The idea I'm getting here is that rather than the left/right divide between Socialist and Libertarian which makes up our world's political axis, here the division is between Butlerian and Utopian.
Butlerians believe that labor strikes are the essential requirement for good governance and the sole purpose of politics is to maintain their value. That the ruling class will only act in the benefit of the lower class if the lower class have a perpetual sword of damocles over them in the form of threatening to refuse to work or volunteer for military service leaving them economically and geopolitically weakened in the face of their rivals. They have a kind of love/hate relationship with nationalism, on one hand seeing the abstract good of their country as propaganda spun to make them accept hardships, on the other, the benefits of antiglobalization keeping them from competing with foreign scab workers whether abroad or imported.
Utopians claim to be what we'd consider Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. That if allowed to automate everything, they could offer post-scarcity. The problem being, around a century ago, they
were given such a chance and they catastrophically abused everyone's trust by keeping the automation-manufactured bounty entirely for themselves and attempting to genocide everyone else with deliberately started meatgrinder warfare against other nations in the same situation then once WW1-Imperial-Russia-style populist conscription riots reached critical levels,
resorting to more direct measures so that they could monopolize all resources for themselves. They're frequently ultranationalists, seeing lower-class citizens who refuse to allow their countries to automate out of self-interest as treacherously weakening their countries in a tragedy of the commons against other potentially automating nations, with whoever gets a von neumann robot army first ruling the world.
I feel like this runs counter to the world being in stasis or looking anything like our modern world though. The Utopians would surely be actively pursuing advanced tech. The Butlerians, being so quick to strike, would seem to provide a perfect recipe for the Utopians to win and assert their automation on the world...
Everytime a strike happens, companies would be more and more inclined to think the Utopians are onto something...
I think it's more like a modern stasis world is what you might get if the Butlerians
won very decisively, like how hard liberals won against feudalists/monarchists in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
So Butlerians vs. Utopians probably won't be the big political division (unless Utopianism is getting a big revival after a long period of marginalization), Utopians will be the decisively defeated and marginalized enemy, like people who want to be ruled by a king in our world.
If that's what's going on, it implies modern stasis world has a very different power structure from our world; it's going to be some kind of leftist-workerist/producerist world, not a capitalist world. If the situation has been stable for centuries likely big private businesses don't even exist, cause if they're still around this left-workerist settlement will have the same instability the twentieth century center-left New Dealist settlement had; its enemies (the capital-owners) will still be around and have a potent power base to attack and destabilize it from. In which case the normal model of how a state runs in multi-century modern stasis world may look a lot like the USSR. Or, perhaps more optimistically, it might be some kind of syndicalism/market socialism, but I think a USSR-like system works better for keeping Butlerianism strong. In a syndicalist system the workers would benefit from automation (they do less work and have much more leverage to make the profits of automation go to them) and would probably drift toward left-utopianism over time. In a state command economy, the workers would value their ability to strike
against the government. I think Butlerianism might be a particularly strong equilibrium if you have a USSR-like economy but political democracy. In an authoritarian state command economy the government would probably drift toward embracing automation for nationalist reasons, but with political democracy politicians could be relatively easily pressured by workers who have incentives toward Butlerianism.
The situation will probably also be more stable with a world government, so there's no possibility of one state drifting into non-compliance with Butlerianism and then gaining a decisive advantage over its rivals by doing so. But another relatively stable equilibrium might be a handful of states that have automation non-proliferation treaties and punish each other for non-compliance (with the system reinforced by at least the most powerful state having political democracy dominated by Butlerian voting blocs, see previous paragraph).
I think in such a world the big political division might be not left vs. right or Butlerian vs. Utopianism but
Stakhanovite vs.
Garfieldian.
