Sort of political Monday

Incremental Whiggism
Last week I suggested that a lot of centrist parties are in fact really left-of-centre parties. I got some pushback on that for which I am grateful.

 I'm going to carry on a bit on the same theme this week starting with the European "right-of-centre" parties. In practice these parties are always left-leaning on economic and ostensibly more conservative on social issues. There is nothing contentious about my saying this, by the way, look up the way they define themselves and you will see that they themselves see themselves this way.

What that has tended to mean in practice is that these parties have pushed for leftist economic reforms and that they have resisted liberal shifts on the social front. They have expanded and improved the welfare state while fighting a rearguard action on changes in divorce, marriage and sexual freedoms. Menaing they have tended to push for more and more in the way of leftish economic policies and gradually concede more and more to the left on the social front.

Now before I go on, please note I am not saying that what they are doing is wrong. Nor am I saying that it is right. All I am claiming is that when you look closely at what these parties actually achieve, these trends are what you find. That what the elite of these parties have thought about of the centre is actually a moving target that is steadily moving left.

Now a number of things follow from that, two of which are of particular importance.

The first is that parties of this sort will always respond very aggressively to parties to the right of them. In Canada, for example, the shift from slightly left of centre—the apparent position of the Liberal Party—to slightly right of centre—the apparent position of the Conservative Party—wouldn't be much of a shift. But the real positions these parties represent is from a politics that is always moving incrementally to the left to a politics that would cease to do so and perhaps even begin to move the other direction in some areas. That is a huge change even if the starting points proposed during any individual election campaign are so close they can seem indistinguishable. It is the difference between slowing the ship of state down a little. or even just stopping it for a while, to reversing course.

The Liberals themselves have slowed down or even stopped the ship when it suited their purposes but changing direction is a huge shift and they responded to it with a barrage of invective directed at the Conservatives.

Which brings me to the second thing about these incremental leftist parties. For why didn't they respond by returning to fundamentals and arguing for their ideology rather than accusing their opponents of every vile thing they could think of? And the reason for that is that the "centrist" parties have quite willfully forgotten what their own ideology is. For them, that is the whole point of positioning yourself as a centrist; if I am in the centre I am just a  pragmatist who doesn't need an ideology. In fact, one of my primary claims against my opponents will always be that they are driven by ideology and I'm not.

There are all sorts of attendant difficulties that come with that but that is a subject for next week.