No panaceas: What MMT gets right, and wrong, about fighting inequality

I've been making an effort lately to understand more about so-called "Modern Monetary Theory" (MMT). There's been an uptick in the use of "MMT Welfare State" and "People's QE" talking points from well-meaning but naive progressives that's making me anxious, for reasons I'll get to in the final section of this blog. I've watched a bunch of interviews with and lectures by Dr Stephanie Kelton (Bernie's Chief Economic Advisor), as well as dived into the blog of Australian economist Bill Mitchell, and in all honesty found that there's not much in what they say I disagree with. What concerns me more is what they don't say, and the policy lessons that others are drawing from MMT with their tacit encouragement. 

What's good isn't original and what's original isn't very good

Let's start with what the MMT theorists get right, and that's their understanding of public finance and the role it plays in the economy. MMT proponents understand, in a way that neoclassical economists often elide or obfuscate, that the state is the consumer, producer and investor of last resort . Taxation and redistribution are not arbitrary and selfish activities undertaken by a rapacious bureaucracy, but necessary tasks to: compensate for insufficient or 'leaky' demand in the economy; guarantee social and economic rights; manage foreign trade; and address the dilemma of declining profits under capitalism and the paradox of thrift. 

MMT gets this right, of course, because it's a simple restatement of basic left economics. In general terms, competitive economic activity is characterised by a multiplicity of dilemmas of interdependence, which produce collective action problems for society as a whole. Taxation is an institutional solution to these problems which redistributes surplus profits to support demand-side consumption by those who are left behind by the competitive market. The government performs other essential institutional roles by regulating trade, supporting long-term investment in R&D and infrastructure and funding basic services that cannot be provided through self-help. Unlike classical economists, Keynesians and MMT proponents all accept that market failures are an endemic and permanent feature of competitive economic systems that require the existence of strong public institutions to correct. 

The chief motivating interest of modern monetary theorists is to counteract the right-wing talking point that government spending and deficits are harmful to the economy. They do this very well: governments which run a deficit are trading on their institutional reputation to pump extra funds into the private economy in much the same way that banks loan against the trusted value of real property to increase home ownership rates. But you don't need MMT to fight back against austerity and deficits hawks: any heterodox economic perspective will get you to that point. Which is why orthodox Keynesians consider MMT proponents to be radicals: they're not just interested in finance, but in the role of monetary policy in supporting public spending, a topic which most economists on both right and left treat with the utmost caution. 

The meat of MMT, therefore, lies in its account of the monetary system and the way in which currency is created and employed. While disconcerting for most people (and many economists!), there's little to disagree with in the MMT description of how Central Banks establish the value of currency through the purchase and redemption of government debt and the regulation of fractional reserve banking. MMT presents itself as a revival of German "Chartalist" ideas in which the value of money is set by laws and institutions. They often mix this account with the paranoid right-libertarian version of the same narrative, in which money is given its value through the state's monopoly on the use of violence and the coercive imposition of taxes to create debt. These narratives are uncontroversial, if incomplete. We've lived in a world of fiat money backed by trust in state institutions since the 1970s, and it works just fine. 

From a cultural evolutionary perspective, it's absolutely true that both the reputation of institutions and violent coercion can be used as mechanisms to generate compliance with a social norm (the value of money being essentially, a shared belief or practice). But institutions and punishments are not the only ways in which social order is established and maintained. MMT proponents are dismissive of the neoclassical exchange theory of value: that money obtains utility becuase it's an efficient shared unit of exchange and account. But as I write in Chapter II of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", the neoclassical account of exchange value as the product of intersubjective belief and social learning is essentially correct (once we adjust for structural inequalities). Although a powerful hegemon can establish the 'rules of the road' for the economy, the continuing utility of norms can be and is in fact supported by a combination of different social mechanisms including the tacit consent of citizens. 

And by dismissing this part of the picture, MMT proponents start to get things wrong. Because the value of money is mutually constructed by both the requirement of the state that debts be redeemable in its currency and the tacit consent of its citizens that fiat currency is a useful medium of exchange and unit of account, then the capacity of the state to spend by simply issuing currency is not unlimited, not even theoretically. A state *could* dictate the value of its currency using only coercion, but that would be a radically different governance regime to the liberal democracies we prefer to rule us. The Levy Institute, for example, advocates for capital controls typically employed by the very same fixed-exchange rate autocracies they purport to critique! Institutional trust in government and the state's power to coerce compliance are not unconstrained, and therefore the government's capacity to issue currency in pursuit of its policy aims is not unlimited in the way MMT suggests. 

