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POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN BRIEF


By John Ray


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEFTISM


It is submitted here that the major psychological reason why Leftists so zealously criticize the existing order and advocate change is in order to feed a pressing need for self-inflation and ego-boosting -- and ultimately for power, the greatest ego boost of all.

They need public attention; they need to demonstrate outrage; they need to feel wiser and kinder and more righteous than most of their fellow man. They fancy for themselves the heroic role of David versus Goliath. They need to show that they are in the small club of the virtuous and the wise so that they can nobly instruct and order about their less wise and less virtuous fellow-citizens. Their need is a pressing need for attention, for self-advertisement and self-promotion -- generally in the absence of any real claims in that direction. They are intrinsically unimportant people who need to feel important and who are aggrieved at their lack of recognition and power. One is tempted to hypothesize that, when they were children, their mothers didn't look when they said, "Mummy, look at me".

This means that the "warm inner glow" that they obtain from their advocacy and agitation is greatly prized. So it is no wonder that anything which threatens to disturb it -- such as mere facts -- is determinedly ignored. This view of Leftism as a club of the righteous that must never be disturbed or threatened is explored in detail by Warby (2002). See also Ridley (2002) for a brief account of the way Lomborg's findings were greeted primarily by abuse rather than by any serious attempt at refutation.

And, of course, people who themselves desperately want power, attention and praise envy with a passion those who already have that. Businessmen, "the establishment", rich people, upper class people, powerful politicians and anybody who helps perpetuate the existing order in any way are seen by the Leftist as obstacles to him having what he wants. They are all seen as automatically "unworthy" compared to his own great virtues and claims on what they already have. "Why should they have ........ ?" is the Leftist's implicit cry -- and those who share that angry cry have an understanding of one-another that no rational argument could achieve and that no outsider can ever share.

The Leftist's passion for equality is really therefore only apparently a desire to lift the disadvantaged up. In reality it is a hatred of all those in society who are already in a superior or more powerful position to the Leftist and a desire to cut them down to size.

This explains the common puzzle of why it is that modern-day "liberals" are still indulgent about the old Soviet system. As Amis (2002) points out, the many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.

Much the same explanation applies, of course, to the similar puzzle of why the French military dictator, Napoleon, is to this day generally regarded as a hero even though practically every family in the France of his day lost a son in his wars. The figures for Napoleon's Russian campaign alone are horrendous. He took 600,000 men into Russia but brought back only 70,000. In terms of loss of life, Napoleon's wars were every bit as bad for France as Hitler's wars were for Germany but Hitler is universally (and justly) reviled whereas Napoleon is still admired! Napoleon, however, justified all his actions as extending the French revolution to other lands and this explanation still resounds favourably with today's Left-leaning intellectuals.

Envy is a very common thing and most of us have probably at some time envied someone but, for someone with the Leftist's strong ego needs, envy becomes a hatred and a consuming force that easily accounts for the ferocious brutality of Communist movements and the economically destructive policies (such as punitively high taxation, price controls and over-regulation generally) employed by Leftists in resolutely democratic societies. So the economic destruction and general impoverishment typically brought about by Leftists is not as irrational as it at first seems. The Leftist actually wants that. Making others poorer is usually an infinitely higher priority for him than doing anybody any good. One suspects that most individual Leftists realize that no revolution or social transformation is ever going to put them personally into a position of wealth or power so the destruction of the wealth and power and satisfaction of those who already have it must be the main thing they hope to get out of supporting Leftist politics. For a fuller account of the enormously destructive nature of envy see Schoeck (1969).

Whether or not someone is important, rich, successful, famous etc., is however of course very much a matter of individual perception. If many of the world's most famous sports stars were introduced to me, for instance, I might well in all innocence proceed to ask them; "And what do you do for a living?". And while Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is my personal hero, there are many, even in academe, who would never have heard of the Mahatma. This "relativity" of importance, prestige etc. would seem to explain why many active Leftists are in fact college or university professors. College or university professor is a generally high status occupation that provides an above-average income so might, on the face of it, be seen as already providing considerable recognition and praise. But if status is precisely why certain people have gone to the considerable trouble generally required to enter that occupation, it could well be that the ego need of that person is so big that even more recognition is then craved. A college professorship may be prestigious but still be seen as providing far too little power, public exposure and opportunity for self-display. "Seeing I am so smart, I should be running the whole show", is an obvious line of thought for such people. Just some power and fame is still not enough power and fame for them.

Such vast egotism and hunger for power and attention does of course make a mockery of the Leftist's claim to be in favour of equality. Like the pigs in George Orwell's "Animal farm", the Leftist wants to be "more equal than others". He wants to rule or at least dominate. Beneath his deceptive rhetoric, he is the ultimate elitist. He actually despises most of his fellow men and thinks that only he and his clique are fit to run everything. The last thing he wants is to be lost in a sea of equal people. This was of course amply shown in the Soviet Union, where membership of the Communist Party became the only pathway to the good life -- conferring on the member all sorts of privileges and access to goods and services not available to other Soviet citizens.

And nothing above, of course, is meant to suggest that pressing ego needs, self-righteousness etc are confined to Leftists. It is merely meant to say that Leftism is the principal political expression of such needs. Such needs can also be met by religion etc. and it must be noted that Communism was often described as a religion by its critics. Why people choose politics rather than some other means of meeting their ego needs would have to be the subject of a whole new enquiry but it seems possible that the potentially very broad exposure that politics provides to an individual might attract the people with the very highest ego needs. This high level of ego need among Leftists would also explain the generally much greater political activism of the political Left compared to the rather somnolent political Right.

It would also explain why Leftists so often have a "spare me the details" or "Don't worry about the facts" orientation. For most Leftists, it is the activism itself rather than what is advocated that is the main point of the exercise. As long as the cause advocated is both generally praiseworthy and disruptive to implement, that will suffice.

The insincerity of the Leftist is of course an abiding theme in the many writings of Ayn Rand (e.g. Rand, 1957) -- who sees the hunger for power as the real motivation behind everything that the Leftist does. If he cannot have power, however, attention and praise are the next best thing from a Leftist's point of view.

The need for self-display does however in MOST people tend to decline as they mature -- which is part of the reason why graduates tend to be less radical than students and why older people tend to be much more conservative than young people (Ray, 1985). To misquote Lenin (1952) only slightly, much of Leftism would appear to be "an infantile disorder".



Guilt, Compassion and "Limousine Liberals"


Another psychological motivation for Leftism that is sometimes mentioned is one that I have always had severe doubts about: Guilt. The claim is that affluent people feel bad (guilty) when they see how poorly others are doing and want to rectify that by getting handouts for the disadvantaged (but not from their own pockets of course). They are "limousine liberals". I have always seen this as just another Leftist hoax: They may sometimes explain their motives in such a high-minded way but if they really felt guilty there is plenty they could do to help others rather than agitating to tax them to the eyeballs. Their "guilt" is, in other words, really a "feel-good" statement saying "Look how sensitive I am". I submit that they are really Leftists because it makes them feel wise, clever and insightful to be able to oppose convention -- even if what is conventional happens to be good sense.

The undoubted fact that Left activists and agitators (from the Bolsheviks on) tend to come from affluent families does not to me point to guilt as their motive at all. Rather the "limousine liberal" phenomenon shows me that those who have all that they want materially then seek other luxuries: such as self-righteousness, praise, power and excitement -- particularly the excitement of being demonstrators in the case of "rich kid" Leftists. And if the young limousine liberal can have praise and self-righteousness along with his/her excitement what a good deal it is! It is much the same motivation that causes self-made rich men (such as Bill Gates) to become highly philanthropic. Bill Gates has power and wealth so he now seeks praise and righteousness.

