Soon after the Second World War, in the early Fifties, Hannah Arendt and others formulated a three part typology to describe political regimes. There was the totalitarian type, something new under the sun in the past twenty years, where the individual citizen, all of them, were subject to such intimidation and terrorism that the very psyche of an individual was shattered, everyone subject to a leadership out to restructure humanity into a new kind of person in keeping with its new ideology and disregarding usual constitutional procedures of law and order. That happened in countries controlled by Nazi Germany and countries controlled by the Soviet Union and inappropriately applied to militant Japan because it was part of the Azis and because the Army and Navy were independant of political institutions even though free speech, for exaample, continued in the press and radio until the last few years of the war. The second type were authoritarian regimes where only political opponents were terrorized and tortured while the rest of the population was allowed to move apace, quickly or slowly to modernize. Authoritarian regimes included Fascist Spain and Portugal and Italy and most of the underdeveloped countries in Latin America and Africa. The third type were the democracies in Western Europe and North America and influenced by British colonialism, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile and India. These countries had free speech, the rule of law, and the other parts of a liberal democracy even if India had gained its independence only recently. A key idea of this three part theory was that there was not much difference between Left and Right totalitarian societies. Ideologies might differ but the structures of terrorism as a cause and a consequence of such regimes was the same. No need to quibble about whether Hitler was more or less worse than Stalin. In both cases, projected utopias had become dystopias.
After the end of the Soviet Union, the tripartite division was turned into two. There were no totalitarian states left, perhaps North Korea the major remaining example of that type. Even China had reorganized itself after Mao so that it became a corporatist state subject to the usual economic laws though with considerable more leverage of the government on influencing economic activity and limiting free speech and engaged in ethnic cleansing in western parts of the country, but the United States was democratic even while it was expunging the American Indians and repressing the political and economic freedom of American Blacks under the Jim Crow South. Joe Biden thinks that the main international struggle is between the authoritarian and democratic regimes over whether which one of them will be able to be economically and politically productive, whether Russia and China, with their attendant limited rights, will prevail over the democracies by, among other things, winning over influence on African and Latin American countries.
I want to get back to an older pre World War II tripartite division with which people remain familiar to describe the dynamics of political and other structural conflicts in society, that of Conservative, Liberal and Radical points of view, these as old as the beginnings of the modern age when the English Civil War, some four hundred years ago, had Cavaliers, who supported the King, and the traditional political arrangements, and believed in authority, and so were the Conservatives; the Roundheads, who supported the Parliament, and wanted improvements in the physical infrastructure as well as more modern governmental institutions, and so were the predecessors of Liberals; and the Levelers, who were outside agitators in favor of creating a new or “natural” form of social organization, and so were the Radicals. Continental Europe saw at the same time the same divisions. As Spinoza put it, the Old Regime of Louis XIV was seeped in Royal authority and in deference to the authority of religion and custom, and an economy based on agriculture, and so Conservative, while the merchant class of the Netherlands was committed to elections and free speech, and so were Liberals, and the Calvinists in Geneva were dedicated to revising society in a new image and beholden to charismatic figures, and so were Radicals. Many historians of ideas would make this three part divide a hundred years later with the French Revolution and that is more familiar to us with Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” as the origin of modern Conservatism, with its allegiance to tradition and slow social change, while the Declaration of Independence and ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man” are treated as the origins of individual rights and constitutionalism, and Radicalism, used in that term in the early Nineteenth Century as a way to alter the basic relation between the worker and the employer. These still current terms sum up the major perspectives on the way to organize an ever modernizing society, each of them focussed on their own central and very distinct ideas.
Here are three hallmarks of these three perspectives, all of them current at the beginning of the period and present today. Conservatives support the veneration of the past, whether for the restoration of the Jacobean monarchy or the way it was in the United States in the Fifties when women and Blacks were not in the forefront of society. It also follows that whatever is new or unprecedented is to be discouraged, and so gay marriage is a bad idea because it is unprecedented. Conservatives also believe that community is the basis of social organization, rather than government and individual rights guaranteed by government, which is the case with Liberals, and so Conservatives prefer small and local government to what happens in Washington, D. C. Conservatives also believe, following Durkheim, that norms or customs are what hold society together and so show great respect to whatever prevails as taste, distrusting new fangled practices or tastes. Liberals, for their part, think that equality is a primordial goal for society so that individuals can accomplish their individually chosen ends, as in the case of romantic love or in a profession, every person a hero in the quest for what kind of happiness they wish to acquire, whether creating a work of art or enjoying sporting events as entertainment, or bringing home the bacon so as to keep the household safe and secure. Government supplies the resources and the circumstances, through adequate income and schooling, so that people can pursue those interests. Radicals, for the third part, think that there is a natural condition of mankind that is to be restored or fulfilled in the modern world. So Rousseau is a Radical in that he believes that primitive people were able to live with one another in peace and that civilization had messed it up and new devices such as yearly elections and a non-harsh education will result in people being assured of themselves. Marx was a Radical in thinking that labor was a good thing but became alienated and so work whose time was to be spent for income, but likely a Liberal in thinking that constitutional mechanisms would result in the working class coming to win elections.
