Thoughts and ramblings on fringes, politics, tuition, and stuff

I was just thinking while writing the previous article... maybe how they treat the fringes has something to do with why the right is so strong and the left is so weak these days. Let me explain...

The right seems to stick together and nurture their fringes, allowing them to grow into a strong political movement. Just look at the religious right in the US and Canada. This allows them to have a strong constituency that they can easily please and rely on for votes. It also widens the debate so that the moderate right looks closer to the center and more sane in comparison. This is also a good media strategy, because to find balance the media often tries to get one person from each side, and make it look like there is an even debate and the truth is somewhere in the middle. Halfway between a crazy Christian fascist and a moderate Liberal is still pretty right wing.

The left, on the other hand, seems to try to cut themselves off from the far left and try to use the same dichotomy as the right to justify their position ("Support our troops, bring them home"? How about "Fuck the troops, they're killing innocent people"). A lot of them go with the theory that you have to try to move towards that centrist position (ie: Tony Blair style Third Way politics) in order to get public support and get elected so you can use your power to eventually slowly change the world while no one notices. Unfortunately, the more you move to the right the more that centrist position moves to the right and you are narrowing the frame of discussion on your side. It also alienates and marginalizes a lot of your potential supporters (eg: my current facebook status) and causes more fractures than is healthy to any sort of social movement. Instead of saying "I'm not really a socialist, they're too far out and idealistic and such", the left should be saying "Yes, I'm a socialist because we need socialism and here's why!" We can also see this with the kind of atheists who criticize people like Richard Dawkins for doing not much more than talking about atheism.

Could you imagine if the Republicans in the US and Conservatives in Canada treated the evangelicals the way the Manitoba NDP treats the radical left? They would never get elected!

One example of this is the recent battle over the tuition freeze. I once went to a conference where we discussed campaigning for the tuition freeze and the presenter said something like "I would like free education too, but we can't really say that or they'll call us communists" (it didn't help that I was wearing my hammer and sickle shirt at the time). Since the most radical position that is talked about is continuing the freeze (we hardly ever hear talk of actually reducing fees and never a universal system of PSE), the debate is framed between supporters of the freeze on the radical left and people who want to eliminate all regulations and allow the Adam Smith fairies to make everything perfect with their magic hands. This leaves the "moderate" position as some sort of capped increase which is probably higher than the CPI. Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass here, but I think we would have been more successful if UMSU and the CFS instead focused on zero tuition (something not unreasonable, they do have it in many countries) and only accepted the tuition freeze as a sort of moderate compromise position.

In short, you don't change the world by being indistinguishable from your opponents. You change the world by proposing ideas that might be considered crazy at the time (free healthcare? That Tommy Douglas guy must be bonkers!) and fighting like hell for them.

Any thoughts?