The Right Are Furious That Abuse Doesn’t Work

We must have sympathy for the right.

After all, it’s difficult being a conservative these days. Progressive politics are proceeding at a rapid pace. World leaders preaching kindness and compassion are lavished with praise and acclamations. You can’t hit your kids anymore, you can’t hit your dog, you can’t hit your horse, you can’t hit each other, you definitely can’t hit your wife, you can’t fire your workers whenever you like — you can’t even rock up to work and do your self-employed job without wearing statistically-lifesaving safety equipment.

And almost every idea that you come up with keeps getting debunked by universities, academics, and researchers, who are, regrettably and terribly, correct. Cruelty doesn’t work.

At the end of the day, Conservatives are so mad that the abuse they want to dish out isn’t sanctioned by statistics and they are running out of excuses for wanting things to be this way.

That raises an interesting hypothetical dilemma as a “leftist”.

Would we still drive ourselves towards these goals of tolerance and empathy if the results suggested otherwise?

 If there was proof that physically punishing kids installed discipline and not trauma, would we still pursue it so hard? If beneficiaries statistically did benefit from “tough love”, would that make it more moral? If treating addictions as illnesses and/or supporting people with their issues was less effective than harsh punishment and incarceration? If communication and consultation with communities and groups wasn’t a markedly better tool than suppression and force?

Over and over again, the worldview that the left espouse is compassion and empathy with others around us. And the right hate it.

The radical demonstrations of compassion from Adern propelled her onto the world stage, and have been mocked by much of the right ever since.

These are a people with ingrained beliefs that there is or( should be) a set social order of some kind; that personal responsibility trumps the collective causes and cures of poor decision-making; that suffering is good for you; and that most of all — and most consistently — that the status quo is the correct one.

And evidence will continue to show that it is not true. Conservatism by definition is anti-progress. They are the sticking point that keeps us from moving forward every time.

That is the role they play and it is not without purpose; progress and leftism can go too far, can produce bad results, and there can be some stupid and ineffective leftist ideas and schemes deployed as a result of leftist philosophy. In theory, conservatism is the force against that, the social segment keeping us from going “too far”.

But if you look at where conservatives have positioned themselves in the recent past and where we find ourselves today, it paints a bit of different picture of their views as a a collective. Slavery, segregation, sexism and strict gender roles, sexual persecution, capital punishment, imperialism… all ideals with poisoned roots that were and still are championed by conservatives.  

 And now, neoliberalism is the latest to be added to that list. The latest ideology to fail the burden of proof test that we should be applying to the policies we implement and philosophies we follow. The latest philosophy based on self-responsibility and maintaining the conservative quo — the rich get richer, remember?

Neoliberalism does not seek to redistribute wealth, it seeks to improve the lot of all by adding to our collective wealth. Which as we’ve discovered, can defeat much of the purpose of us all gaining wealth because the widening of wealth gaps creates a class divide which causes and contributes to all manner of social ills.

“A rising tide lifts all boats” is not limited to conservatives, however. In  fact, one of the most successful Marxist regimes we’ve ever seen used it to eliminate extreme poverty, lifting 100 million people out of the worst economic circumstances we can classify in the modern world.

I am, of course, talking about China, who implemented guaranteed social security at the same time they transformed their economy into a highly-productive and fast-growing machine capable of competing in a neoliberal world and that provided the government the money they needed to support this scheme.

This was not without its drawbacks or it’s costs. This economic triumph is the direct cause of China’s one-child policy and all resulting implications.

Economic expansion required rapid urbanisation, and this came with genuine risks of an exploding, unsupportable urban population. It’s hard to convince people to stay rural and do the hard labour with less opportunity when all these lovely, wealthy cities are springing up. It became imperative for social order that the divide between urban and rural be strictly controlled. It’s also important that a population can be able to sustain itself; adding more per-capita numbers to it waters down your wealth and makes lifting people out of poverty harder (in the immediate future, at least).

We can disagree for the rest of time about the moral and practical implications of China’s policies, but one thing can’t be understated, and that’s it’s overall effectiveness as a poverty reduction measure. China’s driven economic upheaval, combined with its social support and population-control measures (and I’m referring to immigration/urbanisation here, not just the one child policy) is probably the most successful anti-poverty campaign of all time.

In 2021, it was announced that China had eliminated extreme poverty nationwide., That means it lifted 3/4 of the world out of extreme material deprivation of the kind we can barely imagine in the first world.

Not bad going for a bunch of commies, I guess.

Such is the power of collectivism. What has neoliberalism achieved for us, by comparison?

Well, it also lifted people from poverty. Right?

New Zealand’s poverty stats have improved since the sixties, but there has barely been a reduction in the US. However, the more recent Supplemental Poverty Measure has allowed for consideration of near-cash transfers (i.e. non-cash support like food cards, accomodation supplements or provisions, etc) that helps to show these numbers in a kinder light.

