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League of Real Nations Male Rites & Feminist Fallacies 'Anti-Fascism' is the New Fascism Greening The Blues Bombers & Burqas A Book Whose Time Has Come Politics of The Forked Tongue GREENING THE BLUES by Dr Aidan Rankin In the United States, there is a joke about green politics that runs something like this:
Q. "Why is the Green Party like a water melon?"
A. "Because it's green on the outside, red on the inside."Although told by conservative Republicans, the true joke is on the 'liberal' Democrats. They are furious with America's fledgling Green Party, for they blame it, with good reason, for losing a tranche of the left-wing vote. The Greens' three per cent spelled defeat for the Democrats, not least in the cutting edge state of Florida. But Republican humour and Democrat anger reflect the same underlying truth about the Greens. Although their Presidential Candidate, Ralph Nader, is not a man of the left, his party platform turned out to be a blend of vulgar Marxism and Political Correctness. It combined the post-1960s authoritarian-'liberal' obsessions - group rights, reverse race and sex discrimination, the attack on any form of settled values or tradition - with demands for an extension of state control over every area of the economy and the individual's life. Although there are many genuine ecologists in America, to 'Vote Green' was to endorse the economic and cultural agenda of the extreme left and so, effectively, to 'Vote Red'.
I start with the United States because it is there that the polarisation between conservatism and political ecology has become most obvious. Whilst the Greens, as a party, veer ever leftwards, conservatives embrace a fundamentalist interpretation of the free market. Theirs is increasingly a 'narrow individualism', to use Tocqueville's phrase, because it takes little account of civil society (on which individual freedom depends) and pays as scant regard to custom and accumulated wisdom as the Politically Correct left. Yet these American polarities are also to be found in the politics of Britain and continental Europe. Although usually less baldly stated, they are at least as pronounced, especially as Western Europe's far left is more openly Marxist and more explicitly revolutionary in its objectives.
Across Europe, the Greens as an organised political force are either competing directly with the Trotskyists and ex-Communists, or acting as left-wing echo chambers for the social democratic parties. Even where, as in Denmark, they adhere to a centrist tradition, greens find themselves tarred with the leftist brush. 'We say that we are in the centre, but they don't believe us,' a Danish friend told me. 'Whatever we say, they think we are on the left'. The reason she gave for this distrust by moderate and Euro-sceptic Danish voters was the pattern of green politics across the EU, notably Germany. There, the type of centrism defended by Danish greens was first defined as 'neither left, nor right, but in front', in other words not a wishy-washy middle ground, but a philosophy that transcended right and left-wing stereotypes.
This founding principle of the German Green Party in the late 1970s was soon swept rudely aside. Left-wing activists - the 'generation of 1968' - took over much of the party. They are more energetic than conservatives because fanaticism and intolerance come naturally to them. Accordingly, they moved it from 'pure' environmental politics, distrusted by the left, to an obsession with feminist critiques of 'patriarchy' and support for Third World Marxist causes. In Britain, the Green Party is older than its German cousin (it was founded, as the Ecology Party, in 1973), but has adopted a raft of left-wing policies and is inhospitable to conservative ecologists. It welcomes defectors from the left of the Labour Party and at times works closely with Marxist factions.
Defensively 'progressive', green politics in Britain follow the same set of Pavlovian reactions as left-wing activism. Tradition is oppressive. The nation-state is dead. Elitism is evil. Men and women are interchangeable. Change is good. Both in Britain and in continental Europe, greens have derived some benefit from the collapse of Communist parties and the widespread disillusionment with social democracy. But in their Faustian pact with the 'politically correct' left, greens have developed a political programme that inconsistent and contradictory at every level. Their ecological roots enjoin them to conserve local ecosystems whilst their left-wing ideological reflexes demand that they scorn local traditions. 'Natural' patterns are to be preserved whilst patterns of human behaviour are to be constantly disrupted.
In this way, left-greenery destroys the holistic basis of ecological politics by reviving ideas of dualistic conflict. Furthermore, it expresses the alienation between Man and Nature that has proved so problematic in Western thought and which political ecology was intended to question. The left-wing orientation of green politics might yield short-term electoral gains by picking up 'red' protest votes. At the same time, it boxes Green parties into an electoral ghetto by switching off large swathes of the voting public. This was acknowledged, bizarrely, after the European parliamentary elections of 1989. The British Greens, presenting a moderate face, attracted disaffected Shire Tories and traditional Liberals (i.e. those who actually believe in freedom tempered by civility) and won 15% of the popular vote. Far from being happy with the result, the left-wing militants in the party made it clear that they did not 'want' conservative voters. The party's principal speakers, Sara Parkin and Jonothon Porritt, were denounced as reactionaries and eventually driven out.
