I didn't think I was debating. I was expressing my confusion about your X-most things and attempting (maybe failing) at a little levity.
Are you trying to describe policital camps in a way that would pass Turing test? If so, I can tell you why I think you are failing. If that wasn't your goal, I don't see why providing clearn & unambiguous counter arguments does anything for anyone.
I think your left-wing society would be accepted a lot of left wingers. It might be a bit on the liberal or anarchists side and away from the progressive flavor, but yeah.
I think a right-winger would object to your characterization for a maybe subtle but for-sure important reason. I think they would say the hierarchies are given of human nature (or whatever), and the role of the society is to make the best of everything given that. Some Christians would say 'look at the bible, we are all tribal and sinners, Jesus showed us how to handle those impulses'. Some Intelectual Conservatives would say common law, natural rights, the Enlightenment, 'traditional family structure, etc, move us out of a chaotic state of nature where the strong form hierarchies of based on who can band together a few dudes and terrorize a town.
I think most would sign on to the idea that duties come with being part of that society.
The most left thing I can imagine is a death camp into which the wreckers and capitalists have been herded, the most right thing I can imagine is a death camp into which the ethnic undesirables have been herded.
Good catch! I read the post on the substack app which doesn’t seem to show the thumbnail anywhere. About half the time I read this on desktop where I would have seen it.
My first read as well and immediately concluded the article would be about how everyone should stop thinking of themselves as the rebellion and accept responsibility to govern well. But this was good too.
I actually read another article the other day that broadly criticised the violence of Star Wars and saying that both US American parties could identify with the Rebellion (e.g. because it displays diversity, but also is trying to achieve independence from government) and it was making them less interested in talking to each other over fighting each other. So basically your take, but coming from a movie-goer perspective.
(For the record, I didn't like this article very much, because it's ascribing far too much power to a single franchise; it seemed a lot like the old "video games will make our children violent" argument, except rehashed for Star Wars. I imagine it's mostly the other way around in the scenarios the author mentions - Star Wars gives you some nice vocabulary to co-opt for increasingly aggressive politics.)
The rebellion is fundamentally about and led by a persecuted religious group from a backwards desert; the analogy to the Taliban is very strong and was probably intentional, given that the original trilogy was filmed back when the Taliban were allies against the Evil Empire of the USSR. America's Afghanistan quagmire definitely makes this interpretation funnier, though. The USG is definitely not the plucky underdog in anything.
The plucky underdog Rebellion isn't meant to be a stand-in for the U.S., though. If anything it's the opposite, Lucas said he based the Empire partly off American interventionism in Vietnam. He also said that the Ewoks fighting the Empire in Ep. 6 was inspired by how the Viet Cong was able to defeat the technologically-superior American military using guerilla tactics (which isn't exactly what actually happened in real life, but that's besides the point). And the latter two prequels drew some explicit parallels to the War on Terror: Ep. 2 and 3 depicted a democratic Republic slowly becoming militaristic and giving up essential liberties for the sake of security during a war against a nebulous enemy, in a way that very much mirrored concerns about the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War. Ep. 3 even had Darth Vader quote George W. Bush! So the idea that the Empire is meant to symbolize the U.S. isn't some sort of subversive reinterpretation of the series - it's the original authorital intent! (That's not to say that Lucas' portrayal of the Empire wasn't *also* inspired by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Roman Empire, but ultimately those were secondary to the critique he was making of his own nation.)
Let's talk about X-Wing-related political parties!
According to Bloodline by Claudia Gray, the New Republic is divided between "the POPULISTS, who believe individual planets should retain almost all authority, and the CENTRISTS, who favor a stronger galactic government and a more powerful military." Each party has a left- and right-wing faction:
Far left-wing Populists: direct democracy
Far right-wing Populists: dissolve the Republic
Far left-wing Centrists: totalitarian bureaucracy
Far right-wing Centrists: large standing military
Leia is a Populist leader, so they're automatically the more sympathetic group, especially since many Centrists want to outright revive the Empire. Since this isn't Star Peace, neither of them really manage to accomplish anything.
I believe in story she is more of a central figure that all the populists can gather around. That is, because the populists want politics to be local, they in general only support politicians from their own planets and are inherently suspicious of all the politicians from elsewhere, even those of their own party.
Because Leia shares their concerns and no longer has a planet, she can't be trying to advance her own planet at their expense.
The term "Centrist" is fairly misleading here. In the real world, "Centrist" is used to describe people with views in the *center* of the political spectrum, so "far-right Centrist" and "far-left Centrist" seem like a contradiction in terms. In Disney's post-RotJ Star Wars novels, it refers to people who want a strong *central* government for the Republic. The writers probably should have called them "Centralist" instead, it sounds a little clunkier but it would've conveyed their ideology better; "Centrist Party" makes it sound like they're all moderates even though some of their positions are actually quite extreme.
Oh I am sure the people writing Star Wars these days absolutely want to draw parallels between political centrists and Nazis. That is like one of their main political projects!
Does anyone find it a little bit convenient that darth Vader was a very safe distance from the death star when it blew up?
Does anyone find it a little bit odd that at the exact moment that princess Leia escaped the death star, darth Vader was somewhere else fighting an old man?
Still not convinced? Well lets dig a little deeper, then.
That old man that darth Vader was fighting just so happened to be a jedi. If you do your research, Darth Vader used to be a jedi, also! In fact, if you do even more research you will find that he used to be an apprentice of that same old man that he was fighting on board the death star at the same very moment that Leia escaped! Yes, this is quite odd, isn't it?
Oh but it gets deeper!
In fact, rumor has it that the same guy who helped Leia escaped is the very same guy who blew up the death star.
So let me get this straight. Some guy walks in the death star, saves Leia, while Darth Vader is off somewhere else, fighting an old man who used to be his master back in his crazy jedi days? And then the same guy comes back and blows up the death star at the exact moment that Darth Vader gets a safe distance away from it? Are you fucking kidding me??
Oh but it gets weirder than that, my friends.
Turns out that the kid who rescued Leia, came from Tatooine. If you do your research, Darth Vader is from Tatooine. And on that planet he had an older brother, Owen. The kid who blew up the death star had an uncle named Owen. So you know what this means?? He was darth Vaders son! Darth Vaders son blew up the fucking death star!
In fact, he had the help of a droid. Not just any droid, but R2D2. This same very R2D2 is actually known for assisting darth Vader back when he was a jedi.
Clearly there's a conspiracy here, a long-term multi-generational plan that has manipulated the Old Republic, the Empire, and the Rebellion, and now has its hooks into the New Republic. But for what purpose? Why would Darth Vader kill his own mentor? Sure, conspiracy-deniers will respond with some drivel about there being multiple factions with incomplete information and different goals, but come on! Too many of these people were plugged into the Force; they couldn't help but coordinate with each other. That was, like, the Jedi's whole *thing*!
I think it has something to do with this "Force ghost" concept I heard about. For some reason, it was necessary to convert the old mentor into a "Force ghost", probably so that he could do something that he couldn't do were he constrained by a physical body...
OK, the real secret is that, outside of some lame Expanded Universe propaganda, there is only one way to become a Force Ghost: You have to be a Jedi (or Sith), and you have to die near Luke Skywalker.
Obi-Wan always knew this - maybe even before there *was* a Luke Skywalker, but certainly once there is a Luke, Obi-Wan is careful to stick close to him, even retiring in obscurity to a godforsaken desert to run out the clock because that means when he finally does kick the bucket, he'll die near Luke.
Then he gets dragged into a critical and dangerous mission that will take him far from Tattoine, so even though Luke is an untrained amateur who needs saving three times in as many scenes, Obi-Wan makes sure to take Luke with him.
Not on the actual infiltrate-the-Death-Star part, because Luke would make way too much noise for that. But when he winds up in a showdown with Darth Vader, he holds his own *just* long enough for Luke to show up, then lets Vader kill him. Bam, instant Force Ghost Kenobi. If only Vader had known...
OK, maybe he did know in the abstract, but he didn't know that the idiot with a blaster actually was Luke Skywalker. But in the final act, he tells his wingmen to leave Luke to him and then spends a suspiciously long time setting up the perfect shot. Like maybe he was planning to follow Luke right up to the thermal exhaust port and then they'd all die together, closely together, when the Death Star blew up. Curse that meddling Han Solo.
Next movie, Force Ghost Kenobi tells Luke to drop everything and go hang out with his old buddy Yoda, who has been running out the clock on a different godforsaken planet. And decrepit old Yoda insists that Luke needs *lots* of training, he's nowhere near ready to leave. Until Luke runs off and leaves anyway. So as soon as he returns, Yoda changes his tune to "no more training you need, die *right the hell now* I must". Yoda dies near Luke, bam, instant Force Ghost Yoda.
While Luke was away, of course, he reencountered Vader. Who made the pitch that Luke should join him, ruling the galaxy as father and son, staying close until presumably at some point Vader dies of old age. Near Luke. When Luke won't go for that, Vader is careful *not* to kill him.
Now Luke is a full Jedi, ready for his final confrontation with Vader and the Emperor. And they're both eager for an up-close personal meeting. Where the Emperor offers Luke his lightsaber back and tries to piss him off enough to kill him. Palpatine gets it.
So does Vader, hence the lightsaber duel where Luke might kill Vader, up close. But, oops, Vader is only seriously wounded, and Palpatine is now himself pissed enough to kill Luke. That would scotch the whole plan. Hence Vader throwing the Emperor off the railing into the bottomless pit. Die far from Luke, no Force Ghost for You.
Vader gets that Luke needs to bug out, fast. But, hey, before you do that, kiddo, can you please disconnect my life support system so I can die right now, near Luke? Bam, instant Force Ghost Vader. Er, Anakin.
Then in the sequel trilogy, we find out that the new crop of Jedi were maybe not up to par. Not the sort of people Luke wants to hang around eternity with, at any rate. So he runs off to yet another godforsaken planet to run out the clock, obscuring his trail so nobody can show up and off themselves at his doorstep. No more Force Ghosts.
Except, Rey manages to track him down. And she's an annoying quasi-Jedi that Luke doesn't fancy spending eternity with. He convinces her to leave, but the secret'is out, she'll be back, and probably a bunch of immortality-seeking Sith Lords behind her. So he offs *himself*, thus Dying (duh) Near Luke, and becoming the Last Force Ghost. At just the right moment to offer his Force-Ghostly intervention in his last big fight.
Wake up, sheeple! X-wing vs Y-wing is a distraction! The only parties that matter are the Force Ghost Party and the Just Die Already party.
Ooooh, that's really good. I bet Luke suddenly figured it out in that moment when he was standing over Ben Solo with a lightsaber, ready to kill him, and that's why didn't kill Ben and instead ran away!
We just need an epicycle to account for Qui-Gon Jin.
What if Qui-Gon was the one who first figured out the Force Ghost thing, but somehow the only way to reliably duplicate the effect was to cross Anakin with Padme (both of whom Qui-Gon basically discovered in the first place). So in the lead-up to the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan was using reverse psychology to get Anakin and Padme together. And after Luke was born, they had to keep Luke separate from Anakin, because otherwise Luke might turn into another Anakin and start slaughtering Force users left and right, and that would let all sorts of undesirables into the afterlife.
Also, it seems like Leia became a Force Ghost, so maybe she had the same power. It would explain why everyone kept trying to kidnap her.
or is the pushback to wokism an example of something like the thermidorian reaction?
what exactly makes a an egyptian pharoah _more_ like a swarm of profit-maximizing nanonbots than an insectoid hive-mind? isn't the pharoah _ more_ like the queen bee of the hive? haven't merchants always been hated by royalty?
if the left-right distinction means anything, then let's be clear about precisely what it is. Or is that even possible?
A left-right distinction is that Democrats are quite likely to call themselves leftists, while Republicans are very unlikely to call themselves rightists.
Has someone made a list of the top x scissor statements of American politics?
When I realized US energy self-sufficiency had gone from a left goal to a right goal, I became suspicious of the left-right formulation. Significant policy objectives shouldn't switch sides like that.
Many, many significant policy positions do switch sides over time or between countries. The only stable left/right policy I can think of is the degree of adherence to (the dominant) religion (though minority religions can end up on either side)
anyone who criticizes the democrats is called 'right' by popular media
for example, joe rogan - pot smoking, DMT advocating, ancient alien enthusiast is now called 'right wing' for criticizing the democrats
my conclusion is as follows:
- pre printing press, the state was official about 'maintaining the status quo'
- around the time of the french revolution, the concept of progress got big, and the modern left-right distinction makes the most sense when watching the dynamics of the revolution playing out, at which time 'left' was about a powerful state advancing "progress" by erasing "harmful traditions" and crushing its enemies, and 'right' was.... any opposition to that
and that's where things have been since in then in most of the west: the state mythology is no longer "we maintain the status quo" (as it was for hundreds if not thousands of years) it's "we are the main agent of progress", and the right is _anything_ that threatens to get in the way of that progress by critiquing the state for any reason.
This is only complicated by the fact that sometimes the republicans control the government - but if you look carefully, people don't criticize, _the government_, they criticize the republicans. When someone criticzes 'the government', this is almost _always_ red-coded unless we're talking far left people in america (like marxists) who are startign to have an increasing bond with people on the right as being deeply critical of most aspects of the state. But communists are left wing because both sides there want the state to have more power to advance a notion of progress which more or less lines up with their own.
This framing resolves the thing about 'change' vs 'status quo' with regard to public schools; it doesn't matter that 'getting rid of state-run schools and giving everyone vouchers' would be a big change; it's right-coded because it questions whether this is a job for the state.
It doesn't matter that 'america going to a bitcoin standard' would be a HUGE shift involving new technology, that's right-coded because it opposes the power of the state.
From what i can tell, THIS is the real dividing line between left and right in modernity - do you want the state to be the main agent of progress, or not. If you oppose the state, in _any way_, you are considered right wing. Left wing opposition to bad state policies is always given as an opposition to 'the bad guys in power now', and not "the state shouldn't play a role here period."
The stuff about 'keeping culture where it is', i think, is only a secondary game. Ancient states said 'we should be in power because we keep up the good order', probably because that shit worked and was coherent, and change didn't really happen because economic growth was practically zero.
Modern states in the west say 'we should be in power because we advance progress and prevent those bad old ways from coming back.' I think they _have_ to say this because the alternative is basically not feasible. The only exceptions i could think of are maybe some islamic run nation states.
Advancing progress then often comes down to enriching the wealthy people _behind the scenes_, because of course that would happen.
This is why criticizing Davos and the world economic foundation is generally a 'right wing conspiracy' - governments really _are_ controlled by extremely wealthy actors, but they meet out in the open and talk about global warming, so the left general gives them a pass.
This is a common American idea, but I don't think it's coherent. Lots of expansions of state power are considered right wing (the Patriot Act, anti-trans bathroom laws, bans on drugs and abortion, the Holocaust), while there are quite a lot of left-wing anarchists.
I agree that this is more true in America and that there are some counter points.
But for examples like “bans on drugs” or the patriot act, these have bipartisan support. And the argument on abortion isn’t “the state has no role here”, it’s explicitly “individual states shouldn’t be allowed to make choices here.”
Maybe you could help me understand- why is it that “this matter should be left to the states to decide” is generally a right leaning perspective?
The issue here is these things might be considered right wing, but in none of the cases cited is there anything that stops us making an argument that this is a left-wing change (in fact I think the same basic argument, that this is an expansion of state power over the individual, could be applied in all cases). The wing to which we ascribe something probably depends on where you're looking at it from.
This sounds more true to me than the standard "left / right" narrative. From this point of view, the phony definition of "right" is a tool of the left, whose only function in practice is to label anyone who doesn't cheer the cause-of-the-moment as a "Nazi".
What makes an Egyptian Pharoah more similar to profit-maximizing nanobots than an insectoid hive-mind? Probably the same thing that makes mainstream institutions consider theocratic monarchy, anarcho-capitalism, and fascists all on the right wing even though they are all different in form. I would argue that the right wing is measured relative to the left more than the reverse, so if the left wing primarily emphasizes some kind of program for increasing some kind of equality, then anything that deviates from that is on the right.
Monarchism, ultra-capitalism, and ultra-nationalism are all inegalitarian in their major aim and so they tend to be put on the right. Even though things like the USSR were in practice inegalitarian, because they ideologically aimed at producing what was according to them an egalitarian outcome, we put their ideology of communism on the left. A true hive-mind would be perfectly equal so I guess that's why it would be even further on the left than communism, which mostly concerns abolishing property to make everyone equal in terms of class.
Another reason is that there may be far more ways to aim for inequality than to aim for equality. Take equality to its extreme and perhaps you also need to get more universalist since you need to produce equality everywhere, which implies world government. Take inequality to its extreme, and sure you could have a world empire that enforces inegalitarian laws, but you could also have far more countries than ever. There are more arrangements possible. Equality narrows the tools you need and makes egalitarianism emphasizing ideologies more similar, whereas there are more ways to be unequal. Even consider nationalism; the nationalism of one country may not seem very similar to that of another.
Communism (per the manifesto) aims for equality of material possessions as well as class. However, a "hive mind" might take it a step further with equality of thought, as well.
I would suggest that an insectoid hive mind, being mentally, if not physically, a single entity, would be neutral to the question of egalitarianism. The actual eusociality of insects is slightly less extreme (EO Wilson was fond of saying that Marxists got the right idea but the wrong species) but there is still not enough individuality there for the question even to be necessary.
But yes, egalitarianism vs hierarchy (or, since some right-libertarians object to the term 'hierarchy' for anything other than an explicitly imposed authority structure, substitute stratification) is the main way in which I understand left vs right.
I guess it depends on whether or not the hive-mind has a queen. Although I should point out that in insect hives, the queen does not control the workers other than release pheromones to protect and take care of her. Most of the other functions/decisions of the hive are performed in true hive fashion, such as when bees vote on which tree cavity to select after swarming. But also, the drones are sort of freeloaders (but they do serve an important function as sacrificial stock, in addition to their mating function), so it's arguable whether there is true equality for all hive members.
I am also confused as to why a swarm of profit-maximizing nanobots would be right-wing and the opposite of a hivemind, unless there was some severe inequalities between the different nanobots and one class of nanobots were subservient to another class.
I assume the nanobots are dominated by a single entity distinct from the swam, who views all nanobots as disposable and all matter/life as food, while the hivemind is a gestalt consciousness inseparable from the collective, whose component organisms are fully capable of independent thought and action.
> I guess it depends on whether or not the hive-mind has a queen.
You always need someone on the top who will tell the masses how exactly to be perfectly equal. (And of course the individual on the top is an exception to the rule, but one does not talk about it.)
"I am also confused as to why a swarm of profit-maximizing nanobots would be right-wing and the opposite of a hivemind, unless there was some severe inequalities between the different nanobots and one class of nanobots were subservient to another class."
I agree. Both examples strike me as a neat hint of Scott's instincts about the two directions. The salient feature of his max left is no free thought, while the essence of max right is perfectly efficient capital circulation (without any of the social unpleasantness.)
My own leftist eudaimonia would involve something close to perfect parity of power (somehow rendered perpetually stable) rather than the absence of diverse opinion and individuality, but I recognise that's a partisan view.
On the matter of the symbolism of the hive's queen, it might be worth adding that a bee or an ant becomes the queen only thanks to what she is (and isn't) fed by her sisters in her larval stage - in a sense, she's chosen democratically.
Which brings us to another necessary feature for extreme left, and a problem with Wilson's take: genetic similarity cannot matter to the hive's solidarity, else it doesn't count.
"The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and particularly business parallels we draw between the two eras are, by their very nature, bound to be wrong."
-- Mark Corrigan, Business Secrets of the Pharaoahs
>why does the 'left/right' nomenclature really make sense?
I agree. I would ask two questions;
-Do you favor the general public, as opposed to the leadership of your country, having more or less access to firearms?
-Do you favor more strict or less strict restrictions regarding immigration into your country?
For both of those questions, you can find very plausible responses coded "left" and very plausible responses coded "right", even within the past 10 years.
I ask this because both gun control and immigration are cited in this thread and others as obvious examples of left v. right issues.
Can you elaborate on the left wing version of pro gun and anti-immigrant policy?
My usual go-to for deciding whether something is left or right is "does this increase/favor power hierarchies?"
Example a: Guns are un-equalizers, in that they enable a very high degree of unilateral violence.
Left wingers are generally anti-gun, whether those guns are in the hands of private citizens or government employees; there is pretty constant opposition to the idea that person A has available an easy way to kill person B. The idea of positive rights comes into it, maybe a leftist pro-gun position would be "everyone gets a free AR-15 and must have it with them at all times" to ensure a level playing field, but this would likely produce bad results. The alternative "hey, no one should have guns" would seem both egalitarian and less accident prone.
Similarly, anti-immigrant policies are generally framed as "it's bad for the people who live here", while the advantages to the immigrants are not really considered. This is obviously pretty hierarchical thinking, because it explicitly values the interests of one group (existing citizens) above another (immigrants). It might be theoretically possible to create a non-hierarchical anti-immigrant position through utilitarian calculus that values all persons equally. This would take the form of something like "immigration is a huge benefit for the immigrant, but mild negative for everyone in the immigrants new country, and it works out to be a net-negative overall". In practice, right wing arguments don't take this form. Probably because very few people think this way (even far-left politicians tend to favor their own citizens well ahead foreigners. Also, if this was done with even a shred of empiricism, we'd end up with an immigration policy so far to the left of what we have now even the leftists would start getting nervous.
Trying to steel-man you a bit here, I'm genuinely curious what you meant by left-coded versions of these positions.
Good point, although I think leftists being pro-gun in the context of "overthrow the capitalist oppressors" is somewhat different than the contemporary pro-gun position of "everyone should be armed so they can enforce contemporary social norms with lethal violence".
It DOES mean that the writers of the communist manifesto had at least one thing in common with the Oathkeepers, but I think there is some meaningful difference between violently overthrowing the government to put in a new system vs violently overthrowing the government to restore an older system. There's going to be similarities, but anyone trying to equate the two probably has an agenda.
I'm not sure the Oathkeepers are the comparator to Marx here though? Marx's thinking was that the proletariat should be armed. Not armed to the point of a successful revolution and then disarmed, but rather that they should have access to arms to protect against bourgeoisie tyranny. This isn't a different strand of thinking to the Second Amendment but is rather the exact same thing only with a different strata of British society as the stated threat (Britain - we cause the rest of the world to arm itself! Go us). As such, Marx is more like the NRA here.
"To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose [the German class-traitor liberals] whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising."
It was composed in London, true, but sent along with the wily shoemaker Heinrich Bauer to try to stiffen the German comrades' spines. I think we can take the Brits off the hook on this one.
More to the point, Marx's injunction clearly referred to a particular incipient struggle. It was not an inexplicably-sacrosanct line from the American constitution, meant to define a fundamental human right.
Unions are generally left coded, and are generally strongly opposed to skilled immigration in their field, because it is competition. Some of this is direct opposition to the granting of visas, some of this is in the form of onerous recertification requirements that make qualified professionally waste years of their life before being allowed to work in their chosen field in a new country (which in practice dramatically reduces how many are willing to migrate).
I see your poin and historically that was the case, but "unions" as a concept are discrete from union members. The former are left coded for sure, but these days they are broadly neutral on immigration, or even a bit positive. By contrast, the unionized steel and auto workers I have met are pretty socially conservative. They don't like immigration (and seem pretty uncomfortable with trans rights!) Seems a bit reductive to call them left-coded based on union membership.
The real cynic in me says back in the 1920s bringing in cheap labour to undermine the unions was an attack against workers. Over.the next 80 years the ruling class figured out the real value of immigrants wasn't in suppressing wages but in breaking up working class solidarity by offering a scapegoat.
"Over the next 80 years the ruling class figured out the real value of immigrants wasn't in suppressing wages but in breaking up working class solidarity by offering a scapegoat."
This seems a little too convenient to be fully believable. It comes across as a post-hoc explanation for how the leftist position on immigration could change over time, without having to admit that leftists were wrong either then or now.
A more believable explanation is that the Democratic Party draws some of its support from unions who are incentivized to oppose cheap immigrant labor, and some of its support from immigrant populations, and the party's default position changes based on which group provides more of an advantage to them at any given time. Likewise, the Republican Party draws some of its support from wealthy capitalists who would prefer to have an influx of cheap immigrant labor, and some of its support from blue collar social conservatives who are opposed to immigration for both economic and cultural reasons, and similarly changes position over time based on what benefits them more.
Your explanation is a more complete one, and I definitely don't want to imply that leftists were correct throughout all history despite a 180 position in their position. Definitely open to leftists being wrong.
That said, I think there is more going on here. OAN, Fox News, Prager U, Breitbart, etc: these are right wing media organizations with heavy editorial influence by their wealthy owners. I don't think the ubiquitous fear stoking about immigration is just about playing to a blue collar base of support. Rather, it functions to inoculate the blue collar from seeking common cause with another group who would otherwise make good allies. I don't think it's a conspiracy or anything, it's just politics and the right is much MUCH better at it.
> why does the 'left/right' nomenclature really make sense?
It doesn't; or rather, it's a sometimes-useful way of expressing the range of political opinions that exists in a particular society at a particular time, but it tends to fall apart once you start comparing different societies or the same society at different times.
In a given society at a given time, there's a small fraction of political idea-space that's actually occupied. You can usually take the range of opinions that exist in that society and map them onto a spectrum which we call "left" to "right" by analogy to the French National Assembly of 1789. But you can't map the whole of political-idea-space into "left" and "right" once and for all.
Because principal component analysis, essentially. If you poll people on a wide range of different political issues, you'll see a surprisingly strong correlation between unrelated ones; left/right is the name we give the axis that best captures that.
Obviously, the two groups sitting on opposite sides of the national assembly in 18th century France probably didn't actually disagree much on abortion, gun control or gay rights, but I do think there's a continuous line of descent from the political division they embodied to today's tribes.
That sort of principal-component line-of-descent is why DW-NOMINATE shows that the Republicans are the heirs of the Federalists, even while liberals like Lin Manuel-Miranda have taken to lauding Alexander Hamilton.
> If you poll people on a wide range of different political issues, you'll see a surprisingly strong correlation between unrelated ones
This makes sense within a country. If you want to have a majority, you need to join forces with someone, even if your issues are orthogonal, so people believing X will be exposed to Y as "this is what people on our side believe".
But in different countries, the historical coalitions could have been different. So each country may have different ideas of what "left" and "right" correspond to. In one country, you have X+Y against W+Z, in another country it is X+W against Y+Z.
A lot of these movements are international, though, so while I totally agree in principle, in practice the coalitions are often surprisingly stable across borders, especially within the anglo-sphere.
A priori that totally could have been true, but the reason I think "left-wing" and "right-wing" are useful concepts is that empirically a lot of the time political movements in different countries seem to align themselves with one another across borders, on broadly left/right lines.
I'm not sure about left/right as theoretical ideologies, but as observed alliances they're clearly a valuable tool for understanding the world.
As far as I can tell, the main difference is how optimistic each side is about human goodness and our capacity for creating a utopia (or at least a significantly better society than we've hitherto managed) on earth. If you think we can, with the right combination of education, social conditions, etc., usher in a new and better age, you're probably of the left; if you think we're basically flawed and can make at best limited improvements in how we run society, you're probably of the left.
Some policies can be justified on both left-wing grounds and right-wing grounds -- e.g., you might support limited government because you think humans are basically good and freeing them from the shackles of external control will enable this innate goodness to shine through (a left-wing position), or because you think humans are basically evil and can't be trusted with too much power (a right-wing position) -- so we find some positions cropping up on both left and right at various points in time. The fundamental difference in how the two sides view human nature and society is, however, constant, as far as I can see.
As for the question of whether there can be a country with two left- or right-wing parties, if both parties think that humans are perfectible but disagree on how to bring this about, I think you could say, based on the definition above, that both parties are left-wing. Conversely, if both parties are sceptical about human perfectibility, I think you could call them both right-wing.
I don't think that's necessarily contradictory to my point -- the left are optimistic about the potential for creating a utopia, so they're perpetually frustrated by people's failure to live up to their expectations. The right, on the other hand, are more pessimistic about utopias, and so are more ready to just take things as they come.
I feel like that's inherently a leftist perspective. You're painting the left as sunny optimists, the right as gloomy sticks in the mud. That is certainly consistent with the left's view of boths sides, but not with the right's. A rightist might put it: the difference is not in the inherent optimism about people, but optimism about *how* any change could best be achieved. If you think it can be done by passing laws and social compulsion, you're on the left. If you think it's better done by person-to-person persuasion and example, or by voluntary organizations, you're on the right. (I'm not saying that's more accurate, just that it's how a rightist would view the same division you're describing.)
Anyway, I'd be hard pressed to say a devout conservative Catholic middle-age Second Amendment enthusiast feels any less optimistic about the potential for (and importance of) the improvement of the human condition than a passionately Marxist college student living in a group home and angling for an NGO job -- but they would almost certainly disagree on the best road to that Utopia.
> d. If you think it can be done by passing laws and social compulsion, you're on the left. If you think it's better done by person-to-person persuasion and example, or by voluntary organizations, you're on the right. (I'm not saying that's more accurate, just that it's how a rightist would view the same division you're describing.)
If i have to pick i side, i identify as being on the right. Specifically, i see myself as right-leaning liberal and think one of the problems with modernity is that this is seen as somehow a contradiction.
A friend told me he thought i was deeply pessimistic. I said i am optimistic about _individual humans but deeply pessimistic about large groups of people coordinating their behavior through hierarchies. This i don't really see much of a difference between giant corporations, mafias, and governments, except in terms of their "products" and marketing approach.
Yah I would actually agree entirely with that. I get along very well with individual humans, almost of whatever stripe. I have friends who are well-nigh Marxists and others who are hard-core libertarian. And I can navigate small organizations reasonably well. But the larger an organization gets, the less human and sensible it seems to get, the more rigid and full of inertia, the more monumentally stupid.
I believe in the Dunbar Number. Basically if it's more people than can fit in a lecture hall, and it isn't single-mindedly devoted to some very clear-cut simply defined task (like the military, or Exxon-Mobil, or a church), then -- watch out. It will be shockingly incompetent and inefficient, lumbering and clumsy, and if it achieves any good at all it will probably be by accident and notwithstanding its intentions.
I have no idea who you are other than your name but i feel tremendously... grateful to have found you here on the comment boards. It often feels isolating inside my own head because i feel like... i'm internally coherent but the outside world thinks i'm crazy for just wanting to love people and have them get along.
I TOTALLY agree on dunbar's number and think of this through a computational lens; dunbar's number puts a limit on functional relationships. If each person can be friends with something like 150 others, then you could have 150^2 = 22,500 people _possibly_ working well together. If you allow for 'transitive trust' to be a thing (i.e. i care about the friends of my friends, even if i don't know them directly) then you get to an upper limit of ~3,000.000.
What do you think of the claim that there are likely new ways of coordinating human behavior at scale that _don't_ involve humans using their meat brains to evaluate each other's status or to determine how and when to apply violence, and that these new modes of cooperation can bring about human flourishing?
> I have friends who are well-nigh Marxists and others who are hard-core libertarian."
I dunno if i have .. friends.. so much as i feel like i can _Talk_ to both of these groups and mostly understand where they are coming from.
Here's a a post i made yesterday in the 'debate communism' subreddit where i was hoping to get a good back and forth going about whether or not bitcoin actually lines up with some marxist concepts in a weird way:
Thanks for the kind comments, but of course this is the Internet, so I'm sure I'll say something that will make you reconsider entirely soon enough :) No, you're certainly not alone.
I know very little about the sociology of bitcoin, so I probably don't have anything valuable to say on that, alas.
You are definitely not alone and agree with both of you.
My take on left-right discourse has been seeing it benevolently as a balance of wanting to be charitable (and maybe courageous) against wanting to be just (and maybe wise).
>isn't single-mindedly devoted to some very clear-cut simply defined task... will be shockingly incompetent
This is the whole point of the (increasingly unpopular) idea that companies should 1: only care about profit and 2: outsource everything outside their core competencies.
A society that's 80% oil companies, 10% server operators and 10% carbon captors is better off than one filled with bloated beasts that try to do all three.
I think what happens is people who are objecting to this notion are conflating:
- what good means, in the abstract, absolute sense
- what the mission of a specific organization should be
the left/right divide (which i do think is real), at its core seems to be a divide about whether we should have ONE BIG org whose entire mission is 'advance good', or whether good is best advanced by the cooperation and competition of a large number of smaller orgs, each of whom has varying missions and competes for limited resources
I'm not sure why you think that "the military, Exxon-Mobil, or a church" *aren't* "shockingly incompetent and inefficient, lumbering and clumsy". I expect all of them to be utterly riddled with parasitic rent-seekers doing awful things and covering up each other's crimes.
Ha ha, yes they are. They're just *less* affected by that disease than the Federal government or the UN, because the single mindedness and easy measurement of the desired outcome provides some kind of restraint on how much nonadaptive internal behavior can be tolerated.
And even then, I will agree they are only reliably better when the desired outcome is very desired indeed, e.g. the military during wartime, Exxon-Mobil when the price of oil is unusually low, a church when it's in the minority and its members are being oppressed.
Actually I'm a rightist who views the left's insane optimism as a major threat to civilised society, but I guess I can be glad at passing the intellectual turing test, lol.
<i>Anyway, I'd be hard pressed to say a devout conservative Catholic middle-age Second Amendment enthusiast feels any less optimistic about the potential for (and importance of) the improvement of the human condition than a passionately Marxist college student living in a group home and angling for an NGO job -- but they would almost certainly disagree on the best road to that Utopia.</i>
Catholicism, at least, would hold that creating a utopia is impossible, due to original sin.
I don't think it's fair to say the left is more optimistic. Their optimistic seems ~entirely~ limited to the power of states to drive progress.
Look at global warming. Would you call it 'optimistic' to believe that we shoudl encourage everyone to consume less energy?
Or, look at firearm ownership. Is it more optimistic to say "people can be trusted to own weapons and use them responsible"? Or is it more optimistic to say "people can't be trusted to own guns, they'll all shoot each other?"
Or, look at taxes and welfare. Is it more optimistic to say, "let people form strong communities and they will naturally look after reach other," or "we must tax the rich to take care of the poor because otherwise it won't happen."
Or, look at free speech. Is it more optimistic to say "words can't hurt people, the marketplace of ideas is the best way to get to the truth, free and open debate are essential?", or "people are harmed by all kinds of ideas so we need to limit what people can say in public for everyone's good'
I agree that you can formulate this difference in terms of optimism, but it's an extremely narrow kind of optimism: namely, optimism about how much good state institutions can do.
Dunno about that. Christ is supposed to have redeemed that booboo, right? But yeah sure I said it was a *road* to Utopia. Anyone with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt is going to conclude it'll be a long road indeed. But I think they would also say well let's get cracking then, no time to waste, march. It's not a religion of despair.
I feel like this is inherently a Rightist perspective. The Right is exclusively about enriching the wealthy and the Left is about protecting workers. Sure the Right will occasionally throw a bone to the Christians (abortion) or gun owners (2A) but the entire small government spiel is just about cutting taxes on the rich. Voters who believe otherwise are just suckers (unless you are a wealthy aristocrat).
My comment was (largely) sarcasm/snark as designated by the"\s". However, I am quite wealthy and yet I often have discussions about how the world should be run. Am I supposed to question my own political position?
I don't actually understand why anyone having a discussion is necessarily part of any political party. I am also completely unaware of any economic forum at Davos. Your post comes across as if you view it is some shadowy conspiratorial illuminati thing...
> Your post comes across as if you view it is some shadowy conspiratorial illuminati thing...
This is a very common response, which i find puzzling coming from people concerned about plutocrats. Which particular plutcrats are you concerned with?
When i mention a specifc group, "mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies – typically global enterprises with more than five billion US dollars in turnover –", which meets annually to talk about global governance, people will often respond that this is a conspiracy theory.
It seems that it's fine and well to talk about plutocrats, as long as we stay in the abstract realm and avoid mentioning the specific names. Why is that?
Notice that your response is identical to that of the dutch prime minister here:
Er...yes? I mean, that's what I said it was, the way a righty would put it.
But it's been quite a while since the left in the US was all about protecting workers. This is a characterization that was true in 1952, not 2022. That's why Trump's margin of victory came from non-college educated small-town whites, the folks who have been absolutely hammered by industrial job loss over the past 45 years. Go into any small mom-'n'-pop store, heavy industry shop floor, tool, truck, or farm equipment shop, and you are not going to find a lot of Democrats. You'll find a bunch of guys driving pickups with TRUMP FUCK YEAH stickers on them, who only wish he'd nuked China, sold all of Alaska to Exxon Mobil for oil exploration, and (of course) built an eleventy-one foot wall along the border to keep out people who'll work for lower wages.
You'll note that a major part of Trump's tax bill was the SALT limitation, which *raised* taxes -- but very specifically on high wage earners in blue states, like stockbrokers in NYC or Facebook millionaires in Silicon Valley. That's a long way from plutocrat tax cutting, which, again, is something that was true of the right in 1952 but that's a long time ago.
I agree completely that the Left has done a crappy job of protecting Unions. It is generally accepted that Clinton was a disaster for Unions and many Dems (myself included) feel like Obama came up far short of where we hoped.
As noted by the "\s" at the end of my post, it was mostly sarcasm. However, I would still argue that the Republican Party as a whole (not voters or necessarily individual politicians) is ALL about enriching the rich. Trumps tax cut that you mention was a massive(and permanent) tax cut for the wealthy plus a temporary tax cut for the middle class (expires 2026). The SALT change also expires in 2026.
So 100% tax cuts for the rich with a little sugar so the rest don't notice. This sounds like pretty standard Republican fare to me...
Well, with our highly progressive tax system, rich people have lots of taxes to cut, the poor less so. Some would say "well give the poor money then" as the obvious fix, but a) money has to come from somewhere and b) thats increasing govt power & influence, not decreasing it.
Oh nonsense. If anything it favored the lower middle class, as the top rate went from 39.6% to 37%, a reduction of 6.6% in your marginal tax bill, while the 25% bracket when to 22% (a reduction of 12%) and the 15% bracket to 12% (a reduction of 20%).
This is a talking point that was worn out 30 years ago when I first heard it, since it rests on the unexamined (and of course utterly incorrect) assumption that the poor are somehow paying something even remotely approaching the amount of money the better off are paying.
As it happens, the tax system is already grossly unfair. For example, the top 5% earners earn 36% of all income but pay 59% of all tax, and the bottom 50% earn 12% of all income but pay 3% of all tax.