The familiar and four hundred year tripartite division of ideological points of view can also explain what happened in the lamentable Twentieth Century and even more current events. Conservatives became impatient with the querulous and bloody politics of the Weimar Republic and so decided to adopt the hoodlums so as to control them but the glitter of the Nazis as well as the economic successes that the industrialists fostered allowed the Nazis to keep German popular support up until the reversals of war at Stalingrad and the Allied bombings of German cities. For their part, Liberal Marxism was turned by impatience into Soviet Marxism, with its emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the imposition of a radical regime not beholden to law or free speech. Marxism abandoned its premise that there was no use trying to skip stages. And in the Twenty First Century, Donald Trump was clearly an example of an old fashioned demagogue because he was not beholden to any of the three ideologies, only to a fence he never built and which was not paid for by Mexico, accomplishing only getting three Justices appointed to the Supreme Court so as to placate their supporters rather than because he was embroiled in their issues, not having been much concerned with these matters before he ran to the Presidency.
Why does the three part division of ideologies remain so durable? After all, any number of other concepts could be offered as the basis for a new and competing ideology, but they all turn out to be versions of the essential three. Communitarianism, which was based on Durkheim and appealed to some academics a generation ago, was a version of Conservatism, and Libertarianism, which supports free speech and individual liberty in opposition to the state, is a version of Radicalism in that people believe the natural situation of people, its state of nature, was when human civilization had not yet domesticated plants and animals. Christian Democracy, which elected governments in West Germany and elsewhere after the Second World War, was a version of Liberalism, a way to make government humane and reasonable. There are or might have been other alternatives, including a Green or a Vegetarian party or a Feminist Party, that shed their ties to one of the three affiliations and went on in its own, women saying, for example, that their sex always knows best and so men should no longer have the vote because they are inferiors.
The reason, I think, for the continuation of the usual divisions is because of what Karl Mannheim proposed in “Ideology and Utopia” in 1929, which is considerably deeper an analysis than a review of medieval sources. Mannheim is saying that there is logical completeness if what is invoked are ideas about time. There is the past, which venerates what he considers ideology and what I would call Conservatism. Then there is the future, which is Radicalism, because it jumps from a human nature found in the past into the present of an imagined ideal future, while Liberalism, I posit, is the rejection of both for a jerrybuilt system and point of view that foments the solution of immediate problems rather than ideal ones. That is all there is so long as the ideal of progress, essential to the modern age, where Conservatives go slow, Radicals go root and branch to overthrow the past in the name of the future, and Liberals move slowly because they are stymied by constitutionalism. Those three will remain until progress is also dispensed with and some other idea takes its place, whatever that might be.
Bring that down to cases, as happens in science fiction. Robert Heinlein began as a Conservative in that he thought that captains of industry were the innovators, the doers and shakers, that made things happen, just as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Rockefeller had been, and as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are in the present generation even though Joe Biden claims that the middle class are the engines of progress. Then, in “Starship Trooper'', Heinlein presented a Fascistic idea, in that a world wide federation of Earth nations only allowed veterans to become citizens because the risk of blood was what made voting legitimate. But there is one Heinlein novel, “Double Star”, which propounds a Liberal point of view. A worldwide federation of nations has legitimately established one of the Lowland kings as Chief of State while complicated forms of voting allow for a Prime Minister who is Chief of Government and is subject to the intrigues and compromises familiar to parliamentary government, a step ahead followed by half a step back, never knowing the eventual outcome, only solving problems as best they can when they come up. That is different from even Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy where a scientific elite, very much like H. G. Wells’s “Wings Over the World” in “Preview of Things to Come”, guides history, as best it can. to a safer and more secure harbor, overcoming the inherent evils of politics. That is more Radical even though Asimov is very humane in his respect for legalities and free speech. If science fiction writers can’t think of an alternative ideology, who can?