The lemmygrad and Hexbear types are left, but they are authoritarian left, which makes them in my eyes closer to the fascists than to any legitimate left wing movement that wants people to thrive.
The reduction of USA politics down to a single dimension (l/r) is absurd and the cause why the left in the US is so fractured. Authoritarians, regardless of left or right wing, are primarily engaged with securing power, just as long as they stay in power, while the libertarians (l/r) are fractured for a good reason - Right wing Libs (aka “the establishment”) do not have much in common with left wing, anti-authoritarian positions.
I agree that they’re closer to fascists. I’ve tried explaining that to them but they get all up in arms about how their ideologies differ. I tell them it doesn’t matter, because their methodologies are the same, but they just dig in with the strawman, red herring, sea lion combo and claim over and over again that I’m an uneducated idiot who doesn’t know the difference between fascism and communism.
(I tend to refer to their beliefs as bolshevism though, because after all that’s what ML is. Nothing like Marxism or really any other kind of communism. And their only response to that is to try to glaze the bolsheviks because they can’t even deny that that’s what they are).
And yes, US politics are overly reductive, but I find that inevitable in a two-party, FPTP system. I’ve been pointing that out for years, since even before I fully understood it. I’ve learned a lot in the time since and changed my opinions on various things, but the underlying intuition that something was deeply wrong with a two-party political system at least was correct.
And libertarian is such a loaded term because of its association with right-wing libertarian capitalists. But libertarian and liberal are too distinct concepts, although it could be argued that they’re related. Liberal is another loaded term though, and often gets conflated with neoliberal (which is an illiberal and conservative economic policy).
In short though, the libertarian-authoritarian axis on the political matrix is not what most people think of when they hear “libertarian,” even though according to that schema, anarcho-syndicalists would fall all the way on the libertarian side of the spectrum.
Oh and for what it’s worth, I think we could divide the horizontal spectrum into at least seven segments: (from proximal to lateral) “Centrist,” “Center-(L/R)”, “Moderate (L/R)”, and “Radical (or far-) (L/R)”.
Anything beyond radical would be extremist, and falls outside of the political domain so isn’t on this spectrum.
The difference between moderate and center- would be that the Moderates in this interpretation would be the meat and potatoes of representing the values and priorities of that side of the spectrum, neither too rash nor overly compromising, whereas the Center-(L/R)s would be the next thing to centrists, only barely distinguishing themselves as falling to one side or the other, and more prone to compromising and appeasement.
The problem with this interpretation though is that many of these terms are already so loaded in the current political environment, it would be difficult to give them technical definitions that don’t provoke emotional responses and knee-jerk reactions…
I agree on the “loadedness” of terms in the US. Liberalism on its own isn’t a bad thing, it simply means that the state does not want to interfere in basic things like trade or relationships. The US have redefined it into something more like Staliniism - this is nowhere near the truth, but they made it THEIR truth. This makes informed discourse in the US very hard - because just like newspeak in 1984 it removes the ability to communicate different ideas than what the establishment wants to be available as options.
For some reason your comment made me crave loaded baked potatoes.
But yeah, it’s next to impossible to have an intelligent discussion in the US. Not just because the education system is sorely lacking and anti-intellectualism is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness, but also because so many terms are so loaded that you can’t even use them according to their precise technical definitions without everyone assuming you’re exaggerating and hyperbolizing because vitriol and mudslinging are so much the norm here.
The inherently polarizing nature of a two-party FPTP electoral system is partly to blame, but so is the concerted effort the right-wing has made in recent years to discredit all political discussion by using all these buzzwords so disingenuously that they lose their meaning.
I think they did it on purpose. The whole projection/every-accusation-is-a-confession thing was a deliberate tactic to preemptively make anyone sound crazy who accuses them of doing the shit they really do, because they’ve already been so busy accusing everyone else of those things!
I have the same opinion regarding “on purpose”. The GOP has been doing this for a long, long time now while cooperating with evangelists, and if you look in from the outside it is pretty obvious that they want to keep their populace poor in education and money and use religion to keep them radicalized and anti-intellectual.
