Arthur Aughey political writer

A 100 writers and thinkers were asked: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? Hardly any of them think the world will get better in the coming decades; many think it will get worse

Immanuel Wallerstein defined the politics of the 20th century in terms of an irresolvable tension between the modernity of technology—the capacity of human inventiveness to increase our material wellbeing—and the modernity of liberation, the capacity of political action to enhance our secular wellbeing.

The ideological faithful on the left and the right, albeit for different reasons, believed in the harmony of technology and liberation; the ideologically sceptical on the left and the right, again for different reasons, agonised about technological enslavement masquerading as emancipation.

Arthur Aughey

Michael Axworthy, former civil servant

A 100 writers and thinkers were asked: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? Hardly any of them think the world will get better in the coming decades; many think it will get worse

The end of the cold war removed the edge of the left/right division, and left a question about the direction of political leadership.
Political spin moved into that space, but the spin doctors got overconfident, and scandals and cover-ups followed.
Truth reasserted itself, and the people became disillusioned. They see a country that has real problems: terrorism, climate change, an overblown civil service that neither governs nor critically analyses the operation of government.
Above all, a country lobotomised by the failure of state secondary education, and the failed theories of comprehensive schooling and child-centred teaching.

The division in future will not be between left and right, but between the vested interests of governmental incompetence on the one hand, and the democratic urge for reform on the other.

Sooner or later some politician will discover the opportunity to reassert honesty and integrity, tackle the problems, and achieve popularity.

Lisa Appignanesi, writer

A 100 writers and thinkers were asked: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? Hardly any of them think the world will get better in the coming decades; many think it will get worse

Global vs the local. Environmental issues seem to belong to the first, but their political reality will be translated by the wind farm or nuclear station next door.
Web and new technologies connect us globally, but can be banned locally; ditto with human rights.
Meanwhile, we have no institutions, bar an emasculated UN, with which to deal with the global, while local politicians—from oil barons in Russia and the US to Sunni or Shia militants in the middle east—instrumentalise all problems in the name of power.

Goodbye, oh heating world.

Lisa Appignanesi

Bruce Ackerman, political writer

A 100 writers and thinkers were asked: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next?
Hardly any of them think the world will get better in the coming decades; many think it will get worse

Cosmos vs patriots. Cosmopolitans come in two varieties: for left cosmos, the pressing need is to deal with world problems—global warming, nuclear proliferation, and the unjust distribution of wealth and income.
For right cosmos, it is to break down barriers to world trade.
Cosmos of all stripes demand a big build-up in the powers of world institutions, and a cutback on state sovereignty.

For local patriots, the cosmos represent a new imperialism of Davos-man and his do-good hangers-on.
Left pats insist on protecting local workers from foreign competition and local cultures from McDonaldisation.
Right pats want to protect the natives from strange ethnics and engage in pre-emptive strikes against threatening foreign powers.
Pats of all varieties insist that the nation state remains the best last hope of democracy against the meritocratic pretensions of cosmo-elitists.

Bruce Ackerman