What does it mean to be a Liberal or
Conservative? What does it mean to be a Socialist or a Communist? These terms,
or labels, refer to a belief in the way government should run within a
society—also known as a political ideology. Political ideologies are belief
systems that provide people with a perspective on the proper role of elected
officials, which types of public policies should be prioritized, and how the
various elements of society should be arranged. Whether or not they realize it,
most people possess a definitive political ideology. In the United States, most
citizens consider themselves liberal, moderate, or conservative. In other
countries, you may find a majority of people who identify as Socialists,
Marxists, or even Anarchists.
Most ideologies are identified by their
position on a political spectrum—a way of comparing or visualizing different
political ideologies. The political spectrum is usually described along a
left-middle-right line.
L___________________M_____________________R
It is important to recognize that many
ideologies defy categorization, mainly because they encompass views on
different parts of the spectrum. For example, conservatives can be
“traditional” or “moderate” or “right-wing.” Political ideologies are complex,
and some argue that the spectrum theory is an oversimplified view.
Liberalism (Left)
Liberalism is a political ideology that,
at its core, denounces economic and social inequality. Equality of opportunity
is viewed by liberals as essential, and to achieve that end, they believe that
discriminatory practices must be eliminated and that the impact of great
equalities of wealth needs to be lessened. Liberals usually advocate vigorous
public policies to reduce or eliminate these inequalities. They see government
as the means to make this possible, while also preserving civil
liberties/rights, and progressive values. Liberals believe that public policy
should be egalitarian and that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure
ALL citizens have access to affordable health care, quality education, a clean
environment, and social safety net programs. They also generally believe in
affirmative action programs, workers’ health and safety protections,
progressive taxation, and unions’ rights to organize and strike.
Conservative (Right)
Conservatives have a general preference
for the existing order of society and an opposition to most efforts to bring
about rapid or fundamental change. In contrast to liberals, conservatives want
to enhance individual liberty by keeping government small, except in the area
of national defense. Conservatives maintain that people need strong leadership
institutions, firm laws, and strict moral codes. Conservative ideologies most
often base their claims on the teachings of religion and traditional morality
and tend to downplay rational social theories propounded by secular
philosophers, economists, and other intellectuals. They also prefer eliminating
abortion, affirmative action programs, and labor unions. More extreme
conservative ideologies accept all (or nearly all) of society’s inequalities of
wealth, status, and privilege, often supporting a return to an earlier, more
inegalitarian, and hierarchical political-economic order.
Moderates (Middle)
Moderates usually represent a mix of
both liberal and conservative ideologies. The majority of Americans classify
themselves as more moderate than liberal or conservative.
Other Political Ideologies
Communism
An ideology based on the communal
ownership of all property and a classless social structure, with economic
production and distribution to be directed and regulated by means of an
authoritative economic plan that supposedly embodies the interests of the
community as a whole.
Socialism
An ideology based on collective or
governmental ownership and democratic management of the essential means of the
production and distribution of goods. It can often be difficult to define,
since different people have different ideas about what a socialist society
would look like. There are a number of similarities between socialism and
communism.
National Socialism (Nazism)
This ideology originated as a
nationalist movement in European countries after World War I and refers to the
movement of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler. Nazism
rejects liberalism, democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, and stresses
the subordination of the individual to the state and strict obedience to
leaders. It emphasizes the right of the strong to rule the weak, the inequality
of individuals and “races,” and the racial superiority of White Anglo-Saxons
(Aryans).
Fascism
Fascism tends to celebrate masculinity,
youth, mystical unity, and the power of violence. Often, but not always, it
promotes racial superiority doctrines, ethnic persecution, imperialist
expansion, and genocide. Usually, fascism espouses open male supremacy, though
sometimes it may also promote female solidarity and new opportunities for women
of the privileged nation or race.
Anarchism
Anarchism considers the
state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless
society, or anarchy. Anarchists seek to diminish or even eliminate reliance
upon authority in the conduct of human relations, but thus have widely
disagreed on what additional criteria are essential or beneficial to anarchism
and human society. Anarchism is usually identified as the most
anti-authoritarian of all political ideologies.
Libertarianism
Libertarianism is a relatively new
political ideology which gained momentum in the mid 20th century. Libertarians
believe that any legitimate government should be small and should play only the
most minimal possible role in economic, social, and cultural life. Furthermore,
libertarians believe that the individual should be as free as is practically feasible
from government restraint and regulation in both the economic and non-economic
aspects of life.
