i hate to link liberal conspiracy but honestly this is such immature analysis. this is what liberals actually think http://bit.ly/oQGGQo

When i read this, i touch myself

Whilst you’re right in pointing out the problems with extremism, I don’t think that means centrism is the answer. A democracy doesn’t work properly if there aren’t competing ideas fostering creativity and debate. When you have multiple parties all essentially the same it not only increases voter apathy, but it means that bad policies become compounded as different governments make the same mistakes over and over. You need some diversity and fresh blood every so often.

The NHS is a great example of this. Successive governments, be they from blue labour or conservatives, have cut NHS funding and looked into privatising it. With less funds the system falls slowly apart, the new lot get voted and say “What a big mess, the only solution is to cut spending and privatise!”. Rinse and repeat as the entire NHS slowly dies.

This is just an example of something I care about, but the point remains regardless of what your actual political beliefs are. If all parties think the same, then nobody ever tries anything different. There are very few new ideas in politics these days, just the same ones being recycled. If you believe, as I do, that a lot of those ideas are bad ideas then you have a serious problem. Not to mention that banks and big businesses are going to great lengths to maintain this stagnation because it allows them to get away with whatever they want.

Extremists ruin politics but so does sitting in the middle. After a certain amount of time, any change is a good change.

I think your mistake is to assume that it is necessary that governments need to “do things”. If we must have a state, I’d far rather have one that was hamstrung and couldn’t indulge in any folly.

So in the words of John Rentoul, this is a question to which the answer is “no”.

And we have “fewer” checks and balances, not “less”.

Do take some time off political navel-gazing and read a grammar text.

Notoriously, the party whip system is less effectively applied in the US Congress than in Britain’s Parliament but a series of research studies from American academia have observed that Congressional politics have become increasingly polarized over the last 30 or so years:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lmartin/Speakers/Theriault.pdf

RT @scummy_scumdal: Does the US debt-ceiling crisis show why political centrism is inevitable (and desirable)? http://t.co/2DkRoOw

No. It’s a direct consequence of having coalitions as “political parties”, which as New Zealand’s example shows, fall apart into their natural constituent parts under proportional representation.

It’s an incitement of majoritan voting systems (and AV is no better than FPTP, in that respect), not of parties having principles. “Centralism” is also why people stop voting – because they feel nobody can adequately represent them.

(The phenomenon of why this happens more on the left than the right is…quite irrelevant for Westminster elections under FPTP, really, and I don’t think it’d hold under PR anyway.)

Political centrism, or political hegemony? Seems to me that if the system tends toward party a = party b = party c, then there is little point in pretending you live in a democracy.

“It’s a direct consequence of having coalitions as “political parties”, which as New Zealand’s example shows, fall apart into their natural constituent parts under proportional representation.”

I’m not sure about that. Germany’s electoral system results in party representation in the Bundestag which strictly reflects the proportion of the total vote that each party attracts in general elections. But the Bundestag has remained essentially a three party legislature with almost all governments depending on two of the parties forming a coalition. For all that, the political system in Germany since WW2 has proved very stable.

As the result of its commission on electoral reform, the Hansard Society recommended a similar system for Britain in a report published in 1976. The Jenkins Commission came out with a similar recommendation for electoral reform (dubbed AV+) in 1998.

slightly taken aback by how fatuous the argument of this piece is. It may be a cliche to say – sometimes cliches are apt – but a half decent student would hesitate to write something as facile as this in an undergraduate politics essay. What’s going on.?

I just think it’s an unfortunate reflection on the American style of government. Given the overwhelming power of Congress compared to the cabinet, Americans are effectively given a general election every two years and even if your own party is dominating a certain house (as with the Dems in the Senate) there is still a chance you won’t get the support you need. While I admire the principle of a constitution that limits the power of politicians as much as possible, in reality it is an extremely inefficient system where poor decision-making is at epidemic levels.

