Logan Lamont has an interesting Quadrant piece on what seems like an inexorable drift to the left in the politics of the developed world. The whole piece is well worth reading.
The Logic of the Leftist Voter
In a recent piece examining why intellectuals are drawn to the Left, I argued that the pattern cannot be explained by idealism alone. Intellectuals may be idealistic, often genuinely so, but they operate at a distance from production and consequence and are drawn to systems that elevate their role and reorder outcomes. That logic does not stop with intellectuals. It extends to voters and, in doing so, answers a more confronting question. Why do voters support a political movement that now stretches well beyond economics into positions that would once have seemed implausible, even self-defeating?
The answer begins simply: benefit.
The modern Left provides immediate, tangible gain. Transfers, subsidies, concessions and publicly funded services deliver outcomes that are visible and personal. The individual voter need not subscribe to a broader ideological framework to understand this. The benefit is real, and it is received. The cost is not. It is dispersed across the economy, deferred into debt, or absorbed by those still operating at the productive edge. It does not arrive as a direct exchange tied to the decision. It accumulates slowly, often invisibly, and rarely in proportion to what is taken. This distinction is central. If the full cost arrived with the benefit, behaviour would change. But when the benefit is immediate and the cost is remote, the voter has every reason to support expansion and little reason to restrain it.
5 comments:
In other words the leftist voter is performing a rather incompetent parody of how she imagines the hated capitalists behave. More! And now!
The same instant gratification mindset of the child, no concept of cost nor damage.
In UK, we have reached/passed the point where the accumulated costs of past Immediate benefits mean that there can be no more immediate benefits. Tax can't be increased enough any more; and the Government debt is so huge that lenders are going on strike. There is no 'Now Benefit' and the 'Consequence' bailiffs have just kicked the door in.
“I doubt if history can show, in any country at any time, a more greedy form of government than democracy as practised in Great Britain in the last fifty years. The common man has held the voting power, and the common man has voted consistently to increase his own standard of living, regardless of the long-term interests of his children, regardless of the wider interests of his country.”
(‘In The Wet’: Nevil Shute, 1953)
I know I’ve trotted this one out before, but I think it captures the problem rather elegantly. The passage describes a speculative future where Britain is floundering, crippled and bled dry by a Socialist government under a Prime Minister interested only in political posturing, taxation and class warfare.
More than seventy years on from writing, Shute’s dystopian vision is starting to look somewhat tame…
dearieme - that's a good point, no deferred gratification on the left.
James - yes it is childlike, cost and damage are for others to sort out later.
decnine - I agree, it has yet to hit home but maybe there are signs that there is some realisation that we can't carry on like this. Nowhere near enough signs yet though.
Macheath - he was spot on wasn't he? Very explicit too. I've read a number of his novels but not this one, even though I've always intended to read them all one day.
Maybe the Attlee government convinced him that an unstoppable political monster had been let loose. With the advent of socialism and a universal franchise we can't vote the monster away.
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