MMT economists are extremely adept at arguing that the progressive economic policy space is  wider than that alloted to the state under neoliberalism. And as a description of the financial and monetary systems, MMT has much to teach lay economists. But MMT proponents are often guilty, I fear, of validating Hume's dictum that human reasoning slips too readily from describing what 'is' to prescribing what 'ought' to be. 

Big Asterisks

The common criticism of MMT is that it while it describes fiscal and monetary systems well, it underplays the complex interactions between them. Kelton and Mitchell, at least, are very open about the caveats they place on their work. But even so, these are pretty big fucking caveats. Inflation is the main issue lurking beneath the surface, and it's a problem that MMT theorists are far too glib about given how poorly it's understood. It's easy to argue that spending which increases productivity doesn't necessarily increase inflation (because the increase in the value of money in circulation is ideally being offset by an increase in the value of goods being produced). Although the right would no doubt disagree, in a demand-constrained economy like the current moment progressives can demonstrate that more spending on consumption will boost growth whereas further austerity will only choke it off. But the relationships between money, productivity and inflation are highly complex and non-linear, to say the least. 

Problems arise when monetary policy is employed on the assumption that there's a strict correlation between spending and economic activity ("Overt Monetary Financing"). If Central Banks are expected to support fiscal expansion (e.g. through the purchase of government bonds that private savers are unable or unwilling to absorb through open market operations), they risk exogenously devaluing the currency. Money supply is not the only factor leading to inflation, of course, but increasing the availability of any commodity does put downwards pressure on its value. Devaluing currencies drives up prices and corrodes the value of savings, which may counteract the domestic consumption and production effects one is trying to achieve through fiscal expansion (For Mitchell's counterargument on this, see: here) There's a reason the conventional policy view, a view I support in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, is to keep inflation low and the money supply conservative. 

The flip side of preventing inflation is ensuring that the supply of money remains meaningfully linked to the resources of the real economy. As Kelton herself says in one of the clips linked at the top of this piece, it's trivial for the government to give everyone money in their bank account. The more important problem is making sure there are goods and services that people can buy with those funds. That problem is definitely *not* trivial and it cannot be hand waved away - I've read MMT proponents go so far as to say that government spending is fully independent of the real economy. Production is not motivated solely by the macro-availability of money for production and consumption, but at the micro level by the rate of profit and the demand for consumption (this is the perspective I outline in Chapter XIII of my book).

In a market economy it won't matter if the funds to produce and consume necessary goods and services are available if the owners of capital and labour (i.e. workers) cannot be incentivised to produce them. If the rate of profit is low, capitalists have plenty of other things they would rather do with their wealth (i.e. investing overseas, buying into asset bubbles, rent-seek by privatising public assets etc.) than produce goods and services. And if demand for additional consumption is low (because government-supplied 'wages' are high), workers have little motivation to commit their time to perform additional labour. I'm not saying that fundamentally changing our economy to be less reliant on the profit motive and wage labour is a bad thing, only that leaning on MMT to advance these goals without tackling the bigger structural forces at work under capitalism is likely to be extremely counterproductive. 

MMT proponents offer easy solutions for hard problems. They correctly understand the state as a social mechanism for redistribution of wins and losses but don't engage directly with the political question of "who pays" and "who benefits". Distributional justice is the essence of political conflict, and by arguing that it doesn't matter (because the government’s fiscal resources are not scarce), MMT proponents are making a fundamental tactical and strategic mistake. 

Back to the future

I'm anxious about MMT economics rising to prominence on the left because the "MMT welfare state" that some evangelists have proposed looks to me like a fiat money version of 1960s Keynesianism or a demand-side version of post-GFC quantitative easing. If policy-makers are complacent about the critical role of public trust in money and the risk of inflation, there's considerable risk that progressives could walk headlong into a replay of stagflation and the liquidity trap - both of which dramatically worsened inequality We do not want to repeat on the demand-side the collossal failure and waste of supply-side QE, just because those we aim to help are more 'deserving'. MMT gets the diagnosis right, but the cure wrong. 

