This page deals with some potential alternate explanations for political behaviors and positions, where something might be influenced by a side-angle.
It began as a portion of my “various” page on politics, dealing with make-the-rich-richer propaganda. With a later wish to address the use of race/immigration/whatnot as a distraction, I decided to create a separate page for such topics. Further examples might or might not follow (but certainly exist).
Even absent explicit mention below, the explanations should be seen as both partial and somewhat speculative. A particular complication is that attributing deliberation and intent is a tricky area: Firstly, it might over-estimate the intelligence of the potentially guilty parties considerably, and Hanlon’s Razor might apply. Secondly, a great difference in insight, motivation, whatnot, is likely to be present, e.g. when comparing a core party strategist and a random party member, where the former might have a very calculating view and the latter a very naive one. Thirdly, even when the deliberation/intent is there, phrasings involving e.g. “the Left” as the guilty party should, of course, be seen only as approximations and metaphors.
I have long suspected the Left of using some issues to distract from more important ones, e.g. to use climate hysteria (as opposed to a calm and reasoned approach) as a means to distract from the many problems caused by the Left, including reductions in economic growth. A particularly interesting variation is the use of questions around race, immigration, and similar to distract from more important issues in specifically the definitions of political groupings:
If we look at different parties, ideologies, whatnot, they can be very different on a great number of issues. Consider e.g. my discussion of political scales, which also shows some truly important difference between the “Right” and the Left, as with takes on the individual vs. the collective and small vs. big government. Issues that have comparatively little to do with the antiquated and misleading Left–Right scale include issues like race and racism, immigration, and similar. For instance, as demonstrated on a large scale post-“October 7”, anti-Semitism is usually a Leftist thing in the reasonably modern Western world—and certainly was so going back to my own Swedish childhood. For instance, there is no reason why, say, a Libertarian or Conservative should be more racist than a Socialist (nor, outside Leftist and tendentious pseudo-definitions of words like “racism”, any actual signs that they are). For instance, there is no reason why the former would be more adverse to well-handled immigration than the latter.
Indeed, a pro-immigration stance would seem much more natural for a Libertarian than for a random Leftist, while there is strong reason to suspect that e.g. the U.S. Democrats have their eyes mostly on gaining new voters or otherwise earning advantages for themselves. Likewise, the U.S. Democrats have a long history of even anti-Black racism, as with the Jim-Crow laws, and many of them are now anti-White racists. Even the (Leftist!) idea that the Left would be anti-Racism, pro-immigration, and similar to a higher degree than others is a comparatively recent invention/development, largely located in the second half of the 20th century—or later.
What happens on a large scale, however, is that the Left focuses on exactly such “orthogonal” issues to an undue extent and with the clear message that “we, the noble Left, are pro-whatnot; they, the evil Right, are anti-whatnot”, and often with a strong slant of trying to define the “Right” exactly based on opinions in such matters. This is particularly notable in Germany (as I have, indeed, noted repeatedly), where any and all grouping that seems immigration critical, regardless of the reason and regardless of positions in other areas, is immediately branded as (some German equivalent of) “far Right”, anything “Rightwing” is immediately construed as “far Right” and e.g. “anti-immigrant”, and parties that in the U.K. or U.S. would refer to themselves with some variation of “Rightwing” increasingly hide under the misleading label “center”. This is the worse, as the actual opinions and motivations of various non-Left groupings are often severely distorted, including the indicated leap from immigration critic to anti-immigrant and the presupposition that immigration critics only ever are so because of racism—never because they, e.g., have legitimate concerns about the effect of excessive, uncontrolled, or illegal immigration on the economy or on crime.
This with reservations for the new party BSW, which recently has arisen from the far Left but pushes some points that the rest of the Left usually condemns as “far Right”, notably, with regard to immigration. Exactly how this will ultimately be handled in terms of terminology and propaganda is yet to be seen, but I have some hope that an indirect effect of BSW will be that this type of propaganda becomes impossible, because the BSW would be too hard to paint as “far Right”, while remaining credible, and because it exemplifies how e.g. takes on migration have very little to do with more important scales of opinions (cf. the linked-to text).