Various US writers whose opinions I respect (e.g. Levite, 1998) do however disagree with me about the genuineness of the Leftist's guilt so maybe I am missing something. I can only say that all the Leftists I have met in Australia have seemed to me much more angry and hostile than guilty. So maybe guilt politics is mainly an American phenomenon. Why? Perhaps because the USA was founded by religious fanatics whereas Australia was founded by convicts. Cultural attitudes could be long-lived.

There is however one variation on the Leftist guilt theme that might have more weight to it: The idea that some people want to be compassionate or believe that they should be compassionate but know that they really are not. This could perhaps arise from pressures put on them during their upbringing or from formal and informal pressures exerted on them by those they associate with in (say) their churches. Knowing that they themselves lack compassionate feelings, they do the next best thing and advocate loudly that the State (i.e. the taxpayer) should be more compassionate and thus absolve them from having to do anything compassionate personally. They might also hope that by loudly proclaiming their "compassionate" political views, their lack of personal compassion will be overlooked. This could explain the Leftist politics of many clergy in the Church of England (and in associated Anglican churches worldwide). Some "limousine liberals" could also fall into this category.

There is some support for this idea in the survey finding that the Americans who give the highest percentage of their income to charity are the very rich whereas those who give least are Leftists and liberals (Cooke, 2002). But this should not be surprising. From the French revolutionaries to Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, Leftist "compassion" has never been evident in their deeds!

Anyone who thinks that claims of compassion necessarily indicate compassion might also consider the example of California's Rev. Jim Jones with his Leftist "People's Temple". The Rev. Jones was much opposed to racism and devoted to equality and compassion for the disadvantaged but still managed to massacre hundreds of his followers in Guyana (See here ). Jim Jones' actions make no sense as indicators of real compassion but make a lot of sense as indicating a frustrated love of power: Very Leftist!

And the many Leftists, even US Leftists, who, in the name of "anti-imperialism", actually voiced approval for the murderous onslaught on New York's World Trade Centre on Sept. 11, 2001 certainly showed their degree of compassion clearly enough. The great influence that US culture undoubtedly has on the rest of the world is seen as sufficient to justify the murder of thousands of US citizens innocently going about their business. It is again clear that a hatred of any power but their own is what drives Leftists, not compassion.



Leftism as a Religion


For some people, Leftism appears to work as a sort of religion for atheists. There would appear to be a strong inborn need for religion in human beings. Even in the present skeptical, scientific and materialistic age about half of all Americans are churchgoers and years of indoctrination into atheism by the Communists seem to have left the Church stronger than ever in Russia and Poland. And even among people with no formal religious affiliations, very few are outright atheists. Christians such as Billy Graham sometimes say with some cogency that there is a "God-shaped void" in people. They would have to admit, however that some pretty Satanic things can get packed into that void sometimes.

So Leftism could be seen as a Godless religion -- something that meets the religious needs of those who for various reasons are dissatisfied either with other religions or with supernatural ideas in general. Not all religions have a dominant God or father-figure at their centre (e.g. Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto) and a religion that dispenses with the supernatural altogether does not therefore seem impossibly paradoxical. The identification of Leftism as a religion has often been made and the ability to believe in things that sound good but have very little supportive evidence would certainly seem to constitute a common core between Leftism and other religions. Both Leftists and the religious could, in other words, be seen as the wishful thinkers of the world: A very large throng. And, as a religion originally emanating from the economically successful "Western" democracies, Leftism is typical in being very proselytizing and intolerant of competing religions.

And, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, some might argue that Leftism is now more than ever a secular religion. In other words, now that it is crystal clear how awful really Leftist governments are, only faith could keep anyone still believing in the desirability of Leftism.

And anyone who has spent much time among Leftist intellectuals (As I have. I spent 12 years teaching in a School of Sociology at a major Australian university) will be aware of how the writings of Marx are treated as a form of holy writ. Leftist thinkers constantly involve themselves in nitpicking debates about "What Marx really said", just as Christian sectarians constantly argue about "What the Bible says". In our universities, Marxism is undoubtedly a form of theology. So Leftism can even meet people's need for theology! And anyone who knows their mediaeval history or the history of the Byzantine empire will know how overwhelmingly important theology can sometimes be to human beings.

From a Christian point of view, of course, one could well see the Left as the Devil's religion. It denies God and wears the compassionate clothes of Christ to cloak the black and hating heart that its destructive deeds reveal.

Interestingly, the most powerful form of Leftist religion would appear to have been Nazism. As mentioned previously, Nazism ("National Socialism") was Leftist in that Hitler was an extreme socialist -- advocating worker interests and income levelling -- and in its heavy government control of industry and just about everything else in Germany. And like any Leftist, Hitler did not like sharing power with the churches or anybody else.

But Hitler was smart enough to make good use of people's religious inclinations rather than simply oppose them. He did this in two ways: He eventually made peace with the churches as long as the churches did not visibly oppose him. His concordat with the Pope is of course famous in that connection. His own Catholic education and often-expressed Christian beliefs obviously helped with that. So you could eventually be both a good Catholic (for instance) and a good Nazi. And secondly, Nazism itself was also self-consciously religious in that it promoted its celebrations of "Germanic" traditions as an improvement on and alternative to the churches.

And it did that well: Hitler often appealed to God so that was no cause for alarm (unlike atheistic Communism); Nazism had its holy book in the form of "Mein Kampf"; It had saints such as Horst Wessel; It had magnificent religious ceremonies such as its constant torchlight parades, huge rallies and impressive loyalty oath ceremonies; It had inspiring marching songs by way of hymns. It had its Messianic and undoubtedly inspiring leader in the person of Hitler. And the way the Hitler Youth and the Volksturm fought to the bitter end in Berlin is certainly the sort of committment that most churches could only envy.



Other Causes of Leftism


There are, however, many other reasons for Leftism. Some that are related to the prime motivation (ego need) given initially above would appear to be:

Some Leftists just think themselves clever for being able to criticize.

Some Leftists are simply cynical opportunists who see opportunity for themselves in change.

Some Leftists are simply hiding their real hatred of their fellow man in a cloak of good intentions. They want to hurt their fellow man but need to change the system (a "revolution") to get the opportunity of doing so.

The more "revolutionary" and Trotskyite Left often use the word "smash" in their slogans (e.g. smash racism, smash capitalism, smash various political leaders) so it seems probable that some Leftists simply lust to smash things. They seek a socially acceptable excuse for their barely suppressed destructive urges. They presumably are the ones who are responsible for the violence and destruction that often accompanies Leftist street and campus demonstrations. Violent change is what they are interested in. Presumably, in another time and place, many of them would have joined Hitler's Brownshirts.

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But not all motivations for Leftism are as discreditable as the ones given above. Among the more sincere motivations for Leftism would be:

Some are genuinely outraged by things that they do not understand and are unwise enough to want to change those things willy nilly. In particular, they may be genuinely grieved by the unhappy experiences of others and want to fix that ASAP without being wise enough to seek for means of fixing it that have some prospect of working or that are not self-defeating. They might, for instance, be disturbed by the impact of rising rents on the poor and propose rent-control as a quick-fix solution -- though a few minutes of thought or the most elementary inquiry should tell them that rent control will after a time also have the effect of degrading and shrinking the existing stock of rental accommodation and drying up the supply of new rental accommodation, both of which make the poor much worse off in the long run.

The Leftist may still be young and unaware of most of life's complexities so that the drastically simple "solutions" and mantras proffered by the Left simply seem reasonable. Leftism has the appeal of simplicity.

Some, again particularly the young, are idealists who find the imperfect state of the real world unsatisfying. That there is some genuine idealism even among extreme Leftists is shown by the exoduses from Communist Parties in the economically successful "Western" democracies that followed the violent Soviet suppression of the East German, Hungarian and Czechoslovak uprisings against Communist rule in 1953, 1956 and 1968. Once the real nature of Communist regimes became too clear to be denied, honest decent people whose wishful thinking had led them to believe Communist protestations of benevolence and good intentions saw the light and abandoned Communism.

