Observers and pundits commenting on our current political strife often declare that both the left and the right are being held hostage by their more ‘radical’ elements, preventing us from reaching a bi-partisan consensus on many issues.
The term ‘radical’ is used to label opponents and create an image of an extreme, out-of-touch political movement. Other name-calling is often used in combination with radical – Marxist, socialist, racist, white supremacist – to associate the opposition with specific historical bogeymen.
Have the left really become more radical in recent years? What are the policy platforms and how radical are they in historical context? Let’s take a look.
Taxes, Wealth, Income and Big Government
The left is pilloried as being radically anti-business, anti-wealth, anti-private property and pro-big government. Recent proposals by democratic presidential candidates have included raising taxes on the wealthy and businesses. The fact is that income and wealth have skewed dramatically toward the top since the 1970’s (https://rvgeiger.blogspot.com/2020/09/wealth-disparity-and-billionaire-lottery.html ). To argue that this is not a healthy societal condition is hardly radical. The US had a much more aggressive taxing policy from the 1940’s to the 1960’s, a time when our economy was very robust and successful. Even the most aggressive new proposals for taxing the wealthy do not approach the levels that were in place during those years.
Not a single significant voice on the left is arguing for true socialism (the state owning all sources of production and capital) or abolishing private property. To argue for some redistribution of income and/or wealth from the super wealthy to use for infrastructure, education, childcare, public transportation, healthcare, renewable energy initiatives and other important components of a modern, socially harmonious state is hardly radical.
It is of course a difficult challenge to determine how much government, with its inherent bureaucracy, is too much government. But America has had significant governmental intervention in the economy and in business since the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt and it is hardly radical to acknowledge the need for government to play a strong role. We are no longer the nation of freeholding farmers and tradespeople that our founders had in mind as they crafted our constitution and government
Guns and Gun Control
One of the rallying cries of the right is ‘the radical left is coming for your guns!’ But the fact is that there is less gun control in the U.S. and fewer restrictions on gun ownership than at anytime in the last 50 years. Furthermore, a majority of US citizens approve of stricter gun controls, including banning automatic and semi-automatics weapons and large magazines (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/22/facts-about-guns-in-united-states/ ). No one is advocating taking all guns away. This is a politically charged issue, but the call for stricter gun control is only radical when seen through the eyes of a minority of strident gun owners.
Abortion and Birth Control
This is another issue where it is the right who have become more conservative. Roe v Wade has been in place for almost 50 years. The majority of Americans have long believed that women should have the right to have an abortion under all or most conditions (https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/ ). Anti-abortion fanatics are a small portion of the electorate, but they have had increasingly significant political clout. Republican legislators have become far more conservative on this issue over time, fearful of the wrath of anti-abortion political action groups.
Racial Issues and Police Reform
The recent BLM protests and calls for police reform are seen by the right as a radical move toward a society that will have less law and order and more violent criminal acts. The term ‘defund the police’ is understandably unsettling and a poor choice for a slogan, however, questioning the efficacy of our increasingly military-style policing in high crime areas and the heavy burden it places on minority neighborhoods is not radical.
There has been bi-partisan concern for some time about the high incarceration rates and racial profiling that characterize our approach to public safety and drug problems. The US has more of its population in prison than any other developed nation. There is clearly a need for new strategies. It is not radical to propose changes. Some of the recommendations are more radical than others – it is up to legislators and experts to analyze the problem and come to agreements on a measured response.
Healthcare
The right views healthcare as an area that has become radicalized by the left. The call for a single payer system is seen as an extreme and potentially catastrophic change to our current system. However, a fairly significant percentage of healthcare is already provided under a single payer system - medicare, medicaid, military and government healthcare is all single payer and accounts for over 30% of all healthcare. The USA spends much more on healthcare than other developed nations with single payer systems (https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2019/us-health-care-spending-highest-among-developed-countries.html ) and has worse outcomes according to a recent Johns Hopkins study (and numerous others).
While it is true that our unique private employer-assisted insurance scheme would be complex to reconfigure into a single payer system, it is also clear that we desperately need to look for ways to provide better healthcare for all of our citizens. It is not radical to seek improvement, and healthcare is an area where government must play a substantial role because it does not fit into a classic free market scenario. (https://rvgeiger.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-market-based-healthcare-fallacy.html ).
Climate Change and Energy Policy
The AOC-led Green New Deal has been used by the right to portray the left as naively radical on the subject of energy policy. This is an issue where the right’s dogmatic refusal to acknowledge scientific consensus will eventually come back to haunt them. Some of the proposals to address climate change are indeed radical, but the threat from a continued reliance on hydrocarbon energy sources is even more radical. The problem is existential, and there is certainly no simple solution, but putting one’s head in the sand is clearly a catastrophic mistake.
What is indeed radical here is the right’s rallying cry of ‘drill, baby drill’. That is a death wish. Time is running out and we need global solutions to this problem. Radical proposals to completely eliminate coal and oil may not be feasible immediately, but they help define the scope of the problem and push us to address it.
Who Is More Radical?
When people first observed Ronald Reagan vying for the presidency, there was a general opinion that he, like Goldwater, was far too conservative to win. But he did win and thus signaled the rightward trend of the republican party. When Newt Gingrich first came to congress, he was viewed as a reactionary, an extreme conservative whose hyperbolic rhetoric seemed almost comical. His subsequent rise to power in the mid-90’s signaled a further lurching of the republican party to the right. The tea party movement of the late 2000's, a reaction in great part to Obama’s election, moved the party even further to the right and created a whole new universe of right-wing pseudo-media, social media conspiracy lunacy and deep state hysteria. The republican party is substantially different - less traditionally conservate and more reactionary - today than it was in the 70's.
As for the left, the current democratic party has not changed significantly since the 70's. There may be a few more radical left wing representatives in congress, the Squad being the most prominent, but the great majority of democratic representation is very similar to what has existed for many decades.
To equate the evolution of the left with that of the right is simply pure nonsense and a classic example of post-Trumpian false equivalence.
