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?