Left/right will continue to exist, although with new meanings:
- left might come to mean dissatisfaction with unilateralism and empires in general, and assume a spiritual flavour, aiming to go beyond the shortcomings of modernity: secularisation and lack of values, empathy, and compassion.
- right might become an imperial and postmodern, realpolitik and fully secularised perspective; if so, there will be at least two rights: pro-US and pro-China one; during the century, the balance will shift between the two.
Ian Christie
The major fault lines will be between the Ultra-Haves, the At-Risk-Haves and the Have-Nots, and alliances between them will vary greatly. The Ultra-Haves are Michael Lind's Plutopians plus the Resource Barons and Crime Barons. The At-Risk-Haves are the middle classes everywhere, who resent the Ultras but will often side with them against the Have-Nots. They are at risk from low-cost competitors, environmental disruption, social disruption exacerbated by migration, and mounting competition for positional goods. The Have-Nots are split between the Mobile and the Stuck, the latter being incarcerated in estates, barrios, other kinds of ghettos. Mobile Have-Nots could form alliances with the At-Risk Haves; the Stuck are often forced into one-sided alliances with the criminal version of the Ultra-Haves.
The trend towards the embrace of modernity (pro-west, pro-science, pro-reason) will be severely tested for all factions by environmental crisis and resource competition. Mass modernisation has always fostered an irruption of pre-modern forces in new guises, offering either wholesale return to the past or an ideology that provides all mod cons plus tribal cohesion. This will be made more complex by the threat from eco-collapse. There will be sharper divisions between modernists, anti-moderns and in between what I would call the proponents of chastened Enlightenment—those of us who like their modernity tempered by well-behaved liberal religion and humility. Needless to say, the latter bunch of herbivores are in trouble in the 21st century.
I'd expect a new fault line to emerge across the divisions mentioned above, between militants and co-operators. Militants seek to advance their interests aggressively and to externalise costs. The co-operators will be keen on compromise, international agreements, behaviour change and new forms of consumption. One version of this split is being played out now in the Anglican communion.
Duncan Fraser
All the possible alternatives to the left/right dichotomy that were suggested by your authors—environment, globalisation, age, religion, rationalism, communitarianism vs libertarianism—can easily be subsumed within left/right. Virtually all the world's democracies, particularly in advanced economies, remain divided on a left/right basis; usually a left liberal or social democrat party opposing a Christian democratic or conservative party. There is little sign of this disappearing.
As for the level of pessimism, the right are pessimistic about human nature and thus the future, while it is not that long since the left suffered a prolonged ideological reversal and have yet to find a replacement agenda. David Goodhart's sarcastic remark that we can therefore look forward to an era of peace and prosperity is probably correct, as we are at the beginning of a long-wave economic upturn which should last at least another two decades, though these periods do often eventually give rise to international conflict.
David Heigham
The political history of the 21st-century world will resemble the Britain of the Whigs and Tories writ large and pressure cooked. The political bargains are being and will be struck between the "haves" who like, or feel they would benefit from, change; and the other "haves" who crave stability, or feel they would lose from change. The remaining "have-nots" will seek levers, including violence, to assert their interests; but will only succeed insofar as they co-opt the interest of "haves." The pressures heating the cooker will be:
- following the transformation of life in China and in India, the realisation that poverty is not inevitable
- climate change, putting what we all have, and what we might have, at risk
- the extension of life spans; long lives and few children mean wrenching changes in social norms
The institutional challenge will be containing the extraordinary pressures that will result.
The cultural climate will favour science, satire, music and philosophy; all in forms differing from their 18th-century antecedents. Evangelisms of all sorts, including those of violence, will flourish among the frustrated and those who lose their bearings.
Habeeb Marouf
The political future will be delimited by the issues of climate and resources, as it always has been, only with increased urgency. If new ideologies emerge, they will quickly polarise, just as in left/right, reflecting the condition that only two ways of confronting these issues are possible—co-operation or competition. These are the basic modes of interaction of evolving entities in any finite system. In fact, left and right, in their broad meanings, are simply the expressions in language of these solutions to the problem of resource acquisition in Darwinian evolution. That is, political posturing is the expression of the relative worth of fair competition—informed co-operation—vs brute competition as a means to achieving reproduction of the fundamental unit of evolution, the gene.
We will be free of this tyranny of the genes, as Richard Dawkins has termed it, only when we are free of a critical dependence on the environment. And once we are free—perhaps through technology, or by shifting power from the gene to some other information-based replicator such as the meme—polarisations such as left and right will diminish, and the political spectrum will collapse to form a single, fuzzy node that promotes stability.
Whatever we call the next round of political ideologies, they will prevail only if they can bring about sustainability. Else, it is extinction. It is probably safe to say however, that if we do arrive at this single "fuzzy node" of political stability, it will be via informed co-operation rather than brute competition.
KR Srivarahan
The 21st century will witness a fierce battle between "integrationists" and "separationists." Integrationists downplay the differences among various groups in any heterogeneous society and focus on unifying factors. Separationists magnify the differences, sharpen societal friction and try to defeat those who they feel are not on their side. Terrorists are an extreme example of separationists; they are committed to dualism, "us" versus "others."
Globalisation and liberalisation will continue to promote economic growth. Aggravation of social and economic inequality will be a collateral consequence. Champions of globalisation will endeavour to integrate various sections of society so that there is less resistance to growth. Those angered by inequitable distribution of benefits of globalisation will end up as separationists.
