Posts by BenWilson
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Can I clarify something? In this discussion the word "centrist" means people who self-identified that way?
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to chris,
Epic! I think you're right if the main thrust there is to suggest that Left is not synonymous with Labour, even if it's correlated. Opposing immigrant labour is an example of an idea that goes with the Labour movement, but is not necessarily socially progressive at all, and to that extent, perhaps not left-wing. It's one of the thrusts of Labourism I least agree with, being of an immigrant background myself. In this case mostly British, in a wave that came to dominate the demography of NZ, but still - I find it hard to say that there was something fundamentally wrong with Maori ever letting my people in here, a consequence I have to accept if I want to turn around and say that, for instance, we should be strongly resisting immigrant labour now.
And if it IS left wing to so oppose immigration, then I'm NOT left-wing.
I do think that we should probably control immigration, of course. Laissez faire on it is an extreme position. But mostly it's the migration of lots of money that I'm most concerned about. What color the faces are is something I don't see as my right to dictate anything about.
But my position is just mine. The political center probably isn't colorblind, and accent-deaf. Do we have a duty to try to move that center? Well, put it this way: I'm not going to move an inch. But I can't stop Labour doing it. It might influence whether I want to vote for them a little bit. But it's one of the lesser factors, frankly, influencing why I don't vote Labour. So long as they're still closer to me on that particular issue than the other parties, then I can see a coalition with them as preferable to one of the other parties, or worse, the other parties ruling outright, as they do now.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Aaron Incognito,
Please do keep writing it, too. I’m interested in what you come up with.
PS: Welcome to PAS
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Relevant
Also, interesting. Hopefully he continues.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Is it possible to take a 2-pronged approach, where a Left strategy is pitched to the core base, and a Centre strategy is pitched to floating voters, without both prongs tripping each other up? Or are they mutually exclusive?
I think it's possible. You target each group with different emphasis on what messages you want to deliver, depending what you've judged they most want to hear. You only trip on things that are actually directly contrary between the groups. But the solution is to just not talk about those things to either group. Your political opposition will do that, of course, pointing out any such conflicts if they exist. You'd stick to your guns and just continue to refuse fleshing out the conflict zone, talking instead of the similarities and concessions that are not blockers to either group.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Sam Bradford,
This whole analysis is so depressing, because it assumes the sole reason for the existence of the Labour party is to be elected.
Well, it's analysis that says being elected is vitally important to Labour, for sure. Which I don't think is false.
We've got 2 main points in contention:
1. That moving right towards the center is justified if it moves the center to the left as a result
2. That moving rightwards towards the center does actually move the center leftwards.These are separate questions. One is more of a moral question about how we feel about the means justifying the ends. The other is a factual question: Does these means actually lead to these ends?
I think Rob is saying both 1 and 2 are true. Tom is saying that 2 is false, so 1 is irrelevant. I'm not sure if I know whether he agrees with 1 in principle - gut feeling is that he does, from other things he's said over the years.
I would say that we can't generalize about 2 - whether it is true or false is contextual and much in doubt in the context of the UK, and here too. I'd say that I generally actually do agree with 1. It's a pragmatic hypothetical. You can agree with 1, and yet think that moving to the center isn't a good idea, because the IF part isn't satisfied. It doesn't always work, and won't work now, but it could sometimes work, and would be good in those circumstances.
I have to say that I think 2 is actually somewhat true, though. At least in NZ right now. I don't know about the UK situation. My feeling is that Rob is correct, and that centrism would be somewhat effective in growing the Labour vote and winning them an election, and in doing so, moving the political center of NZ somewhat to the Left. It really depends how far they go. So long as they're still to the left of National, they're either pulling left, or at least slowing down the rightwards drift.
But speaking of the Left in this way is such a sweeping generalization. It would need to be fleshed out substantially before I could be cool with it. What actual compromises are we talking about? A lot of them matter to me much more than others. I could say I agree with the strategy in the broadest of terms, but still entirely disagree with a particular suggestion for implementing it.