I mean, in a system where the lower half of earners are paying 3% of the taxes and the upper half are paying 97%, yeah, pretty much *any* broad tax break you give will return lots more money to the upper half. The lower half are forking out practically nothing, so there's nothing to give back.
The poor hardly have any taxes to cut. I always love the surveys where you ask liberals how progressive taxes should be, and they always design progressive taxation systems that are LESS progressive than what we currently have while also believing our current system in unacceptably regressive.
I think they make sense if you assign them to "collectivist" and "individualist". Someone feeling collectivist will favor big, active government, will want the voice of the majority to have very substantial power, will venerate elections, will be suspicious of other sources of collective power (e.g. corporations, churches, private organizations), will want state power to primarily redress injustice and inequality, and be optimistic about the ability of planners and government to accurately foretell and alter the future.
Conversely someone feeling individualistic will favor small, limited government, will want the voice of the majority to have significant limitations vice individual rights, will not be overly enamored of elections -- will be more OK with appointed offices, for example -- will be just fine with, and maybe favor, other smaller sources of collective power that rely on persuasion and voluntary membership, like corporations, churches, and private organizations, will want state power to the extent it's used at all be mostly used to address security threats (e.g. national security and policing), and be pessimistic about the ability of planners and government both to predict the future and to affect it positively.
These seem like perpetually valid categories of human political impulse, in part because they are *both* ways that any normal human being might feel, depending on his personal circumstances and history, and on the situation around him. If we get alone well with our neighbors, have a great job and high respect in the community, plenty of income, we might feel individualistic. If we feel alienated from our neighbors, struggle to find a good job and high pay, we might feel collectivist. If there's a war or giant recession going on, we probably feel collectivist. If times are good, we probably feel more individualistic. If we feel life is generally fair and anyone can become President, we feel individualistic. If we feel life is unfair and there are structural barriers all over the place, we feel collectivist. Probably at various times in our lives, we naturally feel one way or another -- probably when both young and old, we feel more collectivist, and the middle more individualist.
But how these map onto real political parties is tough. They probably do better at some times than others.
I'm confused here. Why would a collectivist be suspicious of "other sources of collective power."?
is it more reasonable to say that the right framing here, at least for the modern left, is "supporting of state power to advance a specific kind of ideal", and then the modern right is just some nonsense coalition of whoever happens to oppose the state, either because they dislike states in principle (libertarians/tradcons) or they just want the state to advance a _differnet_ agenda (natcons, trump, etc)
as fractured as the left is, the right, as a coalition, makes even less sense and i think is only held together because the only thing that unites it is opposition to the left
For the same reason the police don't like organized vigilantes, churches don't like schisms, cults don't like other cults, et cetera. Power doesn't like rivals. If you are highly interested in collective power exerted through government, you automatically dislike other power sources *not* exerted through government.
I dunno how well my labels map onto what people call the modern left and right. If I had to characterize the latter without using "you know what I mean" labels, what I'd say is that the modern left -- or more precisely the leadership and senior members of it -- feels more like a religious movement. It likes collective action, yes, but it has a strong sense of moral righteousness, a deep suspicion of heresy, and a close attention to dogma -- how, precisely, one is supposed to speak and think about things. It's very much concerned with salvation, both collective (as a nation, or even species) and individual. It wants to heal your soul, and that of the nation, and it's OK with burning you at the stake if that's what it takes.
I guess the modern right already mostly has a (private) religion, so they're not so much into the religion of political ideology. I think a lot of it is still traditional conservatives, and some libertarian (grumpy, unwilling) fellow travelers, but it has developed a strong nativist populist wing in the last 20 years, a lot of exiled Truman/Reagan Democrat lunch bucket voters who feel severely left out by the tech revolution and NASDAQ wealth. They don't become dominant because this is matched by an influx of immigrants, blacks, and browns into uneasy alliance with the left because the left is very willing to prioritize their grievances over the poor whites who have edged over to the right (plus the hostility of the nativists on the right pisses them off).
It ends up strange, though. You have soi-disant "leftists" going to the mattress for the Standard Oils of the 21st century (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) as zealously as any laissez-faire Republican from the McKinley era, and you have soi-disant "rightists" getting worked up about industrial job loss and inveighing against skilled immigration, wanting tariffs and protectionism.
This is the key variable, i think. i consider myself a big can of collectivism ~outside~ of government.
I suppose it should also be said that the fun thing about political coalitions is that people can be in either one for _all kinds_ of different reasons that are mutually antagonistic.
Step too far outside of government, though, and you're another bandit. Governing small via elections and or 2nd amendment allows the individual to remain free of unchosen associations, and hence at liberty.
"I argue that this key “left vs. right” inclination to focus more vs less on a talky collective is the main parameter that consistently determines who people tend to ally with in large scale political coalitions."
Also only 50% of americans of either party thinks contraception is ok?? something has to be wrong with the phrasing of that question, that result makes no sense.
Edit: Ahh i see, other commentors are pointing out that "morally acceptable: yes/no" wasn't the exhaustive set of options. Yeah I think this chart is pretty bad then (albeit proooobably enough to make the point Scott wants it to make). Seems plausible to me that almost 100% of americans think "contraception is not morally wrong" but more democrats think it isn't a moral question at all.
I’d put it more at 80%, and it would also depend on the phrasing/context. I was raised Catholic and I know it’s morally wrong, but if asked “are you using any?” I would have to answer yes.
I don't think that's the biggest problem with the chart. It reports that American Democrats and Republicans both have an opinion on extramarital affairs that is not far off of the most intolerant in the world, represented by Lebanon.
But an "intolerant" view of extramarital affairs would involve sentencing the sinners to death! That's not even an unusual policy, historically. Americans are nowhere near that kind of attitude toward extramarital affairs; either the positioning of the American parties on the graph is wildly, wildly off, or almost all of the horizontal space on that graph is devoted to a relatively tiny portion of the policy space.
(I think it's the second one; if I search for "penalties for adultery in Lebanon", I see a result claiming that the penalty for a woman committing adultery is three to twenty-four months in jail. That is one end of the graph, but it's a tolerant position from a global perspective. If I search for "adultery honor killings", there's no shortage of those. Quoting from https://www.mei.edu/publications/iranian-women-campaign-stop-rise-honor-killings,
> Article 630 of the Iranian Penal Code allows a man who witnesses his wife having sexual intercourse with another man to kill both of them if he is certain that she is a willing participant
But also, going back to American political parties, there aren't any of them that would support three months in jail for adultery.
I keep being surprised by American's cavalier attitude on accidental children without a stable father. In my corner of the world (Eastern Europe) that would code as incredibly low IQ.
I almost wrote "low class" instead, but truth is that the low class (and gypsy) habit of young couples is to skip civil marriage, but they still talk about themselves as being married and behave as such when children appear. Of course not marriages survive, but a supermajority of couples at least make a serious effort.
The "low class" might be the more pertinent angle. There's a phenomenon where the elites start to devalue and demean the institution of marriage, and the attitudes trickle down from the elites to the lower classes. Except that for the elites it's largely posturing; the elites' own childbirths and child-rearing continue to happen inside of marriage at an above-90% and virtually unchanging rate, while for the lower classes it nosedives. And then there's a whole range of downstream outcomes for those children which correlate negatively with not having a father present, that continue to cripple the lower classes and that don't affect the higher classes.
This phenomenon, driven by elites devaluing tradition, has been most pronounced in the US, but also UK and France. In the US it particularly affects Blacks -- which over just a few decades flipped from "one in five children growing without a father" to "one in four children growing with a father" -- but the nosedive is present across the other populations as well (except for their elite fragments).
Thomas Sowell commented about this, saying that the Black family had survived centuries of chattel slavery but was not able to survive the welfare state. I think the welfare state was a precondition and facilitator but not the real cause nor trigger of this; the true thing that the Black family did not survive was the bourgeois counterculture revolution of the sixties.
It's funny how I came from seeing the sixties as a miracle in my younger years, to the most likely cause of the 70s mystery nosedive and the following stagnation.
Also I keep wondering how influential "elites" really are, and how do you define them. One option would be the ones that generate and spread ideas: the most educated, the writers, journalists, activists, upper middle class and so on. That's what we'd like to think, but when in my country we had a party created and supported by them, it topped at 9% of the vote.
Or one could say the elites are those that own the companies that employ those writers and journalists, and who have a heavy (but subtle) say in which ideas get disseminated. In this case it's more like the 0.001%. A case study here would be nuclear power in Germany: was it really intelligentsia that decided that nuclear power is bad and should be phased out? Or were the 0.001% owning the industries that preferred cheap gas over nuclear, and created a social context ultimately friendly to Nordstream?
"nuclear power in Germany"; my guess would be that lots of people shit their pants after Fukushima (remembering Chernobyl) and the decision to stop using nuclear energy was about votes.
"Greens" parties have been campaigning against nuclear power since the cold war, AFAICT primarily because nuclear power and nuclear weapons are concepts that are close together in people's minds and nuclear weapons obviously and justifiably scare people.
How to define elites? I think the pre-1789 France had defined them quite well, defining two separate tiers of elites. Their three-tiered division of society was #1: aristocracy, #2: clergy, #3: commoners. This essential division has remained until today, albeit with added uncertainty and nervousness about retaining elite status.
From the 18th century began a takeover, with the academia and media jumping into the shoes of the clergy, as the elite with non-hereditary membership (mostly) which shapes minds, and the capitalists jumping into the shoes of the aristocracy, as the elite with hereditary membership (mostly) which exerts power.
What I mean by "uncertainty" is that before, if you were a bishop or count or lord or archbishop, then that is what you were. Today you can be a "journalist", and exert massive influence or be completely inconsequential - depending *in part* on your merits, but largely on which position you get and where, and are you able to keep it. "Is someone a #2 elite or not" boils down to whether they've successfully jumped into the shoes of the clergy and stayed in them -- not on whether they are /called/ a journalist or professor.
The #1 elites are more constrained today than they were before; they have to play by a quite larger set of rules. Then again, lobbying and capital go a long way in determining what the rules *are*.
Another more recent shift, is one of dependency. The #2 elites were traditionally reasonably independent from the #1 elites. In the tumult of the 2008-2012 period, with its large shifts in financing streams and various takeovers, I believe the #2's to have become more dependent on #1's than ever before. And I don't think any (post-2012) consequence had been good.
He's quite right. Something shocking if you study 19th American history is that immediately following Emancipation, black rates of marriage, out of wedlock birth, incarceration, and even joblessness did not differ substantially from whites in similar economic circumstances. That changed drastically over the following 50 years. Even within my lifetime, things have swung around weirdly: in 1979 black men earned about 80% of what white men earned, while black women earned 95% of what white women earned[1], while in 2016 that had fallen to 70% and 82%. I mean...dafuq? I thought the modern generation was way less racist and far more tuned in to social equity than we Neanderthals of the 80s. And yet...
Whatever is going on, it is neither (since 1865) slavery nor something unique to blacks or black culture, because none of those would explain the strange up-and-down historical trends of black welfare vis-a-vis whites.
>Whatever is going on, it is neither (since 1865) slavery nor something unique to blacks or black culture, because none of those would explain the strange up-and-down historical trends of black welfare vis-a-vis whites.
1942, not 1865. I wrote a whole thing on it elsewhere in these comments and can't be bothered to repost it here, but the idea that chattel slavery ended in the US with the 13th amendment is a sham.
Actual, non-metaphorical chattel slavery. The 13th Amendment has some words in it that would lead you to think that slavery was made illegal, but it didn't provide any enforcement mechanism or proscribe any punishment for the crime of engaging in slavery, and neither did any other laws anywhere in the south. For a while the practice was rebranded "debt peonage", which was itself illegal after the 1867 Federal Anti-Peonage Statute, but it was chattel slavery with some extra pretense smeared on top. In fact, when these latter-day slaveowners were brought up on charges under said Anti-Peonage Statute, they argued (successfully) that because there was no real debt involved, it wasn't peonage but instead slavery, which again had no proscribed punishment under any legal code. Wild, I know. Look up "Tallapoosa Peonage Cases" and prepare to be horrified.
This persists up until world war 2, where the continued situation made for bad war propaganda. Here's a document filed by FDR's attorney general on the matter. I doubt they would have bothered if it was just "metaphorical" slavery. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591
We're not looking at the gap between rich and poor, we're looking at the gap between white and black. One hopes you don't just substitute the word "poor" everywhere you see the word "black."
i don't. I'm going from your own claim "in 1979 black men earned about 80% of what white men earned, while black women earned 95% of what white women earned[1], "
I am no expert on black history in America, but it kinda looks like the start of the decline you identified corresponds with a decade of Republican rule and the war on drugs, followed by a tough-on-crime-neoliberal. The effect of mass incarceration in black communities isn't exactly mysterious.
I'm no expert myself, but my bet would be the massive influx of hard drugs (mostly cocaine, at that time) and the formation of the cartels was destabilising things *before* the massive ramp up of policing that that triggers.
Yes, in my memory the "War on Drugs" was a direct consquence of the sharp ramp-up in availability of high quality low cost crack and cocaine in American cities.
A decade, yes. But you'll note there are 4 decades between the two points cited, and that includes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, too. If you're going to lay *all* the blame on the Reagan Presidency, to my mind you're in the same category of implausibility as those who argue the problems of black out of wedlock birth in 2022 can be directly blamed on the existence of slavery 157 years ago, a causal chain so tenuous it would be laughed out of consideration were it applied to any other social ill.
Yes, indeed. Sowell also remarked "Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty?"
The dive from 80%/95% (1979) to 70%/82% (2016) happened in the wake of the effective dissolution of the Black family. The 1979 "high" was already a good decade into that dissolution -- but well, there's a delay until the affected generation of children join the workforce.
If the 1979 gap had to do with whatever level of racism was common in 1979, I would assume the racism decreased until 2016 but not sufficiently to counter the ill effects of Black family dissolution. I.e. that if the overall level of racism in 2016 had stayed the same as in 1979, the gap would have been quite worse than 70%/82%.
It's missing data. The actual survey has three options, is a thing a)moral, b) immoral or c) not a moral issue. The ones that look weird have large chunks saying it's not a moral issue.
So I haven't read the source in depth, but the numbers in the diagram seem really odd to me. Barely 20% of democrats think abortion is morally acceptable? 30% of both parties think premarital sex is morally acceptable? Even less think homosexuality is okay? And alcohol use is at less than half?
Yeah, that chart looks dodgy to me too. Also, Japan is the world leader in gambling being morally acceptable? Gambling is incredibly illegal in Japan and tied to various criminal activity.
Re: Japan, there's also pachinko parlors covered in brightly colored popular cartoon characters. "They're not gambling, they're gaming" but they're gambling and they're very popular.
I don't think people who gamble all day are morally upright either, but I used to have a monthly poker game with friends, buy in $5. There's pachinko addicts, but there's also people who stop by for an hour when work lets out early.
That said, I tried to look up popularity of various games - apparently WSOP would have us believe 20% of Americans play online poker? More realistic ~5% of Japanese people play pachinko. Maybe that's just one being in person only.
Pachinko is not especially stigmatized. Doing it all day in lieu of a job would be, but that's a separate question from the people who go once or twice a week for a couple of hours.
Reading further, there were actually five different responses possible: "morally acceptable", "morally unacceptable", "not a moral issue", "depends on the situation", and "don’t know". In a lot of these, "not a moral issue" is a large category. They also left out around a third of the responses that were independent. There's a chart on the fourth page that shows all the responses for the US.
I guess you can still use this to show that the parties don't differ that much in views, or at least the people answering the surveys by phone in 2013 who preferred different parties at that time didn't differ by that much.
I like how the paper labels its eight topics "moral issues", thereby settling the question if they are moral issues already.
Also, to nitpick, for almost any topics, the correct answer is "depends on the situation".
Even with universal taboos like homicides or cannibalism there are always exceptional situations.
Abortion: mostly wrong when against the preference of the pregnant person
Alcohol Use: mostly wrong when used on unwitting third parties
Contraception Use: possibly wrong when keeping your partner under the impression that conception is desired. (On might argue that the deception is the real wrong in that case, though.)
Extramarital Affairs: Fine in an open relationship, possibly ok if spouse is in long-term coma?
Divorce: Really context-dependent?
Gambling: Depends on if its Russian roulette or opening Magic boosters
Any kind of sex: consent? public decency? etc.
One might argue that people will mostly agree that from the typical context, most people will have a clear conception that "Alcohol use" probably does not include disinfectant use, and "abortion as a means of furthering genocide" is very non-central from the general use of "abortion".
I am very much not sold on "morally acceptable" vs "not a moral issue". Assuming almost nobody thinks any of the issues under consideration are strictly required (e.g. "anyone who does not use alcohol is a bad person"), there is little practical difference.
Assuming these researchers asked about the existence of a god instead.
The theist answers: yes.
The strong atheist answers: no.
The agnostic answers: I don't know.
The nitpicker answers: Depends on the situati^W on how you define god(s).
* Only one in five affirms the existence of god(s)
* Only one in five denies the existence of god(s)
Of course, these studies likely involved translations, which complicates things further, as there is seldom a 1:1 mapping. Perhaps the Japanese word used for gambling was more associated with "games of chance" than "people playing poker with stacks of dollar bills on a table in some crime den". Perhaps the phrasing of "not a moral issue" was stranger in Czech so people were more likely to pick "morally acceptable".
For example in German, while "Sterbehilfe" is technically synonymous to "Euthanasie", the latter is permanently tainted by Nazi crimes while the former is not, so I would expect you would get quite different replies depending on which term you used.
it is to me. Maybe it's a mutation that's not universal. It seems like that sort of thing would sweep to fixation if your ancestors had alcohol long enough.
To me it registers as a sort of sharp sweetness that is an enjoyable flavor on it's own when diluted.
I would actually venture that for the majority of humans alcohol is not particular bitter at all, supported by the extensive popularity of including it in recreational drinks, several of which are not even trying to hide the taste.
Alcohol has a very distinctive (and distinctly toxic-valenced) flavor, but I definitely wouldn't characterize it as bitter. The only bitter drinks I've tasted are ones that derive it from something else (like hops in IPAs.)
Pure alcohol burns and tastes "like plastic" to me. A complex, slightly unpleasant flavor, combined with an intense burn. I think the enjoyment of the flavor of very strong drinks (like sipping a shot of tequila) is an example of benign masochism, just like eating hot peppers. It's naively unpleasant, but to someone with a taste for it the combination of flavor, bite and texture is extremely appealing.
Edit: To be clear, I speak from personal experience. I rather like sipping full-strength tequila/scotch/bourbon and even GOOD vodka.
"Toxic-valenced" matches the use of "bitter" better than any definition I've heard. It is often defined as "alkaline" but that is rare that people mean that.
Alcohol doesn't taste bitter to the vast majority of people, otherwise denaturing alcohol (adding substances to make it taste intensely bitter) wouldn't work.
denatured alcohol is just alcohol with 5% methanol usually. Google tells me methanol's taste is almost the same as ethanol, but it's vastly more toxic. So basically, denatured alcohol is just alcohol that's been subtly poisoned so people can't make it into drinks and liquor laws aren't violated by the sale. Seems very sus from a utilitarian standpoint.
Usually? In Canada there are dozens of approved denatured alcohol formulations (under the Excise Act), most of which don't rely on methanol at all. Almost all of them alter the taste so that the resulting liquid is unpalatable: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-2005-22/FullText.html
The poll also had a "not a moral issue" option which means basically the same thing as "morally acceptable", and was a more common answer than "morally acceptable" on a lot of questions.
It would be better to graph the percent answering "morally unacceptable".
I tend to measure people's tolerance not primarily by how many different things they accept at one tier, but rather how many tiers they have. By which I mean questions like these:
- How many sorts of people who you'd never become close friends with, would you invite to your house parties and have deep, open-minded conversations with?
- How many sorts of people who you'd never invite to your home, are you still polite to and think are worth listening to?
- How many people who you think are such assholes that you don't even need to be polite to them much of the time, do you think ought to have their views discussed clearly and honestly in the public sphere?
- How many people whose view are so odious that they might as well just be told to shut up, do you still think should not be imprisoned or otherwise coerced by the state?
Having a healthy number of tiers is much more important to me than precisely which behaviors or views someone has on each tier.
When the left/far left says "all parties are right wing" they mean to the right of Western Europe. The left in the US has a deeply post-colonial mindset about how Western Europe is great. And often a somewhat spotty knowledge of what those countries are actually like. If you press them with those maps about how being gay is illegal in like 90% of the world they'll start doing No True Scotsmen and you'll eventually find out they mostly mean Denmark.
The right/far-right, being the party of rah-rah patriotism, is less likely to do this. They're more likely to argue that the US is the best of the world basically in all ways. But when they do it's often some kind of noble savage thing. Yes, Hungary or Thailand might be poor, but at least they have social cohesion brought on by traditional values! Men are men and women are women! None of that western decadence! Or whatever.
It's all a sign of the provincialism of American politics. Other countries don't really exist except as an opportunity to bash your opponents. People will proudly pronounce on how the Swedish healthcare system works without even knowing what the SSAP is.
You're reading the map poorly. That map shows it's illegal in most of Africa, most of the Middle East, and most of Asia plus a few parts of the Americas. It's also missing a few countries like Belarus. 90% might be an overstatement. But China and India alone each almost reach your 20% threshold. Put together you have a significant majority of the world's population.
Grey on this map doesn't mean "no data", it means that it's legal but there is no recognition as registered partnership or marriage. In China and India it's legal and even some form of domestic partnership is available, but there are laws restricting advocacy (which of course is still far to the right of the US).
I Googled this again. Turns out I was slightly out of date in India: it's no longer illegal in India as of 2018. Still illegal in China though. Regardless, while I'm always up for pedantry, the main point (that gay rights are more advanced in the US than most of the world) I think stands.
ETA: Which, for the record, I think is a good thing.
Wikipedia says it's legal in China since 1997. Other google results I've looked at discuss discrimination and "narrowing of gay spaces", but don't say it's illegal.
Digging a bit deeper it appears that private gay sex is decriminalized. Public gay activity is illegal. Being gay is still classified as a mental disorder and can be used as a cause for re-education or involuntary commitment. Likewise there's widespread use of nuisance laws against the gay community. Hong Kong and Macau are different and apparently serve as a legal safe haven.
Also, anecdotally: Major liberal cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen basically ignore gay people whatever the law says. Maybe if they really disturb the peace or something it might get piled on other charges. But you can see same sex couples out and about without issue. As you leave these areas things get much less tolerant much more quickly.
ETA: I was wrong. I have no excuse for misreading the map. Thanks to 10240 for correcting me.
I immediately noticed that Jamaica is grey in this map, which surprised me because the Sodomy Act is still in effect. The title of the map makes me wonder exactly what it is supposed to be reporting. Sure, in the case of Jamaica, an individual can (should they have a death wish) legally announce that they are homosexual, but if they engage in an homosexual act, they are subject to being jailed.
Keep in mind, that Denmark has privatised firefighters and lots of other rather neoliberal policies that would be seen as sacrilegious in either American party.
(Eg many Americans still thinks that government-run snail mail is a great idea, and somehow necessary for democracy or so.)
As you say, many Americans on both left and right have a nebulous idea of what social democracies in central and northern Europe actually get up to in practice.
Privatized firefighters and (whatever danish policy this straw American finds desirable) are not automatically a package deal just because the current government of Denmark has both. This should be obvious.
I think what is going on is that Denmark pays Falck and Falck hires the fire fighters. I'm sure they are NOT selling fire-fighting services to the homeowner.
> Keep in mind, that Denmark has privatised firefighters and lots of other rather neoliberal policies that would be seen as sacrilegious in either American party.
Actually ~70% of American firefighters work for private organizations[1]. Overall only about 20% of US fire departments are government-run, the rest are private nonprofits with which cities and towns contract for services. Emergency services, too, including EMTs, ambulance services, and most emergency rooms are all private, although most big counties have a county hospital and the county FD also provides emergency services.
Denmark has no minimum wage (they do have unions though), no birthright citizenship, much more restrictive immigration than the US, and forced assimilation and Christianization of immigrants.
I agree with the mainstream right arguing supporting the US blindly. A lot of the right though especially nowadays is at least critical of some things about the US and blames at least some things in the US for spreading leftism, like Hanania or Yarvin. Nowadays you have Tucker Carlson praising Hungary and so on.
I agree that American politics is relatively provincial, and countries are often brought up to bash the other side. But I think that America is hardly unique in this regard.
Direct quotes from NYT: "Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments."
Okay, thanks for the clarification, I think I get it. Three remarks:
- The Trumpet article is mostly about conditions to obtain citizenship, not about living as an immigrant in Denmark, which in my eyes is completely different. "Forced assimilation of immigrants" is very much not the same as "some measure of assimilation necessary to obtain full citizenship".
- I don't have access to the NYT, but the excerpt you quote seems to me to be plain false : there are no compulsory schools in Denmark (to say nothing of preschool!), and there is even a school voucher system touching 15% of young children. (On the Danish tradition of independent schooling:
Furthermore suggesting there are different rules for "ghetto children" is tendentious and infuriating. I spent the last thirty minutes searching for independent confirmation for this and found none. What program is the NYT purporting to talk about?
(Besides, I'm always irked by this irresponsible use of the word "ghetto". But I guess I'm opposing a time-honored American thing.)
- I was first taken aback because in western Europe northern Europe and Scandinavia are generally viewed as especially tolerant and non-assimilationist, albeit with a very homogenous lutheran/calvinist cultural tradition (and tremendous far-right backlash). Turns out at least the Trumpet chiefly talks about things common to most of western Europe.
Even charitably assuming the NYT article isn't actively misleading, I would contend it is quite a stretch to call teaching about cultural traditions "forced Christianization". As a western European I had to learn a lot in school about islamic beliefs, and calling this "islamization" or whatever would be rather absurd.
A separate law defines the "ghetto list" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_(Denmark) ): vulnerable public housing areas that has a high proportion of crime, unemployment, non-western immigrants, low education and low income. Several different interventions has been applied to attempt to improve the conditions of these areas.
It is completely true that children living in these areas has to attend kindergarden or a similar offering where they will be exposed to Danish language, culture and values. In principle they can be home-schooled if the parents can ensure that the children learn these things at home.
There is very much an assumption in Denmark that the goal is to assimilate immigrants (in Denmark we call it integration), especially children. Study upon study has shown a very high correlation between outcomes and levels of integration, and it seems quite intuitive that children who struggle with haven't the learned Danish language and learned how to behave in company with Danish children, will have quite a disadvantage when starting in a Danish public school.
I quite disagree with calling it Christianization, though. They have to learn about traditions like Christmas and Easter, but we are talking Santa Claus, christmas tree and the Easter Bunny, not gospel and bible study.
It also cuts the other way: To improve integration outcomes, children/young adults from high SES in upper secondary education (Gymnasium) are currently being blocked from attending their school of choice to schools and moved to schools with high proportion of immigrant children.
Oh, thanks! That's interesting. So there really are special rules for "ghetto" children (and they do officially call it "ghetto").
In France the previous government avoided creating special discriminatory rules by making preschool mandatory for all. (But, as in Denmark, you can argue you're teaching at home, or choose some private preschool of your choice).
Totally with you on not calling this "christianization" and prefering "assimilation" to integration".
AIUI, residents of the 'ghetto' areas also face more severe criminal sentences and are easier to evict. The areas are often slated for redevelopment (gentrification) without adequate guarantees that there will be somewhere for the residents to move to. (source: grauniad)
To the extent that residents live where they do out of economic necessity (accounting not just for housing costs but also commutes) rather than an unwillingness to assimilate, those measures will only spread out the problem while exacerbating it.
I would consider imposing what looks to me like a non-solution upon a disadvantaged group selected in a way that explicity references non-western ancestry to be outside the overton window in many places.
Denmark has no minimum wage, but it has incredibly powerful sectoral union that cover basically everybody in the country that imposes minimum wages on those sectors of the economy.
As a left-wing social democrat, I'll overturn the minimum wage tomorrow for sectoral bargaining for like 95% of employees.
Denmark also has sectoral bargaining by corporations. The way it works is that there's a union representing all the workers and an association representing all the employers and they negotiate with each other for sector wide standards. And then individual unions/employers negotiate in that framework. So "imposes" is probably not the right word. The corporations do not just have to follow union diktat and have significant power. In some ways more power than they do in the US.
The union half is legal in the US. But corporations organizing like that is illegal. Most progressives want to keep that status quo. Which makes the political coalition that keeps it alive and makes it work untenable in the US.
Considering half the country is under right-to-fire laws in the US, unions have nowhere close to the same amount of power, which is inherent to the deal.
And again, my deal was give unions as much power as they have in Denmark, but yes, in sectoral bargaining, the whole sector, not individual companies bargain, and it may not be imposing via fiat, but it'd be considered imposing their will by the vast majority of current American CEO's, I bet.
Because in my current view, at the moment sectoral bargaining > minimum wage process in US > letting corporations collude on wages even further (ask tech workers about what happens when corporations can organize on wages w/out a leveling force)
1.) You know far less about Denmark than you think you do.
2.) You want something far to the left of Denmark. You want sectoral unions but not the counterbalance of corporate associations. But many would insist it's "normal in Europe."
3.) Your policy concerns are not actually an attempt to draw lessons from the Danish system but to extend the American system in ways American progressives already want. Denmark is just a talking point.
But yes, broadly speaking the Danish system means that both unions and corporations are more powerful than in the US. Mostly at the expense of the government. Which I think is one of the positives of the system: it means labor conditions and regulations are mostly set by people in the sector itself rather than bureaucrats who have no direct stake.
You should read about Danish labor history. It's quite interesting. And it probably has some surprises for you.
This post also seems sloppy in the way that it talks about "parties".
The graph in this post is from a poll of Americans, showing the views of the 33% of poll respondents who said that they preferred the Democrats and the 26% of respondents who said they preferred the Republicans (while leaving out the 41% who identified as Independents, or indicated no preference, or gave some other response).
It's showing the views of the people, not the views/positions/agendas of the organized political parties.
Just because those 26% of people prefer the Republicans, that doesn't necessarily mean that Republican Party elected officials & political candidates are doing a good job of representing their views. Some of them might see the Republican party as too left-wing (on, say, premarital sex), but at least not as extremely left-wing as the Democrats.
That graph is graphing a weird thing, "percentage of respondents stating that each issue is morally acceptable."
The poll asked people whether (say) premarital sex was morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or not a moral issue. I don't get what the difference is between saying that premarital sex is morally acceptable vs. saying that premarital sex is not a moral issue. It'd be more meaningful to graph the percentage of people saying that premarital sex is morally unacceptable, and I think that holds across the board for all the issues.
e.g. The graph shows that only about 1/3 of people who prefer the Democrats called premarital sex morally acceptable, but the most common response was to say that premarital sex is not a moral issue. Only about 1/4 of people who prefer the Democrats called premarital sex morally unacceptable.
The only way the difference makes clear sense to me is if "not a moral issue" means something not chosen (or if you don't believe in any sense of free will, not caused by the parts of the brain that moral standards apply to). Like "having brown eyes" isn't a moral issue. I could see saying that being biologically gay is "not a moral issue" while engaging in same-sex acts is "morally acceptable", for example.
Well, I would say killing someone in self defence is a moral issue while e.g. wearing a baseball cap backwards is not, though both are acceptable. But it's definitely fuzzy, and makes the graph confusing and hard to interpret.
Yeah, that distinction makes sense, too. In other words, what you think it's incorrect to morally condemn, versus what you think it's crazy to morally condemn.
I've commented about this elsewhere in the thread, but there's a much bigger issue with the graph. Percentage of people stating that something is morally unacceptable is still a basically meaningless number. In the United States, extramarital affairs are morally "unacceptable" except that there are no penalties, no redress, nothing like that, so the only option you have is to accept them. Elsewhere in the world, extramarital affairs are morally unacceptable and punishable by death. These are not similar policies, and the fact that people call the behavior "morally unacceptable" in each case won't make them similar policies and will not persuade me that those people are expressing similar views.
Words only have meaning within a context. When the context is missing, they become hot air.
Statements like "Police suck at their jobs! They take up 30% of [some town's] budget, but have a murder clearance rate of only 50%!" leave me scratching my head wondering "is 30% unusually high? Is 50% unusually low? What would we expect those numbers to be?" It only confuses the issue.
Good writing doesn't just discuss the facts under consideration, it discusses the world around those facts, so the reader has some context for them. You can't understand the animal without understanding the jungle, so to speak.
(Please email your exhaustive 5000 word explanation on murder clearance rates to me at nobodycares@thisisamadeupexample.com instead of posting it here.)
The version of this that I see most commonly in my circles (leftist) is that both parties are the same in that they both serve corporate interests, and that is basically objectively true. Anti-capitalism just doesn't have a place in American politics, where the dollar is king no matter who is president. Even Bernie, an outsider in his own party and supposed socialist, is pretty milquetoast by global socialist standards.
Right--the key disagreement is whether (from the left) the fact that Republicans consistently get about half the votes means that about half the voters are closer to them than to Democrats on policy.
How do people in your circles explain this, if you don't mind me asking? Is the argument that people are manipulated into focusing on non-economic issues where they country is divided? That people don't see a difference between two corporate alternatives, but if a true socialist were somehow to get the money and attention needed to run they'd win? Or is the argument something else?
>Is the argument that people are manipulated into focusing on non-economic issues where they country is divided?
Something like that, yeah. Either Red Tribe and Blue Tribe point to some pre-existing small differences that have widened as attention is focused on them, or whether they're completely fabricated identities being constantly reinvented to capture the issue du jour. Either way, the two parties have greatly benefitted from the two party system.
>That people don't see a difference between two corporate alternatives, but if a true socialist were somehow to get the money and attention needed to run they'd win?
This seems unbearably optimistic. In my personal friend group, nobody I know could possibly muster up this much hope.
I think to me the idea that red tribe and blue tribe coordinate to distract people from the real issues feels implausible, because it looks so much like individual politicians and media personalities are competing desperately for attention, mostly within the respective tribes.
But, I'd believe a more decentralized version of this, which might actually be what you are thinking.
I think people tend to get more galvanized by issues that feel simple clearly connected to moral questions. That encourages ambitious politicians and media personalities to focus on those issues. I might be willing to buy that big money interests are able to steer conversation away from policies that would hurt them by hiring experts to muddy the waters and create complicated rebuttals to any proposed plan. If this is relatively easy to do, individual political incentives might do the rest.
As an economist, this idea is hard for me because I think of economic policy as something complex and challenging that requires real expertise to get right. At the same time, it's easy for me to see climate policy as having been muddied for years by climate change skeptical experts paid by oil companies.
>I think to me the idea that red tribe and blue tribe coordinate to distract people from the real issues feels implausible, because it looks so much like individual politicians and media personalities are competing desperately for attention, mostly within the respective tribes. But, I'd believe a more decentralized version of this, which might actually be what you are thinking.
Yeah. To be clear, I don't believe that the red tribe and blue tribe (or even the much smaller and distinct Republican Party and Democratic Party) "coordinate" in any large-scale meaningful way. I don't think they need to.
Right. I spend time in a thought-tribe that is very different (anarcho-libertarian), but we see the same thing. Both parties support basically the same, uh we call it economic system becuase we don't have a viseral distate for the corporate form, but both parties support the same economic system by which profits are privitized and losses are socialized. And its because both parties are full of people who either thrive in that setting, paracitize off those who thrive, or who are just front row, hall monitor fucks who can't envision a system other than the one right in front of their eyes.
Schools of fish don't coordinate, they form up because each fish chooses to school.
> That people don't see a difference between two corporate alternatives, but if a true socialist were somehow to get the money and attention needed to run they'd win?
Not a socialist necessarily, but a populist. Hence Trump who said all the right things, like "draining the swamp". Republicans tried everything they could to get someone else to beat Trump in their primaries, but eventually saw the writing on the wall.
Bernie threatened the existing power structures in a similar way and they did everything they could to suppress his popularity, and they barely succeeded by cheating a little.
So yes, the people don't see much different between the typical corporate politicians on both sides, and so they vote on cultural issues, like CRT in schools. They know that either way, they're not getting their minimum wage bump, or higher taxes on the wealthy, or universal health care, etc.
Well that pro publica article in the first few graphs describes someone putting AFTER TAX income into a Roth IRA as “tax avoidance”. If that is the type of reportage in that piece I doubt there is any value in reading it.
Except it's not after tax income put into the IRA. Read more carefully and maybe you'll better understand the outrage over these tax avoidance strategies.
I agree. I think Scott is probably correct that if you use the terms "left wing" and "right wing" it's a bit nonsensical to claim there a two "right wing" parties, but that's not the point. The point is that there are two parties that serve the interests of the capital-owning class.
Of course, for better or for worse, it's quite common to use "left wing" to mean "serves the interests of the working class" and "right wing" to mean "serves the interests of the capitalist class", in which case there are two "right wing" parties. Maybe that's why Scott is getting confused.
This is almost always what people mean. Also what rarified bizarro world does Scott live in where people say the US has two left wing parties. Like maybe in rural bumfuck nowhere or something but not anywhere Scott has copped to living.
Well conspiracy theorists believe in lizard people but you don't see a whiny post by Scott called: "A Serious Post Complaining That I Hear Too Much About Lizard People Conspiracy Theories". Sounds like he is making poor friend/twitter follow choices.
Okay, I get this concept, but I don't see how it would follow that we have two right wing parties.
Let's suppose -- arguendo -- that tomorrow the Democratic Party produces a manifesto that going forward their only issue is the abolition of all Christian churches in the United States as incompatible with the 14th Amendment. Christianity is transphobic, white supremacist, and so on and so forth. Their theory is that the abolition of Christian worship will result in a dramatic improvement in the living conditions of marginalized people.
Perhaps that theory is idiotic. Perhaps the competing Republican Party devotes all its resources to saying it's idiotic. Suppose that's true. Does that mean the Democratic Party is not on the left? Does that mean it's actually right wing, and will remain right wing even if it escalates to strangling priests with the entrails of dudebros?
I guess this is supposed to represent a rapid leftward shift by the democrats? Maybe less people would say there are two right wing parties, okay.
But most people tend to talk about the universe we actually live in and not a thought experiment one where we arbitrarily shift party positions in unrealistic ways that make no sense. The democratic party that you're proposing is not the democratic party we actually have; the one we actually have does have lots of other issues (including supporting the capital-owning class).
Yes, of course that's not what the Democratic Party says, or ever conceivably would say. I'm saying, suppose you have a party whose sole focus is the eradication of traditional sociocultural hierarchies in the name of egalitarian revolution. That's it, that's all they care about; they have no economic agenda whatsoever.
