Quote of the day - Peron on A Country Being Like a Guitar

Image credit.

Thomas Palley citing Juan Domingo Peron to explain his view of the Clintons:

A country is like a guitar. You pick it up with the left hand, and you play it with the right hand.

To the best of my ability, I try to keep this blog free from partisan politics. Which is why I refrain from statements that, as I see it, ask to be taken as partisan pronouncements. Of course, it is not possible to preclude that readers do read a political position into some of what is argued in this blog — irrespective of how plausible such insinuations may actually be. And, of course, a blog dealing with the social sciences cannot possibly be without political content, overt and covert. So, my ambition is rather to avoid political statements, and, when they are made, to stay away as far as possible from exaggeration, one-sidedness or outrageous ideological colouring. 

A friend of mine has recently sent me the below lines, and the video, which I publish anonymously, but with her permission. I think, her view is well worth pondering, though I do not necessarily agree with her conclusions, and certainly not with the last line of her argument:

What has most alienated me from the left, even from those among them espousing reasonable policies, is their commitment to a kind of groupthink that flatly denigrates capitalism, in fact, mostly dismissing it out of hand.

I continue to feel that capitalism is wonderful, and that in levelling deserved criticism at it, we should always be aware of its strength, beauty, and humanity. But, of course, these qualities demand that we are critical of capitalism and that we support it assuming responsibilities that we cannot expect capitalism to perform naturally.

An inability to see the imperfections of capitalism is as bad an an inability to recognise its unprecedented achievements and possibilities.

I do not think that Thomas Palley has all the answers. But he does raise issues that we better be aware of. For instance, I do think that globalisation does come with genuine dilemmas, some of which may be insoluble. Globalisation appears to have worked wonders in reducing world wide poverty; but it also poses massive challenges to the hitherto economically more advanced countries which may find it difficult to countenance the need to apply some measure of national egotism if they are to avoid major social disruptions.

It may well be that we have been moving too far into the neoliberal direction since the late 1970s, especially since the breakdown of communism, but what certainly exacerbates and complicates the imbalance is the dissolution of a genuinely social democratic left, which used to be the centre of the political spectrum in the West.

Instead a new ideological movement, which I like to call the regressive left, increasingly dominates the identity of "the left". In so far as it is actively shaping the political agenda it betrays a lack of sense of reality projecting a world without scarcity and sensitive trade-offs, as in dreams of unlimited immigration or a belief in politically correct energy sources that are insufficient to support a modern economy and therefore ultimately inimical to the environment. In so far as the regressive left is tied in with the capitalist establishment it seems well represented by the greens, who are the ideological power centre of the regressive left, and who one keen-witted pundit described as "neoliberals with bikes."

I do find it plausible that under certain conditions corporate interests will support a politics of short-termism, such as investing in heavily subsidised "renewable" energy, especially if this is the only way to stay profitable. And if politics and resourceful special corporate interests increasingly become insulated from democratic control, as appears to be the case in the EU, and derivatively on the national level — when decisions that matter are sucked upwards to some opaque and unaccountable EU bureaucracy and their lobbying entourage — we may be in for an unholy alliance between economically powerful short-termism and a politics of uncontrolled ideological zealotry.

So, from the point of view of vintage social democracy, as we knew it during the post-war period up to the 1980s, it may well be true that the new left is treating us like a guitar that it picks up with the left and then goes on to play it with the right.

See also Kapiert? (2).

Incidentally, I understand, a guitar is properly played with both hands, the left and the right.