It almost gives me a sense of relief to know the UK cabinet is a total control freak by comparison. Only ridiculous/unreasonable ideas like ID cards get thrown out and there are no fixed terms.

But radical leftism is good, whereas radical rightism is bad. You speak of the centre, but 100 years ago the centre was not where it is today. Something like the NHS would have seemed far to the left of centre. In a hundred years I hope that we’ll all take common ownership and industrial democracy for granted and the centre will be somewhere very different to where it is today.

The centre today is Thatcherism. Remember that.

@7 – Five (CDU/CSU being effectively one) parties still have significant numbers of members in the Bundestag, even with the relatively high 5% (I’d support 4%, personally) barrier to list seats.

The three biggest parties (again counting CDU/CSU as one) in the 2009 German elections took 76.7% of the regional vote and 71.4% of the list vote, and 76.8% of the seats.

In the UK General election 2010, the two big parties took 68.1% of the vote, and 86.6% of the seats.

That’s obviously a significant difference, and that’s before the issue that many people no longer feel that anyone speaks for them, because of the way the parties have drifted center-wards, or who vote for parties who will never have a say under FPTP.

Also, I believe what occurred in New Zealand, where a 2.x party system shattered into a much larger number of parties is far more representative of what would occur here, since – as here – their major parties were internal coalitions.

I’d rather the differences between parties were plain and able to be discussed openly, even if they’re only going to rule in coalitions, rather than the current system of them being movements and “disloyalty” within parties which are really themselves coalitions, but which have to pretend otherwise.

@8 – So, where IS the undergraduate thesis discussing this? Where IS the debate around the topic? Where is the popular movement against majoritan voting?

Yea, that’s right, nobody wants to stick their necks out and start the discussion. Props to Sunny for doing it.

A functioning democracy should result in broadly centrist (as defined by the political beliefs of the population) parties being elected.

If this is not the case, then something is going wrong.

While that may be a good idea in principle, the end result can turn out as it has in the US where no matter how crazy or mad the right wing get, centrists like David Brooks or David Gregory will always say both sides are equally wrong or will pick a middle point between the 2 parties and call it the centre.

This can obviously go wrong when one party (R) goes far further to the right while the other (D) stays where it is and is then dragged further to the right. The American political blogger Driftglass writes brilliantly about this very thing.

@11: “Also, I believe what occurred in New Zealand, where a 2.x party system shattered into a much larger number of parties is far more representative of what would occur here, since – as here – their major parties were internal coalitions.”

I doubt the relevance of the New Zealand example, not least because of the unusual character of New Zealand, an isolated country with a population of about 4 million spread over a territory with a larger land area than Britain. Evidently, both the Hansard Society and the Jenkins Commission were impressed with the way Germany’s electoral system had worked to yield a political system that has proved to be remarkably stable and not susceptible to pressures from extremist fringe parties.

@13 – Yes, things might actually change for the better for workers, not the very rich! Can’t have that (sigh).

@14 – Right. The debt roof debate in America shows this nicely – what the D’s are offering now would have been, six months ago, laughed out by them as radically republican.

leon – try a university library. Or google. It.’s fatuous partly for the reasons chris above rightly points out. There’s always an ahistorical arrogance amongst those declaring themselves to be in the ‘centre’. As chris points out the centre ground shifts. Politics is the battle to shift it. A centrist is simply a dedicated follower of whatever happens to be in fashion.

@17 – Try DOI’s or at worst direct references to papers and thesises, I too can wave my hands and make vague references to how anything has been said before and is passe, but I don’t.

Sunny, a better explanation of why centrism tends to dominate in two party systems is the median voter theorem.

I certainly wouldn’t say this is a good thing, partly because as someone pointed out above the centre moves and part of the point of democratic politics is to find that centre. The problem with adopting centrism as your own politics is that you probably are doing it for strategic reasons rather than based on conviction, and if all people involved in politics adopt their positions based on strategy rather than conviction, it encourages an elitist system where the important decisions about what different parties should adopt as their policies are taken out of public debate and become the preserve only a relatively small elite. This is also the problem with the idea of bipartisanship – by promulgating the idea that politics is just about effective management, it hides the (definitely existing) ideological component and allows a small elite to control society, something very far from the democratic ideal.

