Why vote for the "right"?

* I was going to write about the abject failure of the "Live 2006 News Japan" (FNN) news program, that I have tried not to watch if at all possible, because it remains a parrot of officially approved US foreign policy for overseas news. Interspersing US TV propaganda in the form of ABC network news snippets (featuring clips of G. W. Bush speeches tonight) with regular "handbag-snatching"-quality fear-instilling domestic news? Please.

Late-night prime time on the Fuji TV channel, otherwise one of Japan's more entertaining channels, is definitely being outsourced to clearly unsavory - if otherwise bomb-thrilling - sketches of bad brown people and good white people. No mention of yellow people, but who cares right, that's domestic news.



* What I wanted to mention instead is an unblinkered piece by Ezequiel Adamovsky, entitled "Why do people vote right-wing?". As much as I may dislike his mainstay that all people want is to be lulled into a promise of physical security with "law and order" all the while being socially exploited at work and in the democratic apparatus, it makes sense. Very timely at a time when politics means little to the average disenfranchised Joe.

In a post-modern political world where elections are fought over marginal focus group issues because they're the only ones that actively participate in the system, ideas of "left" and "right" are good shorthand words for a raft of socio-economic policies. Unfortunately, they are relics of a past age and do not reflect the pick-and-mix style of current politicians and the parties they build.

In the current state of things, traditional "left"-ist credos have been effectively assimilated into the "right"'s policy agenda. It has happened conversely with the UK Labour Party that has essentially neutered the Conservative Party (party of "law and order"), which still blindly goes on about typical rightist credos of law, order, zero immigration, zero tolerance, more power to the corporations. If the Conservatives, Liberals, or others are to retake their seat at the helm of UK politics, they have to reengineer themselves to take up all that the New Labourites have neglected: anything with the word "social" in it, anything with the word "benefits", anything with the words "diversity", anything that supplants interventionistic/messianic foreign policy with isolationistic/economic foreign policy.

Impossible? Why, who'd have thought that Blair would be the new Thatcher? But he has, time for other politicians to shed their skins too. As unpalatable as that may sound, it offers us, victims of the State's psychowarfare to make us active consumers/passive citizens as they burn our tax and plunder our youth, a mental window of opportunity to a better alternative. However marginally better that setup may be.