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Once you’ve conceded that the new winners are in fact practicing debate and not “ruining” the sport on any fundamental level, it seems like there’s ONLY suspect motives for wanting a new debate team.

I think it’s less the case that the people trying to start the new debate league have “conceded” that the people who’re shifting the rules are practicing debate than that they were trying to sidestep having to make the accusation that they aren’t, out of fear that such an accusation would itself be interpreted as racism, which fear I think would be completely justified. If they think that the shift is harmful to the debate culture, then in what way could they have expressed that which would not have led to such accusations?

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This conflates three separate currents: Austrianism, mainstream economics, and pro-business ideology. Austrian Economics is a heterodox school that’s more popular on the Internet than anywhere else. There are a few economics departments where it’s relatively popular, but there the Austrianism is less pronounced and it’s more similar to the mainstream. Austrians themselves have not been particularly influential, with the exception of F. A. Hayek, who was closer to mainstream economics. People who subscribe to mainstream academic economics still have widely varying policy prescriptions (compare Greg Mankiw to Brad DeLong, for example) though they do agree on a lot of issues and are more pro-market than the average person, though rarely to the point of Austrian Libertarianism. Their policy prescriptions are sometimes called “neoliberal”, but it’s become a pejorative. In contrast, Austrians are hardly ever called “neoliberal”. As for pro-business ideology, left-wing opponents of Austrian Libertarianism and the policy prescriptions of mainstream economists lump them together with right-wing politicians and call them all “pro-business”, when in reality both Austrians and a significant number of mainstream economists write a lot about cronyism, regulatory capture, protection of special interests, etc – “pro-market” would be a more accurate label.

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This is because there are (broadly speaking) two Lefts and two Rights, and we keep confusing them for no good reason.

They are:

1. The Labour/Economic Left. Intellectual roots in classical Marx. Social roots in the working class union movement. Powered the New Deal, a huge force in the 1950s, but since 1980, crushed by Reagan/Thatcher economic policies and steadily on the decline.

2. The Identity/Deconstruction Left. Intellectual roots in poststructuralism / postmodernism / critical theory. Social roots in elite academia (but strictly on the humanities side, not STEM) and the 1960s youth movement and popular culture. Nonexistent before WW2, took over from the Labour Left in the 1960s, on the ascendent since the 1980s and now the dominant cultural narrative.

3. The Neoliberal/Business Right. Intellectual roots in Austrian School neoliberal economics. Social roots: in all big business, but especially finance; in elite academia, in economics departments and MBA programs. In retreat from 1929 to the 1970s, but ascendent since the 1980s, now the dominant economic narrative.

3. The Traditional/Cultural Right. Intellectual roots in the 2000 year history of the Church. Social roots (in America) in Evangelical churches. On race issues, it was divided; the South and the North had very different views; the push to end slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and the pushback against both all came from (different) Christian communities. On gender issues, however, it was the mainstream consensus in America up until the 1960s counterculture. In apparent constant decline at a federal level since then, despite brief political resurgence in the Republican states.

Each of these groups has separate victories and losses. But the general trajectory has been: since 1980, the Business Right has triumphed exclusively in the economic sphere, to the downfall of the Labour Left. Meanwhile, at the same time, the Identity Left has triumphed exclusively in the cultural sphere, to the downfall of the Traditional Right.

You can choose to see either of these as good or bad things depending on your personal philosophy. But it’s not a case of a single social force moving between Left and Right. At the very least, it’s _two_ social countercurrents moving in opposite directions. The triumph of Capital over Labour, combined with the triumph of Identity over Tradition.

It’s not obvious to me that these two separate and counter-moving (economic, cultural) sectors of ‘left’ and ‘right’ actually owe anything to each other, or that they’ll remain together in the long term.

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Example 1: Politics in New Zealand during the 1980s, and specifically the 1984 Lange/Douglas Labour government. Nominally leftist, it was elected in a landslide against the nominally ‘conservative’ incumbent National… except that National’s economic policies included strict state-managed control of prices and wages, and Labour’s economic policies were hardcore Reagan/Thatcherite laissez-faire privatisation and financial deregulation.

_Social_ policies of the two governments were recognisably ‘left’ vs ‘right’ by 2014 standards – Labour 1984 decriminalised homosexuality, established NZ as an anti-nuclear zone, and began huge land reparations to Maori.

But the social vs economic policies of the two parties had _rotated_. Labour was (social) left / (economic) right – National was (social) right / (economic) left. And that’s important.

It’s important because people still today say ‘left’ and ‘right’ as if both are coherent ideologies where economic and social policies all flow from a single core set of axioms. But they aren’t. They just aren’t. Political (and even ideological) beliefs are a jumble of assorted ideas that for historical reasons have been adopted by a roughly cohesive group of actors. There doesn’t have to be any underlying a priori logic as to why they go together, and there very often isn’t.

Example 2: Alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Adopted by suffragettes _and_ Evangelical Protestant churches. Widely seen as part of the women’s liberation and social justice movements (because men were the main alcohol drinkers, and drunk men tended to commit the most domestic violence). Still visible in that otherwise socially conservative Baptist churches tend to have juice instead of Communion wine – and hard prohibitions on 1. alcohol consumption, 2. dancing (because it could lead to unwed teen sex; and not just as a religious killjoy downer, but because of the social consequences). Both policies seen as a logical, cohesive whole.