We don't have to say this is the Democratic Party. Say it's a new party I establish tomorrow, on the thesis that I'm tired of the Democrats constantly dicking around with Medicaid and the tax rate, and that there needs to be an option for voters who just want to get down to the real business of abolishing religion and the family.
Maybe that's a bad and dumb party that gets no more than five votes. Even so, what exactly would make it a right wing party? Wouldn't it just be a leftist party with an unusual but internally coherent theory that leftist results could be best achieved by ceding the economic domain and focusing 100% on society and culture?
Put in real-world terms: even if the Democrats do heartily embrace supporting the capital-owning class, so what? What if they think the capital-owning class is the most promising coalitional partner for their goal of dismantling traditional social hierarchies? Maybe in the real world that's their goal, maybe it isn't, but my point is that you have to start from there and ask what their goals actually are, rather than assuming that if they're aligned with the capital-owning class they must necessarily be on the right.
I don't really understand what you're getting at with this line of thought. I guess your new party wouldn't be right wing, sure. But nobody is talking about your your made-up party when they say "there are two right wing parties", because your made-up party doesn't exist.
This isn't so much moving the goalposts as much as it is inventing a new kind of goalpost altogether, and scoring system to go with it, but that's not the game being played.
Edit: Look man, you don't have to try convince me. "Left" and "right" are relative terms, both spatially and politically. Any time someone say says "X is to the left/right", they mean relative to some reference point, usually-but-not-always themselves. The people who say "There are two x-wing parties" are saying more about their reference point than they are about the parties themselves. It's why I intentionally avoided using the terms "left" and "right" in my original comment and stuck to more objectively qualifiable criteria.
Okay, fine, maybe you don't like thought experiments as a means of clarifying the parameters of where we disagree. Let me try to reframe this in terms that don't involve any kind of counterfactual scenario.
Do you think the positioning of the Democratic Party on whatever you would define as purely cultural issues, as of this moment on 6/11/22, is right wing?
If not, then what's the principled basis for describing a given party's position as left/right as a priori a matter of economic policy, irrespective of whatever else they might happen to believe, or of whatever might be their central axis of disagreement with the party opposing them?
I object to the reductionist frame of this entire question on many accounts:
1) The Democratic party does not act as a hivemind. Bernie Sanders/AOC share a party with politicians who oppose abortion. Who are we selecting to be the representative Democrat? This isn't incompatible with my original comment; Every member of the democratic party, even the "socialist" among them, are not quite socialist enough (For me).
2) You and I probably define "purely cultural" issues differently. Personally, I see no reason to seperate out economic issues from "cultural" issues. It's all related to the way society should be organized; it's all culture.
3) As I said above, "right wing" is relative. Are they to the right of Yarvin? No. Are they to the right of any given anarchist collective? Yes. What is your point of reference? I can all but guarantee that you and I don't share one. The fact that I'm having so much trouble communicating with you is evidence.
4) Different democrats have different positions on different issues, especially if I accept your cultural/economic divide (which I don't). If we combine and 1) and 3), we can produce nonsensical statements like "The democratic party is right wing compared to the democratic party"
To a first approximation, I'd say we have one party, generally run by people with lots of money, with two wings. The two wings take turns running the country. Also, all things being equal, the general tendency is to move towards the left socially, and also economically, but more slowly economically.
Does moving to the left socially mean becoming more socially permissive on the whole, or does it just mean that society is trending towards whatever moral framework the group defined as "the left" has adopted at any given time?
Well, for me it's pretty complex, but more the former than the latter. I wouldn't use the word "permissive"-for instance, giving women the right to vote is something I would call a move to the left, but I wouldn't call it permissive.
Are you denying that "anti-racism", LGBTQ rights/acceptance, transgenders in the girls changeroom, teaching kids about white privilege, corporations sponsoring BLM rioters etc are left wing things?
Rejecting conventional usage of words without elaboration is meaningless contrarianism. If you mean to say that the major political parties in the US have no noteworthy points of disagreement, that's more or less exactly the argument this piece is rebutting. *You* might not care about the differences, but that's not how political organization works.
1. I'm really having a hard time following you. Where am I rejecting conventional usage of words?
2. I'm not saying that there are no noteworthy points of disagreement on the fringes; I'm saying that both parties have been captured by large monied interests.
3. I read this piece as rebutting the idea that it's possible to draw an "objective" mid-point between left and right; that it all depends on where you set your left and right anchors. It mentions points of disagreement, but that's not at all the focus of the piece.
The US has two major political parties, a couple of minor parties that win the occasional local election, and a multiplicity of smaller organizations that are functionally irrelevant. That is what standard political analysis will tell you, that is what you will read on a ballot, and that is what the man on the street will tell you, if you press them to elaborate beyond the two majors. If you have a contradictory take that 'no, actually, there is only one political party in the US' then you have an awful lot to explain. It's either a half-formed claim to a better model, or an... unusual flavor of linguistic prescriptivism.
"Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?"
"Taken as a relative claim, it at least could make sense. But relative to what? Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left."
There are perspectives from which the major parties are directionally on the same side, but they are clearly distinguishable on axes that matter to a great number of people. If you are claiming there are a single party, you are ignoring both their basic organization and serious ideological disagreements.
I can accept that as a first approximation if you'll agree that to _second_ approximation there are two parties with different agendas and responsive to different groups of people.
The US is definitely NOT moving left economically. Wage power has been decreasing for decades, Medicare premiums just got bumped up for literally no reason, social security has been slowly eroded over decades, the alleged "right-wing" party introduces tax breaks for the rich every time they're in power and the alleged "left wing" party virtually *never* rolls them back when they get power again, and I could go on and on. It took a literal worldwide calamity in the form of a pandemic for the government to support the working class in the form of only two cheques, and even then, the second one wasn't even in the amount they promised, and that was from the allegedly "left wing" US party.
The US had a dramatic leftward shift back in the 30s-60s, and capital has been slowly clawing it back to this day. I haven't seen any real leftward shift over the past few decades, economically speaking.
Property taxes are wealth taxes, so not entirely unthinkable. Taxing the wealthy more is a very popular policy, so some number of politicians will always be swayed by this. It rarely ever changes the party consensus though. Various forms of gun control are also pretty popular, particularly in the wake of recent tragedies, but it's unlikely to change the Republicans' consensus on that issue.
The US spending on public welfare has continued to climb and is by some measures the US has one of the largest welfare states in the world. Some reference points here:
Now one could argue these are poorly spent, etc, but on the topic of "are we moving left economically" I think this data generally would support the answer of yes we are.
Another data point would be business regulations: No matter how you slice this pie we undoubtedly have a public sector that is controlling aspects of the economy more than ever before.
Student loan forgiveness is another economic intervention.
I don't know, I'm trying to think how the *US* has moved economically to the right on a policy perspective and I can't really think of much. Certainly from a short term perspective you could argue administration to administration movements, but I don't think that's very interesting. I'd like to at least look on a decade scale. Can you provide some examples?
Pretty much every administration since the 60s has:
* weakened labour rights and boosted corporate interests instead
* weakened medicare and medicaid
* weakened social security
* effectively reduced taxes on the wealthy (nominal tax increases are not effective because of the loopholes they intentionally leave)
I'm not at all convinced that your data entails your conclusion at all. The fact that some programs like SNAP saw *increased* funding is not a sign of left economic policy, that's a left *social* policy that has to make up for the failure of right *economic* policies that has caused wage stagnation and an explosion in the wealth gap.
On labor rights, I will concede unions so we don't need to go there but please provide some others. In general, the labor market is saddled with a ton of intense and growing regulations (take a look at PAGA in California).
Weakend social security: Constant raiding of the social security funding for various purposes doesn't seem to be coming from a perspective of right vs left as much as a perspective of the need to feed the leviathan and a time before we decided infinite debt was acceptable.
Even on tax policy, I don't think its nearly as clear cut as you claim. The wealthy pay by far the largest % of taxes in this country. The bottom 50% of Americans pay 3% of the total taxes. I understand the counter argument is about accumulation of wealth/income, but the fact remains that we have one of the most progressive tax systems if not the most progressive tax system in the world. I'm not sure how that is a "right wing tilt". A lot of good data here: https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/ Unfortunately it only trends back to 1981.
At the end of the day things are quite muddled unfortunately and I believe that anyone with enough time can argue both sides of this argument. This makes the truth hard to discern. If anything I think we are generally oscillating around a trend that is, on a historical scale, undoubtedly heading to the left.
I always thought the OECD countries thing was implicit. It seemed obvious to me that the left is not talking about Egypt, Thailand, etc when we say the US is rightwing- we're saying it's rightwing compared to the average of countries like the UK, Sweden, Japan, Australia, France, and so on and so on- roughly the OECD/rich countries. Maybe this was unreasonable in hindsight.
Do any of those countries have explicit racial preferences in university admissions? Have any fired tenured professors based on tenuous allegations of sexual harassment, like Roland Fryer? Do any have US-style Title IX hostile environment stuff? The US is rather left-wing on gender and race. Maybe not compared to Canada, but certainly compared to Japan.
Alternative hypothesis: America is so uniquely broken when it comes to gender and race (one of the last countries in the world to outlaw slavery; and even after slavery was outlawed, the last slave in the US wasn't freed until the couple of years leading up to WW2), so that things like explicit racial preferences aren't issues that would ever even arise in other countries.
Same as how there are other countries with more gun control or less gun control, but uniquely the US can't seem to stop shooting up its own schools.
But even setting all that aside, one would naively expect America to be leftwing on race and gender going purely by the America shown in the advertisements: "Give me your tired, your poor", etc etc. But it's been a long time since any of that has been true, if it ever was at all.
The USA was one of the last to outlaw slavery *among european-descended countries* but in *global* terms it was about average. See this map of when slavery was abolished in each country: https://i.redd.it/yqlkfvm0dtm31.png
1) The USA certainly qualifies for "among European-descended countries" or "Western European style liberal democracies" or whatever else. I'm not convinced that comparing the US to Mauritania and Oman is the way to go for truth-finding, even if it does make the US look better on an infographic.
Even if I had no issues with your framing at all, saying that "The land of the free" is about the global average in terms of slavery outlawing is damning with faint...not even praise.
2) 1865 in the US is a technicality and basically a lie. The 13th amendment says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.". What it doesn't say, and what no law anywhere in the US at the time said, is "Anyone engaging in slavery is guilty of a felony and shall serve X years in prison", or anything remotely like that. The practice of slavery continued well into the 1900s under the barest legal cover as "debt peonage". Debt peonage itself has been illegal in the US since the 1867 Federal Anti-Peonage Statute, but when latter-day slaveholders were brought up on charges they were able to argue (In court! Successfully!!) that because the debts that kept their slaves in chains were fictional (because they were), it wasn't debt peonage but instead just plain chattel slavery, which was against no laws. If this sounds too incredible to believe, look up "Tallapoosa Peonage Cases" and pick whichever source you'd like.
This continued until FDR's attorney general issued "Circular 3591" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591) in 1941, only under pressure of how the US's continued practice of slavery was damaging to international propaganda efforts in world war 2. It's hard to stand on a moral high ground about how Imperial Japan treats its conquered peoples when we have our own subjugated underclass, after all.
Almost the entirety of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia outlawed slavery after the US did.
Without any federal cooperation in catching escaped slaves, or looking the other way when private parties assault and kidnap them, it'd be really hard to have chattel slavery on any significant scale post 1865. I'm not impressed by isolated anecdotes.
>Almost the entirety of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia outlawed slavery after the US did.
"USA #1 (Compared to most-but-not-all Africa, the Middle East, and Asia)! USA #1 (Compared to most-but-not-all Africa, the Middle East, and Asia)!"
It doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow.
>Without any federal cooperation in catching escaped slaves, or looking the other way when private parties assault and kidnap them, it'd be really hard to have chattel slavery on any significant scale post 1865. I'm not impressed by isolated anecdotes.
No looking the other way or private assault parties necessary. This is post-reconstructionism Southern America. Police departments barely exist, and don't exist at all outside major cities. Crimes adjudicated at the county level (Which is most crimes adjudicated at the time, it rarely made it to the state or federal level) was handled by "justices of the peace", aka whatever innkeeper or plantation owner happened to be nearby and wanted the job. Want to guess the average plantation owner's stance on slavery in post-reconstruction Southern America?
Isolated anecdotes? The Tallosa Peonage cases I mentioned concerned hundreds of slaves, and that was just one indictment, in just in one county, in just one state. In total, over 800,000 people were mixed up in the "debt peonage" system. Let's apply some critical thinking for a second; Do you think FDR's justice department has nothing better to do that issue concerning slavery if it's just "isolated anecdotes"?
I did you the favor of clicking your dumb link and looking at your dumb map. The least you could do is return the favor and read something before turning your nose up.
Thank you for mentioning the Tallapoosa peonage cases--it was quite depressingly informative. There can be no doubt of the horrible fact that *de facto* chattel slavery continued to exist on a shockingly large scale throughout the pre-WWII South, with many people being kidnapped and held captive without even the pretense of a debt or a criminal conviction.
But I have to slightly disagree with your claim that the court *accepted* the defense's argument that slavery wasn't illegal. Note that (per the detailed account of the case in "Slavery by Another Name"):
1) The argument that it wasn't peonage but chattel slavery was a desperate gambit made late in the trial by the defendants, who had earlier stuck to the line that their actions had been legal because their forced laborers had been duly convicted of a crime. It was not a generally-accepted legal principle and had never been made earlier.
2) The defendant's argument was not that slavery was *legal*, but that it had no *federal* penalty attached to it and therefore could only be prosecuted as kidnapping and false imprisonment under state laws. Of course, the nightmarishly racist social realities meant that a local Alabama court would never actually convict a white man for the false imprisonment of a black person, whatever the law theoretically said.
3) The judge made it very clear that he thought this argument, and the defendant's conduct in general, was repulsive. He all but ordered the jury to acquit. This suggests that the argument was not accepted *by the United States government*.
4) However, horribly, the defendants were acquitted on the basis of a hung jury. This seems to have been, not because they accepted the technical legal argument that slavery had never been criminalized, but due to the crude race-baiting appeals which the defense resorted to at the end, and which didn't even *pretend* to have an actual legal argument behind them--it was pure "You can't convict a white man on the testimony of a black man".
5) Later, however, the defendant ended up pleading guilty to anti-peonage charges (and receiving the customary slap on the wrist), as part of a deal in order to spare his son from being charged with the murder of one of their forced laborers. A horrible injustice in its own right--the son was allowed to get away with murder in exchange for an minor punishment for the father--but it does show that the case didn't establish a legal precedent in favor of slavery or peonage.
Technically true all on all counts, but like you said up top, it all amounts to de facto chattel slavery continuing for the better part of a century with nothing done about it. Words on paper and high minded ideals mean nothing if not enforced, and they weren't enforced. "The federal government doesn't approve of this" is cold comfort to anyone unfortunate to be caught up in the system.
_Especially_ since the dominant narrative in America is that slavery was conquered in 1865 (with racism in general to follow in 1968) and that all of black people's misfortune's since then are their own fault (with some extra theorizing about IQ in this community in particular), this kind of "Technically it was illegal" hand-wringing is useless at best and actively counterproductive at worst.
History is just a rationalization. Why does the US discriminate in favor of recent immigrants, Hispanics for example?
The goal is not to make up for the past, and it's not equity. They don't mind when whites do worse than Asians, or men worse than women. The goal is for white men to not do better than any other group in anything.
The US does not act as a single hivemind, with one will and one purpose. There are people in the US (and I'd like to include myself in this group) who do care about equity. And some people in that group even have a modicum of political power, and might occasional make some kind of attempt to do something about it! But they can't and don't speak for everyone, which is why trying to stuff reality into a frame like "The US discriminates for/against {group}" is always going to produce stupid-looking results.
Says some guy with a substack. I absolutely cannot take seriously any internet conservative who sheds crocodile tears about "wokeness".
"Woke" connotates a special awareness of racial injustices, back in 201X. Now it's just shorthand for "thing that some 19 year old college kids are doing a few thousand miles away that I don't like, even though it doesn't affect me at all". Imagine how ridiculous it is, in 2022, to claim that awareness of racial injustice is some kind of special perception. Big cringe. Racial injustice is everywhere, and it takes a special _lack_ of perception to _not_ be aware. To a first approximation, exactly zero people now self-identify as "woke". The term only continues to exist as a drum for weirdos on the right to beat.
So, no. No to you, and no to whoever Richard Hanania is, and no to his substack.
"Uniquely broken" meaning "Broken in a unique way". South Africa has its own separate but also unique struggles with race, although you could certainly draw plenty of parallels if you were so inclined.
I don't see what's so silly about it. I don't claim to be an expert on the fallout of South Africa's aparthied, but I'm willing to bet a dollar that there are enough difference with the US's legacy of slavery that it would be counterproductive to call the two the same, or to prescribe the same policies in fixing the issues.
So, yeah. Different situations with difference nuances that would require different (dare I say...unique?) approaches to addressing the problem.
If you take 1865 at face value, then the US Is near the global median. I don't take 1865 at face value, because large-scale slavery continued afterwards. 1942 (the year the last US chattel slave was freed) is pretty much on the ass-end of the list.
>Are you under the impression that e.g. black people are more equal in Europe than the US? Because they aren't, at least not significantly.
"not significantly" is doing a lot of the work in that sentence.
>Oh? You think American policy should be dictated by a poem on a statue?
I think American policy should try and live up to the marketing material, for once. I want the America in the ads instead of the one we ended up with.
>Where are all these non-white countries that have unlimited third world immigration? Oh, there are none? So, this is just special pleading by you?
Why are "non-white" countries relevent? Who is talking about unlimited third world immigration? Was this intended for someone else?
"I think American policy should try and live up to the marketing material, for once. I want the America in the ads instead of the one we ended up with. "
Listen up everyone, a Jewish women wrote a poem so now you have to take in all the wretched refuse of the world.
>Do you take the global median at face value? Because there's large scale slavery to this day
Take it up with the guy who posted the map in the first place. I don't have any interest in defending his position for him.
>Listen up everyone, a Jewish women wrote a poem so now you have to take in all the wretched refuse of the world.
And then they put that poem on a prominent statue that partially symbolizes America. And then both the statue and the poem were happily used as propaganda for decades. If the poem and statue weren't supposed to be representative of America's ideals, then we should be much more upfront about it.
But like, does anyone care about that? That's small feed. Barely even government action- more university action. Irrelevant culture war stuff. It seems to me that matters to how far left or right a country is, is things like:
1. What is it's safety net like for the poorest?
2. How long are its prison sentences for equivalent crimes?
3. What percentage of people die due to inability to access medical care?
4. How eager is the country to go to war?
5. What steps is the country taken in relation to it's greenhouse gas emissions?
6. What steps has it taken to allow mothers and fathers to balance career and parenthood.
7. What steps is the country taking in relation to income inequality?
8. Is there an underclass of non-citizen workers exploited as a pool of cheap labour, their legal status used against them by abusive bosses?
9. How often do people go to prison for abortion? (And, apropos the US, does this number look set to increase).
10. Are there serious attempts to criminalize LGBTQ people essentially just for being themselves?
11. Are there minorities with huge life-expectancy gaps?
Politics is about things that kill or maim lots of people. Anything else is mostly sound and fury *in comparison*.
Now I grant that's small consolation if you're the white son of a poor coal miner who missed out on Harvard due to AA, or the professor fired on tenuous metoo grounds (I haven't researched this case, but I'll accept, in arguendo, that it is tenuous). But for those most part, the issues I listed seem to me to be where the life blood is. Even if we were to grant that "dodgy universities being oppressively woke" belongs on the list, it's only one item.
The US is far to the left than most rest of the free world, e.g. Estonia, Israel, Japan on race, gender, and trans issues. Maybe it's not more left than the Anglosphere.
I'm not sure if abortion is really left-wing in any real sense. Christianity is anti-abortion, but Judaism and Islam do not care too much and even the most religious are totally OK with IVF and abortions at the beginning of the pregnancy. Abortion is an issue in the US and in Poland because of a Christian right but it's not an issue in Israel or even a semi-developed and semi-free Muslim country like Turkey where it's legal and not really controversial.
The US is also very pro immigration. Any Japanese politician that supported an American-style immigration policy (birthright citizenship, and large scale immigration and naturalization of ethnic minorities) would be considered far-left. Abolishing birthright citizenship is considered a right-wing or even far-right position in the US, but most of the rest of the free world does not have birthright citizenship.
Again you're missing immigration. Immigration is a big issue where the US is much more pro-immigration than European countries. As to whether immigration is right-wing or not, I think the right-wing position is just to strongly prefer some immigrants (high-skill, some ethnicities etc) and the left-wing position is to oppose this right-wing position and not discriminate, or even favor low-skill immigration more. The reason that anti-immigration is often right-wing is just that it's associated with nationalism, which is right-wing, but it's not an intrinsically right-wing position (look at the US Democrats' position on Cuban immigration).
Europe is left-wing in other ways, compared to say the US, Israel, Japan, UK. Not too many skyscrapers. EU bans GMO food. Old architecture. Not big on exploring space.
1) Yeah, the US is to the left of Europe and much of the free world, to the right of most of the world.
2) I think same as 1 here.
3) I think same as 1 here.
4) US is really up there, we fight a lot of wars. A lot of this is a function of being a superpower, the USSR fought a lot as well, as did Maoist China. I think it's changing though, there's a consensus we spent way too long in Iraq and Afghanistan.
5) Yeah so I think again same as 1. I think that nuclear power is right-wing though.
6) Likely again same as 1.
7) Likely again same as 1.
8) The use of the word "exploit" is wrong and biased here. Is having illegal immigrants work for low wages right-wing? I think so. So the UAE is very right-wing. The US is more right-wing than most other countries in that we do more of this. But it's because we have more immigration.
9) This is bad, but this is more Christianity, I think it's quite rare everywhere, because the places where abortion is illegal and you can go to prison people aren't doing it much or at least not doing it much and getting caught. Again I'd say same as 1.
10) No. In the US? No. In the Muslim world, yes. Unless you believe that opposing gender ideology is rightist. Gender ideology is too strange to even call left-wing. The US is supporting gender ideology more than almost anyone else, even the Finns are against it. I grant you that Canada is more supportive, and also that a few people in red states still somewhat anti-LGBT, just because of Christianity. But overall the US is pretty pro-LGBT, even by the standards of the free world, though maybe not compared to Canada or much of Western Europe. Estonia has civil unions only, Japan has civil unions only (this is recent), Israel recognizes foreign gay marriages but does not perform them (It has no civil marriage). South Korea doesn't even have civil unions.
11) In the US? Maybe more than most countries, but Europe doesn't publish statistics on life expectancies of Black and Muslim migrants. Japan doesn't have enough minorities. A country like Estonia probably has Russians living not as long. Israel has huge life expectancy but Arabs don't live as long. Outside the free world, but still in the developed world, Malays in Singapore probably don't live as long. But here there are lots of confounders. I mean, when you have demographics with lower IQ and higher crime rates (and/or with a Russian drinking culture, or a bad diet full of soul food, high obesity), of course the life expectancy is going to be worse. A function of demographics. Height is also negatively correlated with life span. Asians live much longer than Whites in the US. High IQ, High SES, low crime, short.
As far as things that kill and maim lots of people, you are missing crime. The US is left-wing on crime or right-wing? Singapore is right-wing on crime. I mean, also car accidents, obesity, and many things killing a lot of people are not that politicized.
You're also missing immigration policy. Can I suggest:
1) Does the country have birthright citizenship?
2) Does the country have any ethnic preferences in its citizenship laws? Has any politician advocated those ethnic preferences?
3) What proportion of the country's population is foreign born?
4) How hard is it to naturalize? Is there a Denmark-style assimilation campaign for new immigrants?
5) How many immigrants come per year in proportion to the population?
I can also suggest:
6) Do the largest companies in the country release political statements? What kind of statements?
7) Do the universities pick students and faculty based on race and gender?
8) Does the country allow puberty blockers to be prescribed to people under 18?
9) Does the country have anti-harassment laws that effectively restrict speech in the workplace, or regulate romance between people in a workplace setting?
10) Does the country have the death penalty? Here the US is to the left of Europe and Israel but to the right of not only most of the world, but also Japan.
12) How does the country feel about new technologies, like genetic engineering, nuclear power, and space travel? Does it have many skyscrapers for its size?
13) Does the country have robust free speech protections? What kind of speech is criminalized?
Anyway, I agree with you that Europe is to the left of the US economically and has more of a social safety net. It's much easier for a country without lower IQ and higher crime minorities to have a generous social safety net though. Look at Danish immigration policy, and the burden on their social safety net from the lower IQ and higher crime demographics.
Looking at the rest of the free developed world though, while some countries are to the left on race/gender (Canada), a lot are to the right (Estonia, Israel, Japan).
I'm confused. At point 1 you seem to say that Europe has a weaker safety net for the poor, but at the end you appear to contradict it.
Assuming your point at 1 isn't a typo, and you do think the US is to the left of Europe on its safety net for the left, I'm a bit confused. I'm curious about where you are getting your information from? On the social safety net for example have without providing any evidence, asserted that the US is to the left of Europe. Now the quantification of a social net is a difficult thing, but initial signs are not good. For example, the United States has the highest level of relative poverty in the OECD. Thus if there is a safety net, it's not working especially well:
Moving onto point 2. Once again, it is difficult to quantify relative sentence length, but initial signs are not good, but a quick Google found this article. Granted the countries chosen might be cherrypicked, but, prima facie, it does not look good for the US, that is if you favour shorter sentences:
Yeah, feel free to chuck in a question about immigration if you feel like it, because it does effect a lot of people. My list is nothing like comprehensive, it's a list of some important issues, not all of them.
I don't think there's a consistent left right gradient on new technology in general.
Political statements by companies are broadly meaningless. When people get fired for political reasons, I at least care about that, but it's still a statistical blip so I'm reluctant to include it (although, I'll grant that this sort of thing can have a chilling effect, and I'm almost universally opposed to it).
This is off topic, because it's hard to map onto left v right at the moment, but in my opinion Free speech is an area in which the US is ahead of many other places. HOWEVER, at will employment limits the real effectiveness of this right.
It's a typo in Point 1. Point 2: Yeah the US has long prison sentences even compared to most of the world, that's right. It's true that as far as social welfare and prisons are concerned, the US are right-wing compared to Europe. That's true. But our positions on race and gender and immigration are way more left-wing than Europe. Again, look at birthright citizenship, affirmative action, civil rights law. Gender is tricky because we don't give maternity leave, but we have more gender-based wokeness.
> As to whether immigration is right-wing or not, I think the right-wing position is just to strongly prefer some immigrants (high-skill, some ethnicities etc) and the left-wing position is to oppose this right-wing position and not discriminate, or even favor low-skill immigration more.
It's funny, as I would have describe it the exact opposite way. I guess this is just a symptom of the usual tendency to see only the reasonable nuance on your own side and the extremists on the other side.
You made me chuckle. Just to be contrarian – and make a point -- here's are some POVs that are obviously outside of your leftist hive you may consider. These are not necessarily mine, though I agree with a few of the following:
1. What is it's safety net like for the poorest?
1. Really, the poorest? How about, “What steps has the government taken to protect citizens who don’t use government services, want contact with government bureaucrats, and would rather be poor than mime the government-promoted vision of ‘a good citizen.’” For example:
a. How free are you from government harassment if you forgo two incomes to home school?
b. How free are you from government harassment if you choose NOT to be injected with big-gov/big-pharma chemicals -- vaccines? Did the government protect you from losing your job because of government-coerced COVID vaccinations?
d. Can you opt NOT to pay to recycle or use ethanol petro (because you see this as expensive and ineffective virtue signalling?)
2. How long are its prison sentences for equivalent crimes?
2. Really, are you more worried about criminals or the law-abiding? How about, “What steps has the government taken to help you defend yourself against criminals (which may perhaps include the government itself?)
3. What percentage of people die due to inability to access medical care?
3. This is the classic Obamacare mentality. How about, “What percentage of people die because they’ve been forced into substandard public health care when a private option, one more tailored to their needs and budget, could have been retained?”
4. How eager is the country to go to war?
4. The government IS at war, against its own citizens. How about, “Is the government willing to defend citizens against an invasion of illegal immigrants? Is this a proxy war against heritage Americans?”
5. What steps is the country taken in relation to it's greenhouse gas emissions?
5. Still counting polar bears? How about, “What steps has the government taken to protect the economic interests of citizens over the job-killing, petro-price increasing hysteria of environmental globalists?”
6. What steps has it taken to allow mothers and fathers to balance career and parenthood.
6. First wave feminism peaked decades ago. Now, there’s the countermove. How about, “What steps has the government taken to protect families who have opted to retain a traditional one-earner family with many children?”
7. What steps is the country taking in relation to income inequality?
7. Jesus said it best: “The poor will always be with us.” Given this truism, “What steps has the government taken to permit the freedom to be successful without regard to one’s race, gender, etc?”
a. What steps has the government taken to protect white and Asian males harmed by its own rules and bureaucracies?
b. Do excessive government regulations, rules and taxes hinder business formation by younger Americans trying to make that first and second step into the economy?
8. Is there an underclass of non-citizen workers exploited as a pool of cheap labour, their legal status used against them by abusive bosses?
8. Oh gawd. How about, “What steps has the government taken to stop the surreptitiously encouragement of foreigners to immigrate with the implicit goal of reducing the political, cultural and economic power of traditional, heritage Americans?”
9. How often do people go to prison for abortion? (And, apropos the US, does this number look set to increase).
9. How about, “Is adoption promoted and funded as much as abortion, if not more?”
10. Are there serious attempts to criminalize LGBTQ people essentially just for being themselves?
10. Hmm. One could ask this about other “minority” groups more accurately. There’s a huge POSITIVE pressure toward this sort of sexual expression. So, how about, “What steps has the government take to decriminalize Christians who choose to live according to their deeply held religious beliefs?”
a. What protection was offered to Christian bakers who did not want to bake a cake for a gay couple who could have gone down the street to another baker, or, better yet, become entrepreneurs for a gay-only bakery, for example?
11. Are there minorities with huge life-expectancy gaps?
11. Could it be that the life-expectancy gap is due to mal-adapted behaviours chosen by these minority groups? How about, “Does the government destigmatize behaviours which decrease health and life-expectancy instead of promoting behaviours that are obviously psychologically and physically healthier? Should positive behaviors be promoted by the government? If so, how about: no smoking, no obesity, no alcohol/drugs, no long hours of computer gaming, no divorce, no out-of-wedlock child-bearing, no contact sports, no anonymous sexual encounters, no rioting, no gay bath club behaviour, etc
If you think the US is to the right of Japan, Chile, or Poland you... are wrong. But yes, I generally agree that there's a lot of equivocation between "Western Europe" (plus maybe Canada/Australia/NZ) and "the world" in these memes.
Oh it's definitely to the right of some OECD countries, especially if you disaggregate down to cultural and economic issues, but the claim is that it's quite far right by a kind of OECD average
The average OECD country is usually a country like South Korea, Slovenia, or Hungary. Depends on the statistic. So no, the claim fails compared to the OECD.
The only way the claim works is if you restrict the comparison to a few very left wing Western European countries. And usually add in a strong dash of wishful thinking and American ignorance of how those countries actually work.
But yeah, it's fair to say the US is to the right of (for example) France, Denmark, and probably even the UK or Australia. Modulo a few specific policies. But that list only has like 10 countries on it. Maybe 20. Out of two hundred.
You sure about that? Looking up the two indicators I care most about- unemployment benefits and incarceration (chosen because they can be taken as indicators of how far a person can fall) they seem to be pretty right wing for the OECD:
Still, although I would argue the US does qualify even if we use OECD, the OECD does seem to have become quite a big club. Maybe we'd be better off saying something like "the twenty richest countries by median income". The median income thing is to avoid the inclusion of pure tax havens and oil states.
I'm sure you can find stats where the US is near the bottom. You can also find stats where the US is at the top. Even on "left wing" indicators. Picking two isolated stats and then restricting the sample size is blatant rigging to get the answer you want. You're giving yourself waaay too many degrees of freedom. Under your standards I can prove the US is left wing, right wing, or nearly of any political persuasion. I just need to restrict it to 20 countries and pick a few relevant stats.
Yes. Definitely...and the Western Europeans (along with left-wing Americans don't realize that Western Europe is the real outlier from a global perspective...).
A similar idea is when people refer to entire countries as "right-wing" or "left-wing". It really depends on the issue you're talking about. The US has a dysfunctional right-wing healthcare system, for example, but it simultaneously has immigration policies that are radically liberal compared to those of European countries.
>Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?
I'm inclined to be a little more generous to these people and say that this is mostly a product of geographical self-sorting. Their Overton Window isn't based on themselves, necessarily, but on the set of people they interact with on a daily basis. This statistically tends to be people with similar worldviews. I think this is borne out by the fact that the people making these comments (anecdotally of course) don't consistently describe themselves as being "in the middle"; self-described centrists have a different flavor of lazy cynicism.
Yeah, that's what I said. The US is way to the left of most of the developed world on immigration. Birthright citizenship. I agree the US healthcare system is dysfunctional, I guess it is somewhat "right-wing", at least it is not single payer. What is Singapore's healthcare system? Functional. Right-wing or left-wing? I've heard it's both.
The Czechs are, on average, probably the most direct people I've met, and the famous Japanese polite-indirectness is hard to overstate, so that would be a fascinating culture indeed.
Not that Czechia is famous for its absence of alcohol. In fact, the only way I can imagine Japan ending up ahead of Czechia on that question is if it simply didn't occur to the Czech survey respondents to count beer as "alcohol".
A more relevant question is not the left vs right breakdown but rather globalism vs localism. Have both major parties in the US moved towards a form of global classism? In this view, politicians at the national level become more influenced by corporations and billionaires than by those they supposedly represent. Local voting patterns would in theory realign their interests back to their districts interests. However, the power of media conglomeration, targeted advertising, and bot driven social media may have become so effective that the voting public may have essentially lost its “free-will”. In this view the direction of the global political class will diverge from the voting public until it reaches some breaking point. If past history is a guide, the breaking point is usually run-away inflation and/or food shortages.
I agree that there's a shift from left/right to globalist/nationalist that the parties haven't fully corrected for. Also agree that essentially all people in the professional class (including me) have incentive to dismiss anti-globalist sentiment as luddite claptrap.
Probably our only disagreement is that anti-globalist sentiment is luddite claptrap. Unless folks are willing to smash the internet, the economy is now global. I'll grant that lower-middle class and poorer folks from the developed world get the short end of that stick in the short run at least. But the amount of wealth that has been generated, especially in developing nations, as a direct result of globalism, is unreal. Sometimes there are growing pains, and we should address those. But the best I can tell, nationalist candidates' solution to those growing pains is to cut our legs off and pretend that they've stopped the growing.
I used to see it similarly- in the 90s. Globalization seemed here to stay, even logical. Mostly for trade reasons, not so much for the claptrap about how we’re all ready to sing kumbaya. I think that trend has been definitely broken for the time being. Global trade was destroyed this year and will only get worse. We’re going back to a more local world, in spite of the internet.
Completely flummoxed by this graphic. More Republicans than Democrats believe that contraceptive use is morally acceptable? Only ~38% of Democratic respondents support divorce?? What does this mean? What Democrats OR Republicans are out there arguing for the rollback of the legalization of divorce? How do these "morally acceptable" questions correspond to actual policy decisions? I guess these questions would all be answered if I read the paper, but right now I am just very confused
EDIT: reading the comments, I guess everybody else has already pointed this out. Shame on me for commenting without reading the comments first I guess.
Normally people mean mean the Democratic Party is the right of the mainstream Conservative party in many countries don't they. Don't know if that's true or not though.
It's laughably false if you look at other anglophone countries. What they're really observing is that the US system is (by design) slower than systems in those other countries, which makes it harder for the left wing party in particular to enact their objectives.
No, what they're observing is that the allegedly "left wing party" doesn't enact any meaningful left wing policies even when they have a supermajority of all aspects of the government. No actually enacted policies can threaten capital, that's why it's a right wing party.
Economics are the only policies they actually care about because that's a) where most of their donations come from, and b) where they'll get their cushy consulting/lobbying/speaking jobs after they're done with "public service". Both parties cynical exploit anything else to distract from the economic policies they're pushing. For Democrats these days it's identity politics and Russia, for Republicans, it's typically CRT, abortion and various religious "freedom" issues, like that old chestnut, the "war on Christmas".
One thing I've been questioning is the meaning of "far-right". Colloquially it means either fascism or some sort of neo-reactionary monarchism, but shouldn't it really mean anarcho-capitalism? The more "right wing" you get the more varied and mutually irreconcilable views you encounter, to the point where I don't think we really have a coherent sense of what "right wing" even means.
I think "far-left" is easier to pin down, my first guess is it basically means "Everyone should have all their needs and many of their wants provided through [INSERT SYSTEM], preferably in an equitable way". Probably a Stalinist and an anarcho-communist will agree on this?
I have a right-wing friend who says that there is a universal leftism but there are many different rightisms, including some very stupid rightisms (ISIS, Trumpism).
I feel like using a one-dimensional system to classify politifal positions is overly simplistic.
I get that i makes sense when talking about US politics because there are only two parties and these parties lknd of fit the two poles but as soon as you look at countries with more then two parties it falls apart.
I started introducing a two dimensional view into political discussions and I've made the experience that it reduces the heat and objectifies the discourse.
There are multiple versions of the two dimensions but ultimately I comes down to:
Authoritarian <-> Liberal
Progressive <-> Conservative
Its still not a comprehensive space but introducing spaces with more dimensions makes of to complicated for a oral discussion and I feel like its a good compromise.
In your example, far-right can have two directions, a liberal (anarchocapitalism) direction or a authoritarian direction (facism).
Far-left can also have two directions, the liberal (socialism) and an authoritarian (Bolshevism/Leninism)
(I also try to avoid the term left because there is a party I'm germany (where iam from) that is called "the left" which always results in mix ups between the actual party and the political direction. I guess in the states its the other way around with one party called "the conservatives")
The problem is that the Republican party is a coalition between pro-tradition/pro-nationalist/pro-authority types and libertarian capitalists, who don't really have a home.
Those philosophically incompatible fault lines are causing significant issues for the party, which is why, e.g. they have no platform for the first time since the mid 1800s. The only thing Republicans currently agree on is that they really hate Democrats.
So far right in a U.S. context usually means "really really really hates Democrats and would rather the government not function than function as a Democratic government." The thing is that the only folks who talk in terms of "far right" are Democratic sympathisers so it's hard to tell how accurate that assessment is.
