Both the Left and the Right Contradict Themselves, and Neither Notices

There are deep internal conflicts inside both major political camps. I do not mean disagreements between factions, which everyone can see. I mean contradictions between what each camp says it wants and the means it proposes to get it. These are not noticed by the people inside, because commitment to an ideology is precisely the thing that stops you from auditing it.

Here is the audit, as even-handedly as I can manage.

The Left

The left wants change through a stronger government: collect more taxes, help more people, regulate more firmly. Grant that the goals are good. The means run into four facts the left does not look at.

Government has been the great killer of its own people. Democide, the murder of a population by its own state, has a body count in the twentieth century that dwarfs war between states. I am not saying today's democratic governments are doing this. I am saying the historical record tells you something about what a government is, underneath the words its politicians say, and that the left proceeds as though representation had solved the problem, against all evidence that it has not.

Government is bad at doing things. Anyone who has worked inside a large bureaucratic institution, public or private, knows how much of its effort goes into itself. So even if the state had your interests entirely at heart, whether it could serve them well is an open question, and the left treats it as closed.

Government leaks money. Rigged contracts, absurd expenditure, projects that exist to exist. Raising taxes pours more water into a bucket with holes in it. The left counts the water going in and not the water coming out.

The left claims to want freedom while ignoring who has blocked it. Assisted dying, abortion, the abolition of slavery: in every case the main obstacle to the reform was the state, for as long as it could manage. And where the left itself holds cultural power, it has been happy to narrow speech in the name of protecting people from it. A camp that wanted freedom would be suspicious of the instrument that has most reliably withheld it.

The Right

The right's contradictions are at least as deep.

The right knows government is anti-freedom, then asks government to protect freedom. When did a state last enlarge the set of things you may do? The right's own diagnosis says: rarely, and only under pressure. Yet its programme is to install a party that will guard your liberties. That does not match the history it cites.

The right believes a party that says it wants smaller government will work for smaller government. This is asking the cat to reduce the supply of milk. A party is an organisation whose interest is in power, and power runs through the state. Every right-wing government in living memory has grown the state, and the right has explained each instance away rather than update.

The right is religious, and religion contradicts the right's own case for freedom. Believing things that are not true and instilling them in children by authority, through churches, Sunday schools and community pressure, is not a small exception to a philosophy of individual liberty; it is the core of the upbringing that philosophy is supposed to protect people from. It also puts the right in the position of denying evolution while wanting a thriving pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, which rests on evolution as thoroughly as electronics rests on silicon.

The right is split on the world. Half of it wants nothing to do with foreign wars; half wants to spread democracy by force. These cannot both be the conservative position, and the question of which one a small government could even carry out is never asked.

The right wants growth and cannot look at its costs. The environmental damage of the growth the right champions is large enough that the right has had to deny the science rather than reckon with it. When a camp has to deny a measurement to keep its programme intact, the programme has a problem.

What the Symmetry Tells You

I have not tried to score this. Both lists are long and both would be longer if I kept going. The interesting thing is the shape they share.

In each case the camp has a goal, and a means that its own premises say will not deliver the goal. The left distrusts concentrated power and proposes to concentrate it. The right distrusts the state and proposes to run it. Each has picked a bundle of positions, and the bundle is held together by identity rather than by logic, which is why nobody inside can see the seams.

I have written about how this bundling forces every debate to the wrong altitude and how it captures the institutions that were supposed to catch the errors. This post is the plainest version of the complaint: the two available packages are each internally inconsistent, and the system offers you nothing but the choice between them.

The Way Out Is Not the Centre

The usual response to this kind of critique is to recommend moderation, as though the answer to two inconsistent bundles were a third bundle assembled from half of each. It is not. Averaging two contradictions does not produce a consistency.

The way out is to stop buying bundles. Take each question on its own: does this policy, with these institutions, in this decade, produce the result claimed? That is a question with an answer, and the answer will land sometimes where the left stands and sometimes where the right does, and often where neither does. Which is exactly why neither camp wants you asking it.