Another analogy: MMT social welfare states would look a hell of a lot like the oil-fuelled “socialism” of Venezuela. The resemblence should give anyone caution: the government in Caracas believed it had a quasi-unlimited store of exogenous wealth which it could use to create a welfare state without fundamentally taking on the institutional power of existing elites or reforming the structure of the economy. But of course the economy was more sensitive to international financial markets and the trust of people in its currency than it suspected. The result? For all its good intentions, the Bolivarian Republic is suffering currency depreciation, inflation, the corroding of normal economic production, increased repression and violent political instability.

There is no short-cut to economic equality: it must be built, step-by-step and by imposing direct costs on the wealth and privilege of those at the top of society. We must not only work to redistribute wealth and income, but to build a production system that does not generate belle epoque-levels of inequality in the first place. By all means, progressive governments should spend more, and worry less about the concern trolling of the deficit hawks. And to balance the books? Raise taxes, especially on the rich. Tax capital aggressively and abolish sweet-heart deals for the influential. Such a programme is going to make enemies, and create losers who will use their considerable resources to fight against us. But that's the kind of hard work politics is for: not throwing clever economics against hard problems. 

Climate Change broke the neoliberal consensus, too

We began my interview last week on the "Connected & Disaffected" podcast talking about political polarisation: what is it, where it's come from, and whether or not we should fear it. My contention in the interview was that the Global Financial Crisis, and to a lesser extent the Iraq War, broke the post- Cold War hegemony of the neoliberal ideological consensus. In other words, the cultural quasi-equilibria characterised by the dominance of neoliberal narratives about society and the economy proved to be no longer fit for its structural environment. As a result, formerly marginalised social narratives are (re-)emerging, an experience that is deeply disconcerting to a generation of people socialised to believe there is no alternative. 

One point from my notes that I didn't get to make in the interview was that climate change was the third and final nail in neoliberalism's coffin. I don't talk about environmental issues often on this blog: I'm not an environmentalist by nature and am generally content to let the experts come up with pragmatic fixes. As I write in Chapter XVII of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", I'm interested in the natural environment primarily as a source of free public services that marginalised people (especially) rely on to survive. I'm interested in how the exploitation and privatisation of the environment fuels the unjust accumulation of wealth by the powerful, and how the distribution of environmental harms of that exploitation often falls hardest on those already disadvantaged (see: Naomi Klein). In other words, I'm not the sort of person who declares that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our times. 

A perfect little problem

Once upon a time, climate change was the perfect problem for the socially-conscious neoliberal. A potentially existential external threat, it has several elements that appealed to the technocratic elite: expert scientific evidence was required to establish the case for action; cooperation between states necessitated vast and complex international negotiations; domestic solutions envisaged creating a new freely-traded market commodity without changing the economic status quo; and there were opportunities to 'educate' the masses about their consumption patterns and nudge them to make 'better choices'. I think it's fair to say all these methods failed one way or another. We're already blowing past the climate targets we set just four years ago; barely half of US adults believe human activity causes climate change; and most of the rise in consumer energy prices has been caused by price-gauging privatised monopolies, not investment in renewable power. 

These failures are the result of the neoliberal worldview, and they should demoralise and delegitimise those techniques for anyone serious about social policy. 

