The Right is Ruining Everything.
And humourlessness is the least of it.
Here be dragons
It’s as if we have strayed into one of those unexplored territories on the edges of a Tolkien map.
One of my Substack acquaintances is royally pissed off with the election results and the subsequent cacophony of rightwing chatter among people that he may have hitherto thought of as fellow travellers. We’re all noticing too the amping up of angry commentary here on Substack, cutting both ways, so I see his concern. (You know who you are. Please stop!)
Some people are saying that differentiation by left and right is no longer relevant. Differences now are more up/down, elite and underclass and I think that’s true. (
- The Honest Broker substack is where I first saw this idea.)But we’re all carrying a lot of allegiance baggage. In all honesty, I feel betrayed by the left, who I grew up believing to be good humans who have special insight into a better world. These days that is not just a worn out cliché, it is simply not true of the people who are calling themselves left.
This so-called left has been inflicting a lot of harm in the name of justice and is going unchecked. There is no accountability, no consequences. If the left seriously wants to do good (and who doesn’t really?) they need to do more than lament their fate and search for reasons they are failing just to take another kick at the can in two and four years time.
Equally tired is the cliché that people on the right are mean-spirited and greedy. People on the right have as much empathy and compassion as anybody does. A lot in some cases, a little in others and most somewhere in between. They’re just not going to talk about it (and ruin their reputation).
The empathy chain(gang)
My best and oldest friend has a challenging and unique view of politics. A born businessman (think Michael J. Fox in Family Ties), he eschewed business for the art world as soon as he discovered businessmen don’t how to talk anything but shop.
In art school, where we met, he found a preponderance of left leaning ideology, mostly unspoken, assumed, that rankled his business sense. He started introducing the idea of ideological balance between right and left, socialist and conservative, in his work and in the general conversation. His idea, or hope, was, I think, to develop a kind of dialectic interplay that more realistically reflected how we live, with a lot of social welfare mechanisms operating under a capitalist economic system. His project, in a community where social justice was, and still is, de rigeur, was doomed to fail.
Empathy for the poor, the disadvantaged or persecuted is a consistent theme in many cultural traditions, but the arts were all left wing after Guernica.
My friend and I chat on the phone regularly and sometimes we get going on politics and right/left distinctions. One particular evening, he was decrying the lack of social conscience among conservatives. They oppose social security and universal health care, he lamented. I parried with something to the effect that the right has its own way of looking after others, it’s called charity. Families have always looked after their own, other-abled, spinsters, gay, whatever. So too, communities help those fallen on hard times through churches and service groups.
What has changed, I argued, is the institutionalization of “care” by government. Whereas public social services on a grand scale was generally welcomed in the post-WW2 period and has grown ever since, something else is happening now.
This is so obvious that it pains us to think about. We want to believe that all these massive efforts to help others must be helping. How could they not? And if they are weakening or ineffective, we believe they just need to be shored up; pour more resources into them.
But, I would argue, something happens when charity becomes institutionalized. It doesn’t just lose the spirit of brotherly love that comes from helping your neighbour, it loses its efficiency. Today we see this in all the large institutional public services like welfare, health and immigration.
Let go or you’re going to get drug
Massive help does not help massively. In fact, it stops helping when it starts to feed helplessness.
You don’t need me to explain what is happening now all around us. Disfunction in the massive-help industry is meeting with massive resistance. It’s being called populism and there’s something to that, a tendency to mob-like behaviour. But I don’t know how you can criticize people massing together after #cancelculture bypasses the justice system and EDI ideology has institutionalized prejudice.
This is all very painful for people with social conscience on the left. First, there is the fear that without massive institutionalized care systems, all the people being helped will suffer even more. Second, there is the fear that if they are suffering even more, there’s going to be chaos as they grow more desperate. And finally there’s the fear that in their desperation, they are going to come calling on you, where you live.
Luxury beliefs
Nobody wants to give up whatever privilege they enjoy (including me).
There is a lot of very good writing and analysis about these issues here on Substack. One such writer is Rob Henderson, whose
I can’t recommend highly enough. Henderson invented the term “luxury beliefs” to describe a phenomenon he witnessed attending Yale, that the most assertive advocates for social justice seem to be the most well off and privileged students. Marching for causes, protests and radical political discourse were conspicuously connected to social status, and, as we are seeing everywhere now, increasingly detached from scholarly critical analysis and agressively not open to debate.I like what Henderson is on about. He’s a very bright guy and a straight shooter. He’s trying to call it as he sees it. At the same time, I feel there’s more to the economic analysis that we are still missing: the whole principle of social justice in the West is founded on the belief that we can afford it. We believe we can afford to house and feed and keep everyone healthy without regard for the social compact that requires that everyone contribute. The success of massive-help is based on massive effort, everyone pulling together. Everyone.
If we pride ourselves on our social conscience (I like to think I haven’t lost mine completely, though my family may wonder), would we all not do well to get off our high horses and check our status at the door? Dark times lie ahead. We are going to have to roll up our sleeves and get to work as our generations have never had to work before. There is indeed no going back.
We (I for one) need to see the left do some serious self-criticism and practically address the shouting/shaming/blaming crimes being committed in the name of just causes. The left needs to completely reverse course on ideology-based positions that pervert the basic principles of equality and fairness. The left needs to actively engage in deprogramming on college campuses and schools, and throughout the massive network of NGOs. Yes, deprogramming. I don’t see any other way.
We can leave it to the right, but do we really want to do that?
Postscripts
About the drawings in this post
, one of the creative pros here on Substack, recently posted some tips about drawing practice. (Could have been in or , both stacks of his.) He recommended starting a drawing session by looking at other art. I think that’s a great idea, always inspiring, and I also like copying other artist’s work. There’s nothing wrong with copying. Artists have done it forever and you learn a lot while doing it. I especially like doing “after” drawings, which means in the style of someone else’s work or taking a scene from other art. The reference is part of the work adding a whole new layer of meaning. Four of these drawings draw on older art, each in different ways.Some of these drawings are part of a series I did in the spring of 2023, loosely themed on babies, children, little people, and more or less satirical. I did them as part of The 100 Day Project, an Instagram thing that encourages people to create something every day for 100 days. (Hence the numbers on some of the drawings, like 7/100.) I didn’t get to 100 drawings that year but I tried again in 2024 and did.
The Guernica drawing is new, using a very rudimentary ink line tool in Procreate. I like the simple linear style and plan on doing more.
A note in support of Wikipedia
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