Wide Angle 12 - What are you - Conservative or Liberal?

This week I delve into an interesting divide of views and ideas/ideology that exists in the world and has often led to big turf wars. We in India are not as clearly divided into camps as in the Western countries because post independence, we have been only molded in one particular stream of thought. Most of us are therefore not entirely aware of this divide of ideas so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the left/right debate and show it up to you all so that you can determine for yourself where you stand on the side of this Great Divide.
The worldview on many things but primarily economic policies and social views is divided into what is called “Conservative” and “Liberal”. This is also characteristically the Left and Right divide with Liberals being the Left and Conservatives being the Right. These terms came into existence after the 18th century in the West primarily Europe to begin with and then into US. These concepts were also a consequence of the Industrial Revolution that completely changed the way goods were created and also the ways economies operated. Before the Industrial revolution, goods would be produced by a few skilled artisans or workmen and it took huge effort to create them. Consumption of these goods was for a privileged few with common folks having to do with bare minimum. Prime occupation was agriculture and relationships were mostly feudal. Then the steam engine happened and along with other machinery revolutionized the way goods were produced by bringing in factories. This led to mass production and easy availability of goods but also led to creation of lot of wealth for a few people based on labor of many under excruciating conditions. Modern day capitalism was born where capitalists could invest their money into a productive activity and based on easily available and exploited labor could become many times more wealthy than common folks.
As is widely known, Fredrick Engels was the one to think about an alternative to this system which was to have workers or representative of common folks i.e. the State controls the means of production so that the gains of this productive activity would be equally shared between everyone. This was the genesis of socialism – also called left wing thought. This further led to Karl Marx postulating his thoughts into Das Capital and laying the bedrock of Communism that takes socialism to the extreme of left thoughts – it advocates overthrow of the capitalist order by a proletariat revolution and a supreme controlling state. In a nutshell, the left wing of thought is about more control and intervention of the state in most spheres of life but especially economic activity thus also enabling it to distribute the wealth amongst everyone.
More often than not, the left wing of thought would be against the established social order since historically social orders become oppressive over a period. An example would be the Left in many countries opposing Church interference or in India opposing the caste system etc. “Religion is the opium of the masses” is what Marx had said and in many ways, the Left is against organized religion and the doctrinaire policies of religion. This is what makes the leftists “Liberals”.
The other side of this divide is the Right or the conservatives. Conservative thought is typically called that because they would like to retain the status quo and oppose radical changes in any way to anything. In the West, conservatives were organized against a host of issues for e.g. they were for less government in the economy, against labor’s rights, for landlords and feudalism and many other things. Traditionally, the conservatives are also aligned with religious figures be it the Church in the West or Islamists in the mid West etc. The rightists are also for economic freedom i.e. the rights of markets to evolve by themselves and free trade etc. The leftists have a term for the rightists “Reactionary” since these folks react to the liberal changes that the liberals want to bring.
The funny part is that over a while, the liberals have come to stand for controlled economies that often lead to lack of economic freedom in the socialist countries with large bureaucracies involved in stalling free market enterprise like the one that existed in India before the reforms of 1992. So you will hear the left leaders like Nilotpal Basu railing against “neo liberal” policies driven by the government which means either bringing labor reforms or allowing foreign investment etc.
Let me quickly take you through the history and anatomy of the three countries most associated with us and where they stand in terms of the Left/Right divide:

US:
The US has the Republican party i.e. the conservative party and the Democratic party which is their liberal party. The founding thought of America is about less government and that is in their DNA. They always crow against bigger government or interference by government in economy. That is why the US is the leader of the capitalist world and they were fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union which was the leader of the “Left” world. The Republican party in US believes more in free trade, lesser taxes for everyone, less government spending in the social sector, lesser dole. It is also aligned with the Church and Baptist organizations and sometimes the extreme right including White Supremacist groups. It is less dependent on the minority vote and is typically less encouraging of immigration.
The Democratic party is a left leaning party and is a party of trade unions, liberal intellectuals of California and New York, minority supporters like the Blacks and Hispanics etc. They are typically for more government control and more spending on social schemes. They are also more pro-immigration and by default support abortion etc. which the Republicans are slightly against.

UK:
UK has the Conservative party which is the right wing party and Labor Party which is the left wing party. The agendas of these two map to what I described for the republican and democrat structure in the US.

India:
Opposite of what happened to US, our country was founded by people who strongly believed in the Left Wing thought. Jawaharlal Nehru was a proponent of something called Fabian socialism and was a follower of Professor Harold Lasky who was an authority on this. Since he was our first Prime Minister and ruled for 17 years, the socialist bent of mind and direction of economy was ingrained into our policies. The public sector units established in those years and subsequently were at the “Commanding Heights Of the economy” and still exist today. Most of the thoughts of our countrymen at least the educated ones reflect the liberal thought because left wing intellectuals dominate the intellectual and media discourse in the country. Indians always love big government and look to the “mai baap sarkar” for everything. However, the good part about this discourse is that many suffocating social practices have been weeded out. We never had a real right wing party till the BJP came to the fore but on most of its policies, BJP and Congress do tend to overlap though the Congress is slightly “Left of Centre”.

So that was in a nutshell, a view on the Left/Right divide in the world that has led to many tiffs. Now, you need to map yourselves in terms of where you belong – you could be economically conservative and socially liberal or socially conservative and economically liberal. I am a right winger on the economic policies and a liberal on the social side. What are you?