• Experts are not a magic bullet. And scientific facts are not social facts. As I write in the early chapters of my book, governance is about making value judgements. Despite what utilitarians believe, there's no technocratic formula that will calculate the most ethical way in which to distribute wins and losses. Scientists have established the inevitability of potentially irreversible climate change to a virtual certainty, yet that fact alone tells us nothing about what we should do about it. People intuit this: the best studies show that expert evidence has no effect on public opinion about climate change policy. In fact, relying on appeals to scientific authority has only led the powerful opponents of climate action to develop sophisticated techniques to muddy the waters, conduct personal attacks on scientists and discredit the very idea of expert knowledge. So, good job on that one, neoliberals. 
• And then there's the wonkiest of wonk ideas: carbon trading. Why impose a new tax on pollution when we can create a complex new form of private property traded on indecipherably complex financial markets? Oh, and because this property right will be an artificial creature of state regulation, the price and quantity of carbon permits will be easily manipulated by lobbying interests on behalf the very industries that emit the most carbon. Australia's carbon trading scheme - while effective - was so convoluted and unpopular that the conservatives managed to repeal it FIVE YEARS AGO. As Democrats in the US have discovered with healthcare policy, when voters don't understand a public programme it's absurdly easy for opponents of regulation to portray it as a paranoid right-wing fever dream. Better simpler, direct policies that are easy to understand - and harder to attack. 
• Finally, when all collective solutions fail, neoliberalism tells us that fighting climate change is ultimately a matter of individual responsibility. And since individuals have every incentive to free ride in a collective action problem they have no power over, why we simply need to educate people to make choices contrary to their own rational self interest! I've written before why this kind of 'education' strategy is counterproductive: it creates new hierarchies of knowledge and hides existing hierarchies of power in such a way to generate increased resentment and anxiety from the have-nots. People don't want cheap energy because they're bad people who don't understand climate change: they want cheap energy because they're resource constrained and want one fewer stressor on their daily lives. Middle class neoliberals aren't better or smarter people because of their 'green energy choices', they're using their existing wealth to invest in a social signifier of status. South Park had this one down in 2006.

What's left unsaid

Y'know what's not on this list? The classical sort of central government action traditionally used to solve environmental problems. The same sorts of programs that actually have been implemented and are making the biggest difference in saving us from potential climate catastrophe. Where's China's central planning body setting national targets for solar energy expansion that have made it the world's largest manufacturer of solar cells? The public investment in basic science that led to Australian universities developing modern photovoltaics in the first place? The unilateral government decisions, like Angela Merkel's to close Germany's nuclear power plants, that leads to the market embracing renewables virtually overnight? The basic role of national industry policy in directing subsidies away from the fossil fuel industry and towards more environmentally friendly forms of power generation? The answer is that neoliberalism made these sorts of policy responses literally unthinkable. 

Solving collective action problems requires collective decision-making through national institutions (i.e. governments). As is true of social and economic dilemmas, so too of environmental ones. Nations that are on track to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement are going to do so on the back of their existing competence with industrial management and economic planning. Laissez-faire states without a tradition of government intervention in the economy, like Australia, are least likely to meet them. If you want to save the environment, you're first going to have to take a deeper look at how our societies and economies are structured. Ultimately, I'm with Naomi Klein on this one: our economic system and our relationship with the natural environment are so intrinsically linked that hoping for meaningful action on climate change under neoliberalism is self-defeating. 

Consider that my message for the voters in Batman. 

I was on a podcast!

This week, I was interviewed on the "Connected & Disaffected" politics podcast about my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", my current work on cultural evolution and the role of social media in feeding political polarisation. If you want to here me talk a little more about the origins of the book, I highly recommend checking it out.!

In other news, for non-Australians looking to obtain a paperback copy of the book, I'm pleased to announce that "Politics for the New Dark Age" is available from the Book Depository - who will ship it to anywhere in the world! No excuses now!

Follow the link here and buy "Politics for the New Dakr Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder"!

The Structure and You! Privilege, Preference and #MeToo

The left-of-centre streamer Destiny has argued in a series of recent videos that the Left needs to do a better job at persuasion: that we've lost the capacity to argue effectively for our positions. This is a task I also identify and take up in my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". One of Destiny's principle talking points has been that while the Left is often good at identifying structural injustice in society (as I put it: the Left is liberalism plus structural critique), we often critique it in a way that's perceived by the ordinary voter who participates in those structures as an attack on their personal identity. 

This is an important point worth engaging, because it recurs in a range of policy areas. Take, as an example, the recent back-and-forth between YouTubers Arielle Scarcella and Contra Points over personal sexual preference. The disagreement between the two sides is not whether racist or transphobic (or ableist or fat-shaming) preferences in one's choice of intimate partner are legitimate (both insist they accept this), but rather whether academic critique of the cause and consequences of those preferences at a social level undermines that principle of individual choice. This twitter spat, of course, is merely a pop culture manifestation of the TERF argument that trans lesbians seek to invalidate the identity of cis lesbians (defined in terms of attraction to female sex characteristics). And it also carries echoes of the lower profile but long-running debate over racism and transphobia in gay male pickup culture. 