Example 3: 2014 attitudes toward genetic engineering, on both the left and right. The (socially conservative) right opposes stem cell research and human cloning. The (Green) left opposes genetic engineering of food crops such as Monsanto Roundup Ready corn. Both sides scream at the other and believe that _their_ restriction on genetic research is pure and righteous, and the other sides’ restriction is needless interference with the progress of Science. Yet they’re both stemming from a very similar feeling of unease at engineering of intimate biology. It’s very easy to imagine a political world where a single philosophical framework endorsed or opposed both (and such frameworks do exist; Catholic Seamless Garment life ethics, and Viridian Green, to give two examples). But the two major camps of Liberal and Conservative have split what would elsewhere be a single issue, into two.

Example 4: Conservatism vs Conservationism. In the writings of mid-20th century English conservatives such as Tolkien, Lewis and Chesterton- particularly in Tolkien – there’s a combined horror at modernity expressed as both Leftism and the Industrial Revolution. Saruman is evil because he uproots trees, and is in turn destroyed by the Ents; Sauron is evil because his kingdom becomes what we would recognise today as an open-cast mine. Aragorn is good because he is a king, from an ancient line of kings, and the story is complete when he acknowledges his kingship. There’s a sense that industrial progress at the expense of the organic, natural world is utterly demonic; at the same time as there is a nostalgic longing for the old order of kings and princes and inherited title which is so far Right of today’s hard-core Right that it burns a hole through the Overton Window and heads into outer space.

So in Tolkien’s day conservatism and conservationism (though the latter term had hardly been coined) were part of the same mindset: respect and reverence for the old, distrust of the new. A single cohesive philosophy.

Meanwhile, in the USSR, Marxism-Leninism in full flower had no time for conservationism at all; it was resolutely Taylorist (itself an Overton rotation) in extracting economic value from workers and ecosystems alike.

And yet, after WW2, one can see the cluster of attitudes rotate from alignment to opposition; mainstream conservatives became boosters of industrial capitalism, with environmental exploitation now reframed as a Christian virtue, not a vice; meanwhile conservationists became rebels against the post-war industrial consensus, developing into the Green movement, and increasingly courted and were received by the increasingly atheist, anti-establishment Left.

There are also examples of the dynamic of ‘becoming like your enemy’, where one political group will adopt tactics that a rival group appears to be using successfully, in order to win. Eg: the Bush-era Neoliberals, who were college Marxists who later adopted Right values_but kept a respect for 1970s Marxist dirty-fighting tactics_, and deployed them in the 2000s. The US military adoption almost unchanged of Soviet ‘torture-lite’ techniques. Ayn Rand, whose writings today have a distinct flavour of Soviet Realism and Dialectical Marxism; she started with many of Marx’s philosophical premises but simply flipped the ‘capital bad’ bit. National Socialism (sorry Godwin), which adopted much of the forms of left-socialism within a right-wing framework, becoming something neither wholly right nor wholly left.

None of this is a linear drift. These are all rotations. Most things in the universe have angular as well as linear momentum, after all. And we try to reduce it all to movement in one direction on a line. This is not smart.

It’s not out of the question that a similar hybrid like Fascism will appear in the future; a philosophy that borrows from both today’s Left and Right camps but is its own entity. How will we recognise it? How will we react to it? Will we even know that it’s something new?

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1. The fashion-pendulum thing in politics has seemed obvious-to-self-evident to me for a long time, so your presentation of it here makes sense to me.

2. I ran into similar problems with my leftism during the Bush war years. I was (and still am) strongly anti-war, but I had major issues with the fellow-travellers in the ‘anti-war movement’. Particularly the college Marxists, who had T-shirts with slogans like ‘No War But The Class War’ and made observations like ‘I’m not actually anti-war… I’m opposing this war because it’s Imperialist ™, but we should support revolutionary wars, oppressed peoples, etc. Yay the Intifada!’. Which, well. Some of us still remember when the USSR was an actual thing, and that approach doesn’t lead to good places.

3. Ten years ago a couple of Canadians wrote a book which says pretty much exactly what you’re saying right here. The Rebel Sell (alt: Nation of Rebels) by Heath and Potter. Basically: rebellion is a consumer commodity. It’s impossible to destroy consumer capitalism by rebelling against prior generations’ attitudes, because consumer capitalism _relies on_ destruction of the old and purchasing of the new to sustain its fashion cycles. And political ideology is a consumable status-marker / fashion commodity like any other.

It’s a somewhat grim perspective, but it’s backed by facts; for example, the popular myth of the 1960s as a youth rebellion against the prior generation completely overlooks the role of the record companies and Beat Generation writers and academics in manufacturing and selling rebellion against the post-WW2 ‘company man’ consensus. The hippies were manufactured and exploited to sell product as a group just as much as ‘Seattle Grunge’ and hip-hop was in the 1990s. If not everything is a cultural fashion cycle, certainly large amounts of it are; and this explains why the hippie generation apparently turned on a dime in the 1980s and became the conservative yuppies. Much of what passed for (and is now mythologised and merchandised as) spontaneous generational rebellion was actually social conformity to a demographic looking for identity markers; as that demographic aged and matured and became the dominant group, it spawned reaction/rebellion of its own. And so on.

The tl;dr I took was that cultural memory is a tricky and fraught thing, and the real ideological history of an era is almost never what it is later proclaimed to be by either the winners or losers of a conflict.

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