Political Pole-Reversal

Only a fool or a cynic would blame a Brazilian street urchin for its plight. It’s a terrible start in life, and quite understandable that it frequently ends up terrible too. Given a good home who knows? Some of yesterday’s barrio children might have become today’s concert pianists or physicists, only opportunity never knocked.

Conversely we all acknowledge the responsibility of the individual, to some degree. We all have the gut feeling that subsidising truly slack behaviour does no one any favours. Child, co-worker or politician, we should never bankroll shameless shiftlessness – it only encourages them.

But while we all have these capacities, for sympathy and its polar opposite, scorn, we vary greatly in who we apply them to. Some blow a gasket over insider dealing but speak-up for welfare claimants. Some bang on about sickness benefit but rush to defend the poor downtrodden CEOs. One person’s slacker is another’s victim of circumstance. One person’s welfare scrounger is another’s victim of de-industrialisation, one person’s corporate tax dodger is another’s victimised captain of industry.

Political belief is intimately related to this question – who do you blame for the state of things? Among us, who is it who drags us down, and who that offers us the chance to ascend? Both left and right agree that the central purpose of politics is to empower the worthy and deflate the cynical and the idle, it’s just that we differ over who is who.

Or to put it the other way round, we apportion blame and praise in accordance with our political beliefs. Our politics dictate whether we sympathise with an individual or social group or condemn them as the cause of their own woes.

Although there are no hard and fast rules it seems fair to say that the conservative mind tends to see the materially disadvantaged as responsible for their own condition. Likewise, they tend to see the wealthy as the agents of their own good fortune. It’s unavoidable if you are to maintain the core conservative assumption: The justice of the existing order. Conservatism must in some sense entail the desire to conserve things as they are, in the belief that the current system is fundamentally fair, just and meritocratic.

It can only follow then that domestic and global inequalities are a reflection of ability, rather than tyranny: The poor of Glasgow and New Orleans make their own beds. The governments of Ethiopia and Bangladesh are responsible for their own starving masses, and those starving masses should be ashamed for not ousting such corrupt leaders. To the ‘right’-minded it would be foolish to subsidise such indolence, as wrong as it would be to subsidise a teenager’s drug habit.

Obviously anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing would likely to reject all this and offer up different candidates for blame – the owners of production, western capital, the arms industry – they would more likely see the poor as the victim of the rich.

I say likely because as I said before there are no hard and fast rules. Humans can be very contrary beasts. Many supposed leftists care passionately about domestic living standards but remain quite indifferent to the welfare of foreigners. Nevertheless, certain arguments and world-views do tend to gravitate towards to the same sort of people. Certain views and theories mesh more neatly with our existing ones, reinforce them. Sympathise with the ‘war on terror’ and you’ll most likely also sympathise with Israel but scorn Chavez. Scorn the Bush camp and you’ll probably tend to sympathise with the Palestinians and the Bolivarians but scorn NATO.

Political beliefs accrete over a lifetime, but the ones we glean are the ones that appeal to our existing political outlook. It’s a bit like electrolysis. We each set out with a left and a right terminal, each biased to attract a certain type of belief and argument. By middle life one terminal has often grown much fatter than the other. We might have laid down a thousand reasons to commend Tony Blair, or a thousand to condemn him.

Of course people do change, sometimes violently. Overnight they reject the whole basis of their previous beliefs, a whole lifetime of observations. When right turns to left – the usual direction – all manner of previous convictions find themselves abandoned or reversed. Old sympathies turn to scorn, or are swept under the carpet; people and organisations previously vilified find themselves re-appraised, even commended. It’s like a sudden reversing of polarity. Deep seated beliefs strip off one terminal and rush to form incongruous lumps on the other.

To whatever degree they are aware of it, Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hitchens are currently undergoing this tiresome process – perpetual revision of previous beliefs, writings, conversations, alliances. The saints they spent the first half of their lives defending, suddenly morphed into sinners. Years of criticism and analysis reduced to embarrassment - something to argue away, or revise out of all recognition, rather than utilise.

Meanwhile on the right terminal a new sort of argument starts to accumulate; layer on layer, thicker each day.