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A common complaint about Canadian politics has it that “everyone is on the right.” The NDP likes to say this about the Conservatives and the Liberals; some on the left say the same of the NDP.
On one level, this is nonsensical. When we say “the right,” we presumably mean right of something, ie the centre. Granted, the centre has itself shifted right of late, but it is logically impossible for everyone to be to the right of it.
Nonetheless, it is true that Canadian politics has undergone a great convergence in recent years. It is one, however, in which right and left can take equal satisfaction. If the left has belatedly come to accept the market economy, the right had earlier to come to terms with the state’s social responsibilities. Nobody, left or right, wants to nationalize major industries any more, and nobody, right or left, would deprive the poor of schooling, or health care, or any of the major undertakings of the modern welfare state.
Many people find this suggestion -- that we’ve reached a consensus on such matters -- deeply upsetting, as an underhanded attempt to marginalize dissent. Is it? Isn’t it conceivable that, as a society, we’ve simply come to … agree? The consensus is not general, after all. It is confined to the economy. It only looks general because, for the last hundred years or so, politics has been almost exclusively about economics.
To anyone born in the 2oth century, this seemed like the natural and inevitable state of affairs. Politics took the form of broad clashes of ideology over the organization of economic life -- between communism and capitalism, between state and market, between Keynesianism and monetarism. But it was not always so. Politics in previous centuries was largely concerned with other things: with the rights of religious dissenters, say, or how far to extend the franchise. But in time a consensus formed on these issues, and society moved on.
So while there remains debate about the fine points of democracy -- for example, on the merits of proportional representation versus first-past-the-post -- on the broad strokes there is general agreement: nobody objects that this is “marginalizing” anti-democratic beliefs. Perhaps we have come to the same consensus on the basic social and economic model. We allocate productive resources using markets; we redistribute incomes using the state. We’ll still argue about the particulars. But the stirring ideological battles most of us grew up with may be obsolete.
This isn’t only a matter of convergence: the economy itself seems to give us less to argue about these days. Recessions, and how to remedy them, were once the staples of political debate -- but changes in the structure of the economy mean recessions are likely to be both less frequent and less severe than in the past. Inflation, the deficit, even unemployment: none provide quite the fodder they once did.
Nowhere is it written that there must be disagreement about the fundamentals of economic policy. Politics was not always about the economy in the past. Perhaps it will not be in the future.
What might replace it? Climate change seems an obvious candidate, or terrorism: issues on which there is broad disagreement, and which will probably still confront us decades from now. Both, moreover, may require us to rethink conventional ideas about national sovereignty, inasmuch as neither can be addressed except by concerted international action.
But who knows? My only point is to suggest that the economy need not be one of them, and probably won’t be. If not quite the End of History, it may be the end of economics.