After living in China and UAE I don’t get Western Politics.
The left - right axis comes from France in 1789 during the french revolution.
France’s newly formed National Assembly was debating how much power the king should keep in the new constitution - above all, whether he’d have an absolute veto over legislation.
When the vote on the royal veto came up, the deputies who supported the king and the veto gathered to the right of the presiding officer’s chair, and those who opposed it - the supporters of revolution and popular sovereignty - gathered to the left.
But as the state has grown, the left right axis has become so overloaded - one axis carrying so many unrelated conflicts, it’s lost resolution and collapsed into team-signaling.
And also the main issues of our time are not on the left right axis anymore.
7 prime ministers in 10 years in the UK is because of the misalignment and that people no longer map onto the left right axis.
The same pattern happened in 1922-1924 after four different prime ministers when the electorate changed - women and a greater voting participation no longer mapped onto the main parties.
One core argument is should the state be bigger or smaller?
It’s arguing about the wrong thing - quantity of state rather than quality of state.
We’ve become so afraid of a competent state - learning certain lessons of the 20th century that we’ve overshot and made it incompetent.
And we’ve made things so tribal that the conversation has turned into a short term tug of war rather than a discussion of what’s in the best long term interests of the group.
The right answer is that the economy should be divided into two layers, like a garden - the infrastructure and the dynamic layer.
Much of the failure is the handoff between the two - energy, housing, infrastructure, healthcare.
That’s where the platform state comes in
The Platform State
China has built roughly 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail in about the time it has taken Britain to build 250 kilometres of HS2, at a cost approaching £50 billion.