Most people have little difficulty reconciling the idea that social cues play a role in the formation of their sexual preferences, even cues coded on problematic categories such as race or age (or gender roles or even dominance hierarchies). We all go about our dating lives, secure in the knowledge that our law and culture renders us sovereign over our choice of intimate partner and the pursuit of our own definition of happiness. Trans people are merely the latest in a long line of formerly marginalised minorities to go through the process of winning greater social visibility and respect; they are not the first step on a slippery slope to the erasure of gay identity or the erosion of the bedrock principle of sexual consent. Most of us are fine with being a little hypocritical now and then when it comes to getting laid. 

A bigger problem: Virtue and Vice

But trans acceptance is merely the tiny tip of a very large social iceberg. Perhaps the principle way in which most people experience this phenomenon is when it comes to feminism, or more precisely: the concept of the patriarchy. Most of us have very little exposure of academic feminism, and even those few men (and women!) that do often hesitate to label themselves as feminists. Why? Surely, we can all agree that sexual assault is a very bad thing and that women should not be harassed or intimidated or made subject of violence. But - they insist - #notallmen are like that, by which of course they mean *I* (or my husband, or my father, or my son) am (is) not like that. Rather than putting aside their own identity to listen to the subjective experience of women about how you (yes you!) have contributed to and likely benefitted from a hierarchy that inhibits women's careers and violates their personal autonomy, they complain that feminism has gone too far and threatens their identity as men. 

There are echoes of this too in the discussion of "working class whites", racial privilege and identity politics. The Left critique of structural racism and the way it privileges white identities is qualitatively and quantitatively rigorous. And yet the fact remains that due to widespread economic inequality, many white voters do not *feel* privileged - or indeed racist - at all! Despite the fact that Democratic Party policies would have done more to alleviate their material disadavantage than Republican ones, many conservative white voters chose to support an actual bigot over the candidate who put them in the "basket of deplorables". Most of Trump's supporters have no real attachment to white nationalism. But they will continue to be activated by a backlash bias against politicians who they perceive as attacking their sense of self as 'good people'.

The reality is that while formal philosophy largely focuses on deontological (or rule-based) and consequentialist ethics, most people continue to act as if their virtue was all that mattered. We all have a psychological need to see ourselves as good people, who do only good things for good reasons. We can recognise when bad things happen, but these bad things are done by bad people for bad reasons. In many ways, getting people to think this way about unjust structural categories is a victory. By the 21st century, most people agree that racist behaviour is bad and that people who perform racism are racists who deserve social ostracism. Social movements largely stop the act of persuasion at that point, because we've effectively won. But using categorical rhetoric to persuade people who think categorically limits our capacity to keep fighting when society moves on and new issues arise. We were so successful in convincing ordinary voters that legal racism or homophobia was bad that when we go back and ask them to recognise that ending legal discrimination left behind persistent structural inequalities (such as the treatment of trans people), they reject us on the same rhetorical grounds that we ourselves taught them to use. 

The whole point of intersectionality and solidarity as a practice is to get people to listen and consider their place in society in relation to others. The centre and the right do not reject 'identity politics' because marginalised groups label themselves as victims: they oppose 'identity politics' because it serves to place them in the role of oppressors, a role that is at odds with their own sense of self. Solidarity ultimately is a two-way street: we have to persuade people not only of the justice of a single cause, but to be part of a perpetual movement of interlocking causes. But by the same token, we on the Left must avoid using our own categories in ways which are politically detrimental to the construction of such a solidaristic movement. 

Where does that leave us?

One of the great advantages of evolution-centric thinking is that it conditions you to think in terms of the properties of populations, and not the properties of individuals. In this vein, racism, heteronormativity, homophobia and transphobia are measurable properties of the the social structure and thus should only be used to categorise society as a whole. Individuals, on the other hand, are not completely determined by categories: behaviour is probabilistic and therefore at least partially contradictory. People don't *feel* accurately defined by the labels like racist or transphobe because they often have subjectively good intentions and often blind to the negative consequences of their behaviour, which may be casual or incidental. As a result, they feel that critiques of structural categories are inherently personal.  