To bemoan the fact that one party does one thing and then a few years later the other party comes in and changes it is effectively to have given up the idea of politics entirely, in favour of a fatalistic view about the inevitability of there being only two parties and power switching between them every few years. Unfortunately, this is partly the situation but it’s something that can be fought against. The two parties in the UK weren’t always Tory and Labour, for example. Things change, but they wouldn’t if everyone were centrist. What would the impetus be for a change if everyone basically agreed? This fatalistic view also ignores the point about the changing nature of the two political parties, which is also something that we can have an effect on.

Basically, to be centrist is to give up on explicit politics, in favour of the concealed politics of bureaucratic/elitist/technocratic control. It’s not something anyone should be in favour of, but especially not those on the left.

Who’s denied that the political ‘centre’ shifts? I never said it was static. However, that also relies on forcing the other side to accept your consensus. I’m not sure this is as easy as everyone makes it out to be.

A functioning democracy should result in broadly centrist (as defined by the political beliefs of the population) parties being elected.

If this is not the case, then something is going wrong.

Exactly.

The problem with adopting centrism as your own politics is that you probably are doing it for strategic reasons rather than based on conviction

Not necessarily. I’ve known plenty of political centrists. Also, I’d class myself as in the centre of the Labour party – neither near the Blairites nor the LRC crew. That doesn’t mean I don’t have beliefs.

Basically, to be centrist is to give up on explicit politics, in favour of the concealed politics of bureaucratic/elitist/technocratic control.

I think you’re inferring that, but I’m not saying it. Even in consensual democratic politics you can take steps to push in one direction. the Minimum Wage was a big one. Strengthening the NHS was also key to preserving the idea of a welfare state. But there’s no appetite for wholesale nationalisation of British industry is there? If the left didn’t push for that, does it mean they have no ideas left?

Seems to me like right, centre, left, and coalitions are all arbitrary terms when it comes to what really pulls the strings in terms of power. As long as these politicians are in thrall to the same God of Mammon then it seems to make very little difference. Obama employed Summers as Key Economic Decision Maker, Bush had Hank Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury. In the UK, Blair, Brown and Cameron all had Murdoch through the back door. We now have Blue Labour Glasman whispering into Milliband’s ear, and Blue Skies Hilton, whispering into Cameron’s ear.
Meanwhile, the centre is no more no less than the move towards greater privatisation, which means less NHS, social welfare and benefits, etc….

And us, the people? No, it’s the economy stupid! Us little people are mere pawns in all this.

Sunny, I applaud you for creating this thread and throwing the topic open to thought and discussion.

My own take is that the electorate are the people who matter, more than the politicians. In the UK, the overwhelming majority of the people have views which are within a range which does not extend to extremes at either end, and our political system ought to reflect this. There ought to be a few or several main parties catering for this range of views; a viable or healthy democracy requires in the UK that Conservative and Labour are distinct in their values and not merely competing against each other to be the managerial party of govt. In short, political centrism itself is a bad thing.
However, as good governance is a deadly serious matter, there is a massive onus on all parties to be responsible, sensible and practical – so each party must acknowledge to itself that it cannot and must not seek to roll out its most radical (desired/fantasy/undeclared) policies. Any individual Prime Minister is only the temporary custodian of the 10 Downing St office.
One check which we do not have, as such, but which I think we should have, is that the second chamber should be under obligation to reject any proposed legislation which was not clearly included in the election manifesto and which the second chamber considers to be impractical or unwise or controversial (i.e. lacking in near-unanimous cross-party support). n.b. this would still allow any party to include its more radical ideas in its manifesto, straightforwardly, with a view to acting on them if elected.

The current US debacle is less about radicals and more about a system that, as you say, is exceptionally difficult to get anything through. Obama isn’t the first to struggle with this; it’s just that the stakes are so high this time round.