Actually I would argue that the far left is pretty diverse as well. Did not think it was until I started exploring leftist spaces. This video describes it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-jwkMEGHG8
The American parties are more like TIE fighters. Terrible designs, but when sensible accomplished people like Thrawn try to do anything about it, they can barely be heard over stupid prestige projects like the death star.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who realizes this. Left/right isn't some inherent divide of the universe, it's just where the two clusters happened to end up currently in the US. The fact that there are two clusters is guaranteed by FPTP, but the clusters morph over time, so even comparisons across long periods of time are pretty much meaningless.
" Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?"
Well, I don't get angry, just disappointed with my fellow Americans. :)
From a non-US perspective, both parties reflect the two different sides of America. It's easy to tell the difference between a Democrat politician and a Republican, most of it is squabbling at the fringes about the issues du jour. Which, if we're honest, are merely the trimmings of the socio-economic pie- the big stuff has been more or less agreed. America, regardless of which party controls the apparatus of the state, is the land of trade, opportunity, capitalism, world policeman, head honcho, guffawing tycoon etc.
America has two left/right wing parties in the sense that both of them agree that there is an AMERICA. Even with the new found rhetoric from the left about evil empires and reparations and so on, ultimately the people who are making their speeches about the indignity of the flag are just jaw droppingly AMERICAN to an outsider. Looking from afar at scuffles between, say, Antifa and Trump supporters, it just screams a certain Americanised way of behaving*.
And it isn't just a matter of culture, the politics of your nation is so interwoven with the fabric of your society (freedom! democracy!) that to be AMERICAN is to scream a certain political stance to the rest of the world. Of course, you'll get the communists and the libertarians, politically polar opposites, but even just their voice will betray the irrefutable truth that at the core of their thinking lies the same psyche.
*I'll note that with globalisation the American psyche is rapidly becoming the de facto Western psyche. For example, BLM was imported wholesale across the anglosphere regardless of the completely different cultures on the ground. What seems to matter more and more is the culture of the internet- which is American.
I think a lot of Democrats don't meaningfully believe in AMERICA. Because if you believe that the definition of an AMERICAN is literally anybody who sets foot on American soil, then you're saying your nation doesn't really exist. When you want to tear down everything that makes America meaningfully American (e.g. "cancel" its founders, get-rid of the constitution (even just by de facto)), I don't think its meaningful to say you believe in America.
If the US's two major parties were the Communist (Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist (Revolutionary), I think it'd be fair to say that both parties are left-wing, and not just because they're to the left of where we are now. To the extent that "left" and "right" are meaningful categories, your position on the spectrum is about how much you subscribe to one memeplex/ideology/etc, how much you reject the other one, how much the other one rejects your views, etc. Since the two communist parties both subscribe to the left-wing ideological cluster, they're both left-wing. If both parties in the US subscribed to the right-wing cluster, they'd both be right-wing.
The right-wing party in Australia are called the "Liberals". In France the Radical party went from far-left to left-wing to center-left to center to center-right:
In practice, Marxists yammer on about left vs right deviationism within Bolshevism all the time. Anarchists consider themselves further left than state-socialists, and anarcho-primitivists dismiss ordinary anarchists as bourgeois & insufficiently radical.
And that's the point - there is no objective center and no objective choice of which dimension is the left-right axis that would make something objectively left or objectively right.
> The objective standard? Are you sure that exists?
Yes. Recall yesterday's post on parties being "extreme": Similarly there are multiple reasonable objective definitions of "center".
For example, there's a very common one you may have seen involving a grid and left/right auth/libt axes, used in a million memes. It has its roots in a pretty standard 20th century dichotomy where "left" meant socialist and "right" meant capitalist. In that system, the center meant a mixed economy, and center left / center right meant a mixed economy with a bit more socialist / capitalist stuff, respectively.
There are other definitions you could use too. It depends on your purpose. It's fine. It's good. Let's not demand a single perfect definition that captures all intuitions, and so flail our arms in the air and declare it all "just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable".
(You might have replied to the wrong post? Mine was the "there are multiple reasonable objective definitions of 'center'" one & didn't attempt to identify a unique center.)
Oh, I was looking at your middle paragraph, which did seem to be identifying one particular center, and I was suggesting that even that definition doesn't do a good job of identifying a center.
Ah yeah, I mentioned the left/right axis of the "political compass" memes as an example. It's not based on the economic policies of the US (or anywhere else) though. It's based on ideology.
Like suppose I personally favored a mixed economy that is predominantly capitalist but still has more socialist features than we currently have. On that axis I'd therefore count as center-right, even if the vector from here to there meant moving left.
But that's just one definition. It's a very popular one for its history and memeability, but if you think it's not empirical or precise enough for your purposes, I have no reason to insist on it.
The within-country differences paper doesn’t seem to look at economic issues at all, even those are many of the biggest policy differences between the United States and other countries, not to mention between parties in the United States. Compare to gambling and alcohol use, which aren’t even meaningful partisan issues in the United States.
Wait, what? Less than 30% of Democrats think homosexuality is morally acceptable? Only about half of Democrats think *contraception use* is morally acceptable? Really? How about alcohol? Don't most people drink? Does anybody understand these results?
Ah - should have read the paper. One option you could select (which wasn't graphed above) was "not a moral issue". Sheesh, that really changes the results.
My sense is that this paragraph is where people who seriously make this claim disagree:
"Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left. You can probably argue that the Republican Party’s structural advantages cause both parties to be a little to the right of where they’d be without them, or that Americans’ ignorance of party platforms means you can smuggle a few points in that are slightly more extreme than what they’d endorse, but it’s going to be a small effect."
Left-wing people who believe this argue (something like) that the US is a sham democracy ruled by an oligarchy that uses domination of the media and the churches to convince people to vote against policies that are in their interest and that they (in some broad sense, or with the correct information) support. This is the "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument or the "Manufacturing Consent" argument.
Right-wing people who believe this argue (something like) that the US is a sham democracy ruled by a permanent civil service bureaucracy that stymies all efforts at conservative reform plus an academic/cultural elite that effectively ostracizes anyone who speaks up for the common-sense views of ordinary people. This is Curtis Yarvin's argument, Andrew Breitbart's argument, and to some extent Trump's argument. During the Bush administration, the argument was more specifically that most Americans are conservative but that nonwhite people and some "white ethnic" people were "heritage democrats" that would switch over to Republicans once they became convinced that Republicans didn't hate them.
Both of these arguments can find support from polls showing overwhelming agreement with some properly worded progressive or conservative ideas.
I generally agree with Scott that while we're all obviously being manipulated by powerful forces all the time, and the manipulations are probably often successful, on average people tend to vote for politicians that say they'll do things that people want them to do, and the median voter is somewhere in between the Democrats and Republicans on most issues. But I don't think this is obviously true, and I could be convinced by empirical evidence that it's not true.
Hey, I'm just summarizing what I think the argument is :)
I think it's pretty obvious that most media outlets lean left (and my personal sense is that most left-leaning outlets have become more left-leaning since Trump). But Fox is pretty big and Sinclair owns a lot of local media outlets.
Plus, I think leftists would argue that outlets like the NYTimes favor Democrats over Republicans but ignore or dismiss ideologies to the left of the Democratic party. If your argument is that the two parties are both to the right of the true will of the people, that's the relevant part.
And also Pakistan. These are the really interesting questions here. I wonder if the paper's authors messed up a few countries in a way that caused them to produce much more extreme results? Maybe when they were translating the option for "not a moral issue", they accidentally picked a translation that would make it less likely for people to choose that option.
Czechia is known as the most atheist country and the home of the most porn studios, among other things. I suspect it's the place where the liberalizing tendencies of communism (i.e., it's opposition to religion, nationalism, sexism, etc.) were strongest, while the experience of the Prague Spring in 1968 kept them from going too much for the authoritarian tendencies of Soviet Communism.
I am sorry, but you are wrong. Between 1956 and 1968, we had relatively liberal communist regime, compared to other communist countries. After the Soviet invasion (which happened in 1968), things got worse.
Czechia is more liberal than other postcommunist countries because it was more liberal than them before communism, and despite Soviet occupation, it retained some of this legacy. Imho partially it can be explained by the fact that Catholic Church discredited itself due to its support for the Habsburgs, imho, but mainly, we were fully industrialized country when Communists came to power, unlike most of Eastern Europe, and industrialized countries tend to be more liberal
Native here. The result on homosexuality is very suspect. We do not have same-sex marriage, and it polls probably worse than in the US; at least if I remember correctly from previous post that it is on 70 % support in the US (I don't have time to find relevant polls right now, sorry). It has a highest support here from all postcommunist countries, though. Casual homophobia is common, although I cannot rule out that all other countries are worse in this regard.
Yes. We were first postcommunist country to have them /national pride intesifies, pun intended/. However, our same sex civil unions grant couples fewer rights compared to our marriage laws.
There were a few bills introduced in our parliament attempting to upgrade it to marriage, so far without success. Again, so far no postcommunist country allowed same-sex marriage, yet.
I was shocked that only 50% of US democrats said contraception was acceptable, so I skimmed the paper and saw an additional 40% said it was not a moral issue.
In that poll, there were three options: "morally acceptable", "not a moral issue" and "morally unacceptable". The first two options are nearly equivalent, but only one of them counts in the chart. I would be much happier if the comparison chart went by the percentage who said a thing was morally unacceptable.
Credit to Jonah Goldberg for this phrasing, but rather than two far-whatever parties, we’ve got two parties “determined to be minority parties”. In many cases the institution of the party itself has changed from being concerned with assembling electorally valid coalitions under a loosely aligned set of policy preferences with somewhat consistent messaging and mood affiliation into institutions focused on assembling an narrow coalition less concerned with electoral viability and more concerned with purity, enforcing narrow alignment, and a no enemies to the left (or right) approach - electoral considerations and institutional coherence be damned.
Debates about left-wing and right-wing are tiresome.
We are a two-party democracy - an 18th century quasi-monarchical hybrid. Third parties will come and go but none can establish itself as a major force because of the way our republic is structured. We have a chief executive elected independently of our legislature, a figure operating outside of it who cannot be removed for reasons of competence or policy . Our elections are at set intervals, so governments cannot fall. There are not any no-confidence motions in the US system, but minority parties rely on the no-confidence mechanism to exercise power. And then there's the Electoral College.
Given that we have, and will only ever have, two effective political parties, the real question of interest is this: Do those we have represent the American people sufficiently well that the will of most of the electorate can be expressed by voting for one or the other?
In my opinion, the Republican Party represents a substantial but likely minority of American people, and does so very well. The Democratic Party does not represent enough of the remainder to fill its proper role in our system. That's why there's so much interest in third parties.
I'm one of those who's opinions are not well represented.
The issue is - the people who want third parties are split between those who want some sort of fiscally liberal, but socially conservative party, weirdo libertarians, leftists, and centrists who just want to stay in the middle.
Also, the reason third parties fall in America is because the two major parties steal their views - the GOP was originally a 3rd party, and the reason they actually rose up is because the Whig's were split between pro and anti-slavery wings and couldn't agree, so the GOP actually passed them. After that, every major 3rd party movement, whether it be the Populist's, the actual Socialist's in the early 1900's, or even Ross Perot eventually got chunks of their movements into the two major parties.
The only problem with Scott's argument here is that he assumes that people are saying smarter things than they really are. When someone says "America has two right-wing parties," 99% of the time they're not making a considered comparison with some other country. They're just saying: I wish the American political parties were both more left-wing. And vice versa.
One of the biggest interpretive mistakes you can make is to over-interpret what the other guy is saying. Usually there's less meaning than you think, not more.
I don't like defending trite clichés, but I think this is kind of missing what people mean when they say such things. The mistake here is assuming people are treating "left" and "right" as parts of a continuum rather than distinct and discrete sets of ideas.
Concretely, when someone says "both parties are socialist" they (probably) don't think of socialism as any point at least x standard deviations left of center. Instead, they (probably) mean it as an ideology with some axiomatic, normative idea(s) against which you can compare a party's program and decide one way or another.
Stereotypically (but maybe a bit strawmannish) a right-winger could conceive socialism as the idea that the state has a right to individuals' property and income. Since both parties to some degree support taxation, they'd then both be straightforwardly socialist. Or maybe the right-winger defines socialism as handouts, and neither party outright rejects welfare support, hence socialism. In a third case, regulating the market at all is socialism, etc.
(Also works as a case "for" socialism as common sense, see: Bernie Sanders arguing that fire departments are socialist. The natural conclusion is that everyone is at least a little socialist.)
Conversely, a left-winger might conceive socialism as workers' ownership of the means of production, or abolishing the "chaos of the market" or some such. Since both parties support private capital and markets, they're both liberal or rightist or whatever.
It obviously gets a bit more nebulous when using the phrases left and right rather than the more specific "socialism", but I think generally it's implicitly still about discrete minimum requirements rather than points on a spectrum.
NB. This way of understanding these phrases also gives enough benefit of the doubt to them that they come kind of close to really interesting questions. For example, there is a wealth of literature and think-pieces trying to figure out why the US (and Canada) never developed anything like a European-style labour/social-democratic party. That's a very legitimate mystery – it's a distinct type of party which most comparable countries developed in the 19th-20th century, and yet which even New Deal-democrats only kind of approximated. Doesn't the question of "America's missing labor party" kind of sound like what people are getting at when they say both major parties are right-wing?
This historical argument for saying both parties are left wing is correct.
The OECD argument for saying both parties are right wing is wrong. On basically every cultural issue, Democrats are to the left of other rich country left wing parties. On economics, the Bernie wing (maybe a third of the party and its loudest speakers) is substantially to the left of social democrats elsewhere.
Furthermore, Republicans like to claim MLK for themselves, which is absurd and representative of how dominated by the left most of the political discourse (X is the real racist!).
I generally share this view. But in the interest of steelmanning or whatever, a few other possibilities (not that I necessarily believe them) (mostly from the POV of both parties being to the right but I'm sure you can flip it around)...
Maybe you have one left party and one right party compared to the zero-point of the median voter, but maybe two right parties compared to the zero-point of the median person. Add to that the idea that nonvoters are disproportionately on the left, or hand-waving arguments about why certain people vote but don't count.
Ignorance of party platforms being a bigger deal than you say. In particular the hot button issues that get the attention are a subset of all the issues out there, and maybe on the ignored issues both parties are right wing compared to the nation. Or maybe parties do a better job of hiding the ball on what they care about then you think.
Related is by only considering certain types of issues in your accounting of who is left and right wing. So e.g. the idea on the left that the right uses culture war issues to get elected and then pursues big money interests - you an extend this a few ways. Maybe a view where both parties are to the right on economic issues relative to the median voter, and (though it's not usually phrased this way) the average of the two parties is to the left on social issues, and you consider economic issues to be the "real" measure. Or maybe to the right on economic issues, more center on social issues, and your weighting of the two is simply different from the voters'.
Or relatedly, maybe the parties are centered around the zero point because the two axes aren't "social issues" and "economic issues" but "issues" and "vibes". Then the idea would be, I guess, that both are right wing on "issues", and Dems are left wing on vibes and Republicans are right wing on vibes, but people vote based on vibes. Or perhaps a weighted average of vibes and issues but same basic idea.
Finally on the question about being left/right relative to OECD/American history. I think the reason they don't specify the group they're comparing to is that they see it as obvious. Like, of course the zero-point is measured by reference to other first world democratic nations! Or, of course the zero-point is measured by reference to American history! Sure if you want to use more exactitide you should say who you're using for reference, but since when is political rhetoric like that?
Ok, entirely different nit to pick since no one else seemed to call it out :
"both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left."
It suggests one is to the right of the median American VOTER, and the other is to their left, not the median American. Relatively few eligible Americans vote, something like 50-60% in presidential elections, much less in off year elections. It is possible that the people who don't vote are distributed sufficiently like those who do that the median would still be in the middle somewhere, but it is conceivable that e.g. the median American is a smidge to the left of the Democratic party, but since young people skew left learning and don't vote much the median voter is farther to the right of the Democratic party.
Nit picky, but worth noting that those 40-50% of eligible non-voters in presidential elections are doing... something... and it might differ significantly from the voters, who are a minority of the whole population.
The two main political parties in Poland struck me as both right of center, at least the last time I looked into it a few years ago, with the ruling party being more populist and the the former ruling party being more pro-business.
Israel is pretty much all rightists these days, too, with Bibi being replaced by Naftali Bennett, who identifies as being to the right of Bibi. Eventually Bennett is supposed to be replaced by his coalition partner, who is to the left of Bibi but not by all that much as far as I can tell.
Of course, within Poland or Israel, the various contending parties probably seem quite different to each other.
Absolutely correct (the "both right of center" part, to be exact). The two biggest political parties in Poland started out as natural ideological allies and literal coalition partners. Then they both won big and one refused to share power with the other. That's it, that's all what the conflict between them is about - factional struggle for power.
Of course, that's been almost 2 decades ago and they've been slowly diverging ever since, to the point where they genuinely represent two different, antagonistic parts of the voter and activist base. But both their top brass are still the same old bunch of ideological conservatives. An average Polish voter would prefer access to abortion AND social transfers, but their best option is choosing exactly one and hoping that the party promising it will feel compelled to reluctantly reward their votes instead of simply pointing out how much worse the other one would be.
It doesn't help that our left is an even bigger joke than the one in the West. Western left-wing parties being taken over by prole-hating managerial elite is still a relatively new development. Here in the second world, they've been that way since, like, the 1950s.
I am definitely one of those annoying people who are often found quoting the likely apocryphal, but to my knowledge ascribed to Bastiat, quip that "America needs a second party". Allow me to explain.
I am a lifelong classical liberal/small-l libertarian, which means that I describe myself, politically, as socially liberal and fiscally conservative. My ideal government is a representative, constitutional democracy that focuses on protecting natural rights. In practice, I want a government that is dedicated to safeguarding my and everyone else's individual liberty to engage in both whatever voluntary revenue generating activity appeals to me, and whatever victimless personal behavior that is meaningful. My priorities are: 1) do no harm to others' persons or property; 2) seek fulfillment, happiness and flourishing by whatever means you see fit.
Neither American party has ever represented me. I often find the question in American politics to be, "Do you care more about personal (D) or economic (R) freedom?" Willfully leaving aside commentary on how neither party has lived up to these standards, I resent the fact that this should be the dichotomy.
Personal and economic freedom are not mutually exclusive. I favor both equally. I would love there to be a policy agenda aimed at maximizing ALL victimless freedoms. There is no party that represents me.
I mean, there is a party, it just appears there's not enough people who agree w/ you and care enough to not vote for the two major parties to be electorally successful.
Well, the argument goes that the kind of economic freedom you crave is simply not possible without a strong set of commonly shared and enforced values (i.e. some "social conservative" limitations on personal values freedom). This is supposed to be what makes libertarianism an unworkable fantasy in practice, nice as it sounds in theory.
Like for example if some people think usury (charging interest) is immoral, and other people think women shouldn't be allowed to own businesses, and some other people think problems should be solved by appealing to the local mafia don, imam, or head of clan, and when private violence ensues it's no outsider's business -- all of these things make the libertarian live 'n' let live ideal kind of fall apart.
Even if the values chaos doesn't affect you directly, you end up appealing to an executive for police protection, or a judicial system for justice, and if the values they represent and enforce aren't consistently and strongly along a certain axis (basically a limited form of social conservatism, where nobody can tell anybody else what to do, cash is king, laws and contracts are enforced strictly according to their text, and without regard for religious pieties, "social justice" considerations, or unwritten tribal norms) individuals can't prosper and business fails.
I dunno if the argument is correct, since we've never really seen a purely libertarian state, so we don't know if in fact it *would* implode, but to the extent the argument is accepted by the kind of people who form and run political parties, it would explain why no one is interested in catering to that particular values set.
I think what Carl is trying to say here is that, while social liberalism works extremely well, you will need a reasonably robust state to provide enforcement and prevent corporations from taking over. Thus, straight liberalism is really what you are looking for. \s
Quite the contrary. In the absence of some fortuitous pre-existing cultural homogeneity of high inherent staying power, social liberalism leads to significantly increased demand for economic regulation, because people do not trust others to just do the right thing free of regulation[1].
Contrariwise, if you want to have a very light government hand on economic regulation, you need a significant degree of pre-existing inherent or enforced social values homogeneity, such that when everyone has a wide range of legal ways to act, people can nevertheless predict how they'll act, and that prediction is congenial with their own value systems.
It would be great if human beings didn't work this way, but they do. Wide economic freedom requires a high trust environment, and that only comes from homogeneity in values, and enforcing homogeneity in values is pretty much what being "conservative" means.
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[1] I mean, this is almost a standard left party principle, so I'm not sure why it even needs explaining. Parties on the left are always wanting economic regulation precisely because they believe that people have sufficiently different values that, left to their own devices, they will exploit and abuse each other intolerably. Since the left *also* wants to allow people maximum latitude in personal social values, you find that social liberalism and economic conservatism inevitably go together.
Not even a little bit. I am baffled how you could have read what I said that way, so I kind of suspect you didn't really read it at all. Chopping hands off for theft or imprisoning thieves are both forms of social value coercion, neither has squat to do with economic liberties (or constraint).
I'm extremely skeptical of your claim that social liberalism and economic conservatism inevitably go together.
There's an extremely widespread tradition of conservative anti-capitalist thought (uniquely absent in America compared to the rest of the world, although gaining new prominence from Patrick-Deneen-style conservative critics of classical liberalism), which argues that Marx was *right* when he pointed out that economic freedom inevitably destroys traditional forms of social organization like family, religion, and local community, as "everything solid melts into air".
They fully embrace the libertarian argument that both forms of individual freedom naturally go together, and consistently favor communitarian restrictions on it in both cases.
Sure, there's plenty of people who argue social conservatism isn't enough, that you need government to restrict economic freedom *as well* because why would you enforce morals in the individual/family/social setting and then just go laissez faire hands off whenever money changes hands? If it's right for a community to (say) condemn and suppress lying in the personal realm, why would you permit multi-level marketing and misleading advertising in the economic realm?
But I'm not sure why you say this argument is rare in the United States. I've seen it plenty, and you can find arguments like it among the Trumpies. They'll tell you not only does the family need to be strengthened but also we need tariffs, screw the economic inefficiency, for moral reasons also. It's not necessarily a *governing* principle on the right, but it's definitely present and significant, probably growing.
I haven't really seen the argument go in the causal direction you say, that economic liberty leads to the breakdown of social norms. That strikes me a priori as a bit academic-theological, like a lot of Marx's hypothesizing (which is why I don't take him seriously). What's the hypothetical mechanism? How does abolishing a minimum wage law lead to increased acceptance of out-of-wedlock birth? I'd think you have to argue people are strongly affected in their personal decisions by abstract philosophical considerations of the sort on which only an intellectual might dwell. ("The conditions of the poor are so wretched that I shall reject the advice of my wealthy father, bourgeois oppressor, and not marry the father of my children. That for your values, papa!" In my experience few real ordinary people do this.)
Anyway, the issue here is not what is optimal but just how the causality arrow runs. The argument is that social liberalism -- allowing people as much as possible to do what they please, having a minimum amount of community judgment of moral decisions -- inevitably destroys (or prevents the establishment of) economic liberty, just because people's values don't stop at the point where money changes hands. If we don't suppress lying then we are inevitably going to *get* ponzi schemes and fraudulent advertising and exploitive labor contracts, since we do not agree on what a "lie" is or what is "exploitive," and then people will be unhappy and presumably insist on a collective response to the economic ills.
If the argument is that they wouldn't *stop* in such a case, and go on to insist on a collective response that enforces moral codes, that I do find plausible. When the pendulum swings it usually swings hard.
My complaint is deeper than and subsumes Scott's complaint: I deny that Left and Right are even coherent, much less objective, notions. I deny that there is any such single dimension on which political differences can be measured.
It's not just that political differences are multidimensional, and reduction to the Left-Right is overly lossy. That suggest that we just need to add another dimension, as in the common two-axis political compass charts. I don't think that's right, either.
Forget that you'd every heard of such a spectrum or compass, and ask your, based on first principles, why would one expect political thought to be measurable by one (or two) dimensions? Is the space of, say, computer architecture designs or biological organisms measurable by one (or two) dimensions?
Yes yes yes! Left / right is meaningless when no one agrees on what either left or right means. The vagueness has only gotten worse. IMO politics is tribal for most. You might differ on specific issues with your tribe, but you know what group feels most comfortable.
Left and Right made sense in the 1780s, when the people who thought the King should have more power sat on the side of the King's right hand, and the people who thought the King should have less power sat on the side of the King's left hand. When we got rid of the King, there was definitely some metaphorical sense to be made about how supporting other hierarchies like the priests and corporations, and other traditions like nationalism and religion, would be right wing, while delegating power lower in the hierarchies and supporting minority and dissenting cultural views would be left wing. But after a few more generations, and decades of greater globalization, many of these metaphors no longer make sense, let alone line up. What is actually a left or right wing view on vaccination, or trade policy, or the rights of minorities to practice traditional religions?
I was under the impression that it came from the arrangement of parties during the French Revolution, but yes, tracks with what you say. My question is about centralization vs decentralized systems. As I understand it, most Russian revolutionaries had it mind a radically decentralized system, with the soviets channeling the will of the people upwards. the Bolsheviks turned this into a system of top down control. Who was then left wing? As others have pointed out, sometimes people conflate authoritarianism with the right wing, but in practice the so-called lefties like it too. Maybe it’s the justifications that are different.
I've always thought that a lot of the specific issues that ended up on the right or left in US politics could easily have ended up on the other side. It's not like support for free-market capitalism and fundamentalist Christianity are natural allies. Being in a world where there's a large and influential political movement that opposes both capitalism and religion is probably the reason those two largely ended up in the same party.
> I think most people who claim “America has two left-wing parties” are talking about relative to US history
Wait, who is this? I suppose I’m in a bubble. Even my Republican friends/family don’t say this. Is this some neo-reactionary thing?
> and people who claim “America has two right-wing parties” are talking about relative to other OECD countries.
In my experience, this is true. But to be more specific, I think it tends to be about economic leftism/rightism. On social issues there is less of a clear split; gay and abortion rights are way worse in some predominantly-Catholic Western European countries than in the US.
But on many economic issues (things like taxation, corporate regulation, antitrust, etc.), the Clinton/Biden/DNC wing of the Democratic Party is sometimes viewed more like a business-friendly centrist or center-right party in the EU, rather than an actual “left” party.
> Wait, who is this? I suppose I’m in a bubble. Even my Republican friends/family don’t say this. Is this some neo-reactionary thing?
Well obviously your Republican friends wouldn't say this, it would only be said by people who are too far right to consider themselves Republicans. You may not have any friends who fall into that category.
? What Western European Catholic countries are those. Western European and South American countries are the vanguard of liberalism on gay rights. The map of countries with gay marriage is the map of Catholic countries, with a few Protestant countries thrown in. Gay marriage is in general a fetish of western Christianity.
Some western Catholic countries have legalised homosexuality for centuries. The British Caribbean and South America, British colonies in general including historically the US, are far more problematic.
Italy, Hungary, and Poland complicate your claim about Catholic countries.
The claim about homosexuality made more sense a decade or so ago, when much of the United States had legalized same-sex marriage and much of Western Europe was still lagging (though this was never really a clear distinction between the United States and Europe the way that immigration policy has been and continues to be).
You might want to look up the definition of Western Europe. Italy is the only country in your list which could vaguely be called Western European - but I would put it in the Southern European category. And it has civil marriage, which is pretty close.
The only thing I would change in my post is to say that the map of countries with gay rights is *largely* the map of western Catholic countries. I include South America in western Catholicism.
I wasn't referring to Hungary and Poland as western Europe any more than you were referring to South America as western Europe. I was using them to challenge your claim about Catholicism - and if you say "western Catholicism", then sure, I don't have anything in particular to say about that concept.
In any case, I think gay rights was not a good example for that person to have used - I do believe that for a few years, the United States was more progressive than much of western Europe on gay rights, though not uniformly so, and not for that long. But I think other sorts of policies like immigration are a clearer example.
I was making a statement about Western European Catholicism in response to a claim that the US is now (not in the past) more liberal than Western European countries. In fact the poster said Western European countries were “way worse”.
I personally didn’t feel the need to exclude Poland and Hungary from Western European countries out of respect for the audience here.
After that I moved onto Catholicism in general. The point still stands that Catholicism is fairly liberal in its heartlands of Western Europe and South America. Mentioning Hungary is no kind of gotcha.
I don’t find your responses all that interesting so maybe you can desist from responding to me in future, thanks.
Thanks, perhaps my claim was overly specific and not up to date. I think I probably muddied the water by using both Catholic and Western European as descriptors, where I think these don’t both apply to both issues; I wasn’t really trying to make that specific a point.
I’d happily leave Catholicism out of it and retreat to the weaker claim that on those social issues, there are many EU (or OECD to use Scott’s selector) that are either recently or still “to the right” of the US, which means it’s hard to make the claim that the US is (on social policy) “two right wing parties”, whereas I do believe that frame had some defensibility regarding economic policy.
Some people try to claim that New Zealand has a North Island and a South Island. But by OECD standards it's clear that they should be called the Far South Island and the Really Far South Island.
I think there are some natural clusters. E.g. someone might be generally skeptical of government and thus be generally opposed to government action/power.
That's fair. ( I suspect that preference for government action on e.g. immigration and on e.g. CO2 might be _anti_correlated, but I don't have the data )
Because people's object-level political beliefs usually spring from deeper philosophical commitments, and certain commitments naturally tend to produce certain sets of beliefs.
If you have a political system that requires a majority to pass bills, then you will end up with non-ideologically coherent coalitions. If I care a lot about CO2 emission control, and you care a lot about firearms, then we might get together in the cloakroom and say "I'll vote for your firearm bill if you vote for my CO2 bill". Once we've done this a couple times, we may decide that we'll continue acting as a coalition, and then anything that one of us supports will tend to do quite a bit better than a random issue in the legislature, as long as it isn't directly opposed to what the other does. Thus, there will be an arms race by others to put together coalitions as well.
Under some voting systems, you can end up with several of these coalitions that are relatively strong, that then work together or against each other on an ad hoc basis, like in Germany. But when you've got first-past-the-post voting systems, there's a strong tendency for these coalitions to coalesce until there's just two of them.
There's no reason for individuals to initially have correlated views on these issues, but there is reason for members of a legislature to have correlated votes on them, and then once people start to identify with the team in the legislature, then on issues they don't particularly care about, they will convince themselves to adopt the views that members of their coalition hold. And thus the views will now become strongly correlated.
I think it doesn't necessarily even take anything as deep as identifying with the team in the legislature. I think most of us have the experience of caring about something only because a friend cares about it, and once you and someone else have traded votes on your pet issues a couple times, you start to feel like friends, and might start to feel like you care about each other's pet issues. For the voters at home who didn't do the vote trading, they might still notice the things the person they voted for supports, and think of them positively, and then associate that positive halo with the other things that person supports.
Probably the team identity makes this all a whole lot stronger, but it seems like it's nearly bound to happen in a system like that of the US even without that.
Yeah, but that says what the winning candidates should converge on. My irritation is with the (low rank?) dimensionality of the views of the full electorate.
It also says that all our complex preferences colapse down to a single dimension. If your pet preference(s) are orthoginal to that single dimension (like me), you are shit out of luck and neither party has something to offer you (like me). If your pet preferences are more colinear with that dimension, then the parties either fight over you if you are near the center of the distribution or count you in their camp if not.
It depends on election structure / how public policy decisions are made. When at least some policy decisions are made by referenda, rather than by electing candidates from parties with bundled policy positions, the collapse doesn't have to occur.
The Hotelling-Down's model, and my comment above, absolutely take as a given geographically bounded, winner take all, representative democracy. Given that this whole post is about US electorate and policies, which take place in a nation with geographically bounded, winner take all, representative democracy, I kind of assumed I didn't need to list that given in the model.
Parlementary systems, plebicites, etc etc will all have less bundling and probably won't have 2 parties.
Most people don't care about that many issues - they care about a couple at best, and basically don't care about the others until they become high salience.
For instance, the majority of Obama/Trump voters were pro-choice.
If e.g. your moral worldview is the government shouldn't restrict people's behaviors (libertarianism), then obviously there should be a correlation. This is true much more broadly too, because everyone has a model of the world that (usually implicitly) shapes their judgements on things.
A preference for limited government would be a factor in most of these questions, but hardly the only factor, and the same question can have portions where government actions have happened in opposite directions. ( E.g. this has happened with sexual minorities. )
I kind of agree with respect to some proportion of this kind of thing, and I get annoyed by the article with respect to another proportion of this sort of thing, when the context adds the meaning which is absent from the claim itself.
In regard to the former - yeah, it's not great. (But also "say what you mean" is actually a really high bar to clear, and maybe a lot of people saying this kind of thing, while they do mean something like "compared to American history" or "compared to a particularly salient reference class of European countries", don't actually know that that is what they mean)
In regard to the latter, I think this feels more like a correction when somebody uses who/whom incorrectly.
„ By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right;“ The Soviet Union stopped being a radical left wing party in the 1930s - at least culturally. By the 1970s the US had moved far to the left of the Soviet Union on most social questions, other than abortion. Even Putin is to the left of the USSR when it comes to homosexuality, or freedom of expression.
There’s a sea of difference between left wing economic ideas and “bourgeois liberalism”. Progressive ideology isn’t necessarily related to economic leftism, it’s just a historically been the case in the West that these two distinct philosophies aligned, not that there weren’t conservatives left wing voters and politicians - there were plenty.
There is a real difference, but neither party know what it is. The Republicans are the party of self-control and responsibility, the Democrats of Peter Pan, never growing up, and pretending actions don’t have consequences.
Most people will hate this characterization, and will immediately bring up counter arguments (what about climate change?) but those shibboleths, not fundamentals. If someone tells you that you should “follow your bliss” or that “the drug war is all paranoia” you know pretty well which party they belong to.
We are seeing this play out in SF as many many people who thought they were Democrats are learning what it looks like to live in a city devoid of responsibility, from zero consequence crime to open air drug markets to educators who believe their primary mission is not learning but the destruction of “a white privilege” (whatever that is imagined to be).
A smart Republican (so not Trump, but someone else?) will realize this message and rally people around it: “we may disagree about many details, but we agree that America is built on personal responsibility, and I stand for personal responsibility” — and OMG will that work as a rallying cry… People are absolutely starved for a message like this.
Are you sure? I thought the Republican's were the party of Luddites who would have us still living in caves without fire while the Democrats were the party bringing us medicines, cell phones and nuclear power. We must be reading different magazines. \s
The chart seems odd to me. Democratic voters seem very conservative by the standards of the West, even by the standards of the world sometimes. The leadership is fairly radical though.
The chart is misleading. The poll gave three options: morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, and "not a moral issue". So for example, while only about 30% of Democratic voters said homosexuality was "morally acceptable", most of the rest said it was "not a moral issue", which is basically equivalent, while only a small percentage actually said it was morally unacceptable.
People seem to have a very strong belief in objective leftness or rightness, which I find weird. In my personal life, this mostly manifests as people refusing to believe me when I point out that - stipulating that Hispanics grow to an even larger portion of the US population, and that current Hispanics overwhelmingly vote Democratic - there are no implications for Democratic policies defeating Republican ones. People *want* to believe that more Hispanics means the balance tips permanently over to the Democratic Party and it goes on to implement all of its current goals for no other reason than that those are Democratic goals. But that's not how coalition politics works. Hispanics aren't obligated to support the Democratic Party's current goals - if there are more of them, that just means the Party will shift _its_ goals to be more in line with _them_. (And so will every other party.) That would be a win for economic redistribution, but it would be a loss for environmentalism, feminism, sexual exoticism... and it wouldn't even be a win for the Democratic Party, because every party will shift their policies until a balance of voters is achieved.
In other words, the belief I generally observe other people express is that party platforms exist independently of the voting base (?!), and what policies are implemented is just a question of whether current voters vote for one party or the other one. But it mystifies me how anyone could arrive at, or believe in, this model.
Taking into account non-white Democratic voters and the remaining number of white union members, could be? Democratic voters are often well to the right of the activists, the donors and even most Dem politicians on social policy (and to the left of the Dem establishment on economic issues).
You're reading the chart right, but the chart is misleading. Most Democrats answered that they thought homosexuality was "not a moral issue", while only a small percentage said it was morally unacceptable.
The median American is CULTURALLY to the right and ECONOMICALLY to the left of the average party position. That's because elites are able to sway decision making into their preferred direction.
As an example: a wealth tax on billionaires is popular but not supported by mainstream politicians. Affirmative action is unpopular even in Democratic states, but still a thing.
The pattern in the west I see is a much bigger divide between the long educated and shorter educated than between left and right. The longer educated have a overwhelming hold on politics, academy, media, and higher level civil servants. This IQ gap is increasing because IQ is hereditary. When you sort by IQ and then put the sexes together at prime mating age you got an efficient eugenic system a.k.a. university.
So there is still left and rights in politics but all we hear from is the eloquent voices of the long educated. If the lower IQ gets too disgruntled, the higher IQ tends to dismiss them out of hand since their voices often sound stupid and dumb, therefore all too easy to dismiss. The fact that 95% of the UK Labor (University educated) MP's were against Brexit while 60% of the members was in favor is telling. Observe how a member of congress has a lot more affinity with the other party's members of congress than their own working class members.
This was different in the 20th century, we then still had many high IQ members from the labor class but the widespread adoption of university education, their stellar careers made their kids breed this out out of the working classes.
So we still have a political left but the eugenic universities system made it very theoretical, desperately lacking the pragmatic power from the lower working classes to keep it grounded. An interesting point is how the US opioid crisis that killed 100,000 people in 2021 is rarely discussed but somehow the very rare transgender issue overwhelms the internet bits.
I think a lot of the confusion about left and right comes from the fact that ~70% of the population is excluded from the conversation but still has a vote. A bit like dark matter.
1. People vote on some cultural war positions, say, on abortion and race proxy issues such as policing.
2. The parties satisfy the median voter theorem on these issues, so one is left wing and the other is right wing.
3. On some other issues, e.g. economics, both parties are to the left (or to the right) of the median voter. These issues matter to the voters too, but both parties as so far out as to make their positions indistinguishable for many voters or at least indistinguishable enough for cultural war issues to dominate on the margin.
One could plausibly argue that both parties are to the left or to the right of the median voter because the median voter probably subscribes to positions such as "Keep your goddamn government out of my Medicare" which are both to the left and to the right of both parties.
The meme originated in the late 1990s/early 2000s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll3iyvbsRDM is from December 1999), when the two main US parties were indeed a lot closer to each other than today.
