It’s not about Right or Left

A French friend said casually over dinner the other night that Macron, or any other modern president or prime minister, has infinitely more power than any king of yesteryear.

I agreed enthusiastically, for that was an observation I myself make whenever the subject comes up. However, unlike the economy or education, political power is a zero sum game.

It’s like a pie – the bigger the slice grabbed by the central state, the less is left for everyone else. In other words, if Macron (Scholz, Biden, Johnson et al.) has more power than, say, Louis XIV, then French citizens have less power in the 21^st century than French subjects had in the 17^th.

That means they were freer than today’s Frenchmen (or any other denizens of a modern Western country). And yet European monarchies, whose subjects were freer than today’s citizens, were swept away or at least emasculated in the name of more liberty, not less.

One may say that the law of unintended consequences was at play here. Fine, the consequences might have been unintended. But they certainly weren’t unpredictable.

All people had to do was to delve beneath the surface of political toing and froing. They ought to have considered their presuppositions to select those that reduced politics to the real essentials.

Just look at France’s election that concluded last weekend. The general consensus is that the top three candidates covered the whole political spectrum.

Le Pen hugged the right, violet, end; Mélenchon resided in the left, red, area; Macron sat somewhere in the middle, halfway between yellow and green. Yet none of those descriptors convey any real meaning.

People stubbornly cling to the political taxonomy they learned at school. Because the taxonomy is faulty, so is their political nous.  

They should try to soar over received conventions to get a more panoramic view, not spacially but historically. They’d then realise that there’s precious little difference among today’s political parties and their inner imperatives.

Oh, some trivial divergences exist, but these never go to the core of political thought, nor rise above personal idiosyncrasies. The real gulf is that separating modern Western politics from the traditional Western variety.

If we looked for terminology that elucidates distinctions, which is after all what terms are for, then the two poles signposting the territory of political thought wouldn’t be right and left. They would be centralism and localism.

Traditional Western states, including those as recent as Louis XIV’s , practised localism, devolving political power to the lowest sensible level. The king’s power was thus limited in every area that counted.

He couldn’t exact exorbitant taxes at will, meaning he had only a weak lever of economic control. He couldn’t conscript the whole population, no matter how dire the need. And he certainly couldn’t tell his subjects how to conduct their private affairs, where or how to work, what to read or think.

The king could acquire some more power in some of those areas, but to do so he had to descend down the intricate multi-tiered structure of local institutions separating the royal court from the royal subjects. He could coerce some of them, but only within narrow limits. Most of the time, he had to negotiate for more power in each case, trying to build the required consensus.

That’s why the king’s power derived from the consent of the governed in the true sense, not the bogus one based on the ballot box. When today’s citizen drops a piece of paper into that container, he henceforth relinquishes every morsel of the political power routinely claimed by his ancestors.

Louis XIV’s famous pronouncement on the nature of the state was more rueful than tyrannical. He knew that his power was absolute only over his courtiers at Versailles. The further down the political ladder he had to descend, the more was his power mediated and attenuated.

None of this applies to modern governments, which reduces to insignificance the differences among them. Whether they are called democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian, they all strive to concentrate most of the political power within the confines of the central state.

A modern president like Macron or a prime minister like Johnson, never mind a dictator like Putin, can do all those things a king couldn’t do.

They can tax people at more than half their income – even the most absolute of monarchs could never do that. They can conscript the whole population into the army if the need arises. They can dictate the minutest details of people’s private lives. They can even dictate how people must speak, which comes close to dictating how they must think.

Depending on the country or its current political situation, the power of the central government may be diminished by constitutional constraints. But it can’t be diminished all that much. All those branches of government so dear to the Western heart grow on the same trunk.

They don’t represent divergent but balanced interests the way traditional institutions did. They don’t even represent different classes or trades. Depending on the country’s constitution, some of those institutions are manned by elected or appointed officials. But they are elected from, or appointed by, exactly the same group of people, regardless of whether they are right, left or centre.

They are all equally committed to the infinite centralisation of politics, which isn’t just the dominant modern trend, but the only one. That means they are all equally committed to appropriating political power at the people’s expense.

That’s not to say there are no differences among them. However, these are mostly rhetorical or, at best, procedural. At base, they are all tyrannical.

Thus, to use the economy as an example, one among many, all three major parties in Britain are equally committed to usurping maximum power by extorting much of the people’s income. (Total control over money supply, impossible in the old days, serves the same purpose.)

When Gordon Brown was Chancellor, he inadvertently made a statement of tyranny the likes of which no king could have afforded, or even wished, to make. We’d like, said Brown, to “let the people keep more of their money”.

You can let someone keep more only of something that belongs to you. Hence that statement could be paraphrased to say that all your money belongs to the central state, which can then decide in its munificence how much you’ll be allowed to keep for your family.

Some Western politicians are more careful about what they say. But the logic of the modern state always pulls in the same direction: ever-greater centralisation of power.

Some modern states are more benign than others. Any sane person would rather live in Macron’s France than, say, in Putin’s Russia. However, if modern history teaches anything at all, it’s that any modern state can move from benign to evil at the drop of a hat.

Just look at what happened to Germany, France and Italy in the first half of the 20^th century. Three of the most seemingly civilised countries in the world instantly shed every such vestige to turn into evil tyrannies. At least France was pushed that way by a military defeat; the other two needed no such prompting.

Only smug individuals would think that their own country is eternally immune to a similar metamorphosis. The only question is how, not whether, it may happen.

A transition from a traditional state to a modern one could only be effected by a violent bang – the two types were too fundamentally incompatible.

On the other hand, a transition from one type of modern state to another can happen so gradually, smoothly and effortlessly that people wouldn’t even realise what’s going on. Not with a bang but a whimper – Eliot was right about that.