It was not always thus. Thirty years ago, Edward Goldsmith and a group of ecological pioneers produced a little book called Blueprint for Survival that led to the Ecology Party's founding. Its critique of economic growth as an end in itself struck chords with those of conservative disposition who worried about the loss of human values in politics and the spread of moral vacuity and materialism. The 'goal' of Goldsmith and his colleagues was to shift the balance of Western political culture from an obsession with economic growth, at all human and ecological cost, to a more profound concern with the quality of life, for both individuals and communities. Political ecology, therefore, involves the decentralisation and diffusion of power:
We have seen that man in our present society has been deprived of a satisfactory social environment. A society made up of decentralised, self-sufficient communities, in which people work near their homes, have the responsibility of governing themselves, of running their schools, hospitals and welfare services, in fact of running their own communities, should, we feel, be a much happier place. Its members, in these conditions, would be likely to develop an identity of their own, which many of us have lost in the mass society we live in. They would tend, once more, to find an aim in life, develop a set of values and take pride in their achievement as well as in those of their community.This aspiration has much in common with traditional conservative principles. Indeed there could hardly be a better manifesto for the Tory Party, if it is seeking to revive its localist and voluntarist traditions. For it was Edmund Burke, after all, who spoke of the 'little platoons' as the mainstays of civil society. It was voluntary association, at local level, that upheld both individual freedom and social conscience. Centralised institutions, whether state or corporate in origin, tend to undermine both. Historically, conservatives have emphasised continuity and social evolution over radical breaks with the past. They favour experience over utopian blueprints, the organic over the abstract. Conservatism arose as a response to the sweeping neophiliac certainties of the revolutionary left. Green politics arose, originally, in response to the industrial age, with its superstitious reverence for the new and its preference for political and economic expansionism. Pioneering green thinkers such as E.F. Schumacher and Leopold Kohr popularised the view that 'small is beautiful', that economic and social life should be restored to a human scale. This accords well with the conservative belief in an intelligible political system with strong cultural roots and a sense of proportion. As late as the mid-1990s, the green writer John Pearce acknowledged the connection between political ecology and conservatism. Greens, he wrote, could "borrow from the Conservative tradition the keeping of what is best about the past, namely conserving. This conserving will apply to resources, ancient sites and buildings, forests and habitats, cultures, languages, sports, music and art".
Conservatives today can benefit from the holistic approaches of political ecology. A creative synthesis of Tory and green would champion genuine entrepreneurs - small and medium-sized businesses, skilled craftsmen and the self-employed - against bureaucratic state interference and the homogenising power of the multinationals. Influenced by green thinking, the Tories could plug their electoral gaps without mouthing 'PC' shibboleths they don't really believe. Many Hindus, for example, feel patronised by liberal left-blandishments and dislike being lumped into an amorphous mass called 'British Asians'. Many women, especially the mothers of sons, are repulsed and insulted by gender-bending feminism. Such voters would be attracted to a party that acknowledged the value of tradition and the complexities of life, without trying to force them into simplistic categories. Green thinking, in turn, would benefit from the historical perspectives of conservatism. The connection between preserving biodiversity and valuing cultural diversity would be restored. Without that connection, green politics has become all but meaningless.
Both conservatism and green politics arise out of a search for a spiritual dimension, an awareness that the politics of instant gratification produces alienation and discord. Yet conservatives and greens have usually failed to recognise their shared values. Conservatives have tended, over the last generation, to ally themselves with an ideology once described by a Latin American humorist as 'marketolatry'. This form of fundamentalism or blind worship of market forces has as little to do with genuine free enterprise as the bigoted 'religious right' has to do with Christ's teachings. Far from encouraging choice, it entrenches corporate monopoly. Greens, meanwhile, have tended to embrace Political Correctness, the divisive tyranny of militant pressure groups. Market fundamentalism and Political Correctness are both based on outmoded linear thinking, a simplistic and curiously old-fashioned view of human 'progress'. As ideological certainties unravel, the case for a blue-green alliance becomes stronger than ever.
Aidan Rankin is co-Editor of New European. His book, The Politics of the Forked Tongue: Authoritarian Liberalism was published in 2002 and is available from New European Publications, 14-16 Carroun Road, London SW8 1JT, price £9.
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