So I think our starting position has to be that structural categories can only properly describe populations and behaviours, and not individuals. We can and should talk about how our collective decision-making leads to adverse consequences that disproportionately help or hinder certain categories of person. We can and should talk about the behaviour sets that effectuate and perpetuate those decisions. But we should be extremely reluctant to attribute a category to individuals or sub-populations. Structural racism, for example, is an unequal relationship between constructed racialised categories and is not the defining identity of any one group, even if that group disproportionately benefits from that unequal relationship. Transphobia, too, is a systematic pattern of oppression of trans individuals that is sustained by recurring patterns of discriminatory behaviour and belief, not the malicious intent of any specific individual or sub-group. 

Of course, some people are just assholes. We can and should question how the individual chooses to relate to the structure. The vast majority of the time, they will be neutral or passive towards it. Sometimes, as with the patriarchy, they will actively benefit from it. Rarely, they will serve as active enforcers of structural inequality: punishers of deviance and propagators of supporting ideology. When people have power, and choose to use that power to sustain inequality, then it's fair to call them out for being bigots. But when people lack power and merely benefit passively from the structure, we need to be delicate in prying them from their attachment to the status quo. In particular, we need to find ways to break the identification between group identities and the self-appointed leaders of groups, so that our critiques of those with power aren't received as attacks on the powerless. 

It's OK to be a little uncool sometimes

Progressives, generally, are more comfortable with ambiguity than conservatives. We more readily accept that it's ok to be uncool and hypocritical sometimes. That passively benefitting from racial privilege or only wanting to be intimate with people with vaginas doesn't make us any less of an ally to our comrades-in-arms. Authoritarians have a harder time with this: they are compelled to reconcile their personal identity with social contructed categories. Ultimately, our long-term goal should be to bring about social conditions that make more people into progressives, rather than merely constructing new social structures that cause conservatives to follow our behaviourial lead. Because we're going to want things (now and in the future) that we haven't yet socialised conservatives into supporting. And if we move forward without a way of doing so, the backlash will continue to be strong and fierce. 

The Left eats its children. The Right digs up its dead. (Good!)

There's been a bit of discussion lately on the podcasts I regularly listen to  about whether and how the Left 'eats it own'. The possibility of renewed radicalism on the millennial left, a radicalism with a real prospect of winning and holding political power within the lifetime of those alive today, is meeting with a predictable backlash. A whole generation of centre-leaning media and political personalities - Bill Maher, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jon Haidt etc. - are promoting their belief that contemporary political polarisation is at least in part a reaction to the left's renewed radicalism. I have grave doubts about the sincerity of such people: blaming the left serves as an excuse to spout their own shitty beliefs, and "concern trolling" about the future of the progressive movement is as much about fighting for their own political power and prestige as it is about seeing the left as a whole succeed. 

Conservatives and reactionaries have never needed the left to excuse their existence. Yet centrists historically spend more time fretting about socialists provoking fascists than actually trying to achieve progress. While actual leftists battled Nazis on the streets of Weimar, Germany's centrist elite handed their country over to Hitler. Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" castigates white moderates more concerned with order than progress. Meanwhile, people friendly to marriage equality and gay rights - some gay themselves - are unfairly blaming the trans community for impugning the LGBT community as a whole. Everywhere, centrists are so concerned with respectibility and group consensus that they fail of offer effective defense of either individual rights or progressive social outcomes. 

The Left Devours Its Children. And That's a Good Thing. 

I address this phenonmenon in the Introduction to my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". Belief in the possibility of capital-P "progress" is what makes socialists, well, socialists. We are inclined by both ideology and innate disposition to be open to new experiences and cultural innovation because we trust that they will enrich the life of our community. However, 

"If the left’s animating beliefs are [defined by] single issues alone, it will continue to lead to left-wing politicians, parties and their supporters becoming more and more conservative as they age. Progressivism can devour its own children. Because social advancement is the natural outcome of the human condition, if we have our vision fixed only on the road immediately in front of us, sooner or later we’ll run out of road."