What's striking about your examples is that they bear no relationship to what anyone born before, say, 1980, would consider issues of "Left" and "Right." To the extent that one extreme of these opinions is associated with "the Left", that simply reflects the transformation of those parties from mass movements, often linked to trades unions, to elite boutique political movements run largely by educated middle-class socially liberal professionals. In the days of mass parties of the Left, these parties tended to reflect the social conservatism of their working-class base.
It's truer, in most countries today, to talk of a Monoparty with different internal tendencies. The model is something like the Chinese Communist Party, except not as organised an effective. A career in politics, independent of which label you decide to wear, requires a broad acceptance of various economic and social givens, though there may be sharp disagreements on points of detail. The fact that in most countries this is expressed by the maintenance of a formal two or three party system doesn't prevent a very large measure of agreement within the elite political class: indeed, there is an increasing tendency for politicians to move between parties, much as they would join or leave factions in a one-party state.
The traditional distinctions between Left and Right - who gets to control power and wealth - haven't gone away, but the political system no longer reflects these differences. As I tried to explain in this article, the supply of politics no longer corresponds to the demand.
Yeah it is weird that they're *all* social issues. In my formative years I was used to hearing powerful arguments made about the rights of workers versus the wealth-generating power of free enterprise, the good/evil of government regulation of business, how to improve public education so all the children could be above average, how to "solve" poverty, whether unions or tariffs were good or bad, what the best form of national defense was (what mix of military preparedness and even intervention and diplomacy).
Maybe we're all rich enough now that we can spend our argument Robux on who's sticking which body part into whose orifice, or maybe all the poor schmos for whom making it to the next paycheck without having to eat oatmeal four times a week are just shut out of the debate, so it's a bunch of Marie Antoinettes debating Court Protocol, or maybe we've collectively given up on the idea of material progress and have settled, like a medieval town resigned to unchanging material circumstances from birth to death, on fierce arguments over who's a heretic.
I think there are many issues in which left/right is the wrong framing and center/fringes is more useful for understanding them. For example, the domestic surveillance of the War on Terror (which will probably just never go away because few politicians want the intelligence agencies as enemies) was and is pretty popular from center left to center right, but gets opposition from the fringes. The same was true for the bailouts of big financial companies in the 2008 meltdown.
This leads to the common but frustrating situation where there is nobody running in the election that you can vote for to oppose these center-vs-fringes policies.
It often seems to me that the substantial agreement of the people in power from both parties on these big issues is masked by very loud disagreement on social issues which they probably don't really care much about. You have to get groped by the TSA to board a plane and the NSA is going to record all your phone calls and emails forever and the FDA is going to drag its feet on everything and we will be bombing a new helpless third world country for murky reasons ever few years under both parties, but can I interest you in some outrage over the teaching of critical race theory in the schools?
I agree with you on this. My read of the passion on both sides for trans athletes competing with women pro or con? Black reparations pro or con? January 6 or BLM riots, which is worse? What are the acceptable pronouns in polite speech? and on and on is essentially one giant squirrel to distract people from the fact that *neither* party has a realistic plan to ever escape stagnation and slowing technological and entrepreneurial growth, figure out why the rich-poor divide just keeps getting worse and worse, stop the value received per dollar input of public education from continuing to crater, figure out how to make entitlements sustainable before they completely break, figure out whether anything can be done about relentlessly climbing and brutal health insurance and college tuition rates, or even freaking balance the budget. Iti's said that dictatorships start wars to distract from their inability to manage domestic misery, perhaps endless social culture war squabbles are what republics do for the same purpose.
I think economic issues are currently dead in US politics, and it's related to what Scott wrote in his post about class. Previously, the Republicans were the party of the rich and the Democrats the party of the poor, but Democrats are increasingly trying to appeal to richer voters and Republicans to poorer ones.
Right now we're at a crossover point where the average and median Republican voter is roughly as rich as the average and median Democrat voter, so Democrats can no longer afford to be "fuck the upper middle class" and Republicans can no longer afford to be "fuck the poor".
Trump understood this, which is why he was the most pro-union Republican ever. Romney didn't, which is why he lost.
Could be. We'll see what happens this fall, and even more so in 2024. Economic issues are suddenly very much back in fashion, with $6 gas and food and rent costs through the roof.
Center right? How many countries to the "left" of the US have birthright citizenship? Race-based discrimination against the minority for e.g. university admissions? Teach their kids that the majority of the population are "privileged"? Elect the equivalent of an inexperienced state senator as leader of the country on the basis of being a racial minority?
This feels a strawman-y to me. At least from my end, I’ve only heard this statement followed by a lot of context.
The form I’ve heard has been that “America has two right wing parties”, with the context that:
1- its relative to the other developed western nations today, OR to American standards since Roosvelt.
2- its mostly in the context of social democracy vs Laissez-faire stuff. Think issues like the size of the welfare state, worker’s rights (% country unionized, maternity leave, paid time off, minimum wage), public vs private healthcare, progressive taxation, antitrust laws, nationalizing certain industries (railways, energy sector, prisons, etc), trade laws (more or less protectionism), etc. They are mostly NOT talking about social issues like lgbtq rights, abortion rights, gun control, contraception use, religious freedoms, or adjacent issues like war, corruption, etc.
I don’t want to claim that everyone has used the “two x-wing parties statement” responsibly every time, with all the necessary caveats. But this article struck me as a little unfair, as I’ve seen plenty of people do just that.
What *is* unusual from a European perspective is that since there are only two parties that matter, they have to be very broad.
Meanwhile, the situation in Germany is very typical for a European country - a conservative party (well, two, technically), a liberal party, a social democratic party, a green party, a hard-left party, and an alt-right party. This does give each a much clearer identity. The Democratic party's voters would split (unevenly) into three or four under this.
The German situation is probably what people treat as a paradigm for a European country, but I think France and Italy have only rarely worked like that, and Spain doesn't seem to have the coherent groupings of liberals and greens that Germany does.
The right and conservatives have not "conserved" anything that I care about (except maybe expanding concealed carry at the state level in a lot of places) in my lifetime. Most people on the right have the same impression, which is why they perceive the parties as left, and "lefter."
This is the whole problem with the "extremism" debate, tbh. Neither party can be "extreme" in relation to the average voter, since they both get close to 50% of the vote.
Instead it's a feeling that culture is either lagging far behind or changing way too quickly, and that's contextual. I honestly think both parties' voters expect too much too quickly in terms of feasibility and good policy, but that's a personal judgment. They aren't "extreme," they're just wrong. And they aren't even *objectively* wrong, they're wrong in the eyes of a person who is knowledgeable about policy-making, but who obviously has his own biases and assumptions.
Probably this is one of those models where rationalism can either be useful or worse than useless, and both versions give false confidence about how useful it is.
But something's gone seriously awry. I think the question got bad answers, because on all these topics, we have very different responses to slightly different questions. On homosexuality, see here: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/06/04/global-acceptance-of-homosexuality/ These numbers look much more like other survey results.
I suspect the translation of "morally acceptable," might not give a uniform impression.
The other part is that the authors of the paper blow through "not a moral choice," as another commenter noted. This gives you about a third of Republicans saying that use of alcohol is morally acceptable, which is deceptive. Having a "morally acceptable" contraceptive use number in the US of 50% or so does not tell folks that the percentage saying it was morally unacceptable was 7%.
So I think this is a deeply flawed interpretation of a flawed survey and doesn't support the underlying hypothesis (on which I do not take a position.)
"The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots"
That FINALLY helps me understand what you think left and right mean. No wonder I have such a hard time understanding your politics posts. I had thought it was just the American-centeredness. I guess this is just another piece of evidence that the terms left and right are pretty useless.
Heck, even most European center-right parties are like, "yeah, the welfare state is fine - can we just contract some of it out to our corporate buddies?"
1. Semantics. According to the first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics, "Left-wing politics is the support of social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy." Conversely, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics begins with the statement that "Right-wing politics is generally defined by support of the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable". Now, those are precisely the definitions I'd personally use, so of course I'd quote a source that confirms them. But I feel Wikipedia can be considered a pretty good indication of where the basic social consensus about these terms' meaning currently lies, and people wishing to adopt other definitions should at least feel the need to explain their choices, especially when they criticize others' usage of those terms.
2. "Both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left" is an obviously circular reasoning depending on redefining the terms "left" and "right" as synonymous with the two parties' and their positions. It's not just a bad, fallacious argument against the "two X-wing parties" adage, it represents precisely the kind of intellectual blind spot the adage is aiming to bring awareness to in the first place.
3. Surely, the classification is historically specific and only makes sense within some specific frame of reference. I also agree that, in principle, it's always better to be more precise and leave no assumptions unstated. However, I'd propose that there exists a frame of reference that is such an obvious default choice that many people wouldn't consider the need for it to be stated explicitly. To name it nevertheless, "America has two X-wing parties relative to the average beliefs of its population".
4. I blame the essay's failure to even mention "beliefs of the population" on an unexamined assumption that those beliefs can be adequately expressed by the results of elections. This assumption is false for multiple reasons. I already pointed out the problem of it reducing the vast, multidimensional space of possible political beliefs to a single line drawn between the current positions of the two parties, but there's more. What if the parties don't meaningfully differ on some dimension and the voters have no way to discriminate between them and therefore voice their actual beliefs in a meaningful way? What if the differences between them amount to a, largely strategic, choice between two evils? What about all the more immediate reasons to vote for one party over another, completely separate from abstract political positions? What about factual, low-level disagreements about practical effects of specific policies? I could go on, but skipping to the end - what if the existing model of democracy is systematically biased against representing the will of specific group (general population) and for representing that of another (a caste of career politicians)?
5. I posit that the issue of inequality in the contemporary US can mostly be thought of as an issue of economic inequality specifically. But even if economic inequality is not THE defining left-right issue I think it is, in light of the definitions I quoted earlier it should be uncontroversially understood as A left-right issue. Moreover, I posit that, empirically, two facts are true: 1) The US general public wishes for a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth. 2) The economic inequality in the US has continued to rise for decades, regardless of which party exercised control. Now, we can disagree about whether they're true. But if they are, "America having two right-wing parties" is not just a perfectly coherent statement, it's a direct implication.
> According to the first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics, "Left-wing politics is the support of social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy." Conversely, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics begins with the statement that "Right-wing politics is generally defined by support of the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable"
Here's the problem I have with those definitions. Let's separate out those two statements:
A: I support social equality and egalitarianism
B: I believe that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal or desirable.
I think the big difference is that left-wingers support A and not B (and see them as contradictory), while right-wingers support both A and B (and see them as non-contradictory).
Another annoyance of mine: "America really only has one party." While some interpretations of this statement are fair, most are absolute nonsense, and it's so vague it fails to distinguish between truth and nonsense.
Maybe it's supposed to mean "there are no meaningful differences in the policy positions of the parties." This is clear nonsense, they distinguish themselves on a few dozen different issues.
Maybe it's supposed to mean "the differences between the parties are meaningless wedge issues that don't address America's problems." Except America has open primaries in most states. We pick our own candidates, some of whom focus on so-called "wedge issues" and some of whom focus on other things. We tend to pick the "wedge" issue candidates. To me that suggests those issues aren't meaningless to most Americans. This may be another form of "Americans don't know what's good for them and can't be trusted with democracy" which I find not only annoying but dangerous. People get to pick what they care about.
Maybe it means "Both parties support continued existence of large corporations." Which...most Americans consider themselves capitalists and like capitalism. I happen to think a little too much, but see above. Correct, no party that may win a majority of votes supports an unpopular change of economic system, nor are they thrilled by the idea of massive portions of that system failing on their watch. I don't like this at all. I think regular market failures are part of a functional market society, much as woods sometimes need a wildfire to support new growth. But wildfires are scary, and this looks to me like everyone, including the voters, responding to incentives instead of some insidious conspiracy.
It could mean "America is an extreme vetocracy." This is completely legitimate. The American federal government is not made for fast, revolutionary change, even if that change is legitimately demanded by the voters. If infrastructure bills or 3% tax cuts seem like small potatoes to you (which is reasonable), then it doesn't much matter who's in the chairs at the moment. Neither party will ever pass sweeping legislation. But your beef is not with the candidates, but with a system that requires a majority of voters, a super-majority of majorities of voters in each state, and a friendly court that may have been picked decades ago to come into alignment in order to pass any large legislative reforms. Still, in my home state a change of the state legislature saw a minimum wage hike, districting reform, protections for lgbt folks, massive education overhauls, and several other major policy initiatives passed in like 90 days.
Maybe it means "both candidates are always globalists as opposed to nationalists." And Trump notwithstanding, that's a fair charge. This seems like a place where the political elite either has a blind spot or is intentionally trying to avoid conforming to public opinion. People are reasonably scared of the massive changes brought about by the ease of outsourcing work, bringing in labor from out of the country, automation, global trade, etc. etc. The fact that I've looked at this issue extensively and disagree with the assessment that restricting trade will do anything positive shouldn't factor in. Most people want to feel the government is protecting U.S. interests, and the government of both parties has been mostly pro-Globalism for reasons I don't quite understand.
I'm tempted to chalk this up to "well, they're part of the educated class and they know better" but that's just a massive bias on my part. Also I tend to think of political candidates as being empty shirts that get filled with whatever views they need to win elections in all other cases, not sure why that would change now. It could be that the donor class is very pro-globalism, but I remain deeply skeptical that donations have big impacts on elections (generally the best fundraisers lose). My suspicion is that, like me, they are members of the professional class, and cannot conceive of a way to implement the changes people want. Not that they wouldn't make changes that had bad results, just that demands like "bring back the jobs," or "prevent outsourcing," or "leave the U.N." are entirely infeasible to begin with. My (very biased) take is that the political class calculates that the negative consequences would be so immediate and severe that they would cost more than the goodwill gained from giving in to populist sentiment.
Starting with a compliment, I love this because it's like 75% of political discourse these days:
"Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?"
But: this post is an odd one... Bringing up some possible definitions that are almost completely unused and comparing to countries which aren't remotely the goal of any significant part of US political debate.
Using an objective standard to gauge political sentiment doesn't pass the smell test - is anyone seriously trying to do this? (Perhaps theocrats?) It's almost definitional - politics is about the things we can't all agree on. Anything that can survive 5 minutes of inquiry as an "objective standard" isn't political. "People need food to not die" is an objective standard and not a political question; "we should give people food so they don't die" cannot be objective and thus will forever remain a political question even if largely settled someday. I guess the debate around trans people does raise some of this "objective standard" argument, but the level of good faith around objectiveness there is low on both sides.
“America is to the right of other OECD countries on most issues”
Are a lot of people willfully avoiding this definition? It seems by far the most obvious. Comparisons to i.e. Nordic countries are rampant in US political discourse; no one is trying to be more like Pakistan.
Well, I came here to offer a lame Star Wars pun, but others have already supplied those in sufficient quantity.
So, I'll give a serious answer: The basic assumption of your post is that there are parties in the United States. I disagree. The United States has outlawed political parties a long time ago, what you have instead are toothless folkore clubs that haphazardly dabble in organizing certain marginal aspects of the political day-to-day business.
In essence, a party is a large group of people that publicly bands together to participate in democratic mechanics of government, especially by participating in elections.
But in order to do that a party needs control over its own actions. Specifically it must be able to control who does and does not speak for it and who does and does not run for it. The US system of state controlled primaries has taken this control away from parties. In theory and political myth this was to "empower citizens" against evil party bosses who run things from smoke-filled backrooms. But the reality is that this has disempowered parties against special interests, especially well funded ones. To powerfully act in coordination, a party needs mechanisms to keep its people in line. Every first world democracy has those - except for the US.
Left-wing and right-wing aren't relative, they're meaningful absolute economic positions that one can be more or less of.
Left-wing means supporting economic democracy - nationalization, socialization, worker ownership, unions, strong labour laws, regulation for the common good, strong social safety net.
Right-wing is the opposite. Privatization, consolidation, state support of private enterprise, big business, no unions, limited or no worker protection, limited or no regulation for the common good, limited or no social safety net.
In this sense, yes, America has two right-wing parties. The Dems are centre-right - they support regulation for the common good, are lukewarm on unions and social safety net, but are otherwise mostly econ-right. The GOP is obviously quite far econ-right.
The Democratic party is not lukewarm on either a strong safety net or unions, and to the extent anti-discrimination laws count as labour laws, they are not weak on that either. They are also not weak on monopoly power and seem very enthusiastic about large public investments in infrastructure.
You seem to be stuck in the Bill Clinton Democratic party, which maybe was the neoliberal devil some like to bash, but definitely stopped existing some elections ago.
People have this idea Bernie Sanders was this totally harmless European social democrat when the truth is that when the Swedish Democratic party sent a delegation to observe the election, they liked Buttigieg the most. The boring suits in the Democratic party would be completely at home at any of the major center left parties of Europe, while AOC would swim around in something like Die Linke or Podemos.
The Democratic Party doesn't even support universal healthcare, which is considered a basic plank of the social safety net in pretty much every developed country.
I could go on, but they are only left relative to the Republicans, not in any absolute sense.
"To achieve that objective, we will give all Americans the choice to select a high-quality, affordable public option through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. The public option will provide at least one plan choice without deductibles; will be administered by CMS, not private companies; and will cover all primary care without any co-payments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does on behalf of older people.
Everyone will be eligible to choose the public option or another Affordable Care Act marketplace plan. To help close the persistent racial gap in insurance rates, Democrats will expand funding for Affordable Care Act outreach and enrollment programs, so every American knows their options for securing quality, affordable coverage.
The lowest-income Americans, including more than four million adults who should be eligible for Medicaid but who live in states where Republican governors have refused to expand the program, will be automatically enrolled in the public option without premiums; they may opt out at any time. And we will enable millions of older workers to choose between their employer-provided plans, the public option, or enrolling in Medicare when they turn 60, instead of having to wait until they are 65. Democrats are categorically opposed to raising the Medicare retirement age."
I guess that's why Americans now have universal healthcare! Wait, they didn't introduce a bill to that effect? And they're not going to? Even though they control both houses and the presidency?
(Also, that's not what most people would describe as universal healthcare).
They all intend to achieve something like universal healthcare via government programs, although the exact means differ.
Congress composition:
House - 221 D, 208 R
Senate - 48 D, 50 (!) R
Also, a major spending increase, that would necessitate a major and popular tax hike, in the middle of an inflationary episode, while the president has record low approval ratings seems like a bad idea in general, but maybe you know better.
"(Also, that's not what most people would describe as universal healthcare)."
Laughable assertion and also completely irrelevant. The Democratic party platform on healthcare is entirely consistent with the actual, existing healthcare systems of many rich countries. I'd suggest reading this:
Of note: the chart in this post doesn't have all of the data, which is why the numbers are confusing.
The actual survey asks if a given thing is a) moral b) immoral or c) not a moral issue
That's why, for instance, only 25% of dems think Homosexuality is moral, most of the rest think it's not a moral issue. Only ~10% of dems thought it actually immoral.
The relevant question is really: What's the appropriate reference class to compare the US to?
The right wing answer is US history. Which is not surprising for a party that claims to be conservative.
The left wing answer is Europe, or international organizations which contain mostly European countries. I have always found this surprising. Is the implication that the US is fundamentally a European country?
Not sure if you're actually unclear on this point, but obviously leftists don't think the reference class for the US should be Europe because the USA is a European country. That would be very stupid, so much so that it should have suggested you are not properly understanding the position.
The comparison they are trying to make is with other "western" nations. It's a bit of a cop-out to avoid just saying wealthy countries, because if you include rich Asian countries America starts looking centrist on many issues. But there some good cultural reasons to mostly look at western Europe, in that the influence of European history on the USA has been profound.
I agree that the left wing position is ill defined, just not for the reasons you imply. Rather it's too easy to draw boundaries that exclude conservative countries to make America look more right-wing. When leftists gesture at "europe", we don't mean Moldova, Romania or Turkey. We mean everything to the political left of Germany, which clearly cherry picking.
But I think a very fair comparison is to look at the anglosphere: IE Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA. This is probably the most culturally similar collection of countries you can pick. English speaking, white-dominated, colonial, capitalist, constitutionalist, democratic, rich, highly educated. But despite their similarities, America is a weird outlier on most issues: pro gun, pro jesus, anti abortion.
It's not reasonable to compare the US to Denmark (US IS SUPER CONSERVATIVE) or Saudi Arabia (US IS SUPER LIBERAL), but the US has some really close peer countries and comes off as super right wing and anti-progressive.
Of the countries you listed, only two even closely approximate the USA in the broadest impacts of our development (Canada and Australia) and oth of them have stark differences on multiple other important effects, from immigration source and control to government system, and leaving aside entirely the multiple states of the origin and the resulting Civil War.
Obviously they are not perfectly comparable (nothing is, that's the entire problem in a nutshell). All countries are unique.
But really, you don't think the US is comparable with UK/New Zealand? Take your median US citizen: a white, city-dwelling English speaking woman with some college. If you had to help her rank countries by "how easy would it be for me to integrate into this society", what countries beat out the five I mentioned? What countries would even be close?
You mention the civil war, and I get that it was pretty important to your history, but lots of countries had civil wars. Which statement is more true:
A) American is broadly similar to countries that have had a civil war, such as Greece, Turkey, France, Russia, China and Rwanda
or be:
B) America is broadly similar to Anglosphere countries, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Same question applies to basically anything you can think of that differentiates America from the anglosphere. You either end up inventing a category that makes America unique, or you chose a broader category that ends up lumping America with a bunch of random countries who have nothing in common.
The entire (rest of) the Anglosphere has a population less than a third that of America. If the entire Anglosphere was a single country, Americans would be a supermajority. Presumably therefore, the `political center' of the Anglosphere is roughly where the political center of America is...
Given America is the third largest country on earth and 4 times the size of the next largest wealthy western democracy (or 3 times the size of the next largest non western wealthy democracy), this feels like you are trying to create a subclass based on size. Is america more like similarly sized countries, or like Anglosphere countries?
Unless you are ignoring the significance of countries entirely and asking how left/right the average American is relative to the average human, but this is a boring question: I don't think anyone is arguing America is more right wing than the global median (probably they are leftish bit who cares?).
Unless you think the size of a country implicitly makes it more or less conservative/right wing, America's size is irrelevant: the question is how does her political parties compare to other countries, especially peer countries, and how do we select appropriate peer countries.
Again, I don't really have a horse in this race. I think America's parties are pretty conservative compared to her anglosphere peers and that anglosphere countries are pretty good countries to examine in comparison. As a leftist I think this is bad but hey, maybe it should be a source of pride for your conservatives (we hold the line when compared to our decadent peer group!)
But I'm not seeing why America being big makes the political culture of other smaller countries incomparable, and I don't think you really believe that only countries with similar population sizes can be meaningfully contrasted.
Well...I do think size is relevant to governance. Stuff that works in a city state doesn't work in a continent-state. And stuff that works in a monoethnic polity may not work in a multiethnic one. I mean, I assume you agree that Vatican City and Lichtenstein are poor comparisons to America? Ditto Singapore or Switzerland? (Both, incidentally, probably more `right wing' than America). Well, New Zealand is smaller than Singapore, and Australia and Canada are not that much larger. They all seem like basically city states to me (the fact that Australia and Canada control vast uninhabited wildernesses notwithstanding).
It is hard to come up with a reasonable reference class to compare the US to. The EU is a decent reference class in some sense - but of course it is not one country. Japan + ROK + ROC is getting there in size, but isn't really suitable since they are extremely mono-ethnic polities. India or Brazil are suitable in some senses, as continental scale multiethnic societies, but they are vastly poorer. And so on. So yes, I do think the US is a bit sui generis.
Is the `Anglosphere not including the USA' a reasonable reference class? Maybe! But if we are weighting by population, then we are basically comparing to the UK, which has a very different history (as in, it's an old world society not a new world one). And if we are weighting by `one country one vote' then we run into the `city state' problem above, where (IMO) three of the four entries in your set are city states...
I don't understand why "the West" includes Spain, Greece, and Poland, but not Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. The US has a lot closer historical, cultural, economic, and genetic ties to Mexico than it does to most of the countries of Europe.
I agree that the core Anglosphere is a reasonable category, but it's too small to do good comparisons: there's only 5 countries and the US is 70% of the total population. I don't think that this is what leftists mean. The Anglosphere as a whole is more capitalist, more federalist, and legally more traditional (common vs statutory law) than e.g. France or Scandinavia.
What is find weirdest about leftists using "the West" as a reference class is that it seems to accept a kind of Clash of Civilizations / WEIRDest People worldview. The US is expected to be normal when compared to other white, Christian countries. There isn't the universalist tendency, with a focus on the Global South, that I would expect from leftists.
I think I am agreeing with you, in that either the US is pretty centrist (amongst the global community) or amongst wealthy nations (as long as we include wealthy nations outside of western europe). Almost every other comparison seems to be cherry-picking in favor of a definition that makes the US look conservative, but I think the Anglosphere is a good candidate for a fair comparison.
And yes, I think it's weird that "the west" is being used as a reference class for American leftists, but to be fair, I think that's a necessary tactic by the left in order to stay in the conversation. There's a reason the mainstream right rarely tries to reference Singapore as an example of a conservative Utopia given that even Western-Europe seems like a strange and foreign place to the average voter.
That said, as a leftist, there's really not a lot I like about the global south. Like, don't get me wrong I think they're disadvantaged and exploited and suffering the aftermath of colonialism and all that jazz, but that doesn't mean their politics or policies are somehow more virtuous. Maybe I fail at egalitarianism or am in fact a huge racist, but I don't really look at the global south for examples of how we can re-order our society to promote human flourishing.
Edit: does size matter here? Yeah the US is huge, but does being a big country make you more conservative? Serious question, I don't think the sample group is too small or the US's size invalidates the comparison.
I do in fact think that Canada, Australia and New Zealand are far too small to be meaningful comparison points for the USA. The same way that Switzerland and Singapore are too small.
I'm more concerned that the set is too small to make too strong of claims about trends and outliers.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland were never colonial powers. The UK, Canada, and New Zealand don't have a constitution. The Anglosphere is not that similar religiously (and the US is about average for the fraction of irreligious people). Canada is only 54% native English speaking, behind Guyana, Suriname, Belize, and several small Caribbean countries.
When you have a group of only 6 countries, it's not surprising when every one of them is extreme in at least one important measurement.
Small sampling is definitely a reasonable concern, but the weird thing about these countries is how comparable they are in most way, and that INCLUDES politics. Canada and America are much closer (left/right) than Canada (or the US) and Saudi Arabia. Also they're much closer than Canada (or the US) and Norway.
If we want to do the dishonest thing and take "western europe" as the norm, ALL anglosphere countries are relatively conservative/right wing (the US just more than the rest). That's why I think it's a good group to use when considering some of these questions, because they are broadly more similar than other groupings but still have interesting differences. The most natural groupset, IE all countries, isn't particularly interesting for the purpose of the discussion, and constructed groups tend to be built with an agenda, or include a bunch of very different countries making actual comparison hard.
That said, your examples are kinda interesting. Canada, Australia and New Zealand most definitely did some serious colonializing, just ask the indigenous peoples. You an argue that they were still technically British while doing it, but if that's the case it sure is strange how American settler colonialism looks broadly similar to Canadian settler colonialism despite America having nominally shed itself of British influence.
Canada has a constitution, as does New Zealand; it's just split up a bit (IE Canada's Constitution act and Charter of Rights are separate documents, but combined are pretty similar to the American constitution). The UK... ok that one's a mess, I see your point re there being outliers.
Ditto language. Canada's extreme in the anglosphere, but not as much as you think. We have about 85% English fluency, because Quebec is a thing. We also bring in a lot of imigrants. That's where the 55% native born english comes from. But in provinces that aren't officially bilingual, the numbers are pretty similar to the US (93% vs 95%).
We could use multiple reference classes, each of which has a well defined criterion, or an intersection of multiple well defined criterion. E.g.: >50% native English speakers, >$40,000 GDP per capita PPP, Western hemisphere, European Union, >10 million citizens, >6 on the Democracy Index by the Economist, >50% Christian, or >50% white. Otherwise, we end up essentializing groups of countries. Which is something that you might want to do. But it is a weird thing for leftists to do.
I think that we agree on a lot. The reference class might be cherry-picked for political reasons, but it looks suspiciously like a reference class cherry-picked by race & religion. There is some love for Latin American leftists, but they rarely make it into systematic comparisons.
If the average voter feels that most other countries are a strange and foreign place, then how does referencing them help the left stay in the conversation? Other political movements draw mostly on American sources. I'm not just talking about big political parties here: also smaller political movements like libertarianism or environmentalism.
I think the average voters feels MUCH more in touch with the idea of "western culture" than "european culture", so it ends up meaning something when you argue "Amongst rich western countries, America is so insanely right wing that it has two conservative parties". That's certainly more significant than "America's democrats would be a center right party amongst the EU parliament". True, but feels less trenchant.
"Not sure if you're actually unclear on this point, but obviously leftists don't think the reference class for the US should be Europe because the USA is a European country. That would be very stupid, so much so that it should have suggested you are not properly understanding the position."
I might understand the miscommunication now. The USA is obviously not a European country geographically. Some people might think that it is a European country culturally or genetically. This would be a strange claim for leftists to make.
As I said, it's more the idea of "western countries" than Europe per-se. Yes, it's weird for leftists to talk about "western culture", but it's honestly necessary if you want to talk to moderates about leftist ideals without coming off as foreign/communist.
What the hell even is "pro-Jesus"? Is there an anti-Jesus party somewhere or something?
The US is only something of right-wing outlier on guns and it remains (don't know if that will last, but the past 50 years it has been the case) a liberal outlier on abortion. For all intents and purposes, it also is a liberal outlier on immigration and, if only because it has been a more or less diverse country for far longer than Australia or the UK, a literal trailblazer in your standard DEI measures (affirmative action and so on).
Overall I think this argument is sound, but I wanted to reply to one claim that's important on its own merits: that we can reasonably assume that roughly half of Americans support the policy positions of each party ("both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left.") Most of Achen and Bartels "Democracy for Realists" is knocking down this exact (reasonable) assumption, and I highly recommend reading it; unfortunatey my copy is in storage in another state so I can't quote the relevant passages and studies, but my brief recollection goes basically like this:
*Most Americans are staggeringly ignorant of the policy positions of both individual politicians and the major political parties, to the point that if everyone tried to vote based on policy without otherwise changing their information-seeking behavior, the result would be a lot more than the "few percentage points" Scott suggests.
*Only a minority of American voters are actually driven by policy in their voting behavior; the vast majority vote primarily based on two factors. The first is partisan identity, both of the traditional sort (I identify as a member of Party X) and increasingly and dominantly, negative partisanship (I recognize Party X has issues, but Party Y is so terrible that I have to vote for X to keep them for power). The second is a sort of point-in-time feeling about How The Country Is Doing (mostly economically, but with a few other factors), which gives elections a certain amount of essential randomness; given that the governing parties policies effects on the economy, if any, typically take years to manifest, there is very little relation between whether the economy is doing good under one party and their policies, and yet voters will vote as if there is a strong relation. This itself leads to median voter behaviors: if you have votes with significant random factors, you're going to approach 50% for each party.
This results in a few things: first, that parties can have policy positions significantly away from the mainstream, and not have it significantly impact how much of the vote they can get. Numerous surveys of Democratic vs. Republican policies have found that most (but not all) of core Democratic policies have majority support, many of them even attaining majorities among Republican voters (e.g. some level of gun control, some amount of abortion access, meaningful response to global warming, at least an honest attempt at reducing police violence and qualified immunity) whereas most (but not all) Republican policies do not.
And this is without even examining the relationship between partisan identity and policy preferences; the traditional theory imagines an informed vote with a set of policy preferences who chooses the "best candidate" for them, but what seems to in fact happen is that voters become aligned with a party, often in childhood (growing up in a Republican Family/Community or Democratic Family/Community) and their policy positions, insofar as they have cogent ones, emerge from the partisan identity and not the other way around. If the party changes, so do they; this is why Trump could suddenly pivot the Republican party from free trade to protectionism and lose basically no voters over it.
In short, we should not assume that just because X% of voters vote for a party, that means that those voters, on average, approve of the party's positions; and we shouldn't even assume that they approve of the party's positions *more* than they approve of the other party's positions, at least not when those positions are evaluated on their own merits. One of the theories for why Republicans consistently support gun control in polling, and yet Republican politicians get punished for even the slightest show of support, is that when actual legislation is introduced, it's inevitably by Democrats, and so the Republicans get punished for "crossing party lines" even if it's for a policy they support, because negative partisanship is so strong.
They're not looking at the same axis. When people say America has two right-wing parties, they mean neither party supports true economic leftism, i.e. abolishing private property completely. Western Europe doesn't do that, either. Clinton-era neoliberalism, by which US Democrats were right even of Western Europe Social Democrats, is probably over, and support for higher average tax burden, more progressive rate brackets, and a strong welfare state, are largely back (though also largely unsuccessful because of procedural conservatism built into the US legislative system), but true socialism was never in the Overton Window and still isn't. So there never has been and probably never will be a true left-wing US party on that axis.
The people complaining about the opposite, that there are two left-wing parties, are talking about a completely different type of leftist, and simply comparing widespread social mores of the current era against widespread social mores of past Americas. Acceptable workplace behavior, what constitutes too far for a joke, the demographic makeup of casting calls, have all changed pretty radically in the last 30 years. A lot of people feel like they no longer recognize their own country, and because this is a form of social progressivism, they consider it "leftist." Historically, I think this is because these were more a matter of class values than political values, and all politicians tend to be of the same social class. Witnessing the Obama-era Tea Party types that very conspicuously made sure they were seen eating fried butter at state fairs, wearing cowboy boots, and firing rifles on the campaign trail, Trupm was far from the first politician to realize he could build a constituency by pretending he didn't share Ivy league lifestyle values, but he was so successful that this has quickly become not only definitely now a political axis, but maybe even the most important thing a whole lot of voters care about. To the extent that "right-wing" means something like a political party where the members honest to God can't stand Hollywood movies and would prefer to watch whatever the heck Dean Cain, Kevin Sorbo, and Kirk Cameron are being cast in these days, there is no real right-wing party.
There's a saying that Republicans and Democrats don't differ in that they give to their friends, they just have different friends. (Though not always.) I interpret these kinds of equivalence statements as frustration over Public Choice outcomes of the political system. People often assume the result should flow from ideological first principles.
"If people weren't responding to political incentives, we'd have two different perspectives, but [the Evil side] has corrupted [my Virtuous side] so they no longer hew to Righteous principles." Except that's true of all political perspectives. You can't pretend away Public Choice, nor should you want a system run on pure ideology with no connection to real-world conditions. What you want to avoid is capture by small interest groups, which is a hard problem, but it's not just your side getting captured.
Wait, there are people who claim with a straight face that both major parties are socialist? My mind hurts contemplating that. Also that chart makes the Czech Republic look like a super chill place to live.
And it makes Japan look like a bachelor/ette party.
If the survey is actually representative of voters, the disconnect between a) something like 70-75% of US democrats reporting that they believe abortion is not morally OK and b) actual political outcomes on abortion in dem-heavy states is sure something.
Potential explanations are:
-many voters are personally anti-abortion but are pro-choice when it comes to what they believe others should be allowed to do;
-many voters vote on party lines even if they disagree with the party platform on specific issues;
-there are nuances not captured by the survey/the survey is crap (i did not read the paper, so I am not making this claim).
I was also initially confused by this, but several commenters have pointed ou that the survey had options "acceptable", "not acceptable", and "not a moral issue". Confusingly, only the first category is shown on the graph, though the third was often more common.
from their point of view, any state that interfers with econmyin the theoretial interet is socialist relative to the one they prefer,so the two parties from that perspeciuve are differnet places on the socialist scale.
there's a saying "there's the evil party and the stupid pary" The evil party was the the one on the other side, the closer party was stupid in th sense they thoght the moderate things they advocated would d any good.
Nowadys,conservatives consider aboron the big problem.Back in the day conservatives were againtr contracpetives,but now from the christian perspective they are a definite way toprevent abortions.
dont know where you got tha from but my reasoning on whether it true,
Whereas since contraceptives ae rough on the body and the peoplewho pay the prie and are seen as thus resonsivle for it are women, and lefts tend to agree that society is structurally biased againstr women
I was also initially confused by this, but several commenters have pointed ou that the survey had options "acceptable", "not acceptable", and "not a moral issue". Confusingly, only the first category is shown on the graph, though the third was often more common
I feel like honeslty you ve missed the thread here a bit. of course people are referring to their own beliefs,and prettymuch everyone understands this. Some people like true religous believers do think therer standards are objective by authority of a creator god. sam harris tried to come up with some objective sense of the moral range of humans basedon evolution. but most people even if not explicity have a simialr enough epsitemlogical langayge they see ethics and politcs as different from objective terirotry at least in theory, although they tend to also distort the truth while saying onlyt the othe side distrorts the truth.
What a lot ofpeople meant by this is that while they are seemingly so divded,they were bothultimatleysubserent to instituions and sturtures thta had evolvedwhich there power dependend on. Neither side would challenge certain fundamentsa stuff.
That has changed more and more as time went on. But it was deifnitelt a feeling as the neoliberals and neoconservatives would always fundamentally supprtany expansion of state power even givinglip servive to why the others were bad-there were well defined wallsof the overton window.
When Ron paul was a candaidte the media and talking heads told us he wasnt a serious candidate. That because there is a conscious prcces through various think tanks to frame the naratvie around the party.
If Ron paul had been treated as legit,how many morempeople would have at least consideered him as better alternative then two party monopoly? its not a selffulflinngprophecy,its part of the machiner of power. peopke can say "hey, this isnt the overton window I accept"
Your most extreme imaginable right/left scenarios are interesting. I was gonna say that your profit-seeking nanobot swarm scenario lacks any semblance of conservatism, but just realized that that pretty well characterizes Earth’s biosphere for most of its history. So it’s maximally conservative!
Czech it out, by the way. They have been relaxed about sex there even in socialist times and now they also produce much meth. Sodom or Gomorrha? Very nice people there with a fine old beer culture.
on the "both recieve half votes" thing, I'd like to note that a lot of left-wing people in weimar germany voted for the conservative monarchist hindenburg in an attempt to stop hitler from taking power, while many people from hindenburg's own party voted for hitler, that is to say, a man from a right-wing party (by the standards of the nation in which said party exists) can absolutely be elected by people largely from left-wing parties, that is to say, stategic voting can cause people to vote for people they agree with on few issues, to avoid "the bad person" being elected.
combine this with the fact that a) people don't vote for the candidates, they vote for the people they think those candidates are(or againt the monster they consider the other candidate to be), which may be distorted and b) "Left" and "right" are nebulous concepts in the first place, and you have a framework where groups of people will vote for candidates they do not agree with.
many of the people who voted for hindenburg were mostly trying to keep him out of power.
and given that he then proceeded to make hitler chancelor...
well, I wouldn't call that being in touch with/loyal to one's voters.
