Right vs. Left
Right vs. Left
Climate breakdown. Health care. Gun control. Voting rights. As activists, media personalities, celebrities, and nonprofits attempt to rally support for progress on these issues, they label them with the most authoritative adjective known to modern political discourse: Nonpartisan.
“These are nonpartisan issues. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to come together around common sense solutions to problems that affect all of us.” This narrative permeates almost every major issue facing the United States. Even with immigration, an issue where the partisan divide is stark and near absolute, many campaigners will talk about human rights as a universal concern. If it potentially affects everyone then it’s said to be nonpartisan and thus something we can find common ground on.
Of course, that begs the question: If all major issues are nonpartisan at their core, what issues, then, are partisan?
According to the precept that universal concerns are intrinsically nonpartisan, none of the issues that define the political divisions in this country are actually partisan. Abortion rights? Nonpartisan because all people have an investment in the human capacity to reproduce. Gun rights? Nonpartisan because all people are affected by the distribution of weapons. Taxes? Nonpartisan because all people are impacted by the collection and use of wages and income.
This, of course, is a literal read on a messaging framework that is clearly not intended to be taken literally. The point of the rhetoric around issues being “nonpartisan” isn’t that nothing is partisan, rather it’s an attempt to grow support for action on an issue by suggesting that it isn’t inherently political, that politics has been super-imposed onto it and that we can come together around solutions to problems that we all shared a vested interest in solving.
Take climate breakdown, for example. It is often argued that climate breakdown is a nonpartisan apolitical issue – that this is a human crisis and that concern for a livable planet should transcend political division. On an existential level, this is obviously true. The breakdown of the global climate is having an impact on every living thing on Earth and that impact will only grow, and worsen, as time goes on.
But that isn’t actually the issue.
Whether or not people accept the reality of climate breakdown, whether or not people feel affected by it – these things aren’t important in and of themselves. What matters is that we act to prevent further breakdown and act to adapt ethically to the changes ahead. It’s here where the issue becomes partisan and where it will always be partisan.
The right-leaning “solutions” to climate breakdown are no solutions at all, they’re appeals to the sort of lifestyle politics and hyper-individualistic narratives of personal responsibility that are incapable of addressing systemic problems. This isn’t unique to climate breakdown, it applies to all large-scale concerns.
Take gun violence. The right often suggests that the solution to gun violence is personal responsibility, be it through dispensing vigilante justice, choosing to engage in gun safety training, monitoring “suspicious” individuals in their community, blaming the problem on mental health, or simply calling for people not to commit random acts of violence. The argument is that it is personal failure that leads to gun violence and so it must be personal integrity that combats it. But we know that this does not work, that the way to reduce gun violence isn’t by individuals behaving “responsibly” but by regulating the industries that enable the violence to occur in the first place. The places with the fewest guns not only have the fewest gun deaths (duh), they have the fewest mass murder events period.
Gun violence is a partisan issue because the only real solutions are partisan.
Discussing issues as being “nonpartisan” is pointless. There’s no bridge-building or finding agreement on a problem when there are only a few legitimate solutions and they all fall on one side of the political spectrum. There are far left solutions and then there are moderate left solutions, but there are no right-wing solutions to any of the major problems facing our world, there are simply right-wing accommodations for acclimating to a world where the problem goes unsolved.
All of the above, however, is merely an argument that the solutions to problems are inherently partisan even if an issue is, at its core, nonpartisan. This is not necessarily an argument against nonpartisan messaging, though. After all, while the ultimate goal may be a partisan policy, there could still be something valuable about identifying the problem in nonpartisan language, right?
It can be difficult to view politics through a confrontational lens. It’s often more inspiring to imagine that all of humanity is theoretically on the same page and that our divisions have been artificially created by a few bad actors. In the most extreme version of this, there aren’t any bad actors; all of humanity is made up of decent good-hearted people trying their best and any conflict or destruction is the result of a world yet to embody its full potential for unity and understanding.
While this perspective can appear magnanimous, it’s also vaguely condescending and myopic. It assumes that all perspectives we deem harmful – that all expressions of bigotry, tyranny, intolerance, and injustice – are merely the views of individuals who’ve had different life experiences and come to regrettable conclusions. It assumes that through listening, reaching out, and building bridges, it’s possible to help them change and ultimately embrace universal ideals of human dignity and justice. This framework is, not coincidentally, the exact same that neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and jingoistic patriots hold - that liberals and the left have been brainwashed and confused into believing lies about the world and it’s the job of the right to assert dominance so that others are forced to realize the errors of their ways.
Sometimes people on the right will “See the light” and move to the left – these are the stories you occasionally hear about ex-Nazis working to reform their old communities. Other times the reverse happens and you watch someone who grew up championing social justice and human rights turn to right-wing extremism – these are the people you see joining online forums and being radicalized to white supremacy. These, however, are exceptional cases that do not speak to any greater truth about human unity.
The differences between the right and the left are not a matter of insufficient empathy or understanding, they’re a matter of recognizing that it is possible for humans to hold fundamentally different values and principles. While there are people with commitments to their values who may shift and change as they listen to new perspectives, there are also billions of people whose values and principles are essential to their very sense of self. The difference between the right and left can be expressed as a difference in fundamental values, a difference that makes all political concerns inherently partisan because every path forward skews closer to one set of values than another.
Take this image posted by a right-wing Twitter account:
It was intended to be inflammatory, to rally the right while attempting to present the left as absurd and repulsive. Instead, it rallied both sides. The left saw it as exactly the sort of future they’d like to see, and found it hilarious that the right would find such a vision horrifying. Meanwhile, the right did find the vision horrifying and the image represented for them exactly the sort of world they must continue to fight viciously against.
