August 28, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

Kirkpatrick Sale

Only in a flat world do the designations “Right” and “Left” have any meaning, equivalent to East and West, where Stalinists, say, are on the extreme Left and Nazis on the extreme Right. But for those who no longer believe the world is flat, it is best to discard those labels as worthless.

Let’s look at a round world instead. There we find that the pole at the top is occupied by authoritarians, with the Stalinists on the left side of the pole, the Nazis on the right side. Nothing much differentiates them but a few small points of ideology and a good deal of rhetoric—they are similar in the essential forms of dictatorial rule, omnipotent government, and single-party power.

And the pole at the bottom, obviously, is the home of the anti-authoritarians of all stripes. On the left side are the various anarchists, against all government but shading into those favoring autonomous communities, on the right the libertarians, favoring only minimal government and free markets. The differences between them are real but not as ultimately important as the similarities—guiding both camps is a rejection of Big Government, centralized power, corporate control, and state authority.

So that leaves the middle of the round earth, where we find all those quasi-authoritarians of many different kinds. On the western rim are those characteristically labeled “liberals” because they favor government big enough to be liberal about doling out considerable public funds for public causes but not so big as to be illiberal in checking individual rights and civil liberties. On the eastern side are those traditionally labeled “conservatives” because they favor a government big enough only to conserve corporate interests and provide corporate cushions but not so big as to interfere overmuch with taxes or regulations.

In that sense, then, “liberal” and “conservative” do have some meaning: they describe the people around the equator of the round world. At some points they are far apart, but there are very few of them at the extremes, and most of them blend from east to west to occupy the squishy middle—Ecuador, say—acting and governing, whatever their rhetoric, with a little bit of both sides—in fact becoming something rather like the present-day Republicans and Democrats. That’s the reason “liberal” and “conservative” mean so little in modern American politics, because there’s so little of the genuine original stuff at work: Republican “conservatives” love government as big as it can get, and they pump up the military budget until it takes effectively half of all our dollars (present and past wars included), they love the Security and Exchange Commission’s shenanigans, they even agree to have the government interfere in every public school and college; Democrat “liberals” are quite content to let the Bush government trample individual liberties, tear up habeas corpus, and spy on citizens with only the merest squawks, going along with egregious tax cuts and standing by as social programs are gutted. It’s not that “liberal” and “conservative” have lost their meaning—it’s that the two present parties don’t represent either one of the labels. That’s why they are now so useless—the labels, I mean, but the parties too.

All this says, of course, that what may be needed in American politics are genuine parties of the equatorial Right and Left—a genuine liberal party and a genuine conservative one, as those words once traditionally were meant, truly west and east. At least they wouldn’t be the weak and contradictory Tweedledum and Tweedledee we have now.

But, further, it says that what’s really needed in American politics is not an attempt to somehow try to restore those old parties, which may indeed be irrelevant today, but a way to bring true vitality and democracy into the system with a thoroughgoing creation of an anti-authoritarian form of government, along the lines of the Jeffersonian principle of that which governs least governs best. Here the people of the south pole can join together, working out ways at local and regional levels to order their politics and economics as may seem best to them, without much regard for a creaky, inept, corrupt, inefficient, wasteful, expensive, and essentially useless national regime.

My way of getting to that point, which might not suit everyone but is increasingly being talked about, is to foster decentralism, including secession, and self-determination throughout North America. I am convinced, believe it or not, that secession—by state where the state is cohesive (the model is Vermont, where the secessionist movement is the Second Vermont Republic), or by region where that makes more sense (Southern California or Cascadia are the models here)—is the most fruitful objective for our political future. Peaceful, orderly, popular, democratic, and legal secession would enable a wide variety of governments, amenable to all shades of the anti-authoritarian spectrum, to be established within a modern political context. Such a wide variety, as I see it, that if you didn’t like the place you were, you could always find a place you liked.

That’s when “liberal” and “conservative” become truly irrelevant. 

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of 12 books, including After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination (from Duke University Press this fall) and is the director of the Middlebury Institute “for the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination.”

August 28, 2006 Issue