Maximum left being an insectoid hive-mind is a really weird intuition, for any definition of "left" other than Cold War era propaganda (even the present-day Right isn't exactly using that caricature). For that matter, the 'maximum right' example is also not my intuition, and I think most right-wingers would agree.
Of course it's debatable as to what qualifies as left-wing and right-wing. If we go with a general utopianism / belief in social progress, maximum left is a permanent revolution (the specifics of how it works depend on one's own political position); maximum right is any society that doesn't change and is incapable of it, probably a monarchy of some sort. The connection to the French Revolution is obvious. OTOH, this places anarcho-primitivism on the right and anarcho-capitalism on the left.
Though really left-right is probably better-described as, as said above, a first principal component than any sort of coherent worldview divide (even though such divides absolutely exist and contribute to this first principal component). Probably an egalitarian hive-mind is to the left of Earth-average on this component, and an expanding sphere of Moloch on the right, but realistically both are fringe political positions that are more extreme on other components.
I suspect Scott's examples were based on putting anarchocapitalism on the far right of views that nontrivial numbers of people earnestly hold, and some kind of Communism on the far left (probably Soviet-style Communism, Marx's postulated end state of "True Communism" that would emerge after the dictatorship of the proletariat withered away, or Star Trek-style Luxury Space Communism).
In general, I feel the left-right axis doesn't make much sense when comparing ideologies that don't share some kind of coherent ideological framework. For example, whiggish ideologies (e.g. modern American mainstream conservatives and liberals) can be compared on a left-right spectrum, as can various revolutionary totalitarian ideologies (e.g. Stalinism, Italian Fascism, and Naziism), but trying to put Nazis on the same scale as whiggish parties yields incoherent results depending on what aspects you're focusing on.
So, I haven't checked all the comments yet to see if anyone else has brought this up, but I'm extremely confused by the last table. A majority of both Democrats and Republicans consider alcohol use morally unacceptable? More Republicans consider contraceptive use acceptable than Democrats, and about half of both are opposed? Less than a third of Democrats consider homosexuality morally acceptable? These don't seem to track with other polling results I've seen on these subjects, or with what seems like a common sense understanding of where the Overton window lies.
Following the link to the paper, it seems the questions had three responses (plus refused, don't know, and volunteered answers): morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, and "not a moral issue".
For contraception, only single-digits of either party said "unacceptable" (more Republicans than Democrats, though), with a goodly number saying "not a moral issue".
For alcohol use, a solid plurality of both parties said "not a moral issue", with something like 20% of both parties saying "unacceptable".
I will note that that figure you included shows America as slightly more conservative than average on all the sexual issues, even in a reference class that isn't just OECD.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The US does not have a liberal party and a conservative party. It has a party that claims to be liberal but in practice is somewhat conservative and a party that claims to be conservative but in practice is batshit insane.
> Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists?
I think taxation offers a pretty good example for at least the economic axis: at either end is either 0% of GDP collected as taxation or 100%. The absolute centrist position is therefore 50%.
Yes that is interesting. I don't mean top marginal rates though I mean combined revenue collection of all levels of government. Most of the OECD is below this but I believe Denmark and maybe a few others are just above it.
The problem is that you can't reduce politics to Right versus Left.
It seems so, most strongly in the US, where the first-past-the post system means that there can only ever be two parties and no more. This flattens all politics into a two-ideologies paradigm. Here in Italy, where multiple parties exist, people also think like that, but a little less.
In my opinion:
1 - political ideologies are multi-dimensional.
2 - the political axes of your time and place don't apply to other times and places.
I'll prove the above, bear with me.
There is in Italy the Partito Radicale (Radical party? which doesn’t sound right). A party that's never had a massive presence in parliament, and from the outside you may underestimate its historical importance, but it has long been a greater influence on Italian politics than its size would suggest. Its positions:
- They are the greatest supporter of social freedoms, from abortion and divorce decades ago, to assisted suicide and gay rights more recently.
- They tend to support American wars.
- They are very right-wing on the economy.
And then there is Italy’s political Catholicism, which is not a party as much as a political area. It used to have a party, of course - the enormous Christian Democracy. But since end of that party and the reshuffling of Italian politics in the early 90’s, political Catholicism has rather become an identifiable ideology, channelled either into a plethora of centrist parties or into centrist currents within rightist or leftist parties.
- They are the most hardcore conservatives on all the social issues the Radicali champion.
- They oppose all American wars, or any war; they are pacifists.
- They love immigrants.
- They are middle of the ground on the economy (in a tradition related to what has been described on this blog as Distributism).
As you can see, both Radicali and Catholics are centrists in the left-right spectrum, even the Italian left-right-spectrum. And yet, they have little in common and are each other’s mortal enemies! Which points to the existance of other axes.
I can think of other examples. The fascist-ish far right fringe in Italy has always been much more pro-welfare than the mainstream right. For years they have advocated universal basic income, since long before it was mainstream here.
Also, free-market globalism made a complete U-turn over the course of my lifetime. It was right-wing and now the left embraced it, while opposition to it was left-wing and now it’s right wing.
And the more you go back in time, the more present day concept of right and left cease to apply. Example: Ethno-nationalism used to be left-wing in 19th century Europe.
Judging from online discussions of politics and history it has always seemed to me that Americans don’t know widely about 19th century European left-wing ethno-nationalism.
Compare the map of Europe drawn by the Congress of Vienna, with the one after the Treaty of Versailles 100 years later. What changed? Borders everywhere have been redrawn to match perceived ethnicity. The countries of Italy, Germany, and every country in Eastern Europe form Greece all the way to Finland, have been created to match a pre-existent perceived identity, while the trans-ethnic Hapsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires have vanished. It wasn’t just ww1, it was a whole century of political and ideological pressure and struggle. I’m saying “ethnicity”, even though people back then spoke rather of “nations”, because this is what “nation” back then meant: an ethnic group.
And it all went together with leftism! These people, the same ethno-nationalists who wrote patriotic poems about how Italians are all brothers united by blood and soil, these people were pro-democracy, anti-aristocracy, anti-clerical, and supported having a liberal Constitution. They were the left of their times. Which violates today's understanding of what left and right are.
Another examples: Guelphs and Ghibellines, the opposing political ideologies in 13th century Italy.
They disagreed on who should be the supreme political authority in the HRE. One side said the Pope, the other side the Emperor. Which was right wing and which was left wing?
I know that some will give the knee-jerk answer that the Guelphs were right-wing because they wanted theocracy. But think it through. The Pope was the only authority preventing the assertion of imperial power over the free republics of Italy. Republicanism is to the left of monarchy, right? Also, the office of Emperor tended towards dinasticism, that of Pope did not. The Emperor’s power was backed more by force, the Pope’s more by belief.
The arguments on either side of that debate, anyways, are incomprehensibly alien to us. My point is: I don’t think you can apply modern categories of right and left there.
When people on the left say both American parties are liberal and both are right-wing, they're using precise definitions rather than relative ones. In that context, "liberalism" is a specific worldview that sees the dominance of markets in our lives as both inevitable and desirable; most parties in most of the world are liberal, but 400 years ago *nobody* was. Right in this context refers to a desire to maintain the current economic system, which in the United States means liberal capitalism; a left-wing party would believe in at least eventually replacing this with a non-capitalist system. The Chinese Communist Party is nominally leftist in this sense, the Soviet one was more so. (These are not, obviously, examples which put the left in a good light.)
The US government has had a policy of stamping out anti-capitalist movements both here and abroad for decades, sometimes through extrajudicial violence. That's why there is no paradox about there being one right-wing party that's a little more right than the median voter and another that's a little closer to the left than the median voter, without a true left party being viable (unlike in Europe, where such parties don't win overall but they get some votes).
I find that "America has two right-wing parties" expresses the reality better than “America is to the right of other OECD countries on most issues", when expressed by someone from one of these other OECD countries, to non-Republican Americans or other people from these OECD countries. It’s a matter of context.
If you center your political map with the current status quo; that is, treat ideology as directional, and then go to a two dimensional political map, it is possible to find extended periods of bias.
For example, in one dimension, the Left was characterized by wanting more equality at the expense of bigger government which the Right was characterizing itself as the opposite. But if you separate these values, for a long period of time the Democrats mostly fit in one quadrant, which the Republicans were a mix of more inequality with the benefit of smaller government and those who just tolerated more inequality. The quadrant of advocating for smaller government and less inequality was largely unoccupied by the mainstream parties. (Jimmy Carter was a notable exception; he was as big a deregulator as Reagan.) Those who did consciously occupy this quadrant tended to be fringe figures: Georgists, conspiracy theorists, and those who actually read Adam Smith.
This bias was broken with Trump. Rhetorically, at least, Trump has pushed the Republican Party kicking and screaming into being a smaller government pro workers party.
I’ve never heard the idea that America has two left wing parties, it sounds like someone on the right heard the much more common claim that america has two right wing parties and just instinctively said the opposite because…well that’s all political discourse is nowadays.
The more common claim of both parties being right wing is much more defensible, given both parties shift rightward post new deal, and specifically with the increase in “triangulation” since the Clinton years where the democrats increasingly suck up to Wall Street banks and monopolist donors.
Thus if both parties are fighting to increase monopoly power, increase the concentration of wealth, and increase deregulation of the banking and finance sectors, etc. And no party is fighting to Decrease those things, then how can either party be said to be left wing on finance issues?
This analysis can be repeated in most areas of government policy.
In my own experience, being on the right, the number of times I've heard some version of the "two left wing parties" line isn't literally zero, but it's orders of magnitude less than I've heard "two right wing parties" from people on the left. And always, so far as I can recall, in a context where the speaker was being deliberately provocative and/or tongue-in-cheek, not saying something he assumed would be accepted as a manifest truth.
That said, I think the intuition, "our current political configuration systematically generates results that inexorably benefit the [right/left], and my own preferred coalition's nominal self-positioning as a party of the [left/right] has proven utterly impotent in arresting this trend," exists just as much -- and quite possibly even more -- on the American right as on the left.
The difference is that on the right that intuition tends not to get phrased as "the Republicans are a left wing party," whereas the opposite is true of the Democrats in the eyes of the left.
There are probably a lot of reasons for that. But there's also a quite simple way of modeling it that IMO makes some sense.
The left's mental model is "the left is virtuous, and the right are opportunistic grifters." The right's mental model is "the right is virtuous, and the left are nihilistic vandals." Everyone's mental model of politicians purporting to support one side, taking their money, and then doing nothing, is "the base is virtuous, and the party are opportunistic grifters."
For the left, it's very easy for the narrative of the base's betrayal by the party to slide neatly into the narrative that the party is actually on the right. For the right, the symmetrical complaint about the party's failure to deliver has to be cast in some other terms.
This analysis does seem largely accurate, though there is some justification for the last paragraph.
On economic matters, policies that are the result of corruption are quite often also the policies aggressively Pursued by the right (even when their rhetoric is sometimes different).
The concentration of wealth for the already wealthy, the entrenchment of monopoly power through law and government policy, restrictions on competition in lucrative industries and lack of any regulation for those existing few companies, corporate welfare for massive successful industries, etc. Follow the money of the benefactors of these policies are you will often find they are the donors to the politicians who passed them. And while some industries are cozier to one party over another, the biggest players tend to equally own both.
The primary difference in the two groups, however, is that the right tends to view these policies as desirable parts of their platform. That these people are “job creators” and that government will only get in their way, etc. Whereas the democrats know they are undesirable, but many of them vote for these policies out of greed/ self Interest while talking up how they need to fight against them.
Thus while both sets of politicians are merely self serving and corrupt, this corruption takes the form of supporting policies that many on the right promote as good policy. This lends creedance to the idea that the Democratic Party is itself just another Conservative party that tries to appeal to a left wing base with a few tolken socially liberal issues. Just as long as they don’t effect the bottom line.
I note Czech republic is looking pretty liberal in that graphics, so to provide context for foreigners: this is not because of especial wokeness (few things are further from our national spirit), but a culture of true laissez faire - essentially, the mentality is "as long as it doesn't directly impact my life or the price of beer, IDGAF what people do".
My only comment would be, that, instead of the median voter, we should consider the US voting system to "set the midpoint" at *the modal voter*; and also that we don't have a national "average" vote - but the accumulation of modal voters at the local and state levels.
Which means nationally we're multimodal, and several of the loca election pools are multimodal as well
I think you are failing a Turring test here. I'm just not sure how many.
I didn't think I was debating. I was expressing my confusion about your X-most things and attempting (maybe failing) at a little levity.
Are you trying to describe policital camps in a way that would pass Turing test? If so, I can tell you why I think you are failing. If that wasn't your goal, I don't see why providing clearn & unambiguous counter arguments does anything for anyone.
I enjoy both snark and friendly conversation, so we're good!
The Turing test I was referencing was this:
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ideological-turing-tests
I think your left-wing society would be accepted a lot of left wingers. It might be a bit on the liberal or anarchists side and away from the progressive flavor, but yeah.
I think a right-winger would object to your characterization for a maybe subtle but for-sure important reason. I think they would say the hierarchies are given of human nature (or whatever), and the role of the society is to make the best of everything given that. Some Christians would say 'look at the bible, we are all tribal and sinners, Jesus showed us how to handle those impulses'. Some Intelectual Conservatives would say common law, natural rights, the Enlightenment, 'traditional family structure, etc, move us out of a chaotic state of nature where the strong form hierarchies of based on who can band together a few dudes and terrorize a town.
I think most would sign on to the idea that duties come with being part of that society.
The most left thing I can imagine is a death camp into which the wreckers and capitalists have been herded, the most right thing I can imagine is a death camp into which the ethnic undesirables have been herded.
Liberations always get left out.
We should have private death camps!
Haha
Oh my heck.
What's the difference between "morally acceptable" and "not a moral issue" supposed to be?
I was going to say something far less charitable, so thank you for posting this.
Clearly America has one TIE-Fighter party and one Y-Wing party.
Yeah lol. I saw 'X-Wing Parties' and thought for sure we'd be seeing a star wars analogy. :/
Glad I wasn’t the only reader disappointed that this wasn’t about Star Wars.
But the thumbnail is!
Good catch! I read the post on the substack app which doesn’t seem to show the thumbnail anywhere. About half the time I read this on desktop where I would have seen it.
My first read as well and immediately concluded the article would be about how everyone should stop thinking of themselves as the rebellion and accept responsibility to govern well. But this was good too.
That's also a good take.
I actually read another article the other day that broadly criticised the violence of Star Wars and saying that both US American parties could identify with the Rebellion (e.g. because it displays diversity, but also is trying to achieve independence from government) and it was making them less interested in talking to each other over fighting each other. So basically your take, but coming from a movie-goer perspective.
https://slate.com/culture/2016/12/star-wars-dangerous-politics-of-violence.html
(For the record, I didn't like this article very much, because it's ascribing far too much power to a single franchise; it seemed a lot like the old "video games will make our children violent" argument, except rehashed for Star Wars. I imagine it's mostly the other way around in the scenarios the author mentions - Star Wars gives you some nice vocabulary to co-opt for increasingly aggressive politics.)
The rebellion is fundamentally about and led by a persecuted religious group from a backwards desert; the analogy to the Taliban is very strong and was probably intentional, given that the original trilogy was filmed back when the Taliban were allies against the Evil Empire of the USSR. America's Afghanistan quagmire definitely makes this interpretation funnier, though. The USG is definitely not the plucky underdog in anything.
The plucky underdog Rebellion isn't meant to be a stand-in for the U.S., though. If anything it's the opposite, Lucas said he based the Empire partly off American interventionism in Vietnam. He also said that the Ewoks fighting the Empire in Ep. 6 was inspired by how the Viet Cong was able to defeat the technologically-superior American military using guerilla tactics (which isn't exactly what actually happened in real life, but that's besides the point). And the latter two prequels drew some explicit parallels to the War on Terror: Ep. 2 and 3 depicted a democratic Republic slowly becoming militaristic and giving up essential liberties for the sake of security during a war against a nebulous enemy, in a way that very much mirrored concerns about the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War. Ep. 3 even had Darth Vader quote George W. Bush! So the idea that the Empire is meant to symbolize the U.S. isn't some sort of subversive reinterpretation of the series - it's the original authorital intent! (That's not to say that Lucas' portrayal of the Empire wasn't *also* inspired by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Roman Empire, but ultimately those were secondary to the critique he was making of his own nation.)
I feel like “rebellion” in our modern political parlance is a dodge for having to be responsible for making sure that anything actually works well.
Similar; I've seen (elsewhere on the 'Net) someone using an X-wing with "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS" as an avatar.
I really wish people would just focus on things like “Huh, this seems to work better.”
Let's talk about X-Wing-related political parties!
According to Bloodline by Claudia Gray, the New Republic is divided between "the POPULISTS, who believe individual planets should retain almost all authority, and the CENTRISTS, who favor a stronger galactic government and a more powerful military." Each party has a left- and right-wing faction:
Far left-wing Populists: direct democracy
Far right-wing Populists: dissolve the Republic
Far left-wing Centrists: totalitarian bureaucracy
Far right-wing Centrists: large standing military
Leia is a Populist leader, so they're automatically the more sympathetic group, especially since many Centrists want to outright revive the Empire. Since this isn't Star Peace, neither of them really manage to accomplish anything.
"Leia is a Populist leader". The people's Princess!
I guess she represents the Alderaanian diaspora.
I believe in story she is more of a central figure that all the populists can gather around. That is, because the populists want politics to be local, they in general only support politicians from their own planets and are inherently suspicious of all the politicians from elsewhere, even those of their own party.
Because Leia shares their concerns and no longer has a planet, she can't be trying to advance her own planet at their expense.
The term "Centrist" is fairly misleading here. In the real world, "Centrist" is used to describe people with views in the *center* of the political spectrum, so "far-right Centrist" and "far-left Centrist" seem like a contradiction in terms. In Disney's post-RotJ Star Wars novels, it refers to people who want a strong *central* government for the Republic. The writers probably should have called them "Centralist" instead, it sounds a little clunkier but it would've conveyed their ideology better; "Centrist Party" makes it sound like they're all moderates even though some of their positions are actually quite extreme.
Oh I am sure the people writing Star Wars these days absolutely want to draw parallels between political centrists and Nazis. That is like one of their main political projects!
I reported your comment to the mods for being truly awesome. Not kidding.
Are there mods besides Scott or are you just harassing him with my terrible obvious joke?
I wonder if there would be general consensus here about which is which.
I was looking for this comment and I found it.
Well done.
I read to the end sincerely expecting a Star Wars metaphor reveal. Had to reread the last line to finally get it.
Does anyone find it a little bit convenient that darth Vader was a very safe distance from the death star when it blew up?
Does anyone find it a little bit odd that at the exact moment that princess Leia escaped the death star, darth Vader was somewhere else fighting an old man?
Still not convinced? Well lets dig a little deeper, then.
That old man that darth Vader was fighting just so happened to be a jedi. If you do your research, Darth Vader used to be a jedi, also! In fact, if you do even more research you will find that he used to be an apprentice of that same old man that he was fighting on board the death star at the same very moment that Leia escaped! Yes, this is quite odd, isn't it?
Oh but it gets deeper!
In fact, rumor has it that the same guy who helped Leia escaped is the very same guy who blew up the death star.
So let me get this straight. Some guy walks in the death star, saves Leia, while Darth Vader is off somewhere else, fighting an old man who used to be his master back in his crazy jedi days? And then the same guy comes back and blows up the death star at the exact moment that Darth Vader gets a safe distance away from it? Are you fucking kidding me??
Oh but it gets weirder than that, my friends.
Turns out that the kid who rescued Leia, came from Tatooine. If you do your research, Darth Vader is from Tatooine. And on that planet he had an older brother, Owen. The kid who blew up the death star had an uncle named Owen. So you know what this means?? He was darth Vaders son! Darth Vaders son blew up the fucking death star!
In fact, he had the help of a droid. Not just any droid, but R2D2. This same very R2D2 is actually known for assisting darth Vader back when he was a jedi.
Clearly there's a conspiracy here, a long-term multi-generational plan that has manipulated the Old Republic, the Empire, and the Rebellion, and now has its hooks into the New Republic. But for what purpose? Why would Darth Vader kill his own mentor? Sure, conspiracy-deniers will respond with some drivel about there being multiple factions with incomplete information and different goals, but come on! Too many of these people were plugged into the Force; they couldn't help but coordinate with each other. That was, like, the Jedi's whole *thing*!
I think it has something to do with this "Force ghost" concept I heard about. For some reason, it was necessary to convert the old mentor into a "Force ghost", probably so that he could do something that he couldn't do were he constrained by a physical body...
OK, the real secret is that, outside of some lame Expanded Universe propaganda, there is only one way to become a Force Ghost: You have to be a Jedi (or Sith), and you have to die near Luke Skywalker.
Obi-Wan always knew this - maybe even before there *was* a Luke Skywalker, but certainly once there is a Luke, Obi-Wan is careful to stick close to him, even retiring in obscurity to a godforsaken desert to run out the clock because that means when he finally does kick the bucket, he'll die near Luke.
Then he gets dragged into a critical and dangerous mission that will take him far from Tattoine, so even though Luke is an untrained amateur who needs saving three times in as many scenes, Obi-Wan makes sure to take Luke with him.
Not on the actual infiltrate-the-Death-Star part, because Luke would make way too much noise for that. But when he winds up in a showdown with Darth Vader, he holds his own *just* long enough for Luke to show up, then lets Vader kill him. Bam, instant Force Ghost Kenobi. If only Vader had known...
OK, maybe he did know in the abstract, but he didn't know that the idiot with a blaster actually was Luke Skywalker. But in the final act, he tells his wingmen to leave Luke to him and then spends a suspiciously long time setting up the perfect shot. Like maybe he was planning to follow Luke right up to the thermal exhaust port and then they'd all die together, closely together, when the Death Star blew up. Curse that meddling Han Solo.
Next movie, Force Ghost Kenobi tells Luke to drop everything and go hang out with his old buddy Yoda, who has been running out the clock on a different godforsaken planet. And decrepit old Yoda insists that Luke needs *lots* of training, he's nowhere near ready to leave. Until Luke runs off and leaves anyway. So as soon as he returns, Yoda changes his tune to "no more training you need, die *right the hell now* I must". Yoda dies near Luke, bam, instant Force Ghost Yoda.
While Luke was away, of course, he reencountered Vader. Who made the pitch that Luke should join him, ruling the galaxy as father and son, staying close until presumably at some point Vader dies of old age. Near Luke. When Luke won't go for that, Vader is careful *not* to kill him.
Now Luke is a full Jedi, ready for his final confrontation with Vader and the Emperor. And they're both eager for an up-close personal meeting. Where the Emperor offers Luke his lightsaber back and tries to piss him off enough to kill him. Palpatine gets it.
So does Vader, hence the lightsaber duel where Luke might kill Vader, up close. But, oops, Vader is only seriously wounded, and Palpatine is now himself pissed enough to kill Luke. That would scotch the whole plan. Hence Vader throwing the Emperor off the railing into the bottomless pit. Die far from Luke, no Force Ghost for You.
Vader gets that Luke needs to bug out, fast. But, hey, before you do that, kiddo, can you please disconnect my life support system so I can die right now, near Luke? Bam, instant Force Ghost Vader. Er, Anakin.
Then in the sequel trilogy, we find out that the new crop of Jedi were maybe not up to par. Not the sort of people Luke wants to hang around eternity with, at any rate. So he runs off to yet another godforsaken planet to run out the clock, obscuring his trail so nobody can show up and off themselves at his doorstep. No more Force Ghosts.
Except, Rey manages to track him down. And she's an annoying quasi-Jedi that Luke doesn't fancy spending eternity with. He convinces her to leave, but the secret'is out, she'll be back, and probably a bunch of immortality-seeking Sith Lords behind her. So he offs *himself*, thus Dying (duh) Near Luke, and becoming the Last Force Ghost. At just the right moment to offer his Force-Ghostly intervention in his last big fight.
Wake up, sheeple! X-wing vs Y-wing is a distraction! The only parties that matter are the Force Ghost Party and the Just Die Already party.
Ooooh, that's really good. I bet Luke suddenly figured it out in that moment when he was standing over Ben Solo with a lightsaber, ready to kill him, and that's why didn't kill Ben and instead ran away!
We just need an epicycle to account for Qui-Gon Jin.
What if Qui-Gon was the one who first figured out the Force Ghost thing, but somehow the only way to reliably duplicate the effect was to cross Anakin with Padme (both of whom Qui-Gon basically discovered in the first place). So in the lead-up to the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan was using reverse psychology to get Anakin and Padme together. And after Luke was born, they had to keep Luke separate from Anakin, because otherwise Luke might turn into another Anakin and start slaughtering Force users left and right, and that would let all sorts of undesirables into the afterlife.
Also, it seems like Leia became a Force Ghost, so maybe she had the same power. It would explain why everyone kept trying to kidnap her.
lol I'm not proud of how long it took me to figure out this was not a Star Wars reference.
Yah but there are TWO parties. TWO! 😭
There's more than two, but the others don't matter.
(On the other hand, both American parties would be multiple parties in the German system.)
Two there should be. No more, no less. One to embody power, the other to crave it.
Always two there are; no more, no less.
This is excellent
much kudos to you
So, first-past-the-post is a Sith electoral system? Makes sense...
There are four lights!!!
why does the 'left/right' nomenclature really make sense?
Are we all going to agree with Zhou Enlai that it's too soon to tell the results of the french revolution because it never ended?
He was actually referring to the 1968 riots.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/it-is-too-soon-to-tell-the-real-story.html
maybe, but the point still stands
_did_ the french revolution every really end?
or is the pushback to wokism an example of something like the thermidorian reaction?
what exactly makes a an egyptian pharoah _more_ like a swarm of profit-maximizing nanonbots than an insectoid hive-mind? isn't the pharoah _ more_ like the queen bee of the hive? haven't merchants always been hated by royalty?
if the left-right distinction means anything, then let's be clear about precisely what it is. Or is that even possible?
A left-right distinction is that Democrats are quite likely to call themselves leftists, while Republicans are very unlikely to call themselves rightists.
Has someone made a list of the top x scissor statements of American politics?
When I realized US energy self-sufficiency had gone from a left goal to a right goal, I became suspicious of the left-right formulation. Significant policy objectives shouldn't switch sides like that.
Many, many significant policy positions do switch sides over time or between countries. The only stable left/right policy I can think of is the degree of adherence to (the dominant) religion (though minority religions can end up on either side)
"The only stable left/right policy I can think of is the degree of adherence to (the dominant) religion"
I'm not even sure about that one, given that atheism and outright hostility towards religion seems to be the norm among much of the alt-right.
anyone who criticizes the democrats is called 'right' by popular media
for example, joe rogan - pot smoking, DMT advocating, ancient alien enthusiast is now called 'right wing' for criticizing the democrats
my conclusion is as follows:
- pre printing press, the state was official about 'maintaining the status quo'
- around the time of the french revolution, the concept of progress got big, and the modern left-right distinction makes the most sense when watching the dynamics of the revolution playing out, at which time 'left' was about a powerful state advancing "progress" by erasing "harmful traditions" and crushing its enemies, and 'right' was.... any opposition to that
and that's where things have been since in then in most of the west: the state mythology is no longer "we maintain the status quo" (as it was for hundreds if not thousands of years) it's "we are the main agent of progress", and the right is _anything_ that threatens to get in the way of that progress by critiquing the state for any reason.
This is only complicated by the fact that sometimes the republicans control the government - but if you look carefully, people don't criticize, _the government_, they criticize the republicans. When someone criticzes 'the government', this is almost _always_ red-coded unless we're talking far left people in america (like marxists) who are startign to have an increasing bond with people on the right as being deeply critical of most aspects of the state. But communists are left wing because both sides there want the state to have more power to advance a notion of progress which more or less lines up with their own.
This framing resolves the thing about 'change' vs 'status quo' with regard to public schools; it doesn't matter that 'getting rid of state-run schools and giving everyone vouchers' would be a big change; it's right-coded because it questions whether this is a job for the state.
It doesn't matter that 'america going to a bitcoin standard' would be a HUGE shift involving new technology, that's right-coded because it opposes the power of the state.
From what i can tell, THIS is the real dividing line between left and right in modernity - do you want the state to be the main agent of progress, or not. If you oppose the state, in _any way_, you are considered right wing. Left wing opposition to bad state policies is always given as an opposition to 'the bad guys in power now', and not "the state shouldn't play a role here period."
The stuff about 'keeping culture where it is', i think, is only a secondary game. Ancient states said 'we should be in power because we keep up the good order', probably because that shit worked and was coherent, and change didn't really happen because economic growth was practically zero.
Modern states in the west say 'we should be in power because we advance progress and prevent those bad old ways from coming back.' I think they _have_ to say this because the alternative is basically not feasible. The only exceptions i could think of are maybe some islamic run nation states.
Advancing progress then often comes down to enriching the wealthy people _behind the scenes_, because of course that would happen.
This is why criticizing Davos and the world economic foundation is generally a 'right wing conspiracy' - governments really _are_ controlled by extremely wealthy actors, but they meet out in the open and talk about global warming, so the left general gives them a pass.
This is a common American idea, but I don't think it's coherent. Lots of expansions of state power are considered right wing (the Patriot Act, anti-trans bathroom laws, bans on drugs and abortion, the Holocaust), while there are quite a lot of left-wing anarchists.
I agree that this is more true in America and that there are some counter points.
But for examples like “bans on drugs” or the patriot act, these have bipartisan support. And the argument on abortion isn’t “the state has no role here”, it’s explicitly “individual states shouldn’t be allowed to make choices here.”
Maybe you could help me understand- why is it that “this matter should be left to the states to decide” is generally a right leaning perspective?
The issue here is these things might be considered right wing, but in none of the cases cited is there anything that stops us making an argument that this is a left-wing change (in fact I think the same basic argument, that this is an expansion of state power over the individual, could be applied in all cases). The wing to which we ascribe something probably depends on where you're looking at it from.
This sounds more true to me than the standard "left / right" narrative. From this point of view, the phony definition of "right" is a tool of the left, whose only function in practice is to label anyone who doesn't cheer the cause-of-the-moment as a "Nazi".
What makes an Egyptian Pharoah more similar to profit-maximizing nanobots than an insectoid hive-mind? Probably the same thing that makes mainstream institutions consider theocratic monarchy, anarcho-capitalism, and fascists all on the right wing even though they are all different in form. I would argue that the right wing is measured relative to the left more than the reverse, so if the left wing primarily emphasizes some kind of program for increasing some kind of equality, then anything that deviates from that is on the right.
Monarchism, ultra-capitalism, and ultra-nationalism are all inegalitarian in their major aim and so they tend to be put on the right. Even though things like the USSR were in practice inegalitarian, because they ideologically aimed at producing what was according to them an egalitarian outcome, we put their ideology of communism on the left. A true hive-mind would be perfectly equal so I guess that's why it would be even further on the left than communism, which mostly concerns abolishing property to make everyone equal in terms of class.
Another reason is that there may be far more ways to aim for inequality than to aim for equality. Take equality to its extreme and perhaps you also need to get more universalist since you need to produce equality everywhere, which implies world government. Take inequality to its extreme, and sure you could have a world empire that enforces inegalitarian laws, but you could also have far more countries than ever. There are more arrangements possible. Equality narrows the tools you need and makes egalitarianism emphasizing ideologies more similar, whereas there are more ways to be unequal. Even consider nationalism; the nationalism of one country may not seem very similar to that of another.
Communism (per the manifesto) aims for equality of material possessions as well as class. However, a "hive mind" might take it a step further with equality of thought, as well.
I would suggest that an insectoid hive mind, being mentally, if not physically, a single entity, would be neutral to the question of egalitarianism. The actual eusociality of insects is slightly less extreme (EO Wilson was fond of saying that Marxists got the right idea but the wrong species) but there is still not enough individuality there for the question even to be necessary.
But yes, egalitarianism vs hierarchy (or, since some right-libertarians object to the term 'hierarchy' for anything other than an explicitly imposed authority structure, substitute stratification) is the main way in which I understand left vs right.
Minor correction: EO Wilson
How silly of me. Thanks, corrected.
"Wilson was fond of saying that Marxists got the right idea but the wrong species)"
They even exhibit the incentive problem, since the drones in a honeybee colony do not do any work.
Drones aren't a great example because they do do something vital i.e. have sex.
There are real cases of fertile workers secretly making their own offspring, though.
"A true hive-mind would be perfectly equal"
I guess it depends on whether or not the hive-mind has a queen. Although I should point out that in insect hives, the queen does not control the workers other than release pheromones to protect and take care of her. Most of the other functions/decisions of the hive are performed in true hive fashion, such as when bees vote on which tree cavity to select after swarming. But also, the drones are sort of freeloaders (but they do serve an important function as sacrificial stock, in addition to their mating function), so it's arguable whether there is true equality for all hive members.
I am also confused as to why a swarm of profit-maximizing nanobots would be right-wing and the opposite of a hivemind, unless there was some severe inequalities between the different nanobots and one class of nanobots were subservient to another class.
I assume the nanobots are dominated by a single entity distinct from the swam, who views all nanobots as disposable and all matter/life as food, while the hivemind is a gestalt consciousness inseparable from the collective, whose component organisms are fully capable of independent thought and action.
> I guess it depends on whether or not the hive-mind has a queen.
You always need someone on the top who will tell the masses how exactly to be perfectly equal. (And of course the individual on the top is an exception to the rule, but one does not talk about it.)
I think you will find that Anarchists very much do not agree with your views on how to achieve equality!
"I am also confused as to why a swarm of profit-maximizing nanobots would be right-wing and the opposite of a hivemind, unless there was some severe inequalities between the different nanobots and one class of nanobots were subservient to another class."
I agree. Both examples strike me as a neat hint of Scott's instincts about the two directions. The salient feature of his max left is no free thought, while the essence of max right is perfectly efficient capital circulation (without any of the social unpleasantness.)
My own leftist eudaimonia would involve something close to perfect parity of power (somehow rendered perpetually stable) rather than the absence of diverse opinion and individuality, but I recognise that's a partisan view.
On the matter of the symbolism of the hive's queen, it might be worth adding that a bee or an ant becomes the queen only thanks to what she is (and isn't) fed by her sisters in her larval stage - in a sense, she's chosen democratically.
Which brings us to another necessary feature for extreme left, and a problem with Wilson's take: genetic similarity cannot matter to the hive's solidarity, else it doesn't count.
Why doesn't it count? are eg. kibbutz invalid for being united partly on ethnic grounds?
I avoid "left/right". It's very misleading, even without extending it to include the Soviet Union and Ancient Egypt.
"The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and particularly business parallels we draw between the two eras are, by their very nature, bound to be wrong."
-- Mark Corrigan, Business Secrets of the Pharaoahs
But the quality of the binding!
My favorite Mark Corrigan quote:
"If there isn't room here for people who stand against everything you believe in, then what sort of a hippy free-for-all is this?"
>why does the 'left/right' nomenclature really make sense?
I agree. I would ask two questions;
-Do you favor the general public, as opposed to the leadership of your country, having more or less access to firearms?
-Do you favor more strict or less strict restrictions regarding immigration into your country?
For both of those questions, you can find very plausible responses coded "left" and very plausible responses coded "right", even within the past 10 years.
I ask this because both gun control and immigration are cited in this thread and others as obvious examples of left v. right issues.
Can you elaborate on the left wing version of pro gun and anti-immigrant policy?
My usual go-to for deciding whether something is left or right is "does this increase/favor power hierarchies?"
Example a: Guns are un-equalizers, in that they enable a very high degree of unilateral violence.
Left wingers are generally anti-gun, whether those guns are in the hands of private citizens or government employees; there is pretty constant opposition to the idea that person A has available an easy way to kill person B. The idea of positive rights comes into it, maybe a leftist pro-gun position would be "everyone gets a free AR-15 and must have it with them at all times" to ensure a level playing field, but this would likely produce bad results. The alternative "hey, no one should have guns" would seem both egalitarian and less accident prone.
Similarly, anti-immigrant policies are generally framed as "it's bad for the people who live here", while the advantages to the immigrants are not really considered. This is obviously pretty hierarchical thinking, because it explicitly values the interests of one group (existing citizens) above another (immigrants). It might be theoretically possible to create a non-hierarchical anti-immigrant position through utilitarian calculus that values all persons equally. This would take the form of something like "immigration is a huge benefit for the immigrant, but mild negative for everyone in the immigrants new country, and it works out to be a net-negative overall". In practice, right wing arguments don't take this form. Probably because very few people think this way (even far-left politicians tend to favor their own citizens well ahead foreigners. Also, if this was done with even a shred of empiricism, we'd end up with an immigration policy so far to the left of what we have now even the leftists would start getting nervous.
Trying to steel-man you a bit here, I'm genuinely curious what you meant by left-coded versions of these positions.
Marx: "Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary"
Good point, although I think leftists being pro-gun in the context of "overthrow the capitalist oppressors" is somewhat different than the contemporary pro-gun position of "everyone should be armed so they can enforce contemporary social norms with lethal violence".
It DOES mean that the writers of the communist manifesto had at least one thing in common with the Oathkeepers, but I think there is some meaningful difference between violently overthrowing the government to put in a new system vs violently overthrowing the government to restore an older system. There's going to be similarities, but anyone trying to equate the two probably has an agenda.
I'm not sure the Oathkeepers are the comparator to Marx here though? Marx's thinking was that the proletariat should be armed. Not armed to the point of a successful revolution and then disarmed, but rather that they should have access to arms to protect against bourgeoisie tyranny. This isn't a different strand of thinking to the Second Amendment but is rather the exact same thing only with a different strata of British society as the stated threat (Britain - we cause the rest of the world to arm itself! Go us). As such, Marx is more like the NRA here.
As always, it's helpful to expand the quotation:
"To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose [the German class-traitor liberals] whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising."
It was composed in London, true, but sent along with the wily shoemaker Heinrich Bauer to try to stiffen the German comrades' spines. I think we can take the Brits off the hook on this one.
More to the point, Marx's injunction clearly referred to a particular incipient struggle. It was not an inexplicably-sacrosanct line from the American constitution, meant to define a fundamental human right.