Also, the Tea Party’s views aren’t anything like as fringe in the US as they would be here.

As for the British system, well – if the majority of people vote for something (that they are told about in advance, unlike with the current government), that’s the mandate. Obviously there would be defences of minority interests and lobbying by sectional interests no matter what the electoral mandate, but if a majority of people vote for left-wing radicalism at one election, and then right-wing radicalism at the next, and then back and forth thereafter, then so be it.

In practice, of course, this doesn’t happen. So what you have (as people may have mentioned above; I didn’t bother to read through all the comments) are elections where the political environment – the consensus – shifts for the long term, and then elections where the elected government just sticks to wherever the ‘centre’ is at that point.

In other words, the scenario you’re describing doesn’t come up.

The problem in the US is two-fold – first, that a small minority of elected representatives (the Tea Party) is able to bring the entire business of government to a juddering halt, threatening the entire US economy in the process; second, that this small minority consists of bloody idiots.

The problem isn’t that they’re not centrists – after all, it was centrist policies that got the US into this mess in the first place…

What is wrong with the US system currently is not extremism per say, i mean there was extremism to a far right extent under Bush as well and Democracy worked well enough. The problem here is that the Republicans have reached a point where they care only about getting elected, or near enough only about it. They get back in power by utterly discrediting Obama – Keep the economy bad, keep him looking weak and suspect to the whims of the right. They do this and Obama will be on a weak platform come 2012.

As for other problems, the way Journalism works within America is far less balanced, or rather, it is so balance in its commitment to bringing up both sides of the story that this idea has been ingrained into every talking heads mind to the point that they are seriously debating outright insane policies, or seek to balance out their arguments for both sides. So while it is the Republicans are playing with the nuclear button on this national debt ceiling issue most media in america is reporting it as both sides employing partisan politics, but this makes no sense as Democrats have not nationally communicated a proper liberal argument for decades and secondly the entire debate is in favor of the right from the beginning, the question isn’t about spend or cut, its all about the deficit.

Republicans right now are not the moderate conservatives we remember from a decade ago, but they aren’t just extreme but profoundly undemocratic, statements from these tea party members are talking about re instituting property qualifications to voting, and the way they have played hardball with america’s economy shows they have no sense of national interest.

I would argue that within a neoliberal system centrism tends to be the safest of routes because politicians become providers of the public will, rather than idealists. A republican, Democratic, Labour or Conservative politician before the late 1980’s would be far less likely to play such nationally damaging policies because there was still a belief in something beyond individual demand, stuff like the national interest which meant that as a minister you put the country before party politics, the evolution of Prime ministers question time from an orderly means to address constituency issues to the point scoring zoo it is today is a telling sign of this as the need to get elected has become more important than serving a country and that is why Republican “extremists” are most likely to damage democracy and Centrism is safer in this environment, because centrists are just more cowardly/smarter opportunists.

This however is about the philosophy of capitalism, a Democracy can certainly exist with a wide variety of opinions, it helps more though, if you go for representation (PR) rather than accountability (FPTP).

Problem with this veiw Sunny, it presumes that the self interest policies of the right are legitimate i.e governing in ther intersests of big business and welahty elites when most British people are “hopelessly collective” as one Tory one pointed out. It is therfore very much about what is right and what is wrong for our people , alrthough I would agree that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would not enhance our society for the common good either!

Sunny

” In short, the Tea-party Republicans have created gridlock in the United States government.”

Sorry Sunny but this statement is laughable.

To date, Republicans have passed two bills in the House to raise the debt limit neither of which has even been given a vote in the Democrat controlled Senate. To date, Senate Democrats have not presented a bill for a vote and Barack Obama has not even presented a plan.

In over 800 days, the Democratic Party has not presented a budget despite having a supermajority for 365 days of those and control of all three elements of government for most.

As far as I’m aware, only three leading politicians in the US Govt have voted against a debt ceiling increase: Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Harry Reid.