Marxism
Karl Marx wrote the
seminal works of this political ideology, which described the strengths and
weaknesses of the capitalist economic system and argued that it would
eventually be overthrown in order to bring about a more just and equal society.
This would mean first implementing a socialist system and inevitably a
communist society. According to Marx, all injustices and inequalities in the
world can be traced to the class struggle, or the inequalities inherent to the
capitalist system. Marxists may consider themselves socialists or communists as
there exists much overlap between these ideologies.
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT
MOSCOW TRAILS
Trotsky had received
comparatively good press in the West, especially since World War II, when the
wartime alliance with Stalin turned sour. Trotsky has been published by major
corporations,[1] and is generally considered the grandfatherly figure of
Bolshevism.[2] “Uncle Joe,” on the other hand, was quickly demonized as a
tyrant, and the “gallant Soviet Army” that stopped the Germans at Stalingrad
was turned into a threat to world freedom, when in the aftermath of World War
II the USSR did not prove compliant in regard to US plans for a post-war world
order.[3] However, even before the rift, basically from the beginning of the
Moscow Trials, Western academics such as Professor John Dewey condemned the
proceedings as a brutal travesty. The Moscow Trials are here reconsidered
within the context of the historical circumstances and of the judicial system
that Trotsky and other defendants had themselves played prominent roles in
establishing.
A reconsideration
of the Moscow Trials of the defendants Trotsky et al is important for more
reasons than the purely academic. Since the scuttling of the USSR and of the
Warsaw Pact by a combination of internal betrayal and of subversion undertaken
by a myriad of US-based “civil societies” and NGOs backed by the likes of the
George Soros network, Freedom House, National Endowment for Democracy, and
dozens of other such entities,[4] Russia – after the Yeltsin interregnum of
subservience to globalization – has sought to recreate herself as a power that
offers a multipolar rather than a unipolar world. A reborn Russia and the
reshaping of a new geopolitical bloc which responds to Russian leadership, is
therefore of importance to all those throughout the world who are cynical about
the prospect of a “new world order” dominated by “American ideals.” US foreign
policy analysts, “statesmen” (sic), opinion molders, and lobbyists still have
nightmares about Stalin and the possibility of a Stalin-type figure arising who
will re-establish Russia’s position in the world. For example, Putin, a
“strongman” type in Western-liberal eyes at least, has been ambivalent about
the role of Stalin in history, such ambivalence, rather than unequivocal
rejection, being sufficient to make oligarchs in the USA and Russia herself,
nervous. Hence, The Sunday Times, commenting on the Putin phenomena
being dangerously reminiscent of Stalinism, stated recently:
Joseph Stalin sent
millions to their deaths during his reign of terror, and his name was taboo for
decades, but the dictator is a step closer to rehabilitation after Vladimir
Putin openly praised his achievements.
The Prime Minister
and former KGB agent used an appearance on national television to give credit
to Stalin for making the Soviet Union an industrial superpower, and for
defeating Hitler in the Second World War.
In a verdict that
will be obediently absorbed by a state bureaucracy long used to taking its cue
from above, Mr Putin declared that it was “impossible to make a judgment in
general” about the man who presided over the Gulag slave camps. His view contrasted
sharply with that of President Medvedev, Russia’s nominal leader, who has said
that there is no excuse for the terror unleashed by Stalin.
Mr Putin said that
he had deliberately included the issue of Stalin’s legacy in a marathon annual
question-and-answer program on live television, because it was being “actively
discussed” by Russians.[5]
While The
Times’ Halpin commented that Putin nonetheless gave the obligatory
comments about the brutality of Stalin’s regime, following a forceful
condemnation of Stalin by Medvedev on October 9, 2009, it is worrying
nonetheless that Putin could state that positive aspects “undoubtedly existed.”
