The Right is Wrong, the Left is Right

I agree strongly with Jerome a Paris -- whose words over at The European Tribune very directly inspired this entry -- that people of the Left need to say these things to ourselves from time to time to hold steady in our view the righteous force and conceptual coherence of our outlook. But, more important, of course, we need to say these things often and out loud to enlist reasonable others to the cause of their own best interest and to demolish the lies of the Right and their incessant appeals to the worst in us all. So, here's my version of his own list of basic Left affirmations. This is why I am a person of the Left, and this is why I think you should be, too.

I

Whatever an individual person's strength, he is mastered by the strength of the confederacy of the weakest few or the merest machine. Whatever an individual person's genius or discernment, her intelligence is corrected and outpaced by the aggregation of the most everyday perceptions, knowledges, and attentions expressed through a network. Whatever an individual's contribution to the public world, each depends on community with living others, each is bolstered by the incomparable archive of past accomplishments, each is a precarious organism beset by a rich and demanding environment.
Yes, that's right, true prosperity is not a matter of protecting the profits of a few before all else, but first of all a matter of supporting the planetary commons of the environment that sustains all our lives, of expanding the cultural commons that sustains all our minds, and of deepening the commonwealth that sustains all our society.

II

There has been a struggle throughout all of recorded history between the politics of aristocracy and the politics of democracy, between what has come to be known since the French Revolution as the Right and the Left. Aristocrats are privileged and powerful people who struggle not only to retain and consolidate their position in the world but who imagine that it is right and natural that they should enjoy their status for all time in consequence of their superior capacities and accomplishments. On the side of aristocracy one finds as well the many people who identify with these privileged and powerful people in the unlikely hope to gain something like their lot, in timid fear of their incumbent strength, in shabby contentment to bask in their reflected glories, or in a passivity to their commands that eases the inherent exactions of personal responsibility through robotic obedience. Democrats, on the other side, are those who believe that everyone should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, who believe that the overabundant majority of people who are not under duress, or straining to meet the conditions of day to day survival, or bewildered by the lies and fraud of the unscrupulous are quite competent to acquire and weigh the knowledges and consent to the terms to conduct their lives as they see fit and fair, and who believe that the unsettling diversity and dynamism of modern life is a choir of freedom rather than, as aristocrats would have it, an endless threat to right order.
Yes, that's right, the Left has always been and always will be home to the politics that contributes the measure of progress by which each generation is known to history, the Left will be the force that implements and reforms institutions to better support the scene of informed, nonduressed consent, challenges the public imagination to accommodate ever more different lifeways as peers in progressive struggle, works to create a prosperity shared by all, crusades to banish force and duress from interpersonal affairs, and celebrates the proliferation of knowledges and creations that arise from a free people.

III

People differ from one another in their situations, in their capacities, in their desires, and either they will interminably fight out their differences with the means at their disposal or they will institute democratic government to reconcile their differences in as fair and nonviolent a manner as possible.
Yes, that's right, democratic government is an incomparable force for good.

IV

Taxes are the way governments fund their activities, and yoking taxes to representation is a way of ensuring that government is democratic rather than yet another instrument of violence through which the strongest exploit the more vulnerable.
Yes, that's right, taxes are indispensable to a civilization that works and a means to ensure that governments remain democratic.

V

The rich should pay taxes like everybody else and, indeed, in a proportion that reflects the extent to which they disproportionately benefit from the work of civilization, its physical and legal infrastructure, more than everybody else.
Yes, that's right, the rich are not our natural betters, nor our proper rulers, but lucky people who should be eager to pay their fair share in maintaining the civilization on which they depend so deeply for their continued good fortune.

VI

People in democratic societies are free to speak their minds and to peaceably assemble together and to organize together to better their lot. This is especially important for those who lack resources on their own to ensure their true perspectives are heard, their actual contributions respected, and their legitimate needs met.
Yes, that's right, unions and activists and troublemakers are vital to the progress of which we are all beneficiaries.

VII

On the day you die, your thoughts are little likely to turn to the status of your bank accounts, but to the terms on which you maintained and concluded your relationships with loved ones and neighbors. A person would be an abject fool to live life in a way that does not reflect this reality.
Yes, that's right, there really is more to life than making money.