Can the Left & Right Come Together to Decouple? feat. Emmet Penney and James Fleay

Nuclear has not always been a culture wars issue. Is there an opportunity for the Left with its concern for climate action and the Right with its trust in large scale energy projects to come together around the importance of nuclear energy to address our social and environmental challenges? Historically many nuclear build outs were accomplished by social democratic governments with support accross the political spectrum. Why is harnessing this support from a more traditional left and right politics so difficult at present? In some ways the modern political expressions of Left and Right traditions are unrecognizable to their founding thinkers.

On the Left the science part of scientific socialism has eroded away as the left has moved away from a broad based working class politics into the safety of liberal arts departments on university campuses. The Left's new embrace of "small is beautiful" post-modern politics are hostile to notions of progress and the large centralized projects that have successfully brought basic services to the masses. Degrowth and eco-austerity is the guiding light of so called "eco-socialists" articulating a romantic vision for a way out of our ecological challenges.

On the Right, modern conservatism has undergone a mutation due to exposure to neoliberal economics which has given social license to greed. The value of conserving all different kinds of capital: social, human, cultural and the meta resource: a habitable earth for future generations has been replaced with an ideology that only values a short sighted maximization of financial capital. Free market fundamentalism has led to a fear and loathing of government and a belief that markets are the only way to organize the economy including basic human services and the monopoly that is the electrical grid.

Can we find commonalities across our ideologies again to support Nuclear energy, a technology which can deliver prosperity not austerity, reliability not black outs and economic growth without ecological collapse?