There's a reason why many Gen-X centre leftists, who grew up in a cultural environment characterised by neoliberal economics and soft social liberalism are increasingly defining themselves as centre-right "classical liberals" as the civil rights struggles of their childhood are resolved and a harder edged socialist economics returns to prominence. There's a reason the Boomer neoconservatives abandoned the left during the Cold War struggle against communism. There's a reason why many TERFS use the language of second wave feminism and anti-capitalism to attack trans people right alongside the misogynistic and pro-capitalist right. These people are angry and frustrated; I believe them when they say their beliefs haven't changed. They feel like it's the 'Left' that's moved, not them. But there was never and will never be a Platonic ideal of the 'Left'. What these people are experiencing is the first hand flow of time and progress. This the fate of our kind: to see society carry on past us. 

The progressive Australian political Podcast "Boonta Vista Socialist Club" asked what issue would tip them over the line from progressive to conservative. One co-host replied "poly acceptance" - a regrettable answer, as that issue is coming and coming soon. Another said "furry acceptance", a funnier and better reply. We all face the slow dawning realisation that many of our favourite TV shows (and actors and comedians and directors) are 'problematic'. There are two possible responses to this realisation. One is to do as #GamerGate did and throw a political temper tantrum that drives you into the willing arms of the far right. Another is to accept the complexity of the relationship between past and future. We can laud those who opposed slavery, even if they also held troubling views of race. We can praise the suffragettes fights for legal equality, even some held authoritarian views, for example, on eugenics. Part of being a progressive is acknowledging the achievements of the past while recognising that they never go far enough. The struggle for liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a matter of continual myopic optimisation - we will never achieve utopia, but not for want of trying. 

Moreover, the inflexibility of the individual serves to some degree as a useful brake on the dreams of the radicals. The truth is, moving too far too fast does invite a backlash. Revolutionary fervor may speed up the pace of progress, but it willingly abandons the possibility of receiving meaningful feedback from the rest of the population and risks splitting a society in ways that can only be resolved through violence. When we have big, progressive generations like the millennials, we can and should use the opportunity to move things forward quite far. But the existence of the "classical liberals" is a reminder that we have to message toward those we leave behind as well. 

The Right digs up its dead

OK, so far this blog has done a lot of naval gazing. But what about the equivalent phenonmenon on the Right? If we lose older progressives as the Overton Window moves left, what happens when the Overton Window moves right? I would argue that if the Left eats its children, then the Right raises its dead. As societies learn and grow, the reprehensible views, beliefs and behaviours they contained in the past seem dead and forgotten. They are not of course: the process of cultural evolution merely suppresses reprehensible practices, it does not eliminate them. They continue to exist at lower frequencies in the population, subject to punishment if expressed publicly but still capable of surving in forgotten cultural backwaters and re-invading the body politics if its defenses weaken. 

So when the Overton Window shifts in a more conservative direction, as it sometimes does in response to social and economic crisis? Well, guess what? Fascism's back! Racism's back! Homophobia's back! Religious fundamentalism's back! When they win ground, conservatives goes looking for ideas in the past. Fortunately for us, the past is full of terrible ideas. Ideas that many generations of people alive today have been socialised into having an intense and visceral moral revulsion towards. That's the conservative brake, that's what stops conservatives from running away with a society or splitting it in two: when they start resurrecting zombie ideas, most people think they've gone too far and pick up their shotguns. 

Yet there's a unique danger here. The most insidious tactic of the purveyors of bad ideas, the ones they have been forced to learn by becoming cultural rebels in order to survive is this: looking and appearing normal will lower the defenses of a society enough to let you infiltrate it. Look normal, speak normal, act normal. Appropriate the style and rhetoric of successful authority figures. Be polite, obey the laws and norms as best you can. Use the thin edge of the wedge of your ideas to appeal to diaffected 'centrists'. The far right have mastered these techniques because they had no other choice: without these techniques, their ideologies would have died our generations ago when they were abandoned by the mainstream. The far left are too new to have mastered the same tactics. 

The exuberance of youth

In the end, perhaps this is the true point og difference between left and right in a cultural evolutionary framework. New far left ideas are often divorced, deliberately so, from cultural constructs. Their practitioners are young and enthusiastic, but unblooded in techniques for attaining cultural dominance. The far right, on the other hand, are wiley survivors, adept at masking their presence and swimming upstream in a culture that despises them. Neither advantage is likely decisive, and the success of a given idea is likely to be primarily determined by structural factors given by the extant distribution of power and production in society. In the long run, we must admit that the future belongs to the young.