Left Flank

One of These Politicians Is Not Like the Other

Translation: A black man has been elected president of the United States for the first time in history. The podium says, «The Era of New Progressivism.» Cheong Wa Dae said that President Lee Myung-bak and President-elect Barack Obama share the same political philosophy. Many people think that this is a joke, because Lee's ideology is conservative, not progressive.

The word «Moderate» obviously doesn't exist in the South Korean political lexicon.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz compares progressive and conservative notions of how the state should work with a prospering society.

The left understands that the government’s role in providing infrastructure and education, developing technology, and even acting as an entrepreneur is vital. Government laid the foundations of the Internet and the modern biotechnology revolutions. In the nineteenth century, research at America’s government-supported universities provided the basis for the agricultural revolution. Government then brought these advances to millions of American farmers. Small business loans have been pivotal in creating not only new businesses, but whole new industries.

The final difference may seem odd: the left now understands markets, and the role that they can and should play in the economy. The right, especially in America, does not. The New Right, typified by the Bush-Cheney administration, is really old corporatism in a new guise.

These are not libertarians. They believe in a strong state with robust executive powers, but one used in defense of established interests, with little attention to market principles. The list of examples is long, but it includes subsidies to large corporate farms, tariffs to protect the steel industry, and, most recently, the mega-bail-outs of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. But the inconsistency between rhetoric and reality is long-standing: protectionism expanded under Reagan, including through the imposition of so-called voluntary export restraints on Japanese cars.

By contrast, the new left is trying to make markets work. Unfettered markets do not operate well on their own ‫ a conclusion reinforced by the current financial debacle. Defenders of markets sometimes admit that they do fail, even disastrously, but they claim that markets are “self-correcting.” During the Great Depression, similar arguments were heard: government need not do anything, because markets would restore the economy to full employment in the long run . But, as John Maynard Keynes famously put it, in the long run we are all dead.