What was needed from this debate? A raise in the debt ceiling, a plan to reduce the deficit and a longer term plan to put the American economy on a more even keel. Yesterday, Republicans in the House voted to do all three of those. Democrats opposed it unanimously and Obama threatened a veto.

The only obstructionism is on the part of Democrats.

As for the original point of your post, I’d say it’s the opposite. Partisanship and political ‘extremism’ is what creates the centrism you were referring too. Look at two recent examples. Politics in 80’s UK was about a polarised as it goot with left wing socialists and free market neoliberals calling the shots. And from that we got Tony Blair who was able to appeal to both those on the left and right dismayed by the extremism of their political wings. The same goes for America. It couldn’t get more divisive than Bush era America with extremist rhetoric on both sides. This enabled Obama to run as a centrist candidate appealing to those in the middle.

On the other hand, although there is less obvious evidence for this, as centrism gains ground as a political consensus, it breeds greater partisanship. The American conservative movement grew out of 1940’s to 1960’s Dem party dominance. For myself, I’ve become much more radicalised politically in disgust at the current statism in this country acheiving a ‘centrist’ consensus.

Sorry, not very well explained as I’ve been at work all night but hopefully you get the gist.

Tony Blair ‘dismayed by the political wings of either party’, nice way of putting it, however, Tony Blair, upon joining the Labour Party, was a comitted socialist, he achieved the leadership based on that principle. He was only too eager to drop that facade and, single-handedly, took the Labour Party away from its’ roots, losing millions of votes, in the interests of what, he thought, would win elections.
He attempted to appeal to the left and the right, we call that ‘running with the fox and chasing with hounds’. In the end you please no-one.

I think we should look to the Belgian model.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13725277

So seeing Brown running over to the Tories to get his policies through is part of politics now.

If the Labour party move to much further to the right they will be sitting with the dam Tories before long.

I know Blair and Brown and Miliband love the USA way of politics from even having the same stupid political parties to get people elected, also the money which is pumped in.

New Labour no thanks.

This blog is reckless and irresponsible. Reckless, and irresponsible. We need to move on from the rhetoric.

@jojo

Re Blair

It worked, at least in the short to medium term as far as electability i concerned. I’m sure there are many on the left dismayed at his ‘moderation’, but Blairs run to the middle got more left wing policies enacted than prehaps would have otherwise.

I’m an extremist from the right side, but I’m also aware that my views on society and the economy do not reflect an electable position. However, it is my extreme positions and opposing ones on the left that creates the middle Sunny was talking about. As I read what Sunny is saying, he suggests the middle exists despite the far right and far left. I suggest it exists BECAUSE of the extremes.

@Leon

Is not the restraint on German Govt also to do with the regions having more power.

Can we look to see a similar influence here from ‘regional’ Parliaments?

I’d say that the restraint on British Governments is more precedent, inertia (all the work of untangling all those thousands of pages of legislation) and the Civil Service as interpreters of the possible.

@Wulfy

On this:

“Successive governments, be they from blue labour or conservatives, have cut NHS funding and looked into privatising it. With less funds the system falls slowly apart, the new lot get voted and say “What a big mess, the only solution is to cut spending and privatise!”. Rinse and repeat as the entire NHS slowly dies.”

I don’t think that has *ever* happened. Do you have numbers?

Privatising parts of service delivery or even funding via insurance is fine by me (works elsewhere), but that’s a different thread.

31
IMO Blair appealed more to the right, but the Labour Party, until his reign, were committed to socialism, Blair took socialism out of Labour.
I’m not so sure that you get ‘centrisism’ because certain policies become a mix of left and right. For example, right-wing conservatism and liberalism are in direct contrast to socialism., you cannot both have a central state and no state or minimal state.

It’s an artifact of the voting system.

FPTP => Duverger’s Law => two large parties fighting over the center ground.

