various elections to see how every centre-left party is positioned as right-wing because they're not left enough for the Compass operators. So, the Compass is useful, sure, but take the results from the test or any of their individual election assessments with a real grain of salt.
Two, I'm not doing detailed breakdowns of far-left and far-right politics because they're usually on the fringes and you don't need to understand them well, especially in little old New Zealand. To give a quick summary, the far-left despise capitalism and sees the only viable economic model as one which entirely replaces our current systems. This can range from communism (communism is when the state do everything) to anarchism (anarchism is when no state).
Precisely because capitalism is so dominant, the far-left is confined to the academic fringe. It’s awfully difficult to get people focused on making their daily bread to read theory, never mind the well-off who want to preserve their privileges. Some European countries see far-left parties enter power in coalitions. Otherwise you typically see the far-left pop up with student protestors and older socialist holdovers who are deeply suspicious of the West's foreign policy, e.g hostility to NATO (the American-European defence pact in opposition to Russia).
The far-right are fascists, ultra-nationalists and all others generally united by logging out of coherent policy and logging into "everything can be solved by making it about race/gender/having more babies". They want to keep immigrants and refugees out and defend traditional hierarchies. Their economic views are often incoherent as a result. Many far-right parties back heavy public spending, defending manufacturing and other left-wing staples, but are animatedly hostile to lefties because it’s all about protecting these services for a specific race (white people, in a Western context) and for cisgender and heterosexual men. By their very nature of being uniquely repulsive to most people - the Nazis lost the war, after all - they are typically shunned by society and locked out of coalitions.
Alright, let’s break down the economic left-to-right spectrum first. Economic issues are easily summarised by the following test: when the government takes a dollar of tax, do they spend it better or worse than who they got that dollar from? (And, no, you can't limit test this by saying left-wingers should principally support 100% tax and right-wingers 0%. 99.9% of left-wingers recognise the government shouldn't own everything you have. 99.9% of right-wingers think the government should do some things.)
If you are a left-winger, you typically conclude that government ministries and departments (e.g the Ministry of Education, DOC etc.) are reasonably efficient, and help to meet people’s needs that would otherwise go unmet. For instance, WINZ pays unemployment benefits to a mother out of work. Without that money, the family would be unable to afford rent, power and groceries. Therefore, the right thing to do is to enable the state. That means left-wing parties expanding the government to do more stuff, and that means paying for it by raising taxes. The ideal is to raise taxes on those whose needs are already met and who are seen as wasteful or exploitative (e.g the rich, big corporations).
If you are a right-winger, you usually think that government bureaucrats are inefficient or have outright bad incentives. To give a couple of examples, one, doctors lobby against increasing admissions to medical courses to protect their jobs and high salaries from more competitors, and two, American cops detain people and confiscate their goods and money to enrich their departments. It follows that the state's responsibilities should be rolled back. This goes hand in hand with cutting taxes, which leads us to…
…the distaff counterpart to the public sector (government), the private sector (businesses). Let’s talk about each side’s approach to the private sector. Just as left-wingers have faith in the government, they do not have faith in companies (or other bastions of wealth like the rich - let’s call businesses + the rich “capital”) to do the right thing. The incentives of capital - to make a profit and protect their wealth - encourage them to figure out ways to use their existing resources to exploit those with fewer resources.
A thriving company can afford to turn away somebody who needs to make rent this month, and spend another month sifting through job applicants; that person can’t afford to walk away even though the pay and working conditions are bad because they need cash in hand, now. The rich and the corporations can afford to save, invest and plan; the poor cannot. The state must step in to ensure vulnerable people are supported and to prevent corporations doing harm - for instance, by regulating companies to pay a higher minimum wage to workers.
Right-wingers, on the other hand, complement their scepticism of government with a belief in the private sector. Some attribute a generosity of spirit to capital, seeing charity as a reliable alternative to welfare because charity and other avenues (e.g scholarships) receive sufficient donations from the rich. However, for the most part, right-wing arguments are based not on the idea that capitalists care first to do social good, but that their incentives to make money align with what is best for society.
For instance, a supermarket that only has to pay a low wage to workers will provide plenty of jobs because they make more money than they lose on those employees. If they have to pay a higher wage, they will cut some of those roles, meaning some people make $0 an hour instead of $23 an hour from them. Thus, a bigger government is usually a mistake because they contribute to private sector decline, either by regulating companies or by competing with services they provide. For example, RNZ and TVNZ take listeners and viewers away from Sky and other private media outlets; Air New Zealand snatches customers away from Jetstar and other private airlines; NZRail yoinks passengers from private trains and ferries.
A final thought: yes, you do get happy-go-lucky centrists who think both sectors work really well, and cynics of all stripes who think neither work well. However, most people tend to pick a side, or at least prefer one when push comes to shove. This is what “polarisation” measures: more polarised democracies like the USA see the vast majority of people line up as partisans on one side or the other; less polarised democracies like New Zealand have a lot more swing voters who are more wishy-washy and can see the value in either side of the argument at each election. Now, let’s return to modern history.