But now some great advantages arises for the Left, including the ability to pretend to have the moral high-ground, while the non-Left would be filled with bigots and racists. A particular complication is that many who would otherwise vote for a non-Leftist party/candidate might fail to do so because of specific and exaggerated-by-Leftist-propaganda fears of e.g. racism.
An interesting thought is that the constant claims from the (Old) Left about this-and-that “making [implied: only] the rich richer” and, often, “the poor poorer” could have a partial motivation in an anti-growth attitude. Ditto other arguments of a similar nature, like the Swedish harping about “klyftor”, and the common obsession with GINI instead of (the much more important) social mobility.
(Where “anti-growth” in some cases might be the literal issue, in some only a proxy, e.g. in that a higher-growth policy is rejected on other ideological grounds and must be defended against arguments concerning lost growth.)
One of the core ideas of e.g. Libertarian economic policies is that it is better to have an absolutely larger slice of a larger pie than an absolutely smaller slice of a smaller pie—even should the smaller slice be larger relative the smaller pie than the larger slice relative the larger pie. If we now look at growth, we can e.g. note that a growth of just 1 percent a year (in real terms) will double the economy in 70 years relative an economy with no growth, while 2 percent will do so in 35 years, and 4 percent in 18 years. Assuming the same or even, within limits, smaller (relative) shares, we then have more wealth for everyone based on growth—while a no-growth economy gives the type of zero-sum game that the Left likes to play, where no-one is better off unless someone else is worse off. (The same principle, as can be seen from the numbers, apply to economies that grow faster and slower, in that e.g. just one additional percent of growth per year will have a strong effect on an already growing economy.)
But what if the voters can be convinced, through propaganda lies, that the relative size of their respective slice of pie will shrink so fast that its absolute size remains the same? The pie might then grow, but the growth will only benefit others (with the most notable special case “the rich grow richer”). Worse, what if the growth comes at the price of so rapidly shrinking slices that even the absolute size shrinks (special case, “the poor grow poorer”)?
Why then should the voters care about growth? Just having the government slice up the existing pie more “fairly” would then seem so much better.
The truth, of course, is radically different, as borne out by experiences accumulated since before the likes of Marx: higher growth and a larger pie give benefits in all societal layers. If it fails to do so, it is because of hindering circumstances of another type, likely government imposed (some see the U.S. of the last few decades as an example), and the correct step is to remove these circumstances—not to kill growth. That some individuals might fail to see a better life is true, but then it is usually a matter of circumstances unrelated to growth, like laziness and sheer bad luck, that have nothing to do with rich-richer and poor-poorer, and are highly unlikely to make even these individuals worse off than without growth.
Finding good examples of a failure to benefit from growth is actually hard, which shows how strong the effects are. Consider slavery, a far more extreme setting than, say, the factory with exploited manual workers and a rich industrialist that is so common in Leftist imagery: Double the size of the real-term economy, and chances are that indirect effects will make even the slaves somewhat better off, in terms of better food, a lesser pressure to work beyond a certain point, better equipment/tools/whatnot that can make manual labor easier, or similar. Indeed, if the economy as a whole is strongly slave-based, chances are that the doubling could only come about through productivity improvements among the slaves, which points strongly to e.g. better equipment as a cause rather than an effect. Likewise, a higher productivity would make the slaves more valuable, giving incentives to keep them in health and working condition. Also note earlier/below discussions on e.g. worker productivity and its effects.
In a regular Western economy of today, the effects will be far larger, e.g. through a competition for workers, where an employer who does not keep up with wages will find himself out of workers. At an extreme, someone has to buy the products of the factory in order for the factory to earn a profit, too low wages would mean too little purchasing power, and (for most factories) too little profit—not to mention that this would prohibit the growth scenario that is under discussion. Indeed, a very typical scenario is that growth, increases in demand for products, and increases in demand for (and, thus, wages of) labor go hand in hand and are interleaved in their causalities.
The above is unlikely to be the only explanation for that cheap propaganda. Others include a furthering of the “us vs. them” thinking that is so important to Leftist successes and various manipulations of the “if you don’t vote for us, things will go badly for you, because our opponents [do not care for you, hate you, want to exploit you, whatnot]” and “if you do vote for us, we will make things better, because we [do care for you, whatnot]” kinds.
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