Such comments are the same as if a leading German political figure had stated
that some positive aspects of Hitler “undoubtedly existed.” The guilt complex
of Stalinist tyranny, having its origins in Trotskyite Stalinophobia, which has
been carried over into the present “Cold War II” era of a bastardous mixture of
“neo-cons” (i.e., post-Trotskyites) and Soros type globalists, often working in
tandem despite their supposed differences,[6] is supposed to keep Russia down
in perpetuity. Should Russia rise again, however, the specter of Stalin is
there to frighten the world into adherence to US policy in the same way that
the “war on terrorism” is designed to dragoon the world behind the USA. Just as
importantly, The Times article commented on Putin’s opposition to the
Russian oligarchy, which has been presented by the Western news media as a
“human rights issue”:
During the television
program, Mr Putin demonstrated his populist instincts by lashing out at
Russia’s billionaire class for their vulgar displays of wealth. His comments
came after a scandal in Geneva, when an elderly man was critically injured in
an accident after an alleged road race involving the children of wealthy
Russians in a Lamborghini and three other sports cars. “The nouveaux riches all
of a sudden got rich very quickly, but they cannot manage their wealth without
showing it off all the time. Yes, this is our problem,” Mr Putin said.[7]
This all seems
lamentably (for the plutocrats) like a replay of what happened after the
Bolshevik Revolution when Stalin kicked out Trotsky et al. Under Trotsky, the
Bolshevik regime would have eagerly sought foreign capital.[8] It is after all
why plutocrats would have had such an interest in ensuring Trotsky’s safe
passage back to Russia in time for the Bolshevik coup, after having had a
pleasant stay with his family in the USA as a guest of Julius Hammer, and
having been comfortably ensconced in an upmarket flat, with a chauffeur at the
family’s disposal.[9] In 1923 the omnipresent globalist think tank the Council
on Foreign Relations, was warning investors to hurry up and get into Soviet
Russia before something went wrong,[10] which it did a few years later. Under
Stalin, even Western technicians were not trusted.[11]
Of particular
note, however, is that well-placed Russian politicians and academics are still
very aware of the globalist apparatus that is working for what is frequently
identified in Russia as a “new world order,” and the responsibility Russia has
in reasserting herself to lead in reshaping a “multipolar” world contra
American hegemony. This influences Russia’s foreign policy, perhaps the most
significant manifestation being the BRIC alliance,[12] despite what this writer
regards as the very dangerous liaison with China.[13]
What is dismissed
as “fringe conspiracy theory” by the superficial and generally “kept” Western
news media and academia, is reported and discussed, among the highest echelons
of Russian media, politics, military, and intelligentsia, with an analytical
methodology that is all but gone from Western journalism and research. For
example, the Russian geopolitical theorist Alexander Dugin is a well-respected
academic who lectures at Moscow State University under the auspices of the
Center for Conservative Studies, which is part of the Department of Sociology
(International Relations).[14] The subjects discussed by Professor Dugin and
his colleagues and students feature the menace of world government and the
challenges of globalism to Russian statehood. The movement he inspired, Eurasianism,
has many prominent people in Russia and elsewhere.
Perhaps the best
indication of Russia’s persistence in remaining resistant to globalist and
hegemonic schemes for world re-organization is the information that is
published by the Ministry of International Affairs. Despite the disclaimer, the
articles and analyses are a far cry from the shallowness of the mainstream news
media of the Western world. Articles posted by the Ministry as this paper is
written include a cynical consideration of the North African revolutions and
the role of “social media;”[16] and an article pointing to the immense
socio-economic benefits wrought by the Qaddafi regime, which is now being
targeted by revolts “backed by Western intelligence services.” Political
analyst Sergei Shashkov theorizes that:
Recent events
perfectly fit into the US-invented concept of “manageable chaos” (also known as
“controlled instability” theory). Among its authors are: Zbigniew
Brzezinski, a Polish American political scientist, Gene Sharp, who wrote From
Dictatorship to Democracy, and Steven Mann, whose Chaos Theory and
Strategic Thought was published in Washington in 1992, and who was
involved in plotting “color revolutions” in some former Soviet republics.
The only place one
is going to get that type of analyses in the West is in alternative media
sources such as Foreign Policy Journal or Global Research.
What Western government ministry would have the independence of mind to
circulate analyses of this type? Russians have the opportunity to be the most
well-informed people in the world in matters that are of real importance.
Westerners, on the other hand, do have that essential freedom – to
watch US sitcoms and keep abreast of the tittle-tattle of movie stars and pop
singers. Clearly, Russia is not readily succumbing to the type of post-Cold War
world as envisaged by plutocrats and US hegemonists, expressed by George H W
Bush in his hopes for a “new world order” after the demise of the Soviet
bloc.[19] Beginning with Putin, Russia has refused to co-operate in the
establishment of the “new world order,” just as Stalin did not go along with
similar schemes intended for the post-World War II era.
POLITICAL CLASSIFICATION
In many contemporary
national political systems the forces of history and administrative necessity
have joined to produce regional communities at an intermediate level between
the local and the national community. In some cases—the Swiss canton, the
English county, the German Land, and the American state—these regional
communities possess their own political institutions and exercise governmental
functions. In other cases, however, the territorial community is a product of
ethnic, cultural, linguistic, physiographic, or economic factors and maintains
its identity without the support of political structures.