(Obligatory editor's note: these things are subjective and argued over. I'm presenting the most commonly accepted narrative.) From the 30s to the 70s, the economic Overton Window was centre-left: governments kept growing, taking on new responsibilities and raising taxes. Other actors, outside the scope of this overview to explore in detail, played their part in this landscape. For instance, unions change the calculus of negotiations from one worker vs one company to representing many workers versus one company. Unions in this era rapidly expanded and negotiated across entire sectors with enormous power.
Lots of public spending supported economic growth and kept unemployment low by providing plenty of public sector roles. However, that meant a lot of dollars chasing goods, so businesses kept raising their prices on goods and services - inflation. Gaps between taxation and spending were met by borrowing money, which grew debt levels.
All of this was exacerbated by international circumstances. Colonial empires withdrew or collapsed from their possessions, transforming global supply chains as they could no longer so easily extract primary resources from the Global South. The USA had to borrow lots and spend big to finance their Vietnam War. Most pressingly, multiple crises in the Middle East, like the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, interrupted a huge percentage of the global oil supply that comes from Arab states and Iran in the region.
The 70s saw the rise of "stagflation". Normally, an economy's either shrinking, which means bad GDP growth and unemployment but also healthy inflation, or growing, which is good for jobs and the overall benefits of GDP (a richer society is more competitive in the global economy, produces more tax dollars, and is just evidently good if the average person gets richer) but drives up inflation.
At this time, though, Western economies descended into high inflation AND high unemployment: an unsolvable conundrum. Do you cut government spending, raise taxes and raise interest rates (which makes borrowing more attractive than spending) to lower inflation? Then unemployment would rise. Do you raise government spending, cut taxes and cut interest rates to lower unemployment? Then inflation would rise. With no easy way out of the turmoil, the status quo consensus suffered mightily. Governments fell and a new consensus emerged into the 80s.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan delivered his inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The Overton Window had shifted to the right. The agreed upon solution to economic problems was no longer each state trying to best protect jobs and standards of living through spending and regulations. Instead, economic growth was to be powered by removing the state’s inflationary influence and letting the private sector thrive.
Moreover, going into the 90s, communism collapsed, a clear symbolic victory for capitalism. In an increasingly interconnected world, states competed to see which could become the easiest to do business in and to trade with. The West has a lot of strengths - by global standards, we have highly educated populations, technologically advanced sectors, stable hierarchies and good services - but all of that makes us awfully expensive and complicated to do a lot of stuff in, and we don’t rule massive resource-harvesting empires anymore.
This is what led to “Made in China” and all these other modern economic phenomena. Agree or disagree with it, economic logic dictates the Global South can have the sweatshops, mines and farms full of low-wage labour and minimal costs to do business for us to import raw and cheap goods from, and the Global North (the West) does all the high-tech, high-cost stuff to make and sell advanced goods. (As time goes on, China and other industrialising countries are increasingly taking over these manufacturing roles, while the West is moving more into white-collar jobs and human-centric services like tourism and education.) The Information Age as computer use exploded seemed to be just the latest signal of the successes of innovation and growth.
However, the right wingers fell short on two fronts. The first was, whatever will always be argued back and forth between left-wingers and right-wingers about which was better for everyday people, the right did not manage to permanently put a brake on the growth of government, debt and deficits. The USA is the most notorious example of this: tax cuts plus growth in the Department of Defence only added to deficits and bureaucracy.
The second failing was on social issues. This is an awfully nebulous category compared to economic issues, especially because there’s plenty of overlap. Abortion is always classified as a social issue, even though raising a child versus not is one of the most economically impactful things that can ever happen in your life. Let me try to get the idea of social issues across by conveying vibes, instead. (As always, I’m overgeneralising and there will be plenty of exceptions to the rule.)
Socially, right-wingers are the boomers grumbling "back in my day, you never would have seen this happen". Left-wingers are the zoomers crying out "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people”. Key values for conservatism (right-wing social views) are self-reliance/independence, strength and order (e.g backing the military and police), an objective moral code (e.g religion, family values), and conformity to a place in an expected social hierarchy; key values for progressivism (left-wing social views) are kindness/generosity, a faith in redemption (e.g criminal rehabilitation), trust, and freedom to defy expectations.
One of the curious things about politics is that most left-wingers are left-wing both economically and socially and most right-wingers are right-wing both economically and socially. This is the case despite left-wing economics and right-wing social values tending to be more about dictating society's interests even at the expense of individual freedoms, while right-wing economics and left-wing social values are usually predicated on the idea it's better to protect the freedoms of the individual than to sacrifice them for some collective purpose.
This is why sometimes it's more useful to explain politics off of vibes and narratives than trying to put everything on a quantitative left-right continuum. If you are a right-winger, you probably believe that people are fundamentally in control of their own fates, and your outcomes reflect your choices and character. This is core to the appeal of right-wing economics - if the private sector consistently rewards bad choices and punishes good ones, it can hardly be efficient or virtuous. This also dovetails nicely with right-wing social values - there are certain unbecoming ways to behave (e.g women exerting independence, people being gay) and the traditional ways that have predominated in the past (e.g the nuclear family) are the right way to act.