In the USA (in New York particularly), some liberal intellectuals even saw enough in the Soviet actions of those times to cause them to abandon "liberalism" and found neo-conservatism. Similarly in Australia of the 1950s and '60s, the Andersonian libertarians of Sydney were also intellectuals who might otherwise have been Leftists but who were united by realism about Soviet brutality.

Some Leftists know that they themselves are weird by general social standards so preach change towards greater tolerance for all weirdness out of sheer self-interest. As George Orwell apparently once said long ago: "There is the horrible -- the really disquieting -- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'socialism' and 'communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, 'nature-cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."

Another reason for Leftism that seems worth considering comes from biological theory. If there can be sociological and psychological explanations for Leftism, why not biological ones too? Martin & Jardine (1986) and Eaves, Heath, Martin, Meyer & Corey (1999) have reported strong genetic heritability for political orientation so the possibility of a biological explanation must be taken seriously. A possible biological or evolutionary explanation would be that Leftism is a remnant of the primitive hunter-gatherer in us. A liking for change might have been highly adaptive among hunter-gatherers because it caused them to wander around the landscape more and thus exposed them to a greater diversity of food-sources. Some support for this is the strong tradition, still occasionally observable today, for Australian Aborigines to want to "go walkabout" (leave their current environment) from time to time. Australian Aborigines were, of course, a purely hunter-gatherer people before the coming of the white man. Against this view, however, one must put the fact that hunter gatherer societies in general seem to be characterized more by changelessness than anything else. In hunter-gatherer tribes the same things are done in the same way for generation after generation. It could be however that a changeless environment usually prevents significant change in practices regardless of any desire for change. The corollary of this explanation, of course, is that a conservative orientation has been selected for by the requirements of civilization: People who are psychologically settled are needed to make civilization work.

A final possibility among the more creditable motivations for Leftism locates the appeal of Leftism solely in its usual stress on equality. The French Leftist Todd (1985) has put forward anthropological evidence to suggest that Leftism has strong appeal only in countries where child-rearing practices stress equality of treatment between siblings. Thus Russia showed easy acceptance of Communism because Russian parents normally go to great length to treat all their children equally -- particularly by dividing up inheritances (property) equally. Whereas Britain has only ever had a tiny Communist party because of the traditional English practice of primogeniture -- where the eldest son gets almost all of the inherited property. English child-rearing practices have never had a devotion to treating siblings equally so the English do not usually expect or hope for equality of property distribution in later life. So your attraction to the dream of equality may reflect a childhood where parents imposed a rule of equality. Because of your childhood experiences, equality seems emotionally "right", regardless of its practicality.

Note however, that the work by Martin & Jardine (1986) and Eaves, Heath, Martin, Meyer & Corey (1999) showing that Leftism is to a very considerable extent genetically transmitted rather than learnt militates against this as a general explanation for Leftism. Explanations of Leftism in terms of personality variables -- such as strong ego-need -- do not encounter this objection as the strong genetic transmission of personality characteristics has often been demonstrated (e.g. Lake, Eaves, Maes, Heath & Martin, 2000).



NEO-LIBERALISM


The Past Revived


What North Americans now call "liberal" is a long way from what was called "liberal" in the 19th century and earlier. Liberal ideas were once those ideas that sought to elevate individual rights above the claims of State and community power and hark back at least as far as the writings of Adam Smith (1776). The writings of J.S. Mill (1859) are, however, most quoted as a comprehensive development of such ideas. Classical liberal ideas had considerable influence in the 19th century -- particularly via Britain and the British Liberal party -- but were very much eclipsed in the early 20th century (as was the British Liberal party) by the rise to prominence of Statist ideas -- particularly Marxist, Fabian and Fascist ideas. Late in the 20th century, however, under the influence of writings by Hayek (1944), Ayn Rand (1977) and many others, these ideas were powerfully revived and extended -- when they came to be known among the cognoscenti as "neo-liberalism" or "Libertarianism". They are perhaps best known to the world at large, however, as "Reaganomics" or "Thatcherism" -- from their most prominent and successful political proponents.

Surprisingly, however, modern-day North American "liberals" and their ilk generally seem to view neo-liberalism as anathema. And in fact Neo-liberalism has found its home entirely on the political Right in recent times. Why? The explanations of Leftist motivation given above would appear to be very helpful in explaining why.



Why "liberals" Hate Neo-liberalism


But the reason why is not initially obvious. Neo-Liberalism of course is very pro-change, particularly in the economic sphere, and aims principally to break down, wherever possible, government-imposed restrictions on what people can do. Its application has led to all sorts of economic reorganization, some of which has been very disruptive to the employment (and hence the lives) of many people. Globalization is just one of its manifestations. So how in heaven's name did such a revolutionary doctrine find its home on the Right rather than among the normally pro-change Leftists?

The answer becomes obvious if we posit that Leftists really have no concern at all about what they are advocating, that they do not really care about human advancement at all, that their "concern" for the poor etc. is a sham. What they really want they want now -- and that is power, simple causes that will win them praise and drama in which they can star as the good guys. That really is about all. And neo-liberalism meets none of those needs. The policies advocated by Neo-liberals do demonstrably lead to slow but steady human economic advancement and do increase prosperity for all to levels once undreamt of in human history. But such policies also diffuse power, are far from simple and are very undramatic. It is hard work just to understand neo-liberalism and there are no immediate rewards inbuilt.

One could, for instance, TRY going onto the streets and demonstrating in favour of "comparative advantage" (one of the essential ideas underpinning advocacy of free trade) but that would almost certainly lead to total incomprehension rather than win kudos. And Che Guevara is someone that anybody and everybody can understand -- which is a lot more than can be said for Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk.

So neo-liberalism suffers from the huge handicap that it is a highly intellectual body of ideas that requires considerable study and knowledge of economics -- something that Leftists normally seem to avoid like the plague -- in order to understand it fully. It originated with an economist (Smith), it could even be seen as the practical application of modern economics and some of its most prominent proponents have won Nobel prizes for economics (Friedman, Hayek etc.). It is certainly much harder to explain and communicate to laymen than are such simple ideas as "all men are equal" or "get the government to pass a law".

And the heroes and villains of neo-liberalism do not suit the Leftist either. The neo-liberal hero (the business entrepreneur) normally has to work long and hard to achieve his status. Storming the Winter Palace (as the Bolsheviks did in October, 1917) or vandalizing Seattle (as the anti-globalization protesters did in December, 1999) are heaps quicker, simpler and easier. And the neo-liberal villain is government! The solitary proposal that Leftists have for solving social ills is snatched away from under them! No wonder Leftists do not like neo-liberalism!

On a more fundamental level, Leftist hostility to neo-liberalism revolves around the fact that governments and their instrumentalities are far and away the most effective means of obtaining and exercising power over large numbers of people. They exist for that purpose. So Leftists -- with their yearning for power and the ego-boost it provides -- will always advocate anything that promises to extend State power -- in the hope that they can influence or participate in the exercise of it. Communist governments, of course, represent an extreme in the exercise of State power and, for this reason, some US "liberals" were once wont to speak indulgently of Communists as being simply "liberals in a hurry". So Leftists are perfectly accurate in seeing neo-liberals -- with their advocacy of reduced and limited State power -- as their deadly and hated enemies.



Conservatives and Neo-liberalism


This did of course mean that neo-liberalism was for a long time largely deprived of a home in politics. Its proposals for globalization had some continuing effect (e.g. through GATT -- the predecessor of the WTO) but, generally, without the energy of Leftists to push it, it languished for most of the 20th century as a purely academic theory. And it was asking a lot for the cautious Right with no intrinsic interest in change to take it up.