In
many contemporary national political systems the forces of history and
administrative necessity have joined to produce regional communities at an
intermediate level between the local and the national community. In some
cases—the Swiss canton, the English county, the German Land, and the
American state—these regional communities possess their own political
institutions and exercise governmental functions. In other cases, however, the
territorial community is a product of ethnic, cultural, linguistic,
physiographic, or economic factors and maintains its identity without the
support of political structures.
As
subnational political systems, regional communities are sometimes based in
tradition, even tracing their origin to a period prior to the founding of the
country; in other cases, they are modern administrative units created by
national governments for their own purposes. Examples of both types may be
found in the history of regionalism in France and its complex pattern of
internal territorial divisions. Before the French Revolution, France was
divided into ancient provinces—Burgundy, Gascony, Brittany, Normandy, Provence,
Anjou, Poitou, and others. After the Revolution, in what seems to have been an
effort to discourage regional patriotism and threats of separatism, the
Napoleonic government superimposed a new regional structure of départements
on the old provincial map. More than a century and a half later, in the era of
rapid communications and national economic planning, the French national
government announced a regrouping of the Napoleonic départements into
much larger Gaullist régions. Recognizing, perhaps, the continuing
strength of the provincial attachments of Gascon, Breton, Norman, and Provençal
and the survival of old regional folk cultures with their distinctive patterns
of speech, the new régions were given boundaries similar in many cases
to the traditional provincial boundaries of pre-republican France.
The
history of the French regional communities is not a special case, for
political, administrative, economic, and technical forces have led many other
national governments to replace traditional territorial divisions with new
regional units. In England, for example, the traditional structure of county
governments was replaced in the late 19th century by a system of administrative
counties, many of which in turn lost area to other units of local government in
the 1970s and the 1990s. Attempts have also been made to use older regional
communities as the infrastructure for new systems of regional government. Thus,
the Italian constitution provides for a number of regions, five of which—Valle
d’Aosta, Sardinia, Sicily, Trentino–Alto Adige, and Friuli–Venezia Giulia—enjoy
a special autonomous status and which, in different ways, are historically
distinct from the rest of Italy.
In yet other cases the fear of competition from regional governments or of
separatist movements has led national governments to make various efforts to
resist the development of regional political structures. Again, Italy provides
a convenient example, for Italian governments refused to establish all the
regions provided for in the 1948 constitution until 1970. It should be noted
that the Italian republic of 1870–1922 and its fascist successor state also
made similar efforts to combat regional political development, the former by
the creation of a large number of administrative provinces and the latter by
establishing corporazione to represent occupations regardless of
geographic location.
In
several modern states the growth of vast conurbations and the rise of the
megalopolis have prompted the development of other kinds of regional governmental
structures. The Port of London Authority and the Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey are examples of regional systems designed to serve the needs of
urban communities that have outgrown the boundaries of existing city governments.
Other regional structures have also resulted from the increased responsibility
of national governments for the administration of comprehensive social and
economic programs. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, is both a
national agency and a regional government whose decisions affect the lives of
the inhabitants of all the states and cities in its sphere. Further examples of
such regional administrative structures include zonal councils established in
India for social and economic planning purposes, as well as governmental and
economic units established in Britain to deal with the problems of industrially
depressed areas.
Issues of classification
Types of classification schemes
The
almost infinite range of political systems has been barely suggested in this
brief review. Confronted by the vast array of political forms, political
scientists have attempted to classify and categorize, to develop typologies and
models, or in some other way to bring analytic order to the bewildering variety
of data. Many different schemes have been developed. There is, for example, the
classical distinction between governments in terms of the number of
rulers—government by one man (monarchy or tyranny), government by the few
(aristocracy or oligarchy), and government by the many (democracy). There are
schemes classifying governments in terms of their key institutions (for
example, parliamentarism, cabinet government, presidentialism). There are
classifications that group systems according to basic principles of political
authority or the forms of legitimacy (charismatic, traditional, rational-legal,
and others). Other schemes distinguish between different kinds of economic
organization in the system (the laissez-faire state, the corporate state, and
socialist and communist forms of state economic organization) or between the
rule of different economic classes (feudal, bourgeois, and capitalist). And
there are modern efforts to compare the functions of political systems
(capabilities, conversion functions, and system maintenance and adaptation
functions) and to classify them in terms of structure, function, and political
culture.