Unions are generally left coded, and are generally strongly opposed to skilled immigration in their field, because it is competition. Some of this is direct opposition to the granting of visas, some of this is in the form of onerous recertification requirements that make qualified professionally waste years of their life before being allowed to work in their chosen field in a new country (which in practice dramatically reduces how many are willing to migrate).
I see your poin and historically that was the case, but "unions" as a concept are discrete from union members. The former are left coded for sure, but these days they are broadly neutral on immigration, or even a bit positive. By contrast, the unionized steel and auto workers I have met are pretty socially conservative. They don't like immigration (and seem pretty uncomfortable with trans rights!) Seems a bit reductive to call them left-coded based on union membership.
The real cynic in me says back in the 1920s bringing in cheap labour to undermine the unions was an attack against workers. Over.the next 80 years the ruling class figured out the real value of immigrants wasn't in suppressing wages but in breaking up working class solidarity by offering a scapegoat.
"Over the next 80 years the ruling class figured out the real value of immigrants wasn't in suppressing wages but in breaking up working class solidarity by offering a scapegoat."
This seems a little too convenient to be fully believable. It comes across as a post-hoc explanation for how the leftist position on immigration could change over time, without having to admit that leftists were wrong either then or now.
A more believable explanation is that the Democratic Party draws some of its support from unions who are incentivized to oppose cheap immigrant labor, and some of its support from immigrant populations, and the party's default position changes based on which group provides more of an advantage to them at any given time. Likewise, the Republican Party draws some of its support from wealthy capitalists who would prefer to have an influx of cheap immigrant labor, and some of its support from blue collar social conservatives who are opposed to immigration for both economic and cultural reasons, and similarly changes position over time based on what benefits them more.
Your explanation is a more complete one, and I definitely don't want to imply that leftists were correct throughout all history despite a 180 position in their position. Definitely open to leftists being wrong.
That said, I think there is more going on here. OAN, Fox News, Prager U, Breitbart, etc: these are right wing media organizations with heavy editorial influence by their wealthy owners. I don't think the ubiquitous fear stoking about immigration is just about playing to a blue collar base of support. Rather, it functions to inoculate the blue collar from seeking common cause with another group who would otherwise make good allies. I don't think it's a conspiracy or anything, it's just politics and the right is much MUCH better at it.
> why does the 'left/right' nomenclature really make sense?
It doesn't; or rather, it's a sometimes-useful way of expressing the range of political opinions that exists in a particular society at a particular time, but it tends to fall apart once you start comparing different societies or the same society at different times.
In a given society at a given time, there's a small fraction of political idea-space that's actually occupied. You can usually take the range of opinions that exist in that society and map them onto a spectrum which we call "left" to "right" by analogy to the French National Assembly of 1789. But you can't map the whole of political-idea-space into "left" and "right" once and for all.
Because principal component analysis, essentially. If you poll people on a wide range of different political issues, you'll see a surprisingly strong correlation between unrelated ones; left/right is the name we give the axis that best captures that.
Obviously, the two groups sitting on opposite sides of the national assembly in 18th century France probably didn't actually disagree much on abortion, gun control or gay rights, but I do think there's a continuous line of descent from the political division they embodied to today's tribes.
That sort of principal-component line-of-descent is why DW-NOMINATE shows that the Republicans are the heirs of the Federalists, even while liberals like Lin Manuel-Miranda have taken to lauding Alexander Hamilton.
> If you poll people on a wide range of different political issues, you'll see a surprisingly strong correlation between unrelated ones
This makes sense within a country. If you want to have a majority, you need to join forces with someone, even if your issues are orthogonal, so people believing X will be exposed to Y as "this is what people on our side believe".
But in different countries, the historical coalitions could have been different. So each country may have different ideas of what "left" and "right" correspond to. In one country, you have X+Y against W+Z, in another country it is X+W against Y+Z.
A lot of these movements are international, though, so while I totally agree in principle, in practice the coalitions are often surprisingly stable across borders, especially within the anglo-sphere.
A priori that totally could have been true, but the reason I think "left-wing" and "right-wing" are useful concepts is that empirically a lot of the time political movements in different countries seem to align themselves with one another across borders, on broadly left/right lines.
I'm not sure about left/right as theoretical ideologies, but as observed alliances they're clearly a valuable tool for understanding the world.
As far as I can tell, the main difference is how optimistic each side is about human goodness and our capacity for creating a utopia (or at least a significantly better society than we've hitherto managed) on earth. If you think we can, with the right combination of education, social conditions, etc., usher in a new and better age, you're probably of the left; if you think we're basically flawed and can make at best limited improvements in how we run society, you're probably of the left.
Some policies can be justified on both left-wing grounds and right-wing grounds -- e.g., you might support limited government because you think humans are basically good and freeing them from the shackles of external control will enable this innate goodness to shine through (a left-wing position), or because you think humans are basically evil and can't be trusted with too much power (a right-wing position) -- so we find some positions cropping up on both left and right at various points in time. The fundamental difference in how the two sides view human nature and society is, however, constant, as far as I can see.
As for the question of whether there can be a country with two left- or right-wing parties, if both parties think that humans are perfectible but disagree on how to bring this about, I think you could say, based on the definition above, that both parties are left-wing. Conversely, if both parties are sceptical about human perfectibility, I think you could call them both right-wing.
I don't think that's necessarily contradictory to my point -- the left are optimistic about the potential for creating a utopia, so they're perpetually frustrated by people's failure to live up to their expectations. The right, on the other hand, are more pessimistic about utopias, and so are more ready to just take things as they come.
I feel like that's inherently a leftist perspective. You're painting the left as sunny optimists, the right as gloomy sticks in the mud. That is certainly consistent with the left's view of boths sides, but not with the right's. A rightist might put it: the difference is not in the inherent optimism about people, but optimism about *how* any change could best be achieved. If you think it can be done by passing laws and social compulsion, you're on the left. If you think it's better done by person-to-person persuasion and example, or by voluntary organizations, you're on the right. (I'm not saying that's more accurate, just that it's how a rightist would view the same division you're describing.)
Anyway, I'd be hard pressed to say a devout conservative Catholic middle-age Second Amendment enthusiast feels any less optimistic about the potential for (and importance of) the improvement of the human condition than a passionately Marxist college student living in a group home and angling for an NGO job -- but they would almost certainly disagree on the best road to that Utopia.
> d. If you think it can be done by passing laws and social compulsion, you're on the left. If you think it's better done by person-to-person persuasion and example, or by voluntary organizations, you're on the right. (I'm not saying that's more accurate, just that it's how a rightist would view the same division you're describing.)
If i have to pick i side, i identify as being on the right. Specifically, i see myself as right-leaning liberal and think one of the problems with modernity is that this is seen as somehow a contradiction.
A friend told me he thought i was deeply pessimistic. I said i am optimistic about _individual humans but deeply pessimistic about large groups of people coordinating their behavior through hierarchies. This i don't really see much of a difference between giant corporations, mafias, and governments, except in terms of their "products" and marketing approach.
Yah I would actually agree entirely with that. I get along very well with individual humans, almost of whatever stripe. I have friends who are well-nigh Marxists and others who are hard-core libertarian. And I can navigate small organizations reasonably well. But the larger an organization gets, the less human and sensible it seems to get, the more rigid and full of inertia, the more monumentally stupid.
I believe in the Dunbar Number. Basically if it's more people than can fit in a lecture hall, and it isn't single-mindedly devoted to some very clear-cut simply defined task (like the military, or Exxon-Mobil, or a church), then -- watch out. It will be shockingly incompetent and inefficient, lumbering and clumsy, and if it achieves any good at all it will probably be by accident and notwithstanding its intentions.
I have no idea who you are other than your name but i feel tremendously... grateful to have found you here on the comment boards. It often feels isolating inside my own head because i feel like... i'm internally coherent but the outside world thinks i'm crazy for just wanting to love people and have them get along.
I TOTALLY agree on dunbar's number and think of this through a computational lens; dunbar's number puts a limit on functional relationships. If each person can be friends with something like 150 others, then you could have 150^2 = 22,500 people _possibly_ working well together. If you allow for 'transitive trust' to be a thing (i.e. i care about the friends of my friends, even if i don't know them directly) then you get to an upper limit of ~3,000.000.
What do you think of the claim that there are likely new ways of coordinating human behavior at scale that _don't_ involve humans using their meat brains to evaluate each other's status or to determine how and when to apply violence, and that these new modes of cooperation can bring about human flourishing?
> I have friends who are well-nigh Marxists and others who are hard-core libertarian."
I dunno if i have .. friends.. so much as i feel like i can _Talk_ to both of these groups and mostly understand where they are coming from.
Here's a a post i made yesterday in the 'debate communism' subreddit where i was hoping to get a good back and forth going about whether or not bitcoin actually lines up with some marxist concepts in a weird way:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/v7oev8/what_would_marx_say_about_bitcoin_is_it_possible/
Wonder what you think there?
Thanks for the kind comments, but of course this is the Internet, so I'm sure I'll say something that will make you reconsider entirely soon enough :) No, you're certainly not alone.
I know very little about the sociology of bitcoin, so I probably don't have anything valuable to say on that, alas.
You are definitely not alone and agree with both of you.
My take on left-right discourse has been seeing it benevolently as a balance of wanting to be charitable (and maybe courageous) against wanting to be just (and maybe wise).
>isn't single-mindedly devoted to some very clear-cut simply defined task... will be shockingly incompetent
This is the whole point of the (increasingly unpopular) idea that companies should 1: only care about profit and 2: outsource everything outside their core competencies.
A society that's 80% oil companies, 10% server operators and 10% carbon captors is better off than one filled with bloated beasts that try to do all three.
I think what happens is people who are objecting to this notion are conflating:
- what good means, in the abstract, absolute sense
- what the mission of a specific organization should be
the left/right divide (which i do think is real), at its core seems to be a divide about whether we should have ONE BIG org whose entire mission is 'advance good', or whether good is best advanced by the cooperation and competition of a large number of smaller orgs, each of whom has varying missions and competes for limited resources
I'm not sure why you think that "the military, Exxon-Mobil, or a church" *aren't* "shockingly incompetent and inefficient, lumbering and clumsy". I expect all of them to be utterly riddled with parasitic rent-seekers doing awful things and covering up each other's crimes.
Ha ha, yes they are. They're just *less* affected by that disease than the Federal government or the UN, because the single mindedness and easy measurement of the desired outcome provides some kind of restraint on how much nonadaptive internal behavior can be tolerated.
And even then, I will agree they are only reliably better when the desired outcome is very desired indeed, e.g. the military during wartime, Exxon-Mobil when the price of oil is unusually low, a church when it's in the minority and its members are being oppressed.
Actually I'm a rightist who views the left's insane optimism as a major threat to civilised society, but I guess I can be glad at passing the intellectual turing test, lol.
<i>Anyway, I'd be hard pressed to say a devout conservative Catholic middle-age Second Amendment enthusiast feels any less optimistic about the potential for (and importance of) the improvement of the human condition than a passionately Marxist college student living in a group home and angling for an NGO job -- but they would almost certainly disagree on the best road to that Utopia.</i>
Catholicism, at least, would hold that creating a utopia is impossible, due to original sin.
I don't think it's fair to say the left is more optimistic. Their optimistic seems ~entirely~ limited to the power of states to drive progress.
Look at global warming. Would you call it 'optimistic' to believe that we shoudl encourage everyone to consume less energy?
Or, look at firearm ownership. Is it more optimistic to say "people can be trusted to own weapons and use them responsible"? Or is it more optimistic to say "people can't be trusted to own guns, they'll all shoot each other?"
Or, look at taxes and welfare. Is it more optimistic to say, "let people form strong communities and they will naturally look after reach other," or "we must tax the rich to take care of the poor because otherwise it won't happen."
Or, look at free speech. Is it more optimistic to say "words can't hurt people, the marketplace of ideas is the best way to get to the truth, free and open debate are essential?", or "people are harmed by all kinds of ideas so we need to limit what people can say in public for everyone's good'
I agree that you can formulate this difference in terms of optimism, but it's an extremely narrow kind of optimism: namely, optimism about how much good state institutions can do.
Maybe you;'re suffering from Stockholm syndrome?
Dunno about that. Christ is supposed to have redeemed that booboo, right? But yeah sure I said it was a *road* to Utopia. Anyone with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt is going to conclude it'll be a long road indeed. But I think they would also say well let's get cracking then, no time to waste, march. It's not a religion of despair.
I feel like this is inherently a Rightist perspective. The Right is exclusively about enriching the wealthy and the Left is about protecting workers. Sure the Right will occasionally throw a bone to the Christians (abortion) or gun owners (2A) but the entire small government spiel is just about cutting taxes on the rich. Voters who believe otherwise are just suckers (unless you are a wealthy aristocrat).
/s(but not entirely)
> ut the entire small government spiel is just about cutting taxes on the rich.
What do you think about the world economic forum's annual meeting at davos where billionaries and CEO's discuss how the world should be run.
is that a right wing organization?
My comment was (largely) sarcasm/snark as designated by the"\s". However, I am quite wealthy and yet I often have discussions about how the world should be run. Am I supposed to question my own political position?
I don't actually understand why anyone having a discussion is necessarily part of any political party. I am also completely unaware of any economic forum at Davos. Your post comes across as if you view it is some shadowy conspiratorial illuminati thing...
Try reading the wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum
Note all the warnings at the top.
> Your post comes across as if you view it is some shadowy conspiratorial illuminati thing...
This is a very common response, which i find puzzling coming from people concerned about plutocrats. Which particular plutcrats are you concerned with?
When i mention a specifc group, "mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies – typically global enterprises with more than five billion US dollars in turnover –", which meets annually to talk about global governance, people will often respond that this is a conspiracy theory.
It seems that it's fine and well to talk about plutocrats, as long as we stay in the abstract realm and avoid mentioning the specific names. Why is that?
Notice that your response is identical to that of the dutch prime minister here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaTr3_pRsJQ
Er...yes? I mean, that's what I said it was, the way a righty would put it.
But it's been quite a while since the left in the US was all about protecting workers. This is a characterization that was true in 1952, not 2022. That's why Trump's margin of victory came from non-college educated small-town whites, the folks who have been absolutely hammered by industrial job loss over the past 45 years. Go into any small mom-'n'-pop store, heavy industry shop floor, tool, truck, or farm equipment shop, and you are not going to find a lot of Democrats. You'll find a bunch of guys driving pickups with TRUMP FUCK YEAH stickers on them, who only wish he'd nuked China, sold all of Alaska to Exxon Mobil for oil exploration, and (of course) built an eleventy-one foot wall along the border to keep out people who'll work for lower wages.
You'll note that a major part of Trump's tax bill was the SALT limitation, which *raised* taxes -- but very specifically on high wage earners in blue states, like stockbrokers in NYC or Facebook millionaires in Silicon Valley. That's a long way from plutocrat tax cutting, which, again, is something that was true of the right in 1952 but that's a long time ago.
I agree completely that the Left has done a crappy job of protecting Unions. It is generally accepted that Clinton was a disaster for Unions and many Dems (myself included) feel like Obama came up far short of where we hoped.
As noted by the "\s" at the end of my post, it was mostly sarcasm. However, I would still argue that the Republican Party as a whole (not voters or necessarily individual politicians) is ALL about enriching the rich. Trumps tax cut that you mention was a massive(and permanent) tax cut for the wealthy plus a temporary tax cut for the middle class (expires 2026). The SALT change also expires in 2026.
So 100% tax cuts for the rich with a little sugar so the rest don't notice. This sounds like pretty standard Republican fare to me...
Well, with our highly progressive tax system, rich people have lots of taxes to cut, the poor less so. Some would say "well give the poor money then" as the obvious fix, but a) money has to come from somewhere and b) thats increasing govt power & influence, not decreasing it.
Oh nonsense. If anything it favored the lower middle class, as the top rate went from 39.6% to 37%, a reduction of 6.6% in your marginal tax bill, while the 25% bracket when to 22% (a reduction of 12%) and the 15% bracket to 12% (a reduction of 20%).
This is a talking point that was worn out 30 years ago when I first heard it, since it rests on the unexamined (and of course utterly incorrect) assumption that the poor are somehow paying something even remotely approaching the amount of money the better off are paying.
As it happens, the tax system is already grossly unfair. For example, the top 5% earners earn 36% of all income but pay 59% of all tax, and the bottom 50% earn 12% of all income but pay 3% of all tax.
I mean, in a system where the lower half of earners are paying 3% of the taxes and the upper half are paying 97%, yeah, pretty much *any* broad tax break you give will return lots more money to the upper half. The lower half are forking out practically nothing, so there's nothing to give back.
The poor hardly have any taxes to cut. I always love the surveys where you ask liberals how progressive taxes should be, and they always design progressive taxation systems that are LESS progressive than what we currently have while also believing our current system in unacceptably regressive.
It's easy to have two (or more) left-wing and two right-wing parties... in a parliamentary system with proportional voting.
I think you're describing a real dichotomy in how people see the world, but one that has approximately nothing to do with how parties are categorised
I think they make sense if you assign them to "collectivist" and "individualist". Someone feeling collectivist will favor big, active government, will want the voice of the majority to have very substantial power, will venerate elections, will be suspicious of other sources of collective power (e.g. corporations, churches, private organizations), will want state power to primarily redress injustice and inequality, and be optimistic about the ability of planners and government to accurately foretell and alter the future.
Conversely someone feeling individualistic will favor small, limited government, will want the voice of the majority to have significant limitations vice individual rights, will not be overly enamored of elections -- will be more OK with appointed offices, for example -- will be just fine with, and maybe favor, other smaller sources of collective power that rely on persuasion and voluntary membership, like corporations, churches, and private organizations, will want state power to the extent it's used at all be mostly used to address security threats (e.g. national security and policing), and be pessimistic about the ability of planners and government both to predict the future and to affect it positively.
These seem like perpetually valid categories of human political impulse, in part because they are *both* ways that any normal human being might feel, depending on his personal circumstances and history, and on the situation around him. If we get alone well with our neighbors, have a great job and high respect in the community, plenty of income, we might feel individualistic. If we feel alienated from our neighbors, struggle to find a good job and high pay, we might feel collectivist. If there's a war or giant recession going on, we probably feel collectivist. If times are good, we probably feel more individualistic. If we feel life is generally fair and anyone can become President, we feel individualistic. If we feel life is unfair and there are structural barriers all over the place, we feel collectivist. Probably at various times in our lives, we naturally feel one way or another -- probably when both young and old, we feel more collectivist, and the middle more individualist.
But how these map onto real political parties is tough. They probably do better at some times than others.
I'm confused here. Why would a collectivist be suspicious of "other sources of collective power."?
is it more reasonable to say that the right framing here, at least for the modern left, is "supporting of state power to advance a specific kind of ideal", and then the modern right is just some nonsense coalition of whoever happens to oppose the state, either because they dislike states in principle (libertarians/tradcons) or they just want the state to advance a _differnet_ agenda (natcons, trump, etc)
as fractured as the left is, the right, as a coalition, makes even less sense and i think is only held together because the only thing that unites it is opposition to the left
For the same reason the police don't like organized vigilantes, churches don't like schisms, cults don't like other cults, et cetera. Power doesn't like rivals. If you are highly interested in collective power exerted through government, you automatically dislike other power sources *not* exerted through government.
I dunno how well my labels map onto what people call the modern left and right. If I had to characterize the latter without using "you know what I mean" labels, what I'd say is that the modern left -- or more precisely the leadership and senior members of it -- feels more like a religious movement. It likes collective action, yes, but it has a strong sense of moral righteousness, a deep suspicion of heresy, and a close attention to dogma -- how, precisely, one is supposed to speak and think about things. It's very much concerned with salvation, both collective (as a nation, or even species) and individual. It wants to heal your soul, and that of the nation, and it's OK with burning you at the stake if that's what it takes.
I guess the modern right already mostly has a (private) religion, so they're not so much into the religion of political ideology. I think a lot of it is still traditional conservatives, and some libertarian (grumpy, unwilling) fellow travelers, but it has developed a strong nativist populist wing in the last 20 years, a lot of exiled Truman/Reagan Democrat lunch bucket voters who feel severely left out by the tech revolution and NASDAQ wealth. They don't become dominant because this is matched by an influx of immigrants, blacks, and browns into uneasy alliance with the left because the left is very willing to prioritize their grievances over the poor whites who have edged over to the right (plus the hostility of the nativists on the right pisses them off).
It ends up strange, though. You have soi-disant "leftists" going to the mattress for the Standard Oils of the 21st century (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) as zealously as any laissez-faire Republican from the McKinley era, and you have soi-disant "rightists" getting worked up about industrial job loss and inveighing against skilled immigration, wanting tariffs and protectionism.
yeah i think we are in agreement here:
> collective power exerted through government,
This is the key variable, i think. i consider myself a big can of collectivism ~outside~ of government.
I suppose it should also be said that the fun thing about political coalitions is that people can be in either one for _all kinds_ of different reasons that are mutually antagonistic.
Step too far outside of government, though, and you're another bandit. Governing small via elections and or 2nd amendment allows the individual to remain free of unchosen associations, and hence at liberty.
"I argue that this key “left vs. right” inclination to focus more vs less on a talky collective is the main parameter that consistently determines who people tend to ally with in large scale political coalitions."
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/08/forager-v-farmer-elaborated.html
WOW thanks for sharing, this is great
So if that chart can be believed, US Republicans are slightly more supportive of contraception than US Democrats?
Also only 50% of americans of either party thinks contraception is ok?? something has to be wrong with the phrasing of that question, that result makes no sense.
Edit: Ahh i see, other commentors are pointing out that "morally acceptable: yes/no" wasn't the exhaustive set of options. Yeah I think this chart is pretty bad then (albeit proooobably enough to make the point Scott wants it to make). Seems plausible to me that almost 100% of americans think "contraception is not morally wrong" but more democrats think it isn't a moral question at all.
I’d put it more at 80%, and it would also depend on the phrasing/context. I was raised Catholic and I know it’s morally wrong, but if asked “are you using any?” I would have to answer yes.
I don't think that's the biggest problem with the chart. It reports that American Democrats and Republicans both have an opinion on extramarital affairs that is not far off of the most intolerant in the world, represented by Lebanon.
But an "intolerant" view of extramarital affairs would involve sentencing the sinners to death! That's not even an unusual policy, historically. Americans are nowhere near that kind of attitude toward extramarital affairs; either the positioning of the American parties on the graph is wildly, wildly off, or almost all of the horizontal space on that graph is devoted to a relatively tiny portion of the policy space.
(I think it's the second one; if I search for "penalties for adultery in Lebanon", I see a result claiming that the penalty for a woman committing adultery is three to twenty-four months in jail. That is one end of the graph, but it's a tolerant position from a global perspective. If I search for "adultery honor killings", there's no shortage of those. Quoting from https://www.mei.edu/publications/iranian-women-campaign-stop-rise-honor-killings,
> Article 630 of the Iranian Penal Code allows a man who witnesses his wife having sexual intercourse with another man to kill both of them if he is certain that she is a willing participant
But also, going back to American political parties, there aren't any of them that would support three months in jail for adultery.
)
I keep being surprised by American's cavalier attitude on accidental children without a stable father. In my corner of the world (Eastern Europe) that would code as incredibly low IQ.
I almost wrote "low class" instead, but truth is that the low class (and gypsy) habit of young couples is to skip civil marriage, but they still talk about themselves as being married and behave as such when children appear. Of course not marriages survive, but a supermajority of couples at least make a serious effort.
The "low class" might be the more pertinent angle. There's a phenomenon where the elites start to devalue and demean the institution of marriage, and the attitudes trickle down from the elites to the lower classes. Except that for the elites it's largely posturing; the elites' own childbirths and child-rearing continue to happen inside of marriage at an above-90% and virtually unchanging rate, while for the lower classes it nosedives. And then there's a whole range of downstream outcomes for those children which correlate negatively with not having a father present, that continue to cripple the lower classes and that don't affect the higher classes.
This phenomenon, driven by elites devaluing tradition, has been most pronounced in the US, but also UK and France. In the US it particularly affects Blacks -- which over just a few decades flipped from "one in five children growing without a father" to "one in four children growing with a father" -- but the nosedive is present across the other populations as well (except for their elite fragments).
Thomas Sowell commented about this, saying that the Black family had survived centuries of chattel slavery but was not able to survive the welfare state. I think the welfare state was a precondition and facilitator but not the real cause nor trigger of this; the true thing that the Black family did not survive was the bourgeois counterculture revolution of the sixties.
It's funny how I came from seeing the sixties as a miracle in my younger years, to the most likely cause of the 70s mystery nosedive and the following stagnation.
Also I keep wondering how influential "elites" really are, and how do you define them. One option would be the ones that generate and spread ideas: the most educated, the writers, journalists, activists, upper middle class and so on. That's what we'd like to think, but when in my country we had a party created and supported by them, it topped at 9% of the vote.
Or one could say the elites are those that own the companies that employ those writers and journalists, and who have a heavy (but subtle) say in which ideas get disseminated. In this case it's more like the 0.001%. A case study here would be nuclear power in Germany: was it really intelligentsia that decided that nuclear power is bad and should be phased out? Or were the 0.001% owning the industries that preferred cheap gas over nuclear, and created a social context ultimately friendly to Nordstream?
"nuclear power in Germany"; my guess would be that lots of people shit their pants after Fukushima (remembering Chernobyl) and the decision to stop using nuclear energy was about votes.
Yeah, but this is more like a tool or excuse. For some reason, the actual result was a lor more dramatic in Germany. Why?
"Greens" parties have been campaigning against nuclear power since the cold war, AFAICT primarily because nuclear power and nuclear weapons are concepts that are close together in people's minds and nuclear weapons obviously and justifiably scare people.
How to define elites? I think the pre-1789 France had defined them quite well, defining two separate tiers of elites. Their three-tiered division of society was #1: aristocracy, #2: clergy, #3: commoners. This essential division has remained until today, albeit with added uncertainty and nervousness about retaining elite status.
From the 18th century began a takeover, with the academia and media jumping into the shoes of the clergy, as the elite with non-hereditary membership (mostly) which shapes minds, and the capitalists jumping into the shoes of the aristocracy, as the elite with hereditary membership (mostly) which exerts power.
What I mean by "uncertainty" is that before, if you were a bishop or count or lord or archbishop, then that is what you were. Today you can be a "journalist", and exert massive influence or be completely inconsequential - depending *in part* on your merits, but largely on which position you get and where, and are you able to keep it. "Is someone a #2 elite or not" boils down to whether they've successfully jumped into the shoes of the clergy and stayed in them -- not on whether they are /called/ a journalist or professor.
The #1 elites are more constrained today than they were before; they have to play by a quite larger set of rules. Then again, lobbying and capital go a long way in determining what the rules *are*.
Another more recent shift, is one of dependency. The #2 elites were traditionally reasonably independent from the #1 elites. In the tumult of the 2008-2012 period, with its large shifts in financing streams and various takeovers, I believe the #2's to have become more dependent on #1's than ever before. And I don't think any (post-2012) consequence had been good.
He's quite right. Something shocking if you study 19th American history is that immediately following Emancipation, black rates of marriage, out of wedlock birth, incarceration, and even joblessness did not differ substantially from whites in similar economic circumstances. That changed drastically over the following 50 years. Even within my lifetime, things have swung around weirdly: in 1979 black men earned about 80% of what white men earned, while black women earned 95% of what white women earned[1], while in 2016 that had fallen to 70% and 82%. I mean...dafuq? I thought the modern generation was way less racist and far more tuned in to social equity than we Neanderthals of the 80s. And yet...
Whatever is going on, it is neither (since 1865) slavery nor something unique to blacks or black culture, because none of those would explain the strange up-and-down historical trends of black welfare vis-a-vis whites.
---------------------
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/beyond-bls/the-unexplainable-growing-black-white-wage-gap.htm
>Whatever is going on, it is neither (since 1865) slavery nor something unique to blacks or black culture, because none of those would explain the strange up-and-down historical trends of black welfare vis-a-vis whites.
1942, not 1865. I wrote a whole thing on it elsewhere in these comments and can't be bothered to repost it here, but the idea that chattel slavery ended in the US with the 13th amendment is a sham.
Sorry, I don't believe in metaphorical slavery, and I would guess neither would you if you'd ever actually been a slave.
Actual, non-metaphorical chattel slavery. The 13th Amendment has some words in it that would lead you to think that slavery was made illegal, but it didn't provide any enforcement mechanism or proscribe any punishment for the crime of engaging in slavery, and neither did any other laws anywhere in the south. For a while the practice was rebranded "debt peonage", which was itself illegal after the 1867 Federal Anti-Peonage Statute, but it was chattel slavery with some extra pretense smeared on top. In fact, when these latter-day slaveowners were brought up on charges under said Anti-Peonage Statute, they argued (successfully) that because there was no real debt involved, it wasn't peonage but instead slavery, which again had no proscribed punishment under any legal code. Wild, I know. Look up "Tallapoosa Peonage Cases" and prepare to be horrified.
This persists up until world war 2, where the continued situation made for bad war propaganda. Here's a document filed by FDR's attorney general on the matter. I doubt they would have bothered if it was just "metaphorical" slavery. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591
Increasing gaps between rich and poor, a feature of the post-neoliberal world, will drive excaerbate existing differences, all else being equal.
We're not looking at the gap between rich and poor, we're looking at the gap between white and black. One hopes you don't just substitute the word "poor" everywhere you see the word "black."
i don't. I'm going from your own claim "in 1979 black men earned about 80% of what white men earned, while black women earned 95% of what white women earned[1], "
I am no expert on black history in America, but it kinda looks like the start of the decline you identified corresponds with a decade of Republican rule and the war on drugs, followed by a tough-on-crime-neoliberal. The effect of mass incarceration in black communities isn't exactly mysterious.
I'm no expert myself, but my bet would be the massive influx of hard drugs (mostly cocaine, at that time) and the formation of the cartels was destabilising things *before* the massive ramp up of policing that that triggers.
Yes, in my memory the "War on Drugs" was a direct consquence of the sharp ramp-up in availability of high quality low cost crack and cocaine in American cities.
A decade, yes. But you'll note there are 4 decades between the two points cited, and that includes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, too. If you're going to lay *all* the blame on the Reagan Presidency, to my mind you're in the same category of implausibility as those who argue the problems of black out of wedlock birth in 2022 can be directly blamed on the existence of slavery 157 years ago, a causal chain so tenuous it would be laughed out of consideration were it applied to any other social ill.
Yes, indeed. Sowell also remarked "Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty?"
The dive from 80%/95% (1979) to 70%/82% (2016) happened in the wake of the effective dissolution of the Black family. The 1979 "high" was already a good decade into that dissolution -- but well, there's a delay until the affected generation of children join the workforce.
If the 1979 gap had to do with whatever level of racism was common in 1979, I would assume the racism decreased until 2016 but not sufficiently to counter the ill effects of Black family dissolution. I.e. that if the overall level of racism in 2016 had stayed the same as in 1979, the gap would have been quite worse than 70%/82%.
Discussing this phenomenon is a large part of the point of Charles Murray's book _Coming Apart_.
This data looks very suspicious
It's missing data. The actual survey has three options, is a thing a)moral, b) immoral or c) not a moral issue. The ones that look weird have large chunks saying it's not a moral issue.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/09/28/4-very-few-americans-see-contraception-as-morally-wrong/
Looks like the cause might be the larger number of minorities in the democratic party.
From now on, I will claim that anarchism-capitalists are moderates and cite to this piece
So I haven't read the source in depth, but the numbers in the diagram seem really odd to me. Barely 20% of democrats think abortion is morally acceptable? 30% of both parties think premarital sex is morally acceptable? Even less think homosexuality is okay? And alcohol use is at less than half?
If nothing else, how does this square with e.g. 70% support for gay marriage (https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same-sex-marriage.aspx as the first source I found).
Yeah, that chart looks dodgy to me too. Also, Japan is the world leader in gambling being morally acceptable? Gambling is incredibly illegal in Japan and tied to various criminal activity.
Re: Japan, there's also pachinko parlors covered in brightly colored popular cartoon characters. "They're not gambling, they're gaming" but they're gambling and they're very popular.
My impression is that pachinko is fairly stigmatized. Like no one thinks people who spends all day in pachinko parlors is morally upright.
I don't think people who gamble all day are morally upright either, but I used to have a monthly poker game with friends, buy in $5. There's pachinko addicts, but there's also people who stop by for an hour when work lets out early.
That said, I tried to look up popularity of various games - apparently WSOP would have us believe 20% of Americans play online poker? More realistic ~5% of Japanese people play pachinko. Maybe that's just one being in person only.
Pachinko is not especially stigmatized. Doing it all day in lieu of a job would be, but that's a separate question from the people who go once or twice a week for a couple of hours.
Reading further, there were actually five different responses possible: "morally acceptable", "morally unacceptable", "not a moral issue", "depends on the situation", and "don’t know". In a lot of these, "not a moral issue" is a large category. They also left out around a third of the responses that were independent. There's a chart on the fourth page that shows all the responses for the US.
I guess you can still use this to show that the parties don't differ that much in views, or at least the people answering the surveys by phone in 2013 who preferred different parties at that time didn't differ by that much.
I like how the paper labels its eight topics "moral issues", thereby settling the question if they are moral issues already.
Also, to nitpick, for almost any topics, the correct answer is "depends on the situation".
Even with universal taboos like homicides or cannibalism there are always exceptional situations.
Abortion: mostly wrong when against the preference of the pregnant person
Alcohol Use: mostly wrong when used on unwitting third parties
Contraception Use: possibly wrong when keeping your partner under the impression that conception is desired. (On might argue that the deception is the real wrong in that case, though.)
Extramarital Affairs: Fine in an open relationship, possibly ok if spouse is in long-term coma?
Divorce: Really context-dependent?
Gambling: Depends on if its Russian roulette or opening Magic boosters
Any kind of sex: consent? public decency? etc.
One might argue that people will mostly agree that from the typical context, most people will have a clear conception that "Alcohol use" probably does not include disinfectant use, and "abortion as a means of furthering genocide" is very non-central from the general use of "abortion".
I am very much not sold on "morally acceptable" vs "not a moral issue". Assuming almost nobody thinks any of the issues under consideration are strictly required (e.g. "anyone who does not use alcohol is a bad person"), there is little practical difference.
Assuming these researchers asked about the existence of a god instead.
The theist answers: yes.
The strong atheist answers: no.
The agnostic answers: I don't know.
The nitpicker answers: Depends on the situati^W on how you define god(s).
The igtheist answers: mu (as in http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html).
So the researchers would either report from that:
* Only one in five affirms the existence of god(s)
* Only one in five denies the existence of god(s)
Of course, these studies likely involved translations, which complicates things further, as there is seldom a 1:1 mapping. Perhaps the Japanese word used for gambling was more associated with "games of chance" than "people playing poker with stacks of dollar bills on a table in some crime den". Perhaps the phrasing of "not a moral issue" was stranger in Czech so people were more likely to pick "morally acceptable".
For example in German, while "Sterbehilfe" is technically synonymous to "Euthanasie", the latter is permanently tainted by Nazi crimes while the former is not, so I would expect you would get quite different replies depending on which term you used.
is there anyone who can't taste the intensely bitter flavor of every alcoholic beverage?
Alcohol is bitter?
it is to me. Maybe it's a mutation that's not universal. It seems like that sort of thing would sweep to fixation if your ancestors had alcohol long enough.
Horribly. I cannot fathom anyone who drinks because they enjoy the flavor.
To me it registers as a sort of sharp sweetness that is an enjoyable flavor on it's own when diluted.
I would actually venture that for the majority of humans alcohol is not particular bitter at all, supported by the extensive popularity of including it in recreational drinks, several of which are not even trying to hide the taste.
Alcohol has a very distinctive (and distinctly toxic-valenced) flavor, but I definitely wouldn't characterize it as bitter. The only bitter drinks I've tasted are ones that derive it from something else (like hops in IPAs.)
Pure alcohol burns and tastes "like plastic" to me. A complex, slightly unpleasant flavor, combined with an intense burn. I think the enjoyment of the flavor of very strong drinks (like sipping a shot of tequila) is an example of benign masochism, just like eating hot peppers. It's naively unpleasant, but to someone with a taste for it the combination of flavor, bite and texture is extremely appealing.
Edit: To be clear, I speak from personal experience. I rather like sipping full-strength tequila/scotch/bourbon and even GOOD vodka.
"Toxic-valenced" matches the use of "bitter" better than any definition I've heard. It is often defined as "alkaline" but that is rare that people mean that.
I have that too but I'm pretty sure most people don't.
Alcohol doesn't taste bitter to the vast majority of people, otherwise denaturing alcohol (adding substances to make it taste intensely bitter) wouldn't work.
denatured alcohol is just alcohol with 5% methanol usually. Google tells me methanol's taste is almost the same as ethanol, but it's vastly more toxic. So basically, denatured alcohol is just alcohol that's been subtly poisoned so people can't make it into drinks and liquor laws aren't violated by the sale. Seems very sus from a utilitarian standpoint.
Usually? In Canada there are dozens of approved denatured alcohol formulations (under the Excise Act), most of which don't rely on methanol at all. Almost all of them alter the taste so that the resulting liquid is unpalatable: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-2005-22/FullText.html
The poll also had a "not a moral issue" option which means basically the same thing as "morally acceptable", and was a more common answer than "morally acceptable" on a lot of questions.
It would be better to graph the percent answering "morally unacceptable".
What does "morally unacceptable" mean?
It could include opinions from "I don't like it but the government shouldn't make laws against it" to "capital crime".
My thought exactly.
I tend to measure people's tolerance not primarily by how many different things they accept at one tier, but rather how many tiers they have. By which I mean questions like these:
- How many sorts of people who you'd never become close friends with, would you invite to your house parties and have deep, open-minded conversations with?
- How many sorts of people who you'd never invite to your home, are you still polite to and think are worth listening to?
- How many people who you think are such assholes that you don't even need to be polite to them much of the time, do you think ought to have their views discussed clearly and honestly in the public sphere?
- How many people whose view are so odious that they might as well just be told to shut up, do you still think should not be imprisoned or otherwise coerced by the state?
Having a healthy number of tiers is much more important to me than precisely which behaviors or views someone has on each tier.
When the left/far left says "all parties are right wing" they mean to the right of Western Europe. The left in the US has a deeply post-colonial mindset about how Western Europe is great. And often a somewhat spotty knowledge of what those countries are actually like. If you press them with those maps about how being gay is illegal in like 90% of the world they'll start doing No True Scotsmen and you'll eventually find out they mostly mean Denmark.