The coalition is in the process of privatising the NHS – first by starving it of funds, forcing people into the private sector, then by parcelling off the profitable areas and introducing co-payments, on the road to a full-blown private insurance based model. Welfare benefits are being slashed, even to the most severely disabled. An MS sufferer is told that she must expect to sit in her own faeces because she is not entitled to social care. The payment of the minimum wage to disabled people is being questioned. Higher education is being privatised. The banking system remains largely untouched despite being underwritten by the taxpayer.

Anyone that suggests ‘centrism’ is inevitable would have to be living on another planet.

It isn’t “centrism”. It’s a blatant shifting towards the right as neoliberal ideology becomes the ruling consensus. If the democrats (or Labour) had an ounce of conviction and resolve, the shift would be to the left (as it was until the 1970s). The terminology of compromise and moderation serves the right, not the left.

I don’t know what the hell you’re on about, Sunny. If Barack Obama institutes measures that screw over the great mass of people to benefit their bosses – and a quick look at the American unemployment rate speaks volumes here – then maybe, just maybe, he does that stuff deliberately and not because the Republican minority force him to.

I mean, really. He’s the president of the United States of America and his power is more or less unlimited. If he uses it to enrich the super-wealthy and bomb the hell out of the middle east, for instance, then it’s probably because he always intended to enrich the super-wealthy and bomb the hell out of the middle east.

People struggle to spot this, I think, because they’re working under the massive misapprehension that the Democrats are lefties. They’re not.

@37: “He’s the president of the United States of America and his power is more or less unlimited. ”

Not so. As with all US Presidents, the executive arm of government is subject to the US Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, and to the checks and balances of legislation approved by Congress.

As with all US Presidents, the executive arm of government is subject to the US Constitution

Yes, I am aware of this Bob, thanks to the fact that I’m not five years old. All I’ll say here is that the Constitution hasn’t acted as much of a brake on executive power for quite a long time.

I think you’re confusing “centrism” for “consensus”. There is no such thing as a political centre ground – the idea that workers should be allowed two days off a week was once considered far left. The idea that we would privitatise BT was once considered far right.

However what does exist is political consensus. At the moment, the three biggest parties are all basically liberal capitalist parties. Forty years ago there was a social democratic consensus of sorts. And of course you are right that without a social democratic consensus of sorts we wouldn’t have the welfare state we have now.

But the reason people want parties to be more radical is that these consensuses shift – Atlee and Thatcher famously both moved the goal posts of British politics by being radical. The other party followed in both cases. Right now, Britain has 3 parties which, compared to other European countries, cluster round a relatively right wing consensus. It is time for that pendulum to swing back – a long way back.

I dunno, bombing the hell out of the Middle East (and North Africa, for that matter) seems to sit pretty well with a programme of Wilsonian idealism to me.

@39: “All I’ll say here is that the Constitution hasn’t acted as much of a brake on executive power for quite a long time.”

As President Clinton discovered, the House of Representatives has the Constitutional power of impeachment which it sometimes exercises.

As President Clinton discovered, the House of Representatives has the Constitutional power of impeachment

Oh yes, that really fucked him up, didn’t it? Monica Lewinsky could’ve re-blown him on the floor of the senate and it wouldn’t have touched his ability to exercise power, what with him being a two-term president, and all.

Largely I agree with you. But compare the political cultures of the UK and US. Here in Britain, people are largely indifferent to politics. Our country has lost all of it’s idealogical groups that existed before. There is little difference in belief not only in parties, but often in people. Where political discourse has lessened so that frustration has become filled by Tabloids telling people what to think.

This is a dangerous game, because if a clever radical policy (like the NHS 50 years ago) was ever to appear, and tabloids were against it, chances are it wouldn’t get through. Take AV for example. After the expenses scandal, we were certain we needed political reform. A year later and rigorous campaigning on behalf of the Mail and others, and it loses, by a landslide. The Liberal Democrats performance in the last election too, it was a tabloid assassination that robbed them of any real power.