The Poverty Center tracked poverty in the US back to 1967 using the this supplemental policy measure, and this threw the claim that poverty had stagnated in the US into question, a finding that has damning implications. It tells us that in a neoliberal economy, it is the social supports that reduce poverty, and not the trickle-down-effect from Roger-Reagan-nomics we were all promised.

It turns out the world is not actually made up of entrepreneurs itching to innovate their way into success all on their own, climbing their own bootstraps to reach the top; we are instead a collective of people who need nurturing and assistance to thrive — and who need to be helping others, too.

It does us good to remember that it is only circumstance and chance that dictates which of us can be found sleeping on Auckland streets or in impoverished rural China, vs. in a cozy, mould-free houses in New Zealand (a sure sign of class if there ever was one!)

Case and point: non-profits. Especially social ones, like the non-profit who saved my life when the metal health system wouldn’t. It was just set up by a dad with a mentally ill kid who saw what was out there and wanted to do better. He’ll never get rich off it, but he’ll do more good in his lifetime, has already done more good in his lifetime, than any startup ever could.

Entrepreneurship does not require financial rewards to motivate it. People want to do these things. It is a privilege to be able to do these things. And it is only once people are supported and encouraged and given firm foundations to propel them along their own path in life are they free to innovate and invent.

Whenever I hear the argument or see a protest sign that reads, “What if your aborted baby would’ve cured cancer?”  I’m reminded of a response I heard once:

What if it’s mother would have?

How many miracle cures have we kept from the world by restricting who could achieve an education like that? How many Ernest Rutherfords came from just a bit too much poverty, or just didn’t get the right kind of breaks order to attend the university that would lead to him splitting the atom?

Did you know Rutherford only made it into university because the person who won his scholarship declined it? Without that stroke of luck, he could not have attended. He could not have afforded to.

Coming up through the radical New Zealand right is the idea that universities are leftist organisations which have been “stacked” with academics who will only produce materials that support leftist policies.

That is their answer to “nearly-getting-it” revelations like this:

How else can they justify their positions being unsupported by fact?

As a result, right-leaning people are more partisan and more susceptible to misinformation.  

This is something I suspect will only become more prevalent as invested interests stoke right wing distrust for research, arguments, and institutions that fail to support their position. This is also how the modern right are justifying think tanks, to the world and to themselves.

“Well, universities produce left-wing research and charities advocate for disadvantaged people and unions support workers and the labour movement, so privately-funded institutions are also needed to turn out research that support the right.”

Except that’s not what happening. Universities are “heading left” because on many, many issues, this is what the research and statistics undeniably support. The right are often finding themselves less supported in academia because to cling to conservative positions in the face of this is to deny reality, and this naturally makes you a poor academic.

And these institutions may support right-wing positions in a way that feels to some like a “people vs people” debate, with the think tanks contributing to rightwing views rather than the people supporting the think tanks and their creators, but these institutions are also producing propaganda for those very economic and social systems that lock in the hegemonic status quo.

The rich right retain wealth and power for the existing elite, and to counteract this perception, a mythical left elite must be created for the less-rich right to rage at: academics, bureaucrats, Maori iwi leaders — all groups I have seen referred to as an enforced “class” who are benefiting from this supposedly-partisan research and policy.

This can handily also be used to further demonise left-wing research, which gets twisted to be about “financial gain”; i.e. getting more government funding, or a continued taxpayer-funded salary.

It’s really disturbing how many times the saying “every accusation is a confession” has turned out to be true of late, especially in light of some of the accusations that have been made. The worst of which is obviously the underage sex trafficking circle that we know from the Epstein situation is something that actually exists among the mega-wealthy — and not in Obama’s/Biden’s/whoever’s social circle as the radical right are convinced is happening.

This situation is no exception. The right accuse the left of attempting to install a class system in which bureaucrats or Maori or NZTA or whoever is the enemy of the day is giving themselves power and wealth; this mirrors the neoliberal system in which people with wealth give themselves wealth, at the expense of everyone else.

Distrust in the statistics and analysis of statistics is something that will only support existing elite, as those statistics show that actually a widening wealth gap is bad and a lot of what we are doing is wrong, and that we know how to do it better. We can prove with evidence that supporting people is more productive than punishing people. We know that rehabilitation is better for recidivism than incarceration, that social housing is better than homelessness, that benefits are better than abject poverty, that school lunches make a difference to poor students and cultural acknowledgment improves results for those ethnicities and groups work better with women in them due to increase communications.

That’s not a “moral” better, it’s a statistical better. An economic better. A social cohesion better. A tangible, trackable, provable betterment of our society.

The theory of conservatism, if I may be arrogant and reductive enough to reduce it to one sentence, is “The ends justify the means”. Which ignores the fact that all to often, the ends are the means.

The the right really, really hate being so obviously, statically wrong. It causes them to face an intern conflict as they find that these facts actually aren’t enough to shift their view of the world.

It’s much more important to them that they get to continue behaving as they were, even when it doesn’t work.

When you realise that, this entire political situation starts to make a lot more sense.