That Other Guy’s Winning

I think one of the reasons why politics in developed “““Western””” economies is so polarised and resentful is because we all think the other side is winning/has won already.

I have a strand of thoughts about this, and I’m pretty sure it’ll come across crass and oversimplified, but here goes:

Over the last 40 years or so, the conflict between the left wing and the right wing has had several components. But essentially, it has had two big components: economic and social.

Let’s do economics first (first time in human history for that sentence?). Around 1980, as the theorists all keep yelling, there was a major divide in the way economists saw the world. Whereas the left wing wanted the continuation and expansion of welfare states, the buttressing of workers’ unions, and the redistribution of wealth, the right wing wanted “free market” economics: privatisation, liberalisation, globalisation.

Socially, the divide was different. The left wing were generally comfortable with the idea of gay people, were probably more comfortable with the idea of feminism and gender equality, and were definitely more comfortable with the ideas of transsexuality (as it was) or transgenderism (as it is). Meanwhile, the right were…not. This was a time of the nuclear family, even as the nuclear age died out (not for ever though…stay tuned for season two!). On the social side of things, the left wing and the right wing stuck to their origins: the progressives wanted progress and tolerance, and the conservatives wanted the status quo to be preserved.

And over the past 40 years, we’ve seen huge changes in both respects. Economically, the free marketeers’ wildest dreams came true: unions were crushed, public sectors demolished, tariffs and levees withdrawn, and globalisation turbo-charged enormous economic growth. Socially, women’s rights improved, anti-racism movements burgeoned, gay people became vastly more accepted (in developed, Western societies), trans people became, if not accepted, then visible.

The point here is that the right wing won the economic battle, while the left wing won the social battle.

Both sides won, and yet both sides lost. Perhaps the only people who truly won were in the centre: those who cared about people a little bit, but who were quite happy to pawn their souls in the financial markets and not worry about where their wealth originated.

So, the economic changes since 1980 brought prosperity to a large number of people, but specifically, it brought massive prosperity to a very small number of people. And once the trend began, it was difficult to stop. Meanwhile, the social changes fundamentally altered the nature of life for anyone who wasn’t a default white straight man. And once the trend began, it was difficult to stop.

As with all trends, there was a backlash. The increasing marketisation of everyday life fostered the concept of capitalist realism: that it was impossible to imagine a world without capitalism — that there was no alternative, that there was no escape. The tiny percentage of people who lived in obscene luxury made the rest of us pissed off — we felt that the huge gains of liberalism and globalisation should be shared more equally. Battle lines were drawn. There was a backlash to social changes too: those default men saw their vaulted position in society diminish, saw their pedestal sink, and holy shit, were they mad about it. Antifeminism, racism, and protectionism are the founding tenets of the alt-right, and I don’t think that’s any coincidence.

Anyway, the crux of this half-baked point is that everybody thinks the other side won. Everybody feels left behind, everybody feels that there are more powerful groups who are benefitting behind their backs. It’s easy to equate that sense with an opposing political party, or simply a group of people, be it “Wall Street” or “the woke left” or “The Lizard People of the World Economic Forum.” Battle lines are drawn, and as long as no one feels like they’ve won, the trenches just keep being dug deeper.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. A more socially tolerant society seeks to include everybody, while a freer market leaves just as many right-wingers behind as it does left-wingers. Yet so many people left destitute by a rigged economy are so supportive of winding back the social clock, and these things are inherently connected. If we could harness the anger and resentment of the economically destitute and convince them that social progress is not the reason why they feel this way, maybe things could be difficult. But I think we’re all too susceptible to viewing the world through one paradigm, which allows us to put the blame on one group.

I guess the point here is that it’s possible for a belief system to triumph and fail at the same time. Belief systems aren’t fully-formed and coherent at the best of times, and when they succeed and fail so spectacularly, simultaneously, it leads to mass confusion. That, in turn, leads to mass resentment. We won, so why doesn’t it feel like it?

Mass confusion and mass resentment. I think that’s where we might be now.