But neo-liberalism is in essence perfectly practical (tax cuts, deregulation, privatization etc.) and Rightists have always been interested in practical proposals for human advancement and betterment. To mention just a few particularly striking historical examples:

Few people could be more Rightist than Prince Otto von Bismarck, Prussia's "Iron Chancellor" of the late 19th century and the man who unified modern Germany under the Prussian crown by way of successful wars on Austria and France. He was an hereditary aristocrat who for some years defied the Prussian parliament to rule Prussia in the name of the King alone and often wore his Prussian military uniform -- complete with "Pikelhaube" (spiked helmet). Yet the same man also gave Germany an extensive welfare system (workers compensation, old-age pensions etc.) that exceeded in generosity anything else of its kind in the world of those days.

And perhaps Britain's most famous conservative thinker of the 19th century, who was also one of her most notable Prime Ministers, was Benjamin Disraeli. It is he who is often credited with creating the modern British Conservative party and he certainly had a large role in causing his political party to be known as the Conservative party rather than the Tory party. He was a constitutional traditionalist, a great monarchist and imperialist and was responsible for declaring Queen Victoria "Empress of India".

Yet he was a great friend of British working-class people too -- extending the vote to them in 1867, bringing in legal limits on how many hours per day they could be asked to work, limiting the age at which they could start work, bring in health regulations and for the first time giving some legal protection to labour unions. He saw his duty as Prime Minister as: "to secure the social welfare of the people." He saw his guiding principles as being not only to "maintain the institutions of the country" -- which he saw as an essential barrier to tyranny -- but also "to elevate the condition of the people". And despite often being accused of megalomania and mere opportunism, he refused both a Dukedom and burial in Westminster Abbey.

And what do we make of a war-glorifying, big game hunting, Bible-bashing ex-cowboy who got on his horse and personally led the war to take over the remnants of the Spanish Empire for the USA in the late 19th century and who was the scourge of pacifists in World War I? Someone who was the undoubted darling of Republican Party supporters for many years and twice became Republican President of the United States? A man who put his trust in battleships and whose strong advocacy of war as a necessary purification of the national spirit was soon to be emulated by Messrs. B. Mussolini and A. Hitler? Right-wing enough? Yet Theodore ("Bull Moose") Roosevelt also initiated and got through Congress extensive and ground-breaking consumer protection and worker protection measures and got progressively tougher and tougher on big business throughout his life.

Even that ultimate Prussian autocrat, Wilhelm II ("Kaiser Bill"), who effectively started World War I, saw part of his duty as German monarch as being to represent the interests of ordinary Germans against the influence of the middle and upper classes. This was a significant part of the reason behind his much decried dismissal of Bismarck as his Prime Minister in 1890. Bismarck was of course a "Junker" (landowning Prussian aristocrat). So protecting and promoting the welfare of ordinary people is a venerable tradition on the Right, for all the shrillness of Leftist claims to the contrary.

And the traditionally gloomy conservative view of the powers of government -- summed up so succinctly by Edmund Burke (1907) over two centuries ago as: "It is in the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good" -- fits in well with the neo-liberal view that market forces are usually far superior to government activism in producing generally beneficial outcomes. Furthermore, the practical failure of Leftist economic ideas was well evident to all who would see in the final decades of the 20th century, so that awareness, combined with the rising levels of public education, meant that some limited forms of economic rationality could be made to have popular appeal and get through the processes of democratic politics to implementation. So some Rightists did eventually have enough vision to embrace and promote "neo-liberal" ideas and turned some neo-liberal ideas into reality -- a reality that soon spread throughout the world.

And that is also why roughly the same set of ideas is also sometimes called (rather confusingly) "neo-conservatism" -- though the term "Neo-conservative" is also in the US sometimes used to describe a group of mainly New York intellectuals (Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz etc.) who started out as idealistic "liberals" but who were honest enough to allow themselves eventually to be at least partly overwhelmed ("mugged" in their terms) by reality. The experience that comes with age gradually forces reality onto many of the more idealistic Leftists but the New York Neo-conservatives documented in great detail that process as it happened to them. Their principal journals are "Commentary" and "The Public Interest". Their original focus was primarily anti-Soviet rather than neo-liberal.



LEFTISTS IN POWER


Communism


Although it seems most unlikely that it will ever happen again, there were many occasions in the 20th century when the most extreme form of Leftism -- Communism -- did gain great power in certain countries. Does that experience tell us anything about Leftism?

This paper started out with an endeavour fairly characteristic of modern Anglo-American analytical philosophy (Hospers, 1967): An endeavour to analyse and make coherent the way terms like "Leftist", "Liberal", "Socialist", "Communist" etc are commonly used. Once an underlying focus for such terms had been "discovered", the psychology underlying that focus was considered. The analysis was however principally of what Leftism/liberalism is in the economically advanced countries of the contemporary "Western" world -- where Leftists have only ever had partial success in implementing their programmes. So what happens when Leftists get fully into power? Does the same analysis apply?

For a start, it should be obvious that the personality and goals of the Leftist do not change just because he gets into power. He is still the same person. And that this is true is certainly very clear in the case of Lenin -- who is surely the example par excellence of a Leftist who very clearly did get into power. In his post-revolutionary philippic against his more idealistic revolutionary comrades, Lenin (1952) makes very clear that "absolute centralization and the strictest discipline of the proletariat" are still in his view essential features of the new regime. He speaks very much like the authoritarian dictator that he was but is nonetheless being perfectly consistent with the universal Leftist wish for strong government power and control over the population -- as long as they are in charge. So Leftists in power certainly do not cause the State to "wither away" -- as Marx foresaw in "The Communist Manifesto".

After 1917 change did continue for a few years in Russia while the Communists consolidated their power (e.g. by "liquidating" the Kulaks), but after that Russia settled into a tyranny where State-directed industrialization was the only form of change allowed. After the completion of the revolution, change in Russian society was in fact repressed ferociously. Certainly, no challenges to Russia's new power structure were allowed. Stalin murdered millions without a qualm to ensure that.

But that very State dominance of Russian life did of course eventually cause advanced social and economic sclerosis and stagnation in Russia and its satellites -- leading ultimately to the complete collapse of the Soviet system via Gorbachev's "perestroika" (reconstruction). "Perestroika" implies change so change was in fact the poison that finally destroyed Lenin's legacy. So does that mean that the Soviets were not Leftists? If hunger for change is the defining feature of Leftism, then surely the Bolsheviks ceased to be Leftists in 1917! Surely Lenin and his comrades became conservatives at that point!

Ludicrous though that proposition sounds at first sight, it is precisely the common usage today. Defenders of the old Soviet order and those who wish to return to it in post-Gorbachev Russia are usually referred to in the press as "conservatives". Clearly, the press has adopted the simple (though very unsatisfactory) dichotomy of being for and against change as the definition of Leftism and Conservatism. This does however create the very large problem that precisely the same political policies that are seen in one country (Russia) as being conservative are seen in other countries (e.g. the USA) as wildly Leftist (See also McFarland et al, 1992).

Since change IS in fact obviously somehow involved in the Left/Right dichotomy and since the aims and practice of the Bolsheviks were perfectly concordant with basic Leftist desires everywhere, this dilemma is not easy to solve. In previous papers (See Leftism.txt and Rightcon.txt on my HomePage), I have leant towards the solution of dismissing the role of change altogether and saying that either Leftists or Rightists will oppose or support change depending on whether they are in power or not. I proposed that it is simply the love or suspicion of State power that defines the Leftist or Rightist. And, as a statement about the psychology of Leftists and Rightists, I still adhere to that view. I think it is evident that most Leftists have a strong basic need for power and control and that that flows very simply into the policies that they advocate.

I also think, however, that a DEFINITION of any collectivity should rely primarily on what the collectivity does rather than on a theory about how the group is motivated. One has to define the group before one can study it. And a definition of the "Western" world's Left (but only the Left) in terms of attitude to change both makes sense of common usage and is readily amenable to psychological explanation.