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Speaker: Saying what we actually mean on…, in reply to izogi,
As I said I don’t know if there’s a viable alternative or what it might be, or if the spatial way of thinking about politics is even especially bad, but it does seem to me that this whole spatial language has a compelling effect on how politics works and what we expect and accept. Or maybe it just works that way because it has to for other reasons, and the spatial thing is a very close match for a metaphor.
Very tough to answer that. We interpret a lot of data geometrically because it's how we already see the world, and it's a very convenient metaphor. Less convenient when the dimensionality is high, but we can at least see the idea of that as we move up through the 3 spatial dimensions we can easily represent. But does attempting to convert the space of ideas (and in using the word space I fall back on the physical world language again, even though the idea of a space doesn't actually mathematically mean that it's got anything to do with physical space) into a mathematical object somehow rob it of its essence? The only answer I have is: What other systematic methods exist? I don't know of any. Systematizing things and mathematizing them go virtually hand in hand. Using maths just saves a ton of time because so many things share the same structure, so things proved about the abstract structure hold for so many real ideas, and we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
You could argue, for instance, that the idea of "distance" between ideas is not helpful, that ideas are fundamentally incommensurable in some way. That a person who holds 5 views in common with me is not meaningfully "closer" to me than the person who only holds 4. But I disagree - I expect the quibble is more about the relative importance of some of those disagreements. And that can be modeled better too, and still interpreted geometrically. The distance might be non-Euclidean too - that's not uncommon, and again mathematics is still the best way to model it. It's just more complex again. But I guess one of the things that people who trust in models to explain the world at all have to accept (at least as a working assumption) is that simple models can sometimes be good enough. The trick is to find the balance between models that are overly simplistic and ones that are too big and impractical, and perhaps overfitting too.
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Speaker: Saying what we actually mean on…, in reply to linger,
What data are you suggesting be used for dimensional analysis?
Surveys of opinions on a wide range of topics, and on how they voted. I don't know of existing free sources for such information, but it seems valuable enough to pay for.
Under such conditions, a multidimensional PCA capturing variance in voting behaviour would probably not be as informative as a cluster analysis identifying “faction membership”.
Could be. There's no reason not to do both, though, if we had that data. I think I'd probably overlay the cluster analysis onto the PCA's dimensions. Lots of way to cluster things - the only way to guess if it's useful is to do it and see.
After that, further refinements of the surveys could suggest themselves.
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Which is not to say that I disagree with your main thrust here, Rob. I just don't think it's something that one can generalize about. Which is why I don't agree with Tom either. It seems to me that both strategies are always on the table. If you break the direction the Left could take into smaller components then you can move in both directions simultaneously. Towards the center on one issue, away from it on others. You can aggregate all the directions together if you want to make extremely weak generalizations that apply for short periods of time in particular places.
Also, it's possible to move in directions that are neither toward nor away from the center, but are still highly significant. You can rotate your position around the center until you're the diametric opposite to what you started as, without ever passing through the center at all. I don't think this is a likely thing to happen, but my point is that thinking about this as a one dimensional line of movement is very, very simplistic.
If your point really is to just say that sometimes it's OK to move toward the center for politically expedient reasons, then I totally agree. If you are saying that's what we should be doing right now, and/or for all time, then I don't see the case as particularly well proved.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Rob Salmond,
I don’t really care how radical or not radical the change is, I care how long it lasts.
I care how good it is. I don't want either radical or long lasting change if they're for the worse.
That’s why Working for Families is better than a UBI and high marginal taxes – it’s broadly popular enough that the right can’t afford to undo it, even when they desperately want to and win three terms in a row.
I'll accept that WFF scores more points on ease of acceptance. That isn't the whole story though. Counting against it is that it can't do much for the unemployed, and it doesn't level the playing field. It fundamentally gives assistance to one of the less needy groups, the middle classes. I mean yes, sure, it's a system that the political right can accept, which makes it lasting. But something can be lastingly crap. To suggest it's better to help children by giving money to working families, than to give money to all families, just because your political enemies think it's better, is not something I can buy in such an un-nuanced form.
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