If you are a left-winger, on the other hand, you're a lot more laissez-faire about most individual people (aside from the rich and other elites who are largely beyond consequences from any judgement you could offer). It follows that the state shouldn't condemn people socially - they should be free to use drugs or euthanize themselves if they so choose - and should provide support if they fall on hard times. Just as poverty is a result of circumstances out of their control, so too do the solutions not come from individual choices within their power, but from mending wider systems through the state.
There’s a reason why I chose that boomer-zoomer framing, and that’s because age is a huge factor in political views. Young people, or at the very least millennials and Gen Z, typically start out left-wing, which makes sense. Young people are better educated than the previous generation, are less world weary and more trusting, have had to independently own and operate fewer responsibilities like a business or a house (instead of, for instance, renting from somebody else), and have personally gotten to live in a newer, more liberal world than our elders.
However, as people grow up, they tend to turn towards the right wing. There's the reasons mentioned above - you tend to lose trust in other people and become more protective of what you’ve got over time, as you typically accrue more wealth as you get older. However, there’s also the fact that the next young generation will be liberal in new ways, even if you haven’t actively regressed. This is how, for instance, you end up with lots of gen Xers who would consider themselves to have been feminists and support gay people for a long time in ways many boomers and Silent Gens don’t, but who just as easily turn against trans people.
So, although the right-wingers carried the day economically in the 80s, the boomers and the gen Xers that followed were not especially conservative socially. They slowly arced in that direction over time, but by and large, the 80s and 90s saw an increasingly liberal society emerge. As one example, the West's disastrous response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 80s, which wiped out huge swathes of gay communities, fed into greater support for gay people in the 90s (not as in "it's legal for gay people to get married", but "gay characters can appear in media and maybe even be out IRL"). It seemed like we were headed, ever so gradually, for a peaceful, brighter future. The “End of History”.
The 21st century, however, has been a steady march of disruptions. 9/11 kicked off the War on Terror that raged through the 2000s, which raised tensions across the West and bled the US in particular dry, much like the Vietnam War in the 70s. The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 set off the Great Recession, the biggest economic contraction since the Great Depression which forever reshaped hundreds of millions of lives, like my family's. Government responses to the Great Recession generally focused on minimising debt and deficits over raising spending to fuel growth; this so-called "austerity" is widely criticised in hindsight. I’d analogise the critical perspective as follows: austerity is kind of like gently spraying your fire extinguisher on a raging fire in the kitchen in case a second fire starts in the bedroom and you need some foam left over.
Growing awareness of climate change has piled on as a truly unique crisis in the history of the world. Every generation is convinced that things aren't the way they used to be and the end is nigh - just read religious texts from millennia ago and you’ll find the same rhetoric as TikTok and talkback offer up today - but only with the advent of nuclear weapons did humanity factually face that possibility. Global warming makes the permanent and dramatic transformation of the world a probability, and particularly strikes a chord with younger generations. The economic equation gets a lot more complicated: if growth is accomplished by burning the climate wick at both ends, growth no longer solely increases living standards and supports a more sustainable future, it now seriously undermines both in many ways.
Moreover, and massively underappreciated in the recent history of the West, the European migrant crisis in the mid-2010s fuelled political transformation across Europe. As millions of immigrants and refugees arrived on Europe's shores, racists and Euroskeptics rallied against the consensus of free movement and racial toleration, driving a surge in votes amongst working-class, low-education voters for far-right parties. This has dragged other parties towards xenophobia and firmer borders too to compete for those voters.
The modern narrative of “the world is falling apart and the extremes are taking over” typically begins with Trump, who is a key part of this story, but that often obscures what happened months before. Political mastermind Prime Minister David Cameron decided to call for a referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU to make the Euroskeptics happy, campaign that the UK should definitely stay in the EU and would be devastated by leaving the EU, watched the British public vote to leave the EU, and then resigned on the spot. Bloody hell. Combined, the two events represented a permanent break with the prior world and an uncertain future.
And, just as many households were finally starting to recover to where they were before the Great Recession, we got hit with the COVID-19 pandemic, the world's biggest since the Spanish Flu one hundred years prior. That foisted years more of recession onto us. Instead of austerity, governments opted for big stimulus spending. This contributed, along with supply-chain problems from COVID and, for good measure, Russia invading Ukraine, to our latest calamity of high inflation, a.k.a the cost of living crisis, and to the growth of the fringe and further polarisation of politics.
So, here we stand today, potentially in the transition towards a new epoch. The aftermath to the Great Recession, the challenge of a restive working class, and COVID-19 pushed politics temporarily more left-wing on spending, but there’s no telling if that’ll hold or if the reaction to the cost of living crisis will reject that. Meanwhile, even as great breakthroughs have been achieved socially, many groups - much of the working class, a lot of youth in Europe and a lot of old voters around the world - are moving to the right on social issues. And above all, amidst the rise of social media and the decline of traditional forums of news and debate, politics is polarised and tense and the future is uncertain.
What fun!
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