Regrettably, however, it seems clear that one cannot define Leftists as being the change-hungry ones of ALL the world and of all times. It is a definition that is fully applicable only to the present economically successful "Western" democracies.

If a definition of limited applicability is unattractive, however, we can also grasp the other horn of the dilemma and say that Leftists who attain power cease to be Leftists! This jars a little but does make sense psychologically: Once the Leftist's hunger for power and control is satisfied, he no longer seeks change and in fact actively opposes it. He then opposes change for the same reason that he opposes neo-liberalism: It threatens his power and control. He becomes a conservative (opponent of change) in a way that a Rightist generally is not. There can be no doubt that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were Rightists but they actively worked to REDUCE the power, influence and control of the governments that they led. The contrast is very clear. Not everyone is as power-mad as the Leftist. And that hunger for power makes the Leftist IN POWER the most ferocious conservative (opponent of change) of all.

But there is an exception to every rule and the exception in this case is a most instructive one: Mao Tse Tung. Mao's "cultural revolution" was a very strange phenomenon unparalleled in other Communist regimes. And it appeared to do nobody any good -- including Mao himself. It was a vast but entirely destructive upheaval. But it is just what one would expect of someone in love with change. In the case of Mao, we saw a survival into the post-revolutionary era of the old pre-revolutionary longings. He was so in love with change that he had his revolution all over again. Mao was so thoroughly in charge of China, that he could indulge his natural inclinations without endangering his power and what those inclinations were is precisely what we see in Leftists of the economically successful "Western" democracies to this day: a love of change, preferably revolutionary change. So we can see that power comes first in a Leftist's scale of values but the longing for change per se is always there too.



In the "West"


This conclusion drawn from the grand sweep of history has some counterpart on a much more humble scale in findings from survey research in one of the economically successful "Western" democracies. Ray (1984) found from a large random sample survey of Australians conducted in the Cold War era that Leftists were sensation-seekers even when the sensations concerned were the sensations provided by consumerism. Rather contrary to their usual image, Leftists were found to be materialists who enjoyed buying mass-marketed "quality" consumer goods even more than Rightists did. Their love of new sensations was so great that they even sought out those provided by their ostensible "enemy" -- consumer capitalism. Clearly, like Mao, their love of novelty was so deep-seated that it overcame other considerations.

Although Leftists in the economically successful "Western" democracies have never gained power on anything like the scale achieved by Mao and Stalin, there have of course been Leftist governments in the economically successful "Western" democracies countries on many occasions and these have certainly managed to lay the stifling and impoverishing hand of bureaucracy on many endeavours. The twin disciplines of the ballot box and constitutional constraints have however limited what such governments can do. Their power has always been far from absolute.

In summary, bitter experience has shown that Leftists in power are very dangerous and destructive people. Where their power is effectively unchecked, they generally seems to resort sooner or later to mass murder (as in the case of the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Jim Jones and many Communist regimes and movements worldwide) and where they are partially thwarted by strong democratic traditions and institutions, they at least bring about large-scale impoverishment (as in post-independence India and pre-Thatcher Britain). By contrast, conservatives just muddle along with piecemeal reforms that don't require them to murder anybody. So giving any power to Leftists is a most dangerous thing to do and working to prevent that happening is a matter of no small importance.



LEFTISTS IN ACADEME


As the Luntz poll recently and dramatically showed (Horowitz, 2002), there is one area in the USA where Leftists have almost achieved a monopoly of power over at least hiring policies: The humanities and social science schools of the universities and colleges. An overt conservative finds it almost impossible to gain employment in such places and the message to the wider community emanating from such places is almost unfailingly "liberal". So Leftists in power are once again seen to be very jealous of their power, intolerant of diversity, opposed to free speech and oppressive and discriminatory in their employment practices: All things that they would normally try to deny but which in fact simply make them typical Leftists.

Fortunately, the best brains in America have always gone into business first rather than into any form of teaching. And the fact that the US has survived as a thriving and generally healthy society is proof that it does not need its nutty "liberal" professors. They have only a message of hate to purvey anyway -- mostly hatred of America -- and most people are decent so few of them will be long persuaded by such a message.

So this monopolization of academe by Leftists ought perhaps to be of some concern but its main effect is probably that it simply makes our universities boring. The message emanating from them is so predictable that it is hardly worth attending to. And in a pluralistic society there are many alternative sources of information and influences on attitudes. The internet and Right-wing radio commentators such as Rush Limbaugh in the USA and Alan Jones in Australia spring obviously to mind as alternative sources of information and countervailing influences on the public mind.

Another possible countervailing influence that some Leftists are beginning to notice (Bates, 2001) is the amazingly popular Homer Simpson. It seems to me that although Homer is merely a cartoon character and ostensibly an object of ridicule meant to evoke disgust, his great popularity is due at least in part both to his believability and his grossness. And one reason why he is believable and why people are amused by his grossness is that ordinary people can often see, to some degree, an uncensored or more honest version of themselves in him. So it seems to me that a more subtle and accurate reading of him would see him as a strong and believable character with Rightist views whom many people identify with or even envy to some degree precisely because he is unapologetic about his failings -- failings (such as greed) that are in fact common and normal ones. His utter lack of political correctness must be refreshing where people are so often (and so boringly) being urged to be goody-goodies. And an example that one can identify with will always have infinitely more influence than any amount of preaching, nagging and exhortation. It might not be drawing too long a bow to say that, for many ordinary people, Homer, makes at least one form of Rightism at least attractive and maybe even lovable. Homer could, in other words, have much more influence as a model than is immediately apparent or generally realized (See also Pinsky, 2001 and Appleyard, 2002).

Even if all that is completely untrue, however, Homer has undoubtedly given high visibility and exposure to one type of Rightist view and kept such views very much on the mental agenda of ordinary people at the same times as Leftists have been trying so hard to get them off the agenda. It is after all commonly said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Because of Homer, total political incorrectness constantly spends long periods pervading perhaps hundreds of millions of living-rooms worldwide -- and does it in an entertaining and pleasant rather than a boring way. It is amusing to speculate that Homer Simpson might well be a greater influence on the public mind than the influence all of our universities put together. So low the relevance of our universities would appear to have sunk now that they are in the hands of the Leftists. So in our universities and elsewhere, Leftists are a good example of Lord Acton's axiom that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It must be acknowledged, however, that many conservatives would not identify with Homer in any way at all. His attitudes are mainly "Rightist" in that they completely defy the unnatural and oppressive "political correctness" that Leftists have managed to make dominant in other media sources. By constantly engaging in politically incorrect behaviour in so many people's living rooms, he shows that politically correct behaviour is not as compulsory and as universal as other media sources would like to pretend. He shoots down the artificial liberal consensus.



SO WHAT ARE RIGHTISTS?


The prime focus in this paper has been on defining and explaining what Leftism is. It would nonetheless be remiss not to give also at least a skeletal outline of what Rightism is. If Leftism and Rightism are NOT mirror-images, as this paper asserts, some such account does appear necessary in order to complete the picture. I have, however, written one book and many previous papers for those who wish to study conservatism at length (See Ray, 1972b, 1973, 1974, 1979 & 1981).



Military Dictators?


In the late 20th century, it was a common rhetorical ploy of the more "revolutionary" Left in the "Western" world simply to ignore democracy as an alternative to Communism. Instead they would excuse the brutalities of Communism by pointing to the brutalities of the then numerous military dictatorships of Southern Europe and Latin America and pretend that such regimes were the only alternative to Communism. These regimes were led by generals who might in various ways be seen as conservative (though Peron was Leftist) so do they tell us anything about conservatism?