Although
none is comprehensive, each of these principles of analysis has some validity,
and the classifying schemes that are based on them, although in some cases no
longer relevant to modern forms of political organization, have often been a
major influence on the course of political development. The most influential of
such classifying schemes is undoubtedly the attempt of Plato and Aristotle to define the basic forms of government
in terms of the number of power holders and their use or abuse of power. Plato held that there was a natural succession of the forms of
government: an aristocracy (the ideal form of government by the few) that
abuses its power develops into a timocracy (in which the rule of the best men,
who value wisdom as the highest political good, is succeeded by the rule of men
who are primarily concerned with honour and martial virtue), which through greed
develops into an oligarchy (the perverted form of government by the few), which
in turn is succeeded by a democracy (rule by the many); through excess, the
democracy becomes an anarchy (a lawless government), to which a tyrant is
inevitably the successor. Abuse of power in the Platonic typology is defined by
the rulers’ neglect or rejection of the prevailing law or custom (nomos); the ideal forms are thus nomos
observing (ennomon), and the perverted forms are nomos neglecting
(paranomon). Although disputing the character of this implacable
succession of the forms of government, Aristotle also based his classification on the number of rulers and
distinguished between good and bad forms of government. In his typology it was
the rulers’ concern for the common good that distinguished the ideal from
perverted forms of government. The ideal forms in the Aristotelian scheme are monarchy, aristocracy, and polity (a term conveying some of the
meaning of the modern concept of “constitutional democracy”); when perverted by
the selfish abuse of power, they are transformed respectively into tyranny,
oligarchy, and ochlocracy (or the mob rule of lawless democracy). The concept
of the polity, a “mixed” or blended constitutional order, fascinated political
theorists for another millennium. To achieve its advantages, innumerable
writers from Polybius to St. Thomas Aquinas experimented with the construction
of models giving to each social class the control of appropriate institutions
of government.
Another
very influential classifying scheme was the distinction between monarchies and
republics. In the writings of Machiavelli and others, the tripartism of
classical typologies was replaced by the dichotomy of princely and republican
rule. Sovereignty in the monarchy or the principality is
in the hands of a single ruler; in republics, sovereignty is vested in a
plurality or collectivity of power holders. Reducing aristocracy and democracy
to the single category of republican rule, Machiavelli
also laid the basis in his analysis of the exercise of princely power for a
further distinction between despotic and nondespotic forms of government. In
the work of Montesquieu, for example, despotism, or the lawless exercise of
power by the single ruler, is contrasted with the constitutional forms of
government of the monarchy and the republic. As a result of the decline of
monarchies and the rise of new totalitarian states terming themselves
republics, this traditional classification is now, of course, of little more
than historical interest.
Modern classifying systems
The usefulness of
all the traditional classifications has been undermined by the momentous
changes in the political organization of the modern world. Typologies based on
the number of power holders or the formal structures of the state are rendered
almost meaningless by the standardization of “democratic” forms, the deceptive
similarities in the constitutional claims and governmental institutions of
regimes that actually differ markedly in their political practices, and the
rise of new political orders in the non-Western world. A number of modern
writers have attempted to overcome this difficulty by constructing classifying
schemes that give primary importance to social, cultural, economic, or
psychological factors. The most influential of such schemes is the Marxist
typology, which classifies types of rule on the basis of economic class
divisions and defines the ruling class as that which controls the means of
production in the state. A monistic typology that also emphasized the
importance of a ruling class was developed by an Italian theorist of the early
20th century, Gaetano Mosca. In Mosca’s writings all
forms of government appear as mere facades for oligarchy or the rule of a
political “elite” that centres power in its own hands. Another classification,
which distinguishes between “legitimate” and “revolutionary” governments, was
suggested by Mosca’s contemporary Guglielmo Ferrero.
Using a sociopsychological approach to the relations between rulers and ruled,
Ferrero held that a legitimate government is one whose citizens voluntarily
accept its rule and freely give it their loyalty; in revolutionary systems, the
government fears the people and is feared by them. Legitimacy and leadership
are also the basis of a typology developed by the German sociologist Max Weber. In Weber’s scheme there are three basic types of
rule: charismatic, in which the authority or legitimacy of the ruler rests upon
some genuine sense of calling and in which the followers submit because of
their faith or conviction in the ruler’s exemplary character; traditional, in
which, as in hereditary monarchy, leadership authority is historically or
traditionally accepted; and rational-legal, in which leadership authority is
the outgrowth of a legal order that has been effectively rationalized and where
there is a prevailing belief in the legality of normative rules or commands.
The Weberian typology has been elaborated by a number of writers who have found
it particularly useful for comparing and classifying the political orders of
the non-Western world.