The dems either did not realize the game plan, or didn’t think it would succeed (the displayed hybris in the last decade lets me suspect the second option)
The lemmygrad and Hexbear types are left, but they are authoritarian left, which makes them in my eyes closer to the fascists than to any legitimate left wing movement that wants people to thrive.
The reduction of USA politics down to a single dimension (l/r) is absurd and the cause why the left in the US is so fractured. Authoritarians, regardless of left or right wing, are primarily engaged with securing power, just as long as they stay in power, while the libertarians (l/r) are fractured for a good reason - Right wing Libs (aka “the establishment”) do not have much in common with left wing, anti-authoritarian positions.
I agree that they’re closer to fascists. I’ve tried explaining that to them but they get all up in arms about how their ideologies differ. I tell them it doesn’t matter, because their methodologies are the same, but they just dig in with the strawman, red herring, sea lion combo and claim over and over again that I’m an uneducated idiot who doesn’t know the difference between fascism and communism.
(I tend to refer to their beliefs as bolshevism though, because after all that’s what ML is. Nothing like Marxism or really any other kind of communism. And their only response to that is to try to glaze the bolsheviks because they can’t even deny that that’s what they are).
And yes, US politics are overly reductive, but I find that inevitable in a two-party, FPTP system. I’ve been pointing that out for years, since even before I fully understood it. I’ve learned a lot in the time since and changed my opinions on various things, but the underlying intuition that something was deeply wrong with a two-party political system at least was correct.
And libertarian is such a loaded term because of its association with right-wing libertarian capitalists. But libertarian and liberal are too distinct concepts, although it could be argued that they’re related. Liberal is another loaded term though, and often gets conflated with neoliberal (which is an illiberal and conservative economic policy).
In short though, the libertarian-authoritarian axis on the political matrix is not what most people think of when they hear “libertarian,” even though according to that schema, anarcho-syndicalists would fall all the way on the libertarian side of the spectrum.
Oh and for what it’s worth, I think we could divide the horizontal spectrum into at least seven segments: (from proximal to lateral) “Centrist,” “Center-(L/R)”, “Moderate (L/R)”, and “Radical (or far-) (L/R)”.
Anything beyond radical would be extremist, and falls outside of the political domain so isn’t on this spectrum.
The difference between moderate and center- would be that the Moderates in this interpretation would be the meat and potatoes of representing the values and priorities of that side of the spectrum, neither too rash nor overly compromising, whereas the Center-(L/R)s would be the next thing to centrists, only barely distinguishing themselves as falling to one side or the other, and more prone to compromising and appeasement.
The problem with this interpretation though is that many of these terms are already so loaded in the current political environment, it would be difficult to give them technical definitions that don’t provoke emotional responses and knee-jerk reactions…
I agree on the “loadedness” of terms in the US. Liberalism on its own isn’t a bad thing, it simply means that the state does not want to interfere in basic things like trade or relationships. The US have redefined it into something more like Staliniism - this is nowhere near the truth, but they made it THEIR truth. This makes informed discourse in the US very hard - because just like newspeak in 1984 it removes the ability to communicate different ideas than what the establishment wants to be available as options.
For some reason your comment made me crave loaded baked potatoes.
But yeah, it’s next to impossible to have an intelligent discussion in the US. Not just because the education system is sorely lacking and anti-intellectualism is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness, but also because so many terms are so loaded that you can’t even use them according to their precise technical definitions without everyone assuming you’re exaggerating and hyperbolizing because vitriol and mudslinging are so much the norm here.
The inherently polarizing nature of a two-party FPTP electoral system is partly to blame, but so is the concerted effort the right-wing has made in recent years to discredit all political discussion by using all these buzzwords so disingenuously that they lose their meaning.
I think they did it on purpose. The whole projection/every-accusation-is-a-confession thing was a deliberate tactic to preemptively make anyone sound crazy who accuses them of doing the shit they really do, because they’ve already been so busy accusing everyone else of those things!
I have the same opinion regarding “on purpose”. The GOP has been doing this for a long, long time now while cooperating with evangelists, and if you look in from the outside it is pretty obvious that they want to keep their populace poor in education and money and use religion to keep them radicalized and anti-intellectual.
The dems either did not realize the game plan, or didn’t think it would succeed (the displayed hybris in the last decade lets me suspect the second option)