Historically, most of the world has been ruled by military men and their successors (Sargon II of Assyria, Alexander of Macedon, Caesar, Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne, Frederick II of Prussia etc.) so it seems unlikely but perhaps the main point to note here is that the Hispanic dictatorships of the 20th century were very often created as a response to a perceived threat of a Communist takeover. This is particularly clear in the case of Spain, Chile and Argentina. They were an attempt to fight fire with fire. In Argentina of the 60s and 70s, for instance, Leftist "urban guerillas" were very active -- blowing up anyone they disapproved of. The nice, mild, moderate Anglo-Saxon response to such depredations would have been to endure the deaths and disruptions concerned and use police methods to trace the perpetrators and bring them to trial.

Much of the world is more fiery than that, however, and the Argentine generals certainly were. They became impatient with the slow-grinding wheels of democracy and its apparent impotence in the face of the Leftist revolutionaries. They therefore seized power and instituted a reign of terror against the Leftist revolutionaries that was as bloody, arbitrary and indiscriminate as what the Leftists had inflicted. In a word, they used military methods to deal with the Leftist attackers. So the nature of these regimes was only incidentally conservative. What they were was essentially military. We have to range further than the Hispanic generals, therefore, if we are to find out what is quintessentially conservative.

It might be noted, however, that, centuries earlier, the parliamentary leaders of England -- led by Fairfax, Cromwell etc. -- did something similar to the Hispanic generals of the 20th century. Faced by an attempt on the part of the Stuart tyrant to abrogate their traditional rights, powers and liberties, they resorted to military means to overthrow the threat. There is no reason to argue that democracy cannot or must not use military means to defend itself or that Leftists or anyone else must be granted exclusive rights to the use of force and violence.



German Origins


What modern-day Rightists of the English-speaking world are, then, traces right back to the German invaders who overran Britannia around 1500 years ago and made it into England. They brought with them a very decentralized, largely tribal system of government that was very different from the Oriental despotisms that had ruled the civilized world for most of human history up to that time. And they liked their decentralized system very much. So much so that the system just kept on keeping on in England, century after century, despite many vicissitudes. Only the 20th century really shook it.

Where the English get their traditional dislike of unrestrained central power is not the main point or even an essential point of the present account. Nonetheless, tracing that dislike to the ultimately German descent of most of the English population might seem colossally perverse in view of Germany's recent experience. Was not Hitler a German and was he not almost the ultimate despot and centralizer of power in his own hands? One could quibble here by saying that Hitler was NOT a German (he was an Austrian) and the Israeli historian Unger (1965) has pointed out that Hitler was much less of a despot than Stalin was but neither of those points is really saying much in the present context.

The important thing here again is to see things with an historian's eye and realize that recent times are atypical. Right up until Bismarck's ascendancy in the late 19th century, Germany was remarkable for its degree of decentralization. What we now know as Germany was once always comprised of hundreds of independent States (kingdoms, principalities, Hanseatic cities etc.) of all shapes and sizes: States that were in fact so much in competition with one another in various ways that they were not infrequently at war with one-another.

And it was of course only the fractionated and competing centres of power existing in mediaeval Germany that enabled the successful emergence there of the most transforming and anti-authority event of the last 1000 years: The Protestant Reformation. Despite the almost immediate and certainly widespread popularity of his new teachings among Germans, Luther ran great risks and would almost certainly have been burnt at the stake like Savonarola, Hus and his other predecessors in religious rebellion had it not been for his (and our) good fortune that he was a Saxon. His Prince, Frederick III ("The Wise") of Saxony gave him constant protection. As one of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick was strong enough and independent enough to protect Luther from Pope, from Emperor and from other German potentates.

So only after Bismarck engineered the defeat of the French at Sedan in 1870 did most of Germany become unified -- with the Germans of the Austrian lands remaining independent even then. And to this day Germany has a Federal system very similar to that of their largely Germanic brethren in the United States, Canada and Australia -- a system of State governments which markedly limits central (Federal) government power. So the German origins of the English do make their historic dislike of concentrated power at the Centre just one part of a larger picture.

In 1066, William of Normandy disrupted the traditional decentralized and competitive power structure of England to some degree but by the time of King John and Magna Carta it was back with a vengeance. Even in the reign of that great Tudor despot, Henry VIII, there were still in England great and powerful regional Lords and many less powerful but numerous local notables representing local interests that the King had to take great care with. Even Tudor central government power was highly contingent, far from absolute and much dependant on the popularity of the ruler among ordinary English people. And when the Stuarts, with their doctrine of "the divine right of Kings", ignored all that and tried to turn the English monarchy into something more like a centralized Oriental despotism, off came the head of the Stuart King.



A Conservative Revolution


And the parliamentarians who were responsible for beheading King Charles I in 1649 were perfectly articulate about why. They felt that Charles had attempted to destroy the ancient English governmental system or "constitution" and that he had tried to take away important rights and individual liberties that the English had always enjoyed -- liberty from the arbitrary power of Kings, a right to representation in important decisions and a system of counterbalanced and competing powers rather than an all-powerful central government. It is to them that we can look for the first systematic statements of conservative ideals -- ideals that persevere to this day. And they were both conservatives (wishing to conserve traditional rights and arrangements) and revolutionaries!

So right back in the 17th century we had the apparent paradox of "conservatives" (the parliamentary leaders -- later to be referred to as "Whigs") being prepared to undertake most radical change (deposing monarchy) in order to restore treasured traditional rights and liberties and to rein in overweening governmental power. So Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were not at all breakaways from the conservatism of the past. They had very early and even more determined predecessors. Nobody who knew history should have been surprised by the Reagan/Thatcher "revolution". And it was in deliberate tribute to the parliamentarians of Cromwell's day and their immediate successors that two of the most influential conservative theorists prior to Reagan and Thatcher both described themselves as "Old Whigs" -- Burke (1790) and Hayek (1944). Hayek described Whig ideals as "the only set of ideals that has consistently opposed all arbitrary power" (Hayek, 1960).



Religion


Many influential conservative writers of the past (e.g. Burke, 1790) have held that Christianity is an essential foundation for conservatism -- though others (e.g. Hayek, 1944) disagree. A large part of the reason for that is the traditional role of the church as arbiter and enforcer of morality in general and sexual morality in particular. Although suspicious of authority generally, conservatives have never shrunk from the need for authority if they consider it essential to the functioning of a civil society. And morality has always to them seemed essential for any kind of civilization. And morality generally has to be taught and to some degree enforced. It does not always come naturally. And both the church and the State have generally seemed needed for setting and maintaining moral standards.

In the modern very secular world where religion has a strong influence only on a minority of the population, however, it is clear that civil society and a modicum of morality (both sexual and otherwise) can survive with or without the church. So the Burkean view that religion and its moral codes are essential to a good life and a reasonably well-ordered society has to be seen as disproved by history.

Christian conservatives still claim with some justice, however, that traditional Christian moral standards make for a better society than it otherwise would be and sometimes agitate energetically for such standards to be widely applied. Their view of the benefits of Christian standards may well be correct but any attempt to have such standards applied to non-believers is both un-Christlike (tyrannical) and shows the Christians concerned as mired in an obsolete past. The best that one can say about such attempts is that those who makes such attempts are mistaken about what is essential.

Nonetheless, many American Christian conservatives are adamant that there would be no survival of morality or civility in the US without the widespread transforming power of the Christian faith. They see their faith as the historical and still real foundation of American values. They believe that, without anchors in Christ, Americans would all succumb to the mindless "all is relative" doctrine of the Leftist and be unable to make any distinction between right and wrong. The restraint of faith is seen as needed to prevent everyone from behaving like mindless, selfish beasts. And certainly, even to a foreign visitor, there does seem to be a marked contrast between the Piranha-like attitudes that are often to be found in big cities such as New York or Los Angeles and the more generous and humane attitudes prevalent in smaller, more faith-based American communities.

Although I was once myself a fervent Christian and still retain enormous respect and admiration for the teachings of the carpenter of Nazareth, I see the view of Christianity as essential to civility and social cohesion as having only some truth, however. I agree wholeheartedly that Christianity is an enormously beneficial influence on ethical behaviour but cannot see that it is essential or unique.

