The Shifting Sands of Politics
Political evolution, migration, or just watching the landscape slide left.
Twitter graphic from Colin Wright
My head has been spinning for some time trying to figure out the recent trends in American politics, and my own “evolution” is as good an example as any. I put “evolution” in quotes, as I might with “migration,” because, really, it’s a shifting of the ground under my feet. My views haven’t changed so much as they’ve had the rug pulled out from under them.
Back in the day, like, the eighties, my political north star was what I called “decentralism.” I probably got the term from somebody. By this I meant that political power should be decentralized over the population and the nation. Decision-making, as much as possible, should be devolved to communities and localities, as well as all forms of power- industrial, economic, policing, and so on. I was pretty vague on the details, being in my twenties, but I knew it when I saw it. A term you heard going around at the time was “localism,” which would also have worked just fine for me then.
My views incorporated a lot of agrarianism—straight from Thomas Jefferson and J.R.R. Tolkien—itself a strong American tradition, and the basis of this whole book. This belief, in short, is that rural communities are a good way to organize a society. Rural communities produce a stronger democracy, a more independent, self-reliant, and better informed populace, and people of good character. I have never been one to argue that everyone needs to be an agrarian, and there’s a lot to be said for cities and modern technologies. But for those who choose an agrarian life, their rural communities strengthen the whole of society.
This model prefers a smaller scale, from cities and businesses to factories and farms. It is vaguely anti-global trade, and prefers local manufacture and local foods. This school of thought prefers that these factories and farms be owned and managed by the people who work them. We talked a lot about what we called appropriate technology, basically simpler, often homemade technology, that was thought to better take into consideration the social ramifications its implementation might have. Small is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher, and the Whole Earth Catalog were ubiquitous. There was a lot of DIY, often with laughable results, like the guy who painted his solar collector silver instead of black. One of the beauties of solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies, was said to be that they were inherently decentralized and naturally distributed, and didn’t require being tied to the power grid.
Agriculture would be mostly organic and traditional. Thomas Jefferson would have felt at home. And of course it would be small scale, involving lots of vegetables, apparently, and probably use a lot of draft animals. A lot of it wasn’t very well thought out, at least on my part, and I, as well as others, expressed a lot of contradictory views.
Politically, it corresponds to Federalism, the movement to devolve political power from the federal government to the states, and takes it a step further to localities and communities. Governmental functions would be left to these localities as much as possible. Think school boards instead of state departments of education. Individuals would only be regulated to the minimum extent necessary to make society function, such as to prevent crime, though we kind of thought that such things wouldn’t happen if society were organized properly. It was very anti-corporate and anti-big government. It was flat out utopian.
Looking back at this, you can see that, politically, this was neither conventionally right nor conventionally left. A distrust of centralized government is right-wing in American political thought, but anarchists bring this in from the left, as well. A distrust of business is left-wing, but a free-market flourishing of small business with easy entry is right-wing.
You’d go to alternative energy fairs, and see both countercultural hippies and conservative kulaks. Both considered themselves homesteaders. You’d see Amish at the fairs and vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventist restaurants. You’d have to say this movement was neither strictly left or not strictly right, but with elements of both. It was opposed to both right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing Marxism. It was actually pretty unique. It was much more Hobbits in the Shire than Soviet collective farm.
There was a big cultural component to this, as well. There was a lot of talk of communities. People listened to traditional music— remember folk music? They looked back to at least some cultural traditions. People talked natural food all the time. They baked whole wheat bread, made pickles, and experimented with traditional foods.
I considered myself of the Left, because I lived in a very liberal college town at the time, but I had all these conservative notions, too. Most of the people I knew considered themselves leftists, too, though, in retrospect, they weren’t uncomfortable with these conservative notions either. Honestly, it was neither strictly left nor right.
Was I dreaming? Did somebody switch out my herbal tea? Was this a prolonged hallucination?
Because today, the notions I cherished as a leftie in the 70’s and 80’s, the very notions that I thought made me left-of-center, are considered right-wing. Natural foods are right-wing, white supremacist even. So’s exercise. I’m not making this up. Decentralized government? Are you kidding? The Left is back to centralized planning as much as possible, just like Mao. In fact, they want to take law-making away from elected legislatures, give it to the executive and the judiciary, and even better, the administrative state. We want experts making policy, not the ignorant body politic. Look at the top-down rules, the censorship of opposing views, the lack of transparency, the lying, the deference to authority, the mandates, that we saw during the Covid pandemic. “I represent the Science,” proclaims the exalted Faucci.
Everything is turned on its head. Left is right. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
I was beginning to wonder if I’d made this all up. Everything is memory-holed. Nobody talks about it. Am I losing my mind? I was actually besieged with doubt.
Then I heard Paul Kingsnorth, an environmental writer, say the same thing.
It’s an excellent interview worth listening to. His environmentalism, in the 90’s, was similarly neither left-nor-right, though he also considered himself on the left for no particular reason. But then as it all shifted, he, like me, didn’t. He became an orthodox Christian, just as I re-activated my own Christianity. He also, it should be noted, moved from a city to a farm. He was pretty much singing the same song I was. Thank God I wasn’t going crazy, at least not by myself.
So what happened? I think the Left was for decentralized control as long as it saw itself out of power. But then during the Obama administration, everything changed. The Left slowly realized that it was the Establishment. Weatherman bombers Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayers, out of prison, were not just influential college professors, but close friends and confidants of President Obama. In fact, most college professors were leftists. Much of the administrative state and civil service were retooled leftists. And those that weren’t, like the Weathermen, could see which way the wind blew. If you were a centrist, you moved left. Centralized government was looking better and better, and suddenly, Marxism made sense. Roof-top solar was replaced by massive solar farms, homemade wind mills by 300-foot tall offshore arrays. Environmental concerns became merely a justification for socialism.
Solar then.
Solar now.
So, I, and anybody else who stood by their convictions above their tribal affiliation, found themselves moving right, or rather, standing still and watching the landscape slide by to the left. It’s been weird. I’d like to believe my views are better thought out and more consistent now, even though the Overton window has shifted. Or maybe because it has.
But at least it wasn’t just me.