7 - Hiding in plain sight: nationalism and multiculturalism

Summary

We have now travelled across the ideological maps that inspired the intense polarization of politics into the opposing camps of left versus right. And yet we have also seen that this language is inadequate as we have encountered all sorts of bizarre hybrids, including revolutionary conservatives, gradualist and market socialists, libertarian fascists, communist ultra-nationalists, and more. Indeed, although we continue to use the language of “left versus right”, a cultural approach reveals that there is something woefully deficient and even deceptive about this language. We should be uncomfortable with it, even if it persists as a useful shorthand.

Ideological maps exhibit subtle and complex resonances with one another, which are obscured by the left–right linear taxonomy. Indeed, it remains unclear what is being measured or spatialized across the standard spectrum, often sequenced as:

communism (far left) ↔ socialism (left) ↔ liberalism (centre) ↔ conservatism (right) ↔ fascism (far right)

If one suggests that this ideological measuring tape is organized from the centre outward according to units of “individual freedom”, or “democracy”, it becomes immediately apparent that a definition from a specific ideological map is being pulled out and used to position and locate the others.

The spectrum then implies definitions of democracy and liberty that are particular to liberalism. After all, communists, socialists, conservatives, and even fascists often claim to be expressive of popular sovereignty and to achieve the proper form of liberation. Unsurprisingly, on this schema liberalism appears as not only the freest but also the most rationally “moderate” and “reasonable”. As one reaches the “extreme” radicals of the left and right (communists and fascists) the tips of the line meet and bend into a horseshoe. Supposedly this is because these two ideologies are equally collectivist, statist and totalitarian. But this again reveals that this “neutral”, “descriptive” chart of the world's ideologies is in fact coloured by liberal ideological presuppositions.

As if this were not bad enough, the linear language of left–right also does modern people the extreme disservice of suggesting a kind of unbridgeable gap between particular ideologies.