Responses (34)
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Jason E
over 3 years ago (edited)
I used to like the economist but now realise how neoliberal it is in economics to the point where you’re trapped in groupthink. The fact Southern Europe can be allowed to have a whole generation of the young that may never be gainfully employed…...
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dmitry strakovsky
over 3 years ago
Y’all are pretty much center-left by American standards and center-right by European. I really love the quantative elements of the narratives your publication puts forth. I don’t find calling your pub “globalist” and walking away particularly…...
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9
Paul H Jossey
over 3 years ago (edited)
“True progressivism” ‘neither left nor right' ‘just do what works' are things the fascists used to say.
Obama didn’t have a classical liberal bone in his body. Universal health care and no gun rights are pure government control over the individual.
Keep fooling yourself bro.
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Art Neuro
over 3 years ago
Radical Centre? That’s laughable. Ross Perot thought he was a radical centrist.
Your paper espouses deregulation and privatisation as a good in the face of abject failures around the glove. It also likes Private Public Partnerships, even if it means…...
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6
Çağrı Mert Bakırcı
over 3 years ago
We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy.
You know there is already a word for this, right? Libertarians? It is not “radical centrism”. You can’t be “radical”, if you are at the “center”.
You don’t reconcile anything… You want the corporations to rule the nation while giving slight…...
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Dumisa
over 3 years ago
A plausible attempt to appear neutral and thus playing it safe. I understand you want to protect your image. But I’m not convinced. You can’t be center. Either left or right. To me you are left and occasionally will side with the right on less controversial issues.
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hephaestus
over 3 years ago
4
How about neither? How about sticking to facts and gagging your editors ideological bias whatever what would be. When you put gay rights(I intentionally pick a universality because you can’t “reported on” opinion and values) with drug legalisation(another no-brainer fact wise this time, and any value judgement is ideological), you stop being…
John S. Rundin
over 3 years ago
Ha, ha, ha!
You’re right wing.
56
Annie Brovernik
over 3 years ago
Globalist
4
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Is The Economist left- or right-wing?
Neither. We consider ourselves to be in the “radical centre”
The Economist
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Apr 27, 2017 · 3 min read
Corbynista, or Faragesque?Some readers, particularly those used to the left-right split in most democratic legislatures, are bamboozled by The Economist’s political stance. We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy. So is the newspaper right-wing or left-wing?
“Where there is a liberal case for government to do something, The Economist will air it”
Neither, is the answer. The Economist was founded in 1843 by James Wilson, a British businessman who objected to heavy import duties on foreign corn. Mr Wilson and his friends in the Anti-Corn Law League were classical liberals in the tradition of Adam Smith and, later, the likes of John Stuart Mill and William Ewart Gladstone. This intellectual ancestry has guided the newspaper’s instincts ever since: it opposes all undue curtailment of an individual’s economic or personal freedom. But like its founders, it is not dogmatic. Where there is a liberal case for government to do something, The Economist will air it. Early in its life, its writers were keen supporters of the income tax, for example. Since then it has backed causes like universal health care and gun control. But its starting point is that government should only remove power and wealth from individuals when it has an excellent reason to do so.
“We reconcile the left’s impatience at an unsatisfactory status quo with the right’s scepticism about grandiose redistributive schemes”
The concepts of right- and left-wing predate The Economist’s foundation by half a century. They first referred to seating arrangements in the National Assembly in Paris during the French Revolution. Monarchists sat on the right, revolutionaries on the left. To this day, the phrases distinguish conservatives from egalitarians. But they do a poor job of explaining The Economist’s liberalism, which reconciles the left’s impatience at an unsatisfactory status quo with the right’s scepticism about grandiose redistributive schemes. So although its credo and its history are as rich as that of any reactionary or revolutionary, The Economist has no permanent address on the left-right scale. In most countries, the political divide is conservative-egalitarian, not liberal-illiberal. So it has no party allegiance, either. When it covers elections, it gives its endorsement to the candidate or party most likely to pursue classically liberal policies. It has thrown its weight behind politicians on the right, like Margaret Thatcher, and on the left, like Barack Obama. It is often drawn to centrist politicians and parties who appear to combine the best of both sides, such as Tony Blair, whose combination of social and economic liberalism persuaded it to endorse him at the 2001 and the 2005 elections (though it criticised his government’s infringements of civil liberties).
When The Economist opines on new ideas and policies, it does so on the basis of their merits, not of who supports or opposes them. Last October, for example, it outlined a programme of reforms to combat inequality. Some, like attacking monopolies and targeting public spending on the poor and the young, had a leftish hue. Others, like raising retirement ages and introducing more choice in education, were more rightish. The result, “True Progressivism”, was a blend of the two: neither right nor left, but all the better for it, and coming instead from what we like to call the radical centre.
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