Stakhanovites are class-collaborationists who believe a society where all classes have the same basic interests has already been established. As such, they are in a sense the equivalent this world has to the
right-wing. They support top-down authority, seek to empower the government, and want the workers/populace to obey the government, because in their minds the government/bureaucracy is simply the apparatus by which the class interests of the workers are coordinated and popular non-compliance is mostly likely a case of selfish defection by individuals or special interests or a simple failure by people to properly understand their own class interests (which highly trained experts are better equipped to understand). As their name suggests, Stakhanovites celebrate hard work and productivity, which is seen as pro-social contribution to the community; the way Stakhanovites figure it, the harder people work, the wealthier the community will be and the wealthier and more powerful the nation will be, and hence they see working hard as a moral imperative. Stakhanovites are much more likely to be nationalists, and part of the reason they celebrate hard work and productivity is because these things give their state an advantage over its rivals. By the same token, Stakhanovites see laziness as anti-social. Stakhanovites advocate for mandatory employment policies (with exceptions for severely disabled, elderly, children, new mothers, etc.) and criminalization of activities like begging and oppose no-strings-attached no-questions-asked money hand-out welfare programs. Stakhanovites similarly tend to strongly value education, believing that society should create the most skilled future work-force possible and similarly students have a moral obligation to make themselves as useful as possible to society as future workers. Stakhanovites tend to believe that labor is morally improving to the laborer, that the experience of working for the good of all or others teaches people to be pro-social and the experience of working as a team builds community and solidarity, and they oppose automation in large part because they believe idleness degrades the morality of the population. While their politics probably doesn't map exactly to our cultural conservatism, I could see Stakhanovites having what we'd see as basically right-wing attitudes to things like recreational drug use, disliking it because it reduces productivity. Similarly, Stakhanovites tend to dislike luxury, which they see as wasteful and not properly proletarian; they would favor austere minimalist functionalist aesthetics, simple food, utilitarian clothing, etc. - though, on the other hand, they also have an appreciation of material wealth as a fruit of and reward for hard work and pro-social behavior (working class Stakhanovites would be the sort of people who'd be very proud of getting a big screen TV as a reward for the factory they work at exceeding its quota by 50% one week). The core natural constituency of Stakhanovism would be the government bureaucracy (including the managers of factories and so on), but I think to work in a democracy it'd need cross-over appeal to the working class on nationalism and cultural conservatism and offering a narrative for taking pride in their work and material possibilities of being rewarded for hard work and conformity, a little like how the US Republican Party works but with a core constituency of managers instead of owners. Appeals to the necessity and virtue of putting family, community, and nation ahead of yourself (and promises of reward to people who act in alignment with its value system) would be a huge part of how Stakhanovites prevent Garfieldians (see next) from winning basically every election ever.
Garfieldians on the other hand believe that class conflict is still at the core of politics, and specifically the believe that
the important class conflict is now workers vs. managers and bureaucrats. They take their name from Garfield the cat, who hates Mondays. Garfieldians are directly opposed to Stakhanovites in that
Garfieldian politics is basically anti-work. There's nuance and disagreement about it, Garfieldians mostly see some amount of work as pro-social given Butlerian conditions, are good Butlerians in that they see the ability to withhold labor as the primary leverage the working class have, and see chosen self-actualizing work like much of art as a positive good, but the "we can talk about the nuances after we've grabbed their attention" soundbite elevator pitch summary of Garfieldian politics is that work sucks and anybody who's telling you to work harder is probably trying to exploit you. The Garfieldian manifesto would be something like Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" speech but for laziness ("...laziness is one of the core motivations of human progress, it's what got us out of the caves, we're not hunting dinner with wooden clubs cause somebody decided that was too much work..."). The natural constituency of Garfieldianism is the working classes and the lumpenproletariat/unemployed. The working classes because it basically tells them that they should get paid more and work less and use their ability to withhold their labor to that end; it's the primary motor of this world's version of labor movement politics. The lumpenproles/unemployed because Garfieldians are also the primary political constituency pushing for things like no-strings-attached no-questions-asked money distribution as welfare; they believe these things are good because they increase the leverage of workers by making it easier/less painful to withhold your labor. Disability advocacy in this world also tends to have a Garfieldian bent. As believers in class antagonism, Garfieldians tend to be anti-nationalist, believing that the exploited workers of the world should instead have solidarity with each other against their managerial classes. Believing in class antagonism also means Garfieldians have a more positive attitude toward various forms of physical and social rebellion (riots, "tuning in and dropping out," dodging the draft or deserting from the army, etc.) and a more negative attitude toward the government, the school system, the police, and the military. In matters of personal life, taste, and morality, Garfieldians tend to be more hedonistic, seeing enjoying life as the highest good and hence celebrating pleasure and leisure, though their vision of the good life tends to emphasize leisure over material luxury, aspiration to material wealth ironically being more of a Stakhanovite thing despite their tendency toward aesthetics of austerity (after all, without automation, for society to have lots of stuff, people must work hard, and stuff is an obvious thing to reward hard workers with!). Stakhanovites often accuse Garfieldians of being anti-social and treasonous, sapping the strength of their families, communities, and nations with their selfish pursuit of pleasure, and worse, encouraging those vices in others and trying to make society cater to those vices. Stakhanovites probably get
a lot of mileage making their politics appealing to working class people by accusing Garfieldians of being treasonous. In all this, Garfieldians are more equivalent to our left-wing.
This divide would cut across Butlerian/Utopian lines, with both sides being mostly Butlerian in their present forms but having a latent potential for a shift toward Utopianism. Stakhanovites have a potential to be drawn towards Utopianism by their love of productivity and their nationalism, e.g. they might be drawn toward supporting automation as a way to build more guns and tanks and planes to own the goddamn Chinks/Russkies/Yanks/whatever. Garfieldians would have a potential to be drawn toward Utopianism by their dislike of work, embracing automation as a way to have more leisure; a lot of them would in principle agree that fully automated luxury communism is basically the ideal society and should be the ultimate end-goal, they just fear automation would only further empower the managerial class and think they need to be done away with first (probably they tend to be syndicalist and anarchist adjacent).