It seems to me that, in the US, the national traditions embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the ideas of the American Revolution are still great unifiers also, even among those with little or no religious faith. Americans on the whole still do (with good reason) believe in the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", and in democratic institutions, in protection of property rights, in the rule of law, and in the "American Dream." And the "American Dream" is about working hard and taking risks to become well-off, not about winning the lottery or robbing the rich.

A second reason for my skepticism is the reality of another venerable democracy of the English speaking world: Britain. England is one of the most Godless places on earth these days. A huge proportion of the population appear to have virtually no religious belief and only about 2% go to church regularly. And, as noted already, when they do go to church what they hear from their Church of England clergy is much more akin to Leftist politics than traditional Christianity.

So has the United Kingdom collapsed into anarchy or Stalinism? Not at all. Margaret Thatcher was as energetic and as effective a conservative reformer as Ronald Reagan and her influence has arguably been more long-lasting. A prominent member (Peter Mandelson) of the nominally Leftist political party that presently governs Britain recently declared that "we are all Thatcherites now". And that is the LEFT of British politics. Can we imagine Ted Kennedy saying that "We are all Reaganites now"?



Monarchy


So how does Britain do it? If Britain lacks the cohesive force of Christian faith, what keeps Britain as still one of the world's more civilized and prosperous places? One answer, I believe, is the influence of the monarchy. I myself am in the happy position of being both a keen monarchist and a citizen of a monarchy (Australia) and I tend to assent to the usual monarchist claim that the House of Windsor, for all its human weaknesses, is infinitely more reliable as a model of worthiness than are certain American Presidents with (for instance) strange uses for cigars. Be that as it may, however, I think the reality is that the claims of monarchy are emotional. To be ruled by a distant, glamorous and prestigious figure with access to a lifestyle unimaginable to the ordinary person is the normal lot of mankind. It is democracy that is the freak. The Roman republic succumbed to Caesar and Augustus and the ancient Greek democracies succumbed to the tyrants of first Sparta and then Macedon. So people seem to have evolved to need a monarch. They need that glorious and distant figure at the centre of power in their community.

And the British genius has been to find a way of having their cake and eating it too. They have a monarchy with all the trappings of greatness and real reserve powers yet are nonetheless governed by one of the world's oldest, most stable and effective democracies.

And, as it is so often re-iterated, the monarch is the symbol of the nation and of the continuity of national traditions. The popularity and prestige of the Queen is enormous and her powers are no less real for not being exercised. The reality of the reserve powers of the monarchy was vividly seen in Australia in 1974 when the Queen's representative dismissed a Leftist Federal government that tried to continue governing against constitutional precedent (failure to get its budget through both houses). In short, the monarchy gives the British people a strong sense of security against arbitrary power, a strong sense of their identity, history and nationhood and serves as a model for what is decent and allowable. It is a unifying and cohesive force that transcends differences of class, accent, education, occupation, region etc.

So it may be that in the US, Christianity plays an important part in preserving civility and a healthy common culture but I submit that the monarchy does a similar job for Britain and the other countries where the Queen reigns.

And is it coincidence that the other enduring European monarchies (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands and Belgium) are also highly civilized and stable democracies that have never turned to dictatorship and remain among the more peaceful and prosperous places to live?

More potted history of the European monarchies: The Fascist dictator Mussolini came to power only because the Italian King allowed it. Monarchy is weak in Greece and Spain (though the Spanish have recently restored theirs) and both suffered years of military dictatorship. Germany abandoned their monarchy (with good reason) after World War I and got Hitler in exchange. France decapitated Louis 16th only to get the military dictator Napoleon and the incredible loss of life of his wars in exchange. And look what happened to Russia when they deposed the Tsar! I think it is not unreasonable to conclude from all this that, incredible though it might sound to American ears, monarchy has a powerful role to play in maintaining a civil society and is not easily replaced, once lost.



Other theories of conservatism


Perhaps the best-known work on political psychology is that by Adorno et al. (1950) -- who claim that conservatives are pro-authority whereas Leftists are anti-authority. This vast oversimplification is perhaps an understandable mistake given the characteristic opposition by Leftists in the economically successful "Western" democracies to the existing centres of authority and power in their countries and given the characteristic acceptance by conservatives of those same authorities but it once again lacks in historical perspective. What Leftists oppose is not authority as such (or there would be no Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao etc.) but only authorities that they do not control; and what conservatives favour is not any and all authority but rather carefully limited authority -- only that degree of central authority and power that is needed for a civil society to function. See Ray (1988, 1989 & 1990) for a more extensive critique of the Adorno claims.

The biggest mistake that has been made by psychologists (e.g. Altemeyer 1981 & 1988) and others, however, is to identify conservative motivation with opposition to change. Obviously, from Cromwell to Reagan and Thatcher, change has never bothered "conservatives" one bit -- but preservation of their rights and liberties from governments that would take those rights and liberties away always has. THAT is what has always made a "conservative" -- and it still does.



ONE DIMENSION OR TWO?


As is evident from the above, describing the entire domain of political attitudes in terms of a single Right/Left dimension does have its problems. For this reason various authors (e.g. Eysenck, 1954; Rokeach, 1960; Kerlinger, 1967) have proposed that an adequate description of world politics really needs two dimensions. They propose, for example, that the Left-Right dimension be supplemented by an Authoritarian/Permissive dimension. So that democratic Leftists and Rightists are Permissive Leftists and Rightists whereas Communists and Fascists are Authoritarian Leftists and Rightists.

Although such proposals have considerable intuitive appeal, they do not, unfortunately, seem to coincide with how people's attitudes are in fact organized when we do surveys of public opinion. It is very easy to find people's attitudes polarizing on a Left/Right dimension but nobody has yet managed to show in a satisfactory way any polarization of attitudes on the postulated second dimension (Ray, 1980 & 1982).

The account of Left/Right attitudes given in this paper suggests why this is so. For a start, the assumption that Fascists or Nazis are Right-wing is false. Hitler himself energetically claimed to be a socialist and Mussolini (the founder of Fascism) was a lifelong Marxist. The evidence for this has been summarized at great length in two previous papers (See here and here) so will not be further elaborated here.

Historically, the core of conservatism has always been a suspicion of government power and intervention and conservatives therefore accept only the minimum amount of government that seems needed for a civil society to function. So it is no wonder that there is no authoritarian version of conservative ideology. If it were authoritarian it could not be conservative.

Leftism, on the other hand, IS intrinsically authoritarian and power-loving and will always therefore tend in the direction of government domination. It is only non-authoritarian to the extent that is thwarted by external influences (such as democracy) from achieving its aims. Leftists in democratic societies do of course commonly deny authoritarian motivations but that is just part of their "cover". Deeds speak louder than words.



EGOTISM: THE LARGER PICTURE


Egotism has been pinpointed in this paper as a major psychological source of a Leftist orientation. It seems reasonable therefore to have a more searching look at egotism in general.

There is no dispute that thinking well of oneself is in general healthy, normal and desirable. But it is very difficult to point an optimum level of self-satisfaction. That ego can very easily go beyond an optimum is nonetheless surely clear. It could even be argued that excess ego is the besetting "sin" of the human race, that people generally are far more in love with themselves than is wise. By this I mean that many if not most of our troubles can be traced to people thinking too highly of themselves. Let us consider some examples:



Crime


As perhaps the most obvious instance of egotism, crime involves the criminal thinking that he alone matters and that (for instance) the person who has worked to earn possession of certain assets is not nearly so entitled to those assets as the criminal (thief) who wants them. The thief is putting his wants far above any consideration for others.