I agree there is a line where centrism is preferable, but we have a dull politics, where politicians are often scared to take a real stand. We may balk and laugh at the american system, and in some ways, you should, but at least liberals and conservatives know what they believe.

@43: “Oh yes, that really fucked him up, didn’t it? ”

Posting in American political forums online at that time, I was cheering on President Clinton.

For all the machinations of Newt Gingrich and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives then, public opinion polls in American were regularly reporting 60+% approval ratings for Clinton.

I’ve little doubt that had Clinton been constitutionally able to stand again for a third term in the US Presidential elections in 2000, he would have been re-elected. One outcome of the machinations was to decredit Gingrich, whose political fortunes sank thereafter.

It is seriously arguable that British prime ministers with Crown prerogatives have greater unchecked political powers than American presidents. Britain’s smaller national resources are the effective restrictions on British prime ministers – as events leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 showed.

In America, the US Senate has to approve a huge range of Presidential appointments, including his cabinet, the White House chief of staff, and judicial appointments. There is no equivalent to that in Britain.

I think the problem is that centrism in this country is defined as between the Blairites and the Conservative party (and there really isn’t much meaningful difference between the two) and the Libdems have decided, as a centrist party, that that is the place for them.

Keynesian Capitalism is now regarded as left wing.

Privatising as many functions of the state as possible is regarded as centrist.

Allowing industries to write their own regulations is regarded as centrist (Vodafone and Barclays are part of the group writing business tax regulations now so they are more business friendly and of course significantly lower).

Think back 35 years. Would anyone have supported privatising the Labour exchange? They’d have thought you were mad. Now all three main parties have farming dealing with the unemployed or disabled out to for profit companies as a policy.

@32 – Only if it’s evenly distributed (i.e. an English Parliament), and I oppose the massive duplication of functions involved in any case, we have too many layers of government here now, afaik.

@46: “Keynesian Capitalism is now regarded as left wing. ”

Absolutely. In the 1970s the late (unlamented) President Nixon was saying, “We’re all keynsians now.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_are_all_Keynesians_now

In Britain, post war through to the 1970s, “Butskellism” prevailed, which meant demand management by mostly fiscal policy to maintain “a high and stable level of employment”, to quote the 1944 White Paper on employment policy.

Sunny Jim Callaghan as PM rang the death knell on keynesianism in 1976:

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.” [supposedly drafted by Peter Jay, who later became BBC economics editor]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3288907.stm

Until May 1979, the Conservatives and Labour had almost equally divided the time in government since the war. Thatcher then came in and broke with the post-war consensus. Monetarism, as manifested by the Medium Term Financial Strategy, was introduced by Geoffrey Howe as Thatcher’s first Chancellor. That was abandoned in the autumn of 1985 and the Lawsonite muddle followed to enable us to put the Pound into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990, which we did until the Pound was forced out in September 1992.

Simon Jenkins: Thatcher & Sons (Penguin 2006) is a well-documented, illuminating assessment of how we arrived at New Labour and what that meant.

Ben2

” Keynesian Capitalism is now regarded as left wing. ”

Which is kinda funny because Keynes despised the trade unions. He described members of the British Labour Party as, “sectaries of an outworn creed mumbling moss-grown demi-semi Fabian Marxism.” His verdict of the Labour Party was that it had been an “immense destructive force” that responded to “anti-communist rubbish with anti-capitalist rubbish.”

Keynes whole General Theory was an attempt to preserve the free market and destroy the power of unions. He recognised that in a democracy if the government did not respond to high unemployment, then something worse than intervening and preserving the free market would be the result. Whose side was he on?

“the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.”

His student, Arthur Plumptre, explained Keynes’ philosophy. If high unemployment was allowed to continue for too long, Keynes thought the inevitable result would be socialism–total government control–and the destruction of political freedom. This highly undesirable result had to be resisted and could only be held at bay if rigid adherence to laissez-faire gave way, but not too much. As Plumptre put it, Keynes “tried to devise the minimum government controls that would allow free enterprise to work.”

