The Business of Ideology
Things They Forgot To Tell Me in Business School
 
While recession watching the other day I got to thinking about the responses of governments of different political stripes around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis, those identified as being on the «left», in the «center» or on the «right». In so doing it hit me (again) that the single most hard-wired image related to politics that I, and many people, know - this linear «political spectrum» thing - was wrong.  Wrong and counterproductive. 
 
So how is the political spectrum one of the «Things They Forgot to Tell Me in Business School»? While it may not seem like a core business issue, after all an MBA is not a Poli Sci program, ideology around the political spectrum is entirely intertwined with capitalist financial and economic orthodoxies - with all orthodoxies in fact. And if these orthodoxies are based on dubious underlying premises I’d like a heads up. [See Things 16: The Tale of The Efficient Market Hypothesis]
 
The standard political spectrum goes something like this:

 

 

 

 

 

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While the terminology may vary to the tastes of the author, the basic running order is always the same. The fundamental orthodoxy of the left-right political spectrum is that the key difference between the extremes is their attitude toward «property» in the largest sense - assets, income, and control of the fabled «means of production»:
 

• On the far left we have radicals/ communists, intent on seizing all income and assets by the state as the sole representative of «the people», with each of these people contributing and receiving according to their ability and needs - as determined in practice by repressive and impersonal bureaucracies and violent police states.

 

• Inboard but still on the left lie the political liberals/ social democrats, accepting of mixed state/ private control but leaning toward statism in the name of social equality. The tendency toward high tax, high bureaucracy, high quality of life.

 

• At the center of the spectrum, we have the moderates, like liberals or conservatives except less so.

 

• On the early right side of the spectrum lie conservatives/ economic liberals, accepting a mixed economy but favoring private ownership and wealth generation in the name of personal liberty. Economic liberals promote a system of inequality based on the accumulation of private property with people freely contributing and receiving according to their efforts, limited only by their talent, ambition, and a system of impersonal, sometimes repressive, always mystical, «market forces».

 

• At the farthest right, we have reactionaries/ fascists, who should be super pro-private property, no-government conservatives, the very antithesis of communists, but somehow they just aren’t...

 
While I may be 80-100 years late to the party on this one, this breakdown in logic makes me crazy because it leads to muddle-headed thinking about very important issues - issues including how you think about society and economics, and whom you believe your natural allies to be.
 
The attempt to classify political positions on a relative scale between two extremes falls on the overly simple side - whither the anarchist? - but is a useful organizing device. It is the linear part of is that is misleading by indicating that the greatest ideological distance lies between the far left and the far right.
What really happens is that the further «right», or «left» you get, the more the thinking wraps around itself. Fascists do not champion private property and individual rights any more than communists but rather promote the concentration of assets into a select few private hands under suzerainty and in the name of «the people» - well not actual people, but rather mythical and contrived historical people generally robbed of greatness by a few scapegoated others.
 
As such, instead of a linear projection, the «political spectrum» curls back on itself in a helical fashion never meeting at the extremes but sharing certain core characteristics. You only have to look at the current trends of certain large advanced post-industrial economies: the incredible increase in the concentration of wealth among an uber-elite of politically connected private enterprises; the downward pressure on median incomes; and the decline in social mobility to see how the oligarchic tendencies of the right can begin to resemble the monopolistic tendencies of the left in the eyes of the average person at the mercy of both.
 
A more accurate helical political spectrum looks something like this:





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything is still there, so it is just a twist, not a leap: the same factions - liberals, moderates, conservatives, radicals left and right; the same great divide around the control of wealth.
 
Left radicals seek to seize income and assets in the name of the people, and suffer from the tragedy of all assets being common, with individuals stripped naked at the mercy of a centralized state.
 
The right is content to funnel income and assets into the private hands of a smaller and smaller elite. The right also suffers the Tragedy of the Commons, where individuals have incentives to consume resources without regard to the collective, resulting in over-consumption, under-investment, and ultimately the depletion of shared resources.
 
The big difference between the traditional spectrum and helical spectrum is in the perception of who your natural allies are. Natural alliances for anyone in the moderate spectrum should not focus on «left» or «right», but should hinge rather on whether you are a «moderate», i.e. above the waterline, or a «radical» below it. And since radicals, by their very nature tend to hate everyone but themselves, you cannot expect solidarity at ragged ends, but you absolutely need it in the middle.
 
All of this matters why? Because around the world today we are being dragged below the waterline by radicals being aided and abetted by moderate thinkers both left and right strongly conditioned to see their more radical counterparts as natural, if potentially distasteful, allies. This is both wrong and counterproductive. If you believe in a balance between individual and collectivist control of society whether from the moderate «left» or the «right» don’t be fooled who your real friends are - it is other moderates, not people superficially similar but far more radical than yourself. In life as in the bucket of ice cream I ate last night, too much of a good thing never turns out to be a good thing.