Nationalism


In the post-Soviet world, one of the most pernicious forms of excessive ego is nationalism and racism. We all know how Hitler's incredible ego gave birth to the notion that he and his fellow Teutons were a superior race and thus justified and brought about the slaughter of some of Europe's best and brightest (the Jews). But even in the last decade of the second millennium there were Hitlers everywhere, from Serbia to Rwanda. Everywhere the folly of believing that those like oneself (i.e. those of one's own group, tribe, nation or race) are somehow better or more worthy is leading to mass slaughter of outgroup members. How much a little humility would do towards preventing such evils.



Gambling


Perhaps it is my Presbyterian upbringing but it seems to me that another great evil that afflicts many in all societies I know of is gambling. It causes significant losses to many and is quite disastrous to some -- leading to poverty, broken marriages, crime etc. Yet even vision-challenged Frederick knows that the house always wins in the end and that 99% of gamblers lose in the end. Even those who win big at the lottery etc generally seem to blow it all and rapidly return to poverty. So why fight such extremely adverse odds? Why devote oneself to fighting losing battles? Why destroy one's hard-earned money so pointlessly? Ego. The gambler thinks he is special. He must (almost by definition) think that he can beat the odds. He thinks that he has special powers or special luck. What a fool! Gambling could then be seen as a rather pernicious form of mental illness if one did not understand that it is derived from our dominant human folly of excess ego.



Religion


Religion is perhaps the most pervasive expression of ego. Ego thinks that he or she is so important that he/she cannot really die and that the creator of the universe is concerned about his/her every thought and deed! How unrealistic! How ludicrous! How egocentric! If the universe does have a creator, such a creator is surely far above any human passions or concerns and has far bigger things to concern him/it than worry about what some priest does with his penis (for instance). And yet what evils have been perpetrated in the name of religion! Without excess ego, we would, for instance, have no Islamic fundamentalism.



Communism


And that secular religion known as Socialism or Communism is just another case in point. Some middle-class academic theorists were egotistical enough to think that they could with a little thought remake all of mankind's economic arrangements for the better overnight. They thought that they could repeal some of the deepest human passions by legislation and "education". From Lenin to Pol Pot they killed millions in their procrustean attempt to make humanity fit their preconceived notions. What towering ego and what a vast evil! Despite the now almost universally acknowledged failure of the Communist experiment, however, the ego that drove the Communists and their ilk has not gone away. In modern Leftists it still leads to pervasive "equalizing" follies, but on a less ambitious scale.



Capitalism


One of the great virtues of capitalism is that, in capitalism, excess ego is largely self-correcting. I may think I have this great idea that will enable me to sell millions of products or services and put everything I have into the project in the firm belief that I will make millions out of it. But if I am wrong and I am not as clever as I thought I was, people will not buy and I will go broke. I will learn a lesson in humility the hard way.



Humility versus Self-Esteem


So in the end I am again struck by the insight of that much quoted but little heeded wise man -- Jesus Christ -- in his preaching of humility and concern for others (e.g. Matthew 5:3-5; 18:4; 23:8-12). It does seem to be just what the human race needs. The "self-esteem" gospel that passes for wisdom among present-day psychologists is the antithesis of this in that it positively fosters the growth of ego. In Christian terms this psychological credo could perhaps well be characterized as the Devil's gospel. In my own personal terms, I would simply say that for the good of us all we need less self-esteem, not more.

The self-esteem gurus would no doubt argue that Hitler had to have LOW self-esteem to perpetrate his anti-social evils. If, however, the self-proclaimed "leader" (Fuehrer) of the "master-race" (Herrenvolk) was short of self-esteem, what meaning could the concept have? If Hitler had low self-esteem, how would we ever recognize high self-esteem? We would need some pretty circular definitions, I suspect.

This does however highlight the seeming paradox that many of those who seem to have very high self-regard also often seem to a have high need for that self-regard to be reinforced. The person with excess ego also seems to have a high ego-need. This is hardly surprising, however. There is much in the world and in life that tells each of us about our inadequacies, failures and mistakes so any person who has a high level of self-love has a lot of attacks on that self-love to fend off, counteract and defend against. The higher one's self-love, the more there is to attack and the more one will have a need to get it justified in some way. Humility would make life a lot simpler and realism a lot easier. It is no wonder that the inflated ego of the Leftist makes him/her an habitual denier of reality.



The Biology of Egotism


From the viewpoint of theoretical (evolutionary) biology, high self-esteem was probably once necessary and adaptive. In pre-modern times, when human life was generally "nasty, brutish and short" (to misquote Leviathan by Hobbes), it took a lot of ego to carry on and think that one could survive and do well. Without a lot of ego, a rational man might well have been tempted in such times to "drop his bundle" (give up, cease the struggle, lie down and die). Only unrealistic egotism could support in him the belief that he could do better than the common lot of man at that time and thus keep on struggling and surviving. Now that survival and a good lifespan is for most of us more or less guaranteed and boredom is a far greater problem than enough food or other material basics, excess ego has lost its point and has only negative consequences -- as outlined above.



DENIAL OF REALITY


"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." (H.L. Mencken)


There would seem to be some possibility that excess ego can be curbed. The traditional Christian preaching of humility certainly assumes that. It is doubtful, however, that another underpinning of Leftism can be much influenced: Denial of reality.

Denial is perhaps best known through the work of Sigmund Freud as a classical neurotic symptom or coping mechanism. Instead of dealing with uncomfortable truths, the neurotic acts as if those truths simply do not exist. This is, of course, very maladaptive and creates at least as many problems as it solves. Sadly, however, it would seem that reality denial is far from limited to psychiatric cases. Denial would appear to be in fact much more common even than excess egotism. Human beings generally do not handle reality well. That is why humans are such a drug-using species. Whether it be alcohol, cannabis, opiates, Khat, cocaine, nicotine or merely caffeine, few of us seem able to face life without chemical crutches. Straight reality is generally too much for us.

Religion too is essentially a reality denying exercise. As Marx famously said, it is the "opium of the people". Those of us with ultimately Judaic traditions delude ourselves into believing that somewhere there must exist some real counterpart to the omnipotent and benevolent father we thought we had in our early childhood and those of us influenced by Eastern religions generally believe that our elder family members continue to be able to help us even after death. We invent imaginary helpers and benefactors to replace the lack of real ones.

But WHY are human beings so uncomfortable with reality? Why do they use so many means to "escape" it? Again it probably goes back to more primitive times when reality was very oppressive and dispiriting. Only those who could escape reality in some way had the heart to carry on. So a talent for ignoring unpleasant truths was adaptive. In the modern world, however, reality is much more benign and, as Freud saw, denying it can easily descend into the psychopathological.

So any attack on the reality-denying habits of Leftists would appear doomed to failure. Even such an overwhelming reality as the utter collapse of the world's 70 year experiment with Communism caused them not at all to abandon their equalitarian mania but only to change their focus somewhat.



CONCLUSIONS


Only the briefest attempt has been made in this paper to define or study conservatism or the political Right. The focus has been almost entirely on the political Left (in world terms) or "liberalism" (in North American terms). It is concluded that the one thing that all Leftists have in common (until they get into complete power) is a desire for change in society -- and that for most Leftists advocating change serves mainly to meet the Leftist's strong ego-needs -- the need for attention, praise and, ultimately power. Leftists are not therefore really much interested in the reality of what they advocate -- so normally greatly oversimplify any political issues that they debate -- often to the point of ignoring many of the facts of the matter.



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Copyright May 11th to September 16th., 2002.


The paper may however be circulated freely as long as it is unmodified and postings of it are welcome.

Note that the articles by J.J. Ray cited in the list of references above are all now available for viewing online. See here.

Further enquiries by email.

Just as a final note: Over a period of about 20 years I wrote and had published in the academic journals of psychology and sociology a total of over 200 papers on the psychology of ideology but all the papers concerned seem to have sunk almost without trace. (But see here for some of them).

The publication of a much earlier version of this present paper in Front Page Magazine on June 20th., 2002 did however by contrast generate a very lively and continuing correspondence: Quite a comment on the power of the internet and the irrelevance of most academic writing!




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