Keynes idea was that the government should be impotent other than adjusting tax and spending to keep the red menace at bay. State socialism, according to Keynes, “is, in fact, little better than a dusty survival of a plan to meet the problems of 50 years ago, based on a misunderstanding of what someone said a hundred years ago.” i.e. Marx misunderstanding Ricardo.

Keynes fearing what could happen with enduring unemployment, nevertheless, wanted unemployment to be reduced because it restored profits.

“If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary.”

“Economic prosperity is … dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average businessman.”

Keynes first and foremost was a classical British liberal, who feared government inaction would lead to even worse outcomes than limited interventions. Although, he was not always consistent in what he actually did believe. It was the ones who came after him who corrupted some of his theories and turned him into a left winger, which he certainly was not.

Define centrism please.

Because what is described as centrism in the US is really right wing conservatism.

“Keynes first and foremost was a classical British liberal, who feared government inaction would lead to even worse outcomes than limited interventions. Although, he was not always consistent in what he actually did believe. It was the ones who came after him who corrupted some of his theories and turned him into a left winger, which he certainly was not.”

In his General Theory, Keynes attempted an innovative explanation of how capitalist market economies could get stuck, as it were, with persistently high levels of unemployment – a feature which conventional wisdom had attributed to temporary malfunctions that would eventually work out, hence Keynes’s famous remark: In the long-run we are all dead.

There are sensible and persuasive criticisms of the General Theory which nevertheless retain much of his macroeconomic framework for determining aggregate demand:

Franco Modigliani: Liquidty Preference and the Theory of Interest and Money
http://stevereads.com/papers_to_read/liquidity_preference_and_the_theory_of_interest_and_money.pdf

Roger Farmer: How the economy works (OUP 2010), and this series of five lectures on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXxp4WO4cTw

Almost all the econometric models used nowadays to predict economic activity ahead are extensions of Keynes’s model. Some models are better at predicting than others. Disagreements tend to focus on the most appropriate contra-cyclical policies to apply in particular contexts.

@50: Define centrism please.

It’s a moving fest. As mentioned @4, a string of academic research studies in America has argued that Congressional politics have become increasingly partisan and polarised over the last 30 or so years. Some attribute this to the decline of the solid Democrat hold on on the southern states in America after President Johnson, a Democrat, drove through the civil rights legislation to end segregation.

I’m an extremist from the right side, but I’m also aware that my views on society and the economy do not reflect an electable position
At least your honest.
Also I don’t think you would be unelectable.
Most conservatives have many views that in line with the economic,not social part of the tea party.
Scotland will soon be independent.
That will mean that you will never ever see a left of centre government elected. The right and left are very tribal in their voting patterns (athough that is always directed at the Labour working class voters but you cannot see Winchester ever going red).
the real battle in the future will be between social liberal conservatives and the Daily Mail.

@52 – In that case, I’ll leave. There’s another state where, despite a strongly right-wing (and indeed partially fascist) government the basis of the social state is not under attack.

I’ll leave not because I want to, but because it’s a better alternative to slow starvation.

If that’s what you want…

leon
i am a leftie of sorts.
Unfortunately the UK’s future political world is to libertarain friedman right. Ian , Tim J , the rest of the many right wing posters are the future.
Forget Palin’s barking social and foreign policy views, economically is she any different say to Gove, May and Osbourne.
Remember in the last election, only ONE paper didn’t back the coalition.

@54 – So they’ll drive me out. It’s their choice.

The bright young things of my people will all be emigrating to go to a completely funded university course anyway, I don’t think we have a future in this country unless the Government changes tack anyway, between that and their attacks on non-christian cultures.

But is a functioning government possible if there is too much difference?

If by ‘functioning government’ you mean something that represents (as best it can) the will of the people, then a difference in the will means that government will not be able to pass what either side wants but it does not mean the government isn’t functioning, it means it is functioning. Of course, if by ‘functioning government’ you mean a government that passes what you want it to pass, then it is not functioning when it does not do what you think it should.