The classic liberal response to this is to attribute the different perspectives to a matter of exposure and tribe: If only the right were more educated on gender and religion they wouldn’t feel this anger or resentment, and if they only knew people like those in the picture they wouldn’t find such images so alienating. Right-wing animosity toward people different from them is said to be a result of propaganda and fear-mongering; if we can do the hard work of having vulnerable conversations in right-wing communities, we can break through these lines and come together.
That perspective, however, assumes that it’s the particulars of this image that the right finds upsetting – it’s the woman in the Niqab which triggers their Islamophobia and the person eschewing traditional gender expression which upsets their commitment to gender essentialism. But the right isn’t exclusively a Western Christian enterprise nor is it one beholden only to people who embody traditional gender roles. The Muslim right is a potent force throughout the Middle East, with Wahhabism dominating Saudi Arabia for over a century. Despite a recent change of heart, trans athlete and public figure Caitlin Jenner adamantly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and she continues to align with the political right, .
It can be easy to characterize the right by their particular regional bigotries, but the truth is that the right isn’t opposed to any single particular expression of diversity, the right is opposed to the very concept of diversity itself.
The particulars matter insofar as they make tangible the abstract values that define the right, and as a result, they’re often vigorously defended as a means to rally individuals around a single identity or set of beliefs. Some particulars tend to remain consistent over centuries - sexual repression, oppression of women, religious hegemony - but none of the particulars are inherently essential and can, and do, change over time.
The right are not merely Cis White Male Able-Bodied Christian Conservatives, rather the right are those who seek to develop an authoritarian hierarchical homogeneous society where dominance and individual prosperity are considered more important than justice and equity. Those values and principles can be expressed in infinite variations and underpin the reason why you can’t simply educate someone out of being right-wing. It’s not about the particulars because the right can evolve to accommodate any particular trait or variable into its hierarchy. What matters is that the right won’t abandon the notion of human worth being hierarchical nor will it abandon its drive to grind down diversity toward a single monolithic archetype of humanity because those are the values that define the right.
There will always be a conflict between those drawn to the authoritarian ideology of the right and the liberation ideology of the left – partisan politics is ingrained in the structures of society itself. While many people fall somewhere in the middle, there is no such thing as a neutral or nonpartisan position as any “middle” option intrinsically reinforces whichever direction the status quo is currently leaning.
All of this is to say, by framing issues as nonpartisan – even if in the most basic sense they truly are – and by holding nonpartisanship as the ultimate praise of a policy/organization/campaign, the status quo is elevated as the reasonable default position and any proposal that openly leans to the left or right is inherently “agenda-driven” politics that one should view with skepticism. The ultimate virtue becomes policy positions whose political alignment is obscured or otherwise downplayed in favor of a neutral tone and centrist-ideology.
While this approaches might encourage a degree of political illiteracy by suggesting that openly holding right or left wing beliefs is inherently un-serious and only some ever-shifting baseline “center” is a respectable and legitimate position, it could conceivably be workable if you felt society was fundamentally where it ought to be, that is, if you felt content with the status quo.
If, however, society is currently operating in ways that are deeply broken, framing major issues as being nonpartisan creates an environment where radical solutions seem intrinsically unreasonable, even if those solutions are the only ones that are viable.
Once again, let’s consider climate breakdown, the paragon of “nonpartisan” issues.
The economic and institutional status quo is driving us toward the irrevocable collapse of the ecosystems that human life depends on, to say nothing of the millions of other species currently being besieged by an erratically overheating Earth. The only scientifically supported solutions to this situation would be considered extreme relative to the status quo: dismantling the fossil fuel industry, overhauling global transportation and agricultural systems, contracting huge swaths of the economy instead of focusing on growth. These changes appear extreme because they would dramatically shift the trajectory our world has been on for the last 200 years, but they also appear extreme because they require embracing far left policy ideas – global regulation of industry, shifting food sources from big agribusinesses to expanded local farming, big government jobs projects for revolutionizing infrastructure away from private enterprise and toward public access and affordability. Right-wing “solutions” to climate breakdown are nonexistent because the problem itself stems from right-wing ideology; the right-wing side of addressing climate breakdown is to accelerate it, while the left wing side is to bring it to a halt.
Framing climate breakdown as being a nonpartisan issue suggests that the division between the right and left is over how to solve the crisis, when in fact the division is whether to solve the crisis.
This is just one example, but it applies to every major issue facing our world. Access to healthcare, education, economic inequality, the proliferation of firearms – these aren’t nonpartisan issues because their very origin is a reflection of partisan values and principles. The right will never have a “solution” to healthcare inequalities or income disparities or gun violence or prejudiced education structures because the values and principles of the right are predicated on inequality being the natural, true, and optimal state of the world. While the left sees these as problems facing the world, the right sees them as features – as intrinsic parts of life that the wishy-washy left refuses to accept as part of a meritocracy where people get what they deserve.
This doesn’t mean that everyone on the right agrees on everything or that there’s a single vision of the world that would perfectly suit the left, rather, it means that there is little-to-no overlap in the values and principles that define the left and the right. Nonpartisanship is an appeal to a center that doesn’t actually exist and is only sought after by those without enough of a vested interest in the outcomes to lean one way or the other. As humans we all share certain physiological needs – food, water, shelter – and most of us share certain psychological needs – community, connection, understanding – but there is nothing about the experience of being a human that drives us toward a shared set of values when it comes to how those needs are fulfilled. The more clearly we can articulate and recognize the different, and often competing, ways we seek to meet our needs, the more honestly we can face the issues that drive us apart and work toward the future we seek.