The right/far-right, being the party of rah-rah patriotism, is less likely to do this. They're more likely to argue that the US is the best of the world basically in all ways. But when they do it's often some kind of noble savage thing. Yes, Hungary or Thailand might be poor, but at least they have social cohesion brought on by traditional values! Men are men and women are women! None of that western decadence! Or whatever.
It's all a sign of the provincialism of American politics. Other countries don't really exist except as an opportunity to bash your opponents. People will proudly pronounce on how the Swedish healthcare system works without even knowing what the SSAP is.
What maps show that being gay is illegal in like 90% of the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_laws_pertaining_to_homosexual_relationships_and_expression.svg shows homosexuality as illegal in few countries outside the Muslim world; I'd guess perhaps around 20% of the world population in total.
You're reading the map poorly. That map shows it's illegal in most of Africa, most of the Middle East, and most of Asia plus a few parts of the Americas. It's also missing a few countries like Belarus. 90% might be an overstatement. But China and India alone each almost reach your 20% threshold. Put together you have a significant majority of the world's population.
Grey on this map doesn't mean "no data", it means that it's legal but there is no recognition as registered partnership or marriage. In China and India it's legal and even some form of domestic partnership is available, but there are laws restricting advocacy (which of course is still far to the right of the US).
I Googled this again. Turns out I was slightly out of date in India: it's no longer illegal in India as of 2018. Still illegal in China though. Regardless, while I'm always up for pedantry, the main point (that gay rights are more advanced in the US than most of the world) I think stands.
ETA: Which, for the record, I think is a good thing.
Wikipedia says it's legal in China since 1997. Other google results I've looked at discuss discrimination and "narrowing of gay spaces", but don't say it's illegal.
Digging a bit deeper it appears that private gay sex is decriminalized. Public gay activity is illegal. Being gay is still classified as a mental disorder and can be used as a cause for re-education or involuntary commitment. Likewise there's widespread use of nuisance laws against the gay community. Hong Kong and Macau are different and apparently serve as a legal safe haven.
Also, anecdotally: Major liberal cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen basically ignore gay people whatever the law says. Maybe if they really disturb the peace or something it might get piled on other charges. But you can see same sex couples out and about without issue. As you leave these areas things get much less tolerant much more quickly.
ETA: I was wrong. I have no excuse for misreading the map. Thanks to 10240 for correcting me.
I immediately noticed that Jamaica is grey in this map, which surprised me because the Sodomy Act is still in effect. The title of the map makes me wonder exactly what it is supposed to be reporting. Sure, in the case of Jamaica, an individual can (should they have a death wish) legally announce that they are homosexual, but if they engage in an homosexual act, they are subject to being jailed.
Just an observation.
No, Jamaica is yellow on the map (indicating illegal but no arrests in the last 3 years).
Keep in mind, that Denmark has privatised firefighters and lots of other rather neoliberal policies that would be seen as sacrilegious in either American party.
(Eg many Americans still thinks that government-run snail mail is a great idea, and somehow necessary for democracy or so.)
As you say, many Americans on both left and right have a nebulous idea of what social democracies in central and northern Europe actually get up to in practice.
Privatized firefighters and (whatever danish policy this straw American finds desirable) are not automatically a package deal just because the current government of Denmark has both. This should be obvious.
I would bet a pretty penny that Denmark is not letting urban fires burn because someone is late on their payment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falck_(emergency_services_company)
I think what is going on is that Denmark pays Falck and Falck hires the fire fighters. I'm sure they are NOT selling fire-fighting services to the homeowner.
I would NOT call that "privatization".
> Keep in mind, that Denmark has privatised firefighters and lots of other rather neoliberal policies that would be seen as sacrilegious in either American party.
But privatised firefighters are common in the US.
Actually ~70% of American firefighters work for private organizations[1]. Overall only about 20% of US fire departments are government-run, the rest are private nonprofits with which cities and towns contract for services. Emergency services, too, including EMTs, ambulance services, and most emergency rooms are all private, although most big counties have a county hospital and the county FD also provides emergency services.
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[1] https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-tools/Emergency-Responders/US-fire-department-profile
Denmark has no minimum wage (they do have unions though), no birthright citizenship, much more restrictive immigration than the US, and forced assimilation and Christianization of immigrants.
I agree with the mainstream right arguing supporting the US blindly. A lot of the right though especially nowadays is at least critical of some things about the US and blames at least some things in the US for spreading leftism, like Hanania or Yarvin. Nowadays you have Tucker Carlson praising Hungary and so on.
I agree that American politics is relatively provincial, and countries are often brought up to bash the other side. But I think that America is hardly unique in this regard.
"forced assimilation and christianization of immigrants"... whut??? Are you seriously believing this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Denmark
Not forced conversion, but there is https://www.thetrumpet.com/18331-denmark-handshake-enforces-european-values-on-muslims and https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immigrant-ghettos.html ... I don't think it's inaccurate to say there is forced assimilation and Christianization of immigrants. Perhaps it's misleading, it's not all immigrants, but it is some of them, and it is not "forced", as it's on pain of removing welfare payments.
Direct quotes from NYT: "Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments."
Okay, thanks for the clarification, I think I get it. Three remarks:
- The Trumpet article is mostly about conditions to obtain citizenship, not about living as an immigrant in Denmark, which in my eyes is completely different. "Forced assimilation of immigrants" is very much not the same as "some measure of assimilation necessary to obtain full citizenship".
- I don't have access to the NYT, but the excerpt you quote seems to me to be plain false : there are no compulsory schools in Denmark (to say nothing of preschool!), and there is even a school voucher system touching 15% of young children. (On the Danish tradition of independent schooling:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120302215828/http://oldfraser.lexi.net/publications/critical_issues/1999/school_choice/section_05.html)
Furthermore suggesting there are different rules for "ghetto children" is tendentious and infuriating. I spent the last thirty minutes searching for independent confirmation for this and found none. What program is the NYT purporting to talk about?
(Besides, I'm always irked by this irresponsible use of the word "ghetto". But I guess I'm opposing a time-honored American thing.)
- I was first taken aback because in western Europe northern Europe and Scandinavia are generally viewed as especially tolerant and non-assimilationist, albeit with a very homogenous lutheran/calvinist cultural tradition (and tremendous far-right backlash). Turns out at least the Trumpet chiefly talks about things common to most of western Europe.
Even charitably assuming the NYT article isn't actively misleading, I would contend it is quite a stretch to call teaching about cultural traditions "forced Christianization". As a western European I had to learn a lot in school about islamic beliefs, and calling this "islamization" or whatever would be rather absurd.
The NYT is talking about the "Ghetto package" that was introduced in 2018 (https://www-kl-dk.translate.goog/kommunale-opgaver/boern-og-unge/dagtilbud/ghettopakkens-lovelementer/?_x_tr_sl=da&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp ).
A separate law defines the "ghetto list" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_(Denmark) ): vulnerable public housing areas that has a high proportion of crime, unemployment, non-western immigrants, low education and low income. Several different interventions has been applied to attempt to improve the conditions of these areas.
It is completely true that children living in these areas has to attend kindergarden or a similar offering where they will be exposed to Danish language, culture and values. In principle they can be home-schooled if the parents can ensure that the children learn these things at home.
There is very much an assumption in Denmark that the goal is to assimilate immigrants (in Denmark we call it integration), especially children. Study upon study has shown a very high correlation between outcomes and levels of integration, and it seems quite intuitive that children who struggle with haven't the learned Danish language and learned how to behave in company with Danish children, will have quite a disadvantage when starting in a Danish public school.
I quite disagree with calling it Christianization, though. They have to learn about traditions like Christmas and Easter, but we are talking Santa Claus, christmas tree and the Easter Bunny, not gospel and bible study.
It also cuts the other way: To improve integration outcomes, children/young adults from high SES in upper secondary education (Gymnasium) are currently being blocked from attending their school of choice to schools and moved to schools with high proportion of immigrant children.
Oh, thanks! That's interesting. So there really are special rules for "ghetto" children (and they do officially call it "ghetto").
In France the previous government avoided creating special discriminatory rules by making preschool mandatory for all. (But, as in Denmark, you can argue you're teaching at home, or choose some private preschool of your choice).
Totally with you on not calling this "christianization" and prefering "assimilation" to integration".
AIUI, residents of the 'ghetto' areas also face more severe criminal sentences and are easier to evict. The areas are often slated for redevelopment (gentrification) without adequate guarantees that there will be somewhere for the residents to move to. (source: grauniad)
To the extent that residents live where they do out of economic necessity (accounting not just for housing costs but also commutes) rather than an unwillingness to assimilate, those measures will only spread out the problem while exacerbating it.
I would consider imposing what looks to me like a non-solution upon a disadvantaged group selected in a way that explicity references non-western ancestry to be outside the overton window in many places.
Denmark has no minimum wage, but it has incredibly powerful sectoral union that cover basically everybody in the country that imposes minimum wages on those sectors of the economy.
As a left-wing social democrat, I'll overturn the minimum wage tomorrow for sectoral bargaining for like 95% of employees.
Denmark also has sectoral bargaining by corporations. The way it works is that there's a union representing all the workers and an association representing all the employers and they negotiate with each other for sector wide standards. And then individual unions/employers negotiate in that framework. So "imposes" is probably not the right word. The corporations do not just have to follow union diktat and have significant power. In some ways more power than they do in the US.
The union half is legal in the US. But corporations organizing like that is illegal. Most progressives want to keep that status quo. Which makes the political coalition that keeps it alive and makes it work untenable in the US.
Considering half the country is under right-to-fire laws in the US, unions have nowhere close to the same amount of power, which is inherent to the deal.
And again, my deal was give unions as much power as they have in Denmark, but yes, in sectoral bargaining, the whole sector, not individual companies bargain, and it may not be imposing via fiat, but it'd be considered imposing their will by the vast majority of current American CEO's, I bet.
Because in my current view, at the moment sectoral bargaining > minimum wage process in US > letting corporations collude on wages even further (ask tech workers about what happens when corporations can organize on wages w/out a leveling force)
>tech workers about what happens when corporations can organize on wages w/out a leveling force)
The smart ones move to Utah, Austin, and Minneapolis?
See, this is what I mean:
1.) You know far less about Denmark than you think you do.
2.) You want something far to the left of Denmark. You want sectoral unions but not the counterbalance of corporate associations. But many would insist it's "normal in Europe."
3.) Your policy concerns are not actually an attempt to draw lessons from the Danish system but to extend the American system in ways American progressives already want. Denmark is just a talking point.
But yes, broadly speaking the Danish system means that both unions and corporations are more powerful than in the US. Mostly at the expense of the government. Which I think is one of the positives of the system: it means labor conditions and regulations are mostly set by people in the sector itself rather than bureaucrats who have no direct stake.
You should read about Danish labor history. It's quite interesting. And it probably has some surprises for you.
That will only work with Denmark style immigration restriction, otherwise welcome to mass unemployment.
Agreed.
This post also seems sloppy in the way that it talks about "parties".
The graph in this post is from a poll of Americans, showing the views of the 33% of poll respondents who said that they preferred the Democrats and the 26% of respondents who said they preferred the Republicans (while leaving out the 41% who identified as Independents, or indicated no preference, or gave some other response).
It's showing the views of the people, not the views/positions/agendas of the organized political parties.
Just because those 26% of people prefer the Republicans, that doesn't necessarily mean that Republican Party elected officials & political candidates are doing a good job of representing their views. Some of them might see the Republican party as too left-wing (on, say, premarital sex), but at least not as extremely left-wing as the Democrats.
That graph is graphing a weird thing, "percentage of respondents stating that each issue is morally acceptable."
The poll asked people whether (say) premarital sex was morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or not a moral issue. I don't get what the difference is between saying that premarital sex is morally acceptable vs. saying that premarital sex is not a moral issue. It'd be more meaningful to graph the percentage of people saying that premarital sex is morally unacceptable, and I think that holds across the board for all the issues.
e.g. The graph shows that only about 1/3 of people who prefer the Democrats called premarital sex morally acceptable, but the most common response was to say that premarital sex is not a moral issue. Only about 1/4 of people who prefer the Democrats called premarital sex morally unacceptable.
Thank you, I could tell the data was screwed up but I couldn't tell why (and didn't want to click through and read the whole methodology).
The only way the difference makes clear sense to me is if "not a moral issue" means something not chosen (or if you don't believe in any sense of free will, not caused by the parts of the brain that moral standards apply to). Like "having brown eyes" isn't a moral issue. I could see saying that being biologically gay is "not a moral issue" while engaging in same-sex acts is "morally acceptable", for example.
Well, I would say killing someone in self defence is a moral issue while e.g. wearing a baseball cap backwards is not, though both are acceptable. But it's definitely fuzzy, and makes the graph confusing and hard to interpret.
Yeah, that distinction makes sense, too. In other words, what you think it's incorrect to morally condemn, versus what you think it's crazy to morally condemn.
I've commented about this elsewhere in the thread, but there's a much bigger issue with the graph. Percentage of people stating that something is morally unacceptable is still a basically meaningless number. In the United States, extramarital affairs are morally "unacceptable" except that there are no penalties, no redress, nothing like that, so the only option you have is to accept them. Elsewhere in the world, extramarital affairs are morally unacceptable and punishable by death. These are not similar policies, and the fact that people call the behavior "morally unacceptable" in each case won't make them similar policies and will not persuade me that those people are expressing similar views.
>In the United States, extramarital affairs are morally "unacceptable"
There certainly seems to be a push from some people to change this.
To change what? If the only possible response to some behavior is to say "cool, whatever", it's already acceptable.
Yes, this sort of thing frustrates me constantly.
Words only have meaning within a context. When the context is missing, they become hot air.
Statements like "Police suck at their jobs! They take up 30% of [some town's] budget, but have a murder clearance rate of only 50%!" leave me scratching my head wondering "is 30% unusually high? Is 50% unusually low? What would we expect those numbers to be?" It only confuses the issue.
Good writing doesn't just discuss the facts under consideration, it discusses the world around those facts, so the reader has some context for them. You can't understand the animal without understanding the jungle, so to speak.
(Please email your exhaustive 5000 word explanation on murder clearance rates to me at nobodycares@thisisamadeupexample.com instead of posting it here.)
Here's my 12 word guess: committing murder and getting away with it is really really fucking easy
The version of this that I see most commonly in my circles (leftist) is that both parties are the same in that they both serve corporate interests, and that is basically objectively true. Anti-capitalism just doesn't have a place in American politics, where the dollar is king no matter who is president. Even Bernie, an outsider in his own party and supposed socialist, is pretty milquetoast by global socialist standards.
Right--the key disagreement is whether (from the left) the fact that Republicans consistently get about half the votes means that about half the voters are closer to them than to Democrats on policy.
How do people in your circles explain this, if you don't mind me asking? Is the argument that people are manipulated into focusing on non-economic issues where they country is divided? That people don't see a difference between two corporate alternatives, but if a true socialist were somehow to get the money and attention needed to run they'd win? Or is the argument something else?
>Is the argument that people are manipulated into focusing on non-economic issues where they country is divided?
Something like that, yeah. Either Red Tribe and Blue Tribe point to some pre-existing small differences that have widened as attention is focused on them, or whether they're completely fabricated identities being constantly reinvented to capture the issue du jour. Either way, the two parties have greatly benefitted from the two party system.
>That people don't see a difference between two corporate alternatives, but if a true socialist were somehow to get the money and attention needed to run they'd win?
This seems unbearably optimistic. In my personal friend group, nobody I know could possibly muster up this much hope.
This makes sense to me! Thanks for answering.
I think to me the idea that red tribe and blue tribe coordinate to distract people from the real issues feels implausible, because it looks so much like individual politicians and media personalities are competing desperately for attention, mostly within the respective tribes.
But, I'd believe a more decentralized version of this, which might actually be what you are thinking.
I think people tend to get more galvanized by issues that feel simple clearly connected to moral questions. That encourages ambitious politicians and media personalities to focus on those issues. I might be willing to buy that big money interests are able to steer conversation away from policies that would hurt them by hiring experts to muddy the waters and create complicated rebuttals to any proposed plan. If this is relatively easy to do, individual political incentives might do the rest.
As an economist, this idea is hard for me because I think of economic policy as something complex and challenging that requires real expertise to get right. At the same time, it's easy for me to see climate policy as having been muddied for years by climate change skeptical experts paid by oil companies.
>I think to me the idea that red tribe and blue tribe coordinate to distract people from the real issues feels implausible, because it looks so much like individual politicians and media personalities are competing desperately for attention, mostly within the respective tribes. But, I'd believe a more decentralized version of this, which might actually be what you are thinking.
Yeah. To be clear, I don't believe that the red tribe and blue tribe (or even the much smaller and distinct Republican Party and Democratic Party) "coordinate" in any large-scale meaningful way. I don't think they need to.
Right. I spend time in a thought-tribe that is very different (anarcho-libertarian), but we see the same thing. Both parties support basically the same, uh we call it economic system becuase we don't have a viseral distate for the corporate form, but both parties support the same economic system by which profits are privitized and losses are socialized. And its because both parties are full of people who either thrive in that setting, paracitize off those who thrive, or who are just front row, hall monitor fucks who can't envision a system other than the one right in front of their eyes.
Schools of fish don't coordinate, they form up because each fish chooses to school.
This is a good analogy. The coordination is natural/instinctual.
> That people don't see a difference between two corporate alternatives, but if a true socialist were somehow to get the money and attention needed to run they'd win?
Not a socialist necessarily, but a populist. Hence Trump who said all the right things, like "draining the swamp". Republicans tried everything they could to get someone else to beat Trump in their primaries, but eventually saw the writing on the wall.
Bernie threatened the existing power structures in a similar way and they did everything they could to suppress his popularity, and they barely succeeded by cheating a little.
So yes, the people don't see much different between the typical corporate politicians on both sides, and so they vote on cultural issues, like CRT in schools. They know that either way, they're not getting their minimum wage bump, or higher taxes on the wealthy, or universal health care, etc.
The wealthy already pay very high taxes?
Not only are the wealthy now enjoying the lowest tax rates since the great depression [1], the wealthier you are, the less you pay [2].
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techniques-irs-files
Well that pro publica article in the first few graphs describes someone putting AFTER TAX income into a Roth IRA as “tax avoidance”. If that is the type of reportage in that piece I doubt there is any value in reading it.
Except it's not after tax income put into the IRA. Read more carefully and maybe you'll better understand the outrage over these tax avoidance strategies.
I agree. I think Scott is probably correct that if you use the terms "left wing" and "right wing" it's a bit nonsensical to claim there a two "right wing" parties, but that's not the point. The point is that there are two parties that serve the interests of the capital-owning class.
Of course, for better or for worse, it's quite common to use "left wing" to mean "serves the interests of the working class" and "right wing" to mean "serves the interests of the capitalist class", in which case there are two "right wing" parties. Maybe that's why Scott is getting confused.
This is almost always what people mean. Also what rarified bizarro world does Scott live in where people say the US has two left wing parties. Like maybe in rural bumfuck nowhere or something but not anywhere Scott has copped to living.
Neoreactionaries beleive something close to two left wing parties.
Well conspiracy theorists believe in lizard people but you don't see a whiny post by Scott called: "A Serious Post Complaining That I Hear Too Much About Lizard People Conspiracy Theories". Sounds like he is making poor friend/twitter follow choices.
OK, neoreactionaries are bizarro. At least we now know what kind of bizzaro.
Okay, I get this concept, but I don't see how it would follow that we have two right wing parties.
Let's suppose -- arguendo -- that tomorrow the Democratic Party produces a manifesto that going forward their only issue is the abolition of all Christian churches in the United States as incompatible with the 14th Amendment. Christianity is transphobic, white supremacist, and so on and so forth. Their theory is that the abolition of Christian worship will result in a dramatic improvement in the living conditions of marginalized people.
Perhaps that theory is idiotic. Perhaps the competing Republican Party devotes all its resources to saying it's idiotic. Suppose that's true. Does that mean the Democratic Party is not on the left? Does that mean it's actually right wing, and will remain right wing even if it escalates to strangling priests with the entrails of dudebros?
I guess this is supposed to represent a rapid leftward shift by the democrats? Maybe less people would say there are two right wing parties, okay.
But most people tend to talk about the universe we actually live in and not a thought experiment one where we arbitrarily shift party positions in unrealistic ways that make no sense. The democratic party that you're proposing is not the democratic party we actually have; the one we actually have does have lots of other issues (including supporting the capital-owning class).
Yes, of course that's not what the Democratic Party says, or ever conceivably would say. I'm saying, suppose you have a party whose sole focus is the eradication of traditional sociocultural hierarchies in the name of egalitarian revolution. That's it, that's all they care about; they have no economic agenda whatsoever.
We don't have to say this is the Democratic Party. Say it's a new party I establish tomorrow, on the thesis that I'm tired of the Democrats constantly dicking around with Medicaid and the tax rate, and that there needs to be an option for voters who just want to get down to the real business of abolishing religion and the family.
Maybe that's a bad and dumb party that gets no more than five votes. Even so, what exactly would make it a right wing party? Wouldn't it just be a leftist party with an unusual but internally coherent theory that leftist results could be best achieved by ceding the economic domain and focusing 100% on society and culture?
Put in real-world terms: even if the Democrats do heartily embrace supporting the capital-owning class, so what? What if they think the capital-owning class is the most promising coalitional partner for their goal of dismantling traditional social hierarchies? Maybe in the real world that's their goal, maybe it isn't, but my point is that you have to start from there and ask what their goals actually are, rather than assuming that if they're aligned with the capital-owning class they must necessarily be on the right.
I don't really understand what you're getting at with this line of thought. I guess your new party wouldn't be right wing, sure. But nobody is talking about your your made-up party when they say "there are two right wing parties", because your made-up party doesn't exist.
This isn't so much moving the goalposts as much as it is inventing a new kind of goalpost altogether, and scoring system to go with it, but that's not the game being played.
Edit: Look man, you don't have to try convince me. "Left" and "right" are relative terms, both spatially and politically. Any time someone say says "X is to the left/right", they mean relative to some reference point, usually-but-not-always themselves. The people who say "There are two x-wing parties" are saying more about their reference point than they are about the parties themselves. It's why I intentionally avoided using the terms "left" and "right" in my original comment and stuck to more objectively qualifiable criteria.
Okay, fine, maybe you don't like thought experiments as a means of clarifying the parameters of where we disagree. Let me try to reframe this in terms that don't involve any kind of counterfactual scenario.
Do you think the positioning of the Democratic Party on whatever you would define as purely cultural issues, as of this moment on 6/11/22, is right wing?
If not, then what's the principled basis for describing a given party's position as left/right as a priori a matter of economic policy, irrespective of whatever else they might happen to believe, or of whatever might be their central axis of disagreement with the party opposing them?
I object to the reductionist frame of this entire question on many accounts:
1) The Democratic party does not act as a hivemind. Bernie Sanders/AOC share a party with politicians who oppose abortion. Who are we selecting to be the representative Democrat? This isn't incompatible with my original comment; Every member of the democratic party, even the "socialist" among them, are not quite socialist enough (For me).
2) You and I probably define "purely cultural" issues differently. Personally, I see no reason to seperate out economic issues from "cultural" issues. It's all related to the way society should be organized; it's all culture.
3) As I said above, "right wing" is relative. Are they to the right of Yarvin? No. Are they to the right of any given anarchist collective? Yes. What is your point of reference? I can all but guarantee that you and I don't share one. The fact that I'm having so much trouble communicating with you is evidence.
4) Different democrats have different positions on different issues, especially if I accept your cultural/economic divide (which I don't). If we combine and 1) and 3), we can produce nonsensical statements like "The democratic party is right wing compared to the democratic party"
To a first approximation, I'd say we have one party, generally run by people with lots of money, with two wings. The two wings take turns running the country. Also, all things being equal, the general tendency is to move towards the left socially, and also economically, but more slowly economically.
Yep. John Kass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kass calls it the Uniparty. Its certainly what we have in Illinois.
Does moving to the left socially mean becoming more socially permissive on the whole, or does it just mean that society is trending towards whatever moral framework the group defined as "the left" has adopted at any given time?
Well, for me it's pretty complex, but more the former than the latter. I wouldn't use the word "permissive"-for instance, giving women the right to vote is something I would call a move to the left, but I wouldn't call it permissive.
Are you denying that "anti-racism", LGBTQ rights/acceptance, transgenders in the girls changeroom, teaching kids about white privilege, corporations sponsoring BLM rioters etc are left wing things?
Nope. Where do you think I said that?
Rejecting conventional usage of words without elaboration is meaningless contrarianism. If you mean to say that the major political parties in the US have no noteworthy points of disagreement, that's more or less exactly the argument this piece is rebutting. *You* might not care about the differences, but that's not how political organization works.
1. I'm really having a hard time following you. Where am I rejecting conventional usage of words?
2. I'm not saying that there are no noteworthy points of disagreement on the fringes; I'm saying that both parties have been captured by large monied interests.
3. I read this piece as rebutting the idea that it's possible to draw an "objective" mid-point between left and right; that it all depends on where you set your left and right anchors. It mentions points of disagreement, but that's not at all the focus of the piece.
The US has two major political parties, a couple of minor parties that win the occasional local election, and a multiplicity of smaller organizations that are functionally irrelevant. That is what standard political analysis will tell you, that is what you will read on a ballot, and that is what the man on the street will tell you, if you press them to elaborate beyond the two majors. If you have a contradictory take that 'no, actually, there is only one political party in the US' then you have an awful lot to explain. It's either a half-formed claim to a better model, or an... unusual flavor of linguistic prescriptivism.
"Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?"
"Taken as a relative claim, it at least could make sense. But relative to what? Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left."
There are perspectives from which the major parties are directionally on the same side, but they are clearly distinguishable on axes that matter to a great number of people. If you are claiming there are a single party, you are ignoring both their basic organization and serious ideological disagreements.
That's a fair perspective. I'm talking about the capture of both those parties.
I can accept that as a first approximation if you'll agree that to _second_ approximation there are two parties with different agendas and responsive to different groups of people.
Yes, that's fair. And I could have been clearer.
The US is definitely NOT moving left economically. Wage power has been decreasing for decades, Medicare premiums just got bumped up for literally no reason, social security has been slowly eroded over decades, the alleged "right-wing" party introduces tax breaks for the rich every time they're in power and the alleged "left wing" party virtually *never* rolls them back when they get power again, and I could go on and on. It took a literal worldwide calamity in the form of a pandemic for the government to support the working class in the form of only two cheques, and even then, the second one wasn't even in the amount they promised, and that was from the allegedly "left wing" US party.
The US had a dramatic leftward shift back in the 30s-60s, and capital has been slowly clawing it back to this day. I haven't seen any real leftward shift over the past few decades, economically speaking.
A wealth tax is something being seriously considered by (some) Democrats. This would have been unthinkable in the past.
Property taxes are wealth taxes, so not entirely unthinkable. Taxing the wealthy more is a very popular policy, so some number of politicians will always be swayed by this. It rarely ever changes the party consensus though. Various forms of gun control are also pretty popular, particularly in the wake of recent tragedies, but it's unlikely to change the Republicans' consensus on that issue.
The US spending on public welfare has continued to climb and is by some measures the US has one of the largest welfare states in the world. Some reference points here:
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/public-welfare-expenditures
https://federalsafetynet.com/welfare-programs/#picture
Now one could argue these are poorly spent, etc, but on the topic of "are we moving left economically" I think this data generally would support the answer of yes we are.
Another data point would be business regulations: No matter how you slice this pie we undoubtedly have a public sector that is controlling aspects of the economy more than ever before.
Student loan forgiveness is another economic intervention.
I don't know, I'm trying to think how the *US* has moved economically to the right on a policy perspective and I can't really think of much. Certainly from a short term perspective you could argue administration to administration movements, but I don't think that's very interesting. I'd like to at least look on a decade scale. Can you provide some examples?
Pretty much every administration since the 60s has:
* weakened labour rights and boosted corporate interests instead
* weakened medicare and medicaid
* weakened social security
* effectively reduced taxes on the wealthy (nominal tax increases are not effective because of the loopholes they intentionally leave)
I'm not at all convinced that your data entails your conclusion at all. The fact that some programs like SNAP saw *increased* funding is not a sign of left economic policy, that's a left *social* policy that has to make up for the failure of right *economic* policies that has caused wage stagnation and an explosion in the wealth gap.
Can you provide evidence of your claims?
On labor rights, I will concede unions so we don't need to go there but please provide some others. In general, the labor market is saddled with a ton of intense and growing regulations (take a look at PAGA in California).
Weakened Medicaid? Again please cite something. I found this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/245348/total-medicaid-expenditure-since-1966/ ..... in 1966 we spent 1 billion in 2019 we spent 640 billion.... I mean....... Even according to this calculator on health care inflation: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Medical-care/price-inflation/1966-to-2019?amount=1 this is an astronomical increase.
Weakend social security: Constant raiding of the social security funding for various purposes doesn't seem to be coming from a perspective of right vs left as much as a perspective of the need to feed the leviathan and a time before we decided infinite debt was acceptable.
Even on tax policy, I don't think its nearly as clear cut as you claim. The wealthy pay by far the largest % of taxes in this country. The bottom 50% of Americans pay 3% of the total taxes. I understand the counter argument is about accumulation of wealth/income, but the fact remains that we have one of the most progressive tax systems if not the most progressive tax system in the world. I'm not sure how that is a "right wing tilt". A lot of good data here: https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/ Unfortunately it only trends back to 1981.
At the end of the day things are quite muddled unfortunately and I believe that anyone with enough time can argue both sides of this argument. This makes the truth hard to discern. If anything I think we are generally oscillating around a trend that is, on a historical scale, undoubtedly heading to the left.
I always thought the OECD countries thing was implicit. It seemed obvious to me that the left is not talking about Egypt, Thailand, etc when we say the US is rightwing- we're saying it's rightwing compared to the average of countries like the UK, Sweden, Japan, Australia, France, and so on and so on- roughly the OECD/rich countries. Maybe this was unreasonable in hindsight.
Do any of those countries have explicit racial preferences in university admissions? Have any fired tenured professors based on tenuous allegations of sexual harassment, like Roland Fryer? Do any have US-style Title IX hostile environment stuff? The US is rather left-wing on gender and race. Maybe not compared to Canada, but certainly compared to Japan.
Alternative hypothesis: America is so uniquely broken when it comes to gender and race (one of the last countries in the world to outlaw slavery; and even after slavery was outlawed, the last slave in the US wasn't freed until the couple of years leading up to WW2), so that things like explicit racial preferences aren't issues that would ever even arise in other countries.
Same as how there are other countries with more gun control or less gun control, but uniquely the US can't seem to stop shooting up its own schools.
But even setting all that aside, one would naively expect America to be leftwing on race and gender going purely by the America shown in the advertisements: "Give me your tired, your poor", etc etc. But it's been a long time since any of that has been true, if it ever was at all.
The USA was one of the last to outlaw slavery *among european-descended countries* but in *global* terms it was about average. See this map of when slavery was abolished in each country: https://i.redd.it/yqlkfvm0dtm31.png
1) The USA certainly qualifies for "among European-descended countries" or "Western European style liberal democracies" or whatever else. I'm not convinced that comparing the US to Mauritania and Oman is the way to go for truth-finding, even if it does make the US look better on an infographic.
Even if I had no issues with your framing at all, saying that "The land of the free" is about the global average in terms of slavery outlawing is damning with faint...not even praise.
2) 1865 in the US is a technicality and basically a lie. The 13th amendment says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.". What it doesn't say, and what no law anywhere in the US at the time said, is "Anyone engaging in slavery is guilty of a felony and shall serve X years in prison", or anything remotely like that. The practice of slavery continued well into the 1900s under the barest legal cover as "debt peonage". Debt peonage itself has been illegal in the US since the 1867 Federal Anti-Peonage Statute, but when latter-day slaveholders were brought up on charges they were able to argue (In court! Successfully!!) that because the debts that kept their slaves in chains were fictional (because they were), it wasn't debt peonage but instead just plain chattel slavery, which was against no laws. If this sounds too incredible to believe, look up "Tallapoosa Peonage Cases" and pick whichever source you'd like.
This continued until FDR's attorney general issued "Circular 3591" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591) in 1941, only under pressure of how the US's continued practice of slavery was damaging to international propaganda efforts in world war 2. It's hard to stand on a moral high ground about how Imperial Japan treats its conquered peoples when we have our own subjugated underclass, after all.
The last chattel slave in the US to be freed was Alfred Irving of Beeville TX, in September 1942. Here's a contemporary newspaper clipping: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Beeville_couple_arraigned_on_charge_of_holding_Negro_in_slavery_on_farm_%281942%29_The_Brownsville_Herald.jpg
My original point stands; America has a race problem that no comparisons with Mauritania will fix.
Almost the entirety of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia outlawed slavery after the US did.
Without any federal cooperation in catching escaped slaves, or looking the other way when private parties assault and kidnap them, it'd be really hard to have chattel slavery on any significant scale post 1865. I'm not impressed by isolated anecdotes.
>Almost the entirety of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia outlawed slavery after the US did.
"USA #1 (Compared to most-but-not-all Africa, the Middle East, and Asia)! USA #1 (Compared to most-but-not-all Africa, the Middle East, and Asia)!"
It doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow.
>Without any federal cooperation in catching escaped slaves, or looking the other way when private parties assault and kidnap them, it'd be really hard to have chattel slavery on any significant scale post 1865. I'm not impressed by isolated anecdotes.
No looking the other way or private assault parties necessary. This is post-reconstructionism Southern America. Police departments barely exist, and don't exist at all outside major cities. Crimes adjudicated at the county level (Which is most crimes adjudicated at the time, it rarely made it to the state or federal level) was handled by "justices of the peace", aka whatever innkeeper or plantation owner happened to be nearby and wanted the job. Want to guess the average plantation owner's stance on slavery in post-reconstruction Southern America?
Isolated anecdotes? The Tallosa Peonage cases I mentioned concerned hundreds of slaves, and that was just one indictment, in just in one county, in just one state. In total, over 800,000 people were mixed up in the "debt peonage" system. Let's apply some critical thinking for a second; Do you think FDR's justice department has nothing better to do that issue concerning slavery if it's just "isolated anecdotes"?
I did you the favor of clicking your dumb link and looking at your dumb map. The least you could do is return the favor and read something before turning your nose up.
Thank you for mentioning the Tallapoosa peonage cases--it was quite depressingly informative. There can be no doubt of the horrible fact that *de facto* chattel slavery continued to exist on a shockingly large scale throughout the pre-WWII South, with many people being kidnapped and held captive without even the pretense of a debt or a criminal conviction.
But I have to slightly disagree with your claim that the court *accepted* the defense's argument that slavery wasn't illegal. Note that (per the detailed account of the case in "Slavery by Another Name"):
1) The argument that it wasn't peonage but chattel slavery was a desperate gambit made late in the trial by the defendants, who had earlier stuck to the line that their actions had been legal because their forced laborers had been duly convicted of a crime. It was not a generally-accepted legal principle and had never been made earlier.
2) The defendant's argument was not that slavery was *legal*, but that it had no *federal* penalty attached to it and therefore could only be prosecuted as kidnapping and false imprisonment under state laws. Of course, the nightmarishly racist social realities meant that a local Alabama court would never actually convict a white man for the false imprisonment of a black person, whatever the law theoretically said.
3) The judge made it very clear that he thought this argument, and the defendant's conduct in general, was repulsive. He all but ordered the jury to acquit. This suggests that the argument was not accepted *by the United States government*.
4) However, horribly, the defendants were acquitted on the basis of a hung jury. This seems to have been, not because they accepted the technical legal argument that slavery had never been criminalized, but due to the crude race-baiting appeals which the defense resorted to at the end, and which didn't even *pretend* to have an actual legal argument behind them--it was pure "You can't convict a white man on the testimony of a black man".
5) Later, however, the defendant ended up pleading guilty to anti-peonage charges (and receiving the customary slap on the wrist), as part of a deal in order to spare his son from being charged with the murder of one of their forced laborers. A horrible injustice in its own right--the son was allowed to get away with murder in exchange for an minor punishment for the father--but it does show that the case didn't establish a legal precedent in favor of slavery or peonage.
Technically true all on all counts, but like you said up top, it all amounts to de facto chattel slavery continuing for the better part of a century with nothing done about it. Words on paper and high minded ideals mean nothing if not enforced, and they weren't enforced. "The federal government doesn't approve of this" is cold comfort to anyone unfortunate to be caught up in the system.
_Especially_ since the dominant narrative in America is that slavery was conquered in 1865 (with racism in general to follow in 1968) and that all of black people's misfortune's since then are their own fault (with some extra theorizing about IQ in this community in particular), this kind of "Technically it was illegal" hand-wringing is useless at best and actively counterproductive at worst.
Not so unique:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#National_approaches
History is just a rationalization. Why does the US discriminate in favor of recent immigrants, Hispanics for example?
The goal is not to make up for the past, and it's not equity. They don't mind when whites do worse than Asians, or men worse than women. The goal is for white men to not do better than any other group in anything.
The US does not act as a single hivemind, with one will and one purpose. There are people in the US (and I'd like to include myself in this group) who do care about equity. And some people in that group even have a modicum of political power, and might occasional make some kind of attempt to do something about it! But they can't and don't speak for everyone, which is why trying to stuff reality into a frame like "The US discriminates for/against {group}" is always going to produce stupid-looking results.
The institutions of the US act like a hive mind though: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights?s=r
The only open discrimination is against whites, men, and Asians.
Says some guy with a substack. I absolutely cannot take seriously any internet conservative who sheds crocodile tears about "wokeness".
"Woke" connotates a special awareness of racial injustices, back in 201X. Now it's just shorthand for "thing that some 19 year old college kids are doing a few thousand miles away that I don't like, even though it doesn't affect me at all". Imagine how ridiculous it is, in 2022, to claim that awareness of racial injustice is some kind of special perception. Big cringe. Racial injustice is everywhere, and it takes a special _lack_ of perception to _not_ be aware. To a first approximation, exactly zero people now self-identify as "woke". The term only continues to exist as a drum for weirdos on the right to beat.
So, no. No to you, and no to whoever Richard Hanania is, and no to his substack.
Uniquely broken, eh? I feel like the shade of Nelson Mandela would like to have a word with you.
"Uniquely broken" meaning "Broken in a unique way". South Africa has its own separate but also unique struggles with race, although you could certainly draw plenty of parallels if you were so inclined.
Ah I see. So every place that had slavery was uniquely broken, eh? An interesting but rather silly use of the adverb.
I don't see what's so silly about it. I don't claim to be an expert on the fallout of South Africa's aparthied, but I'm willing to bet a dollar that there are enough difference with the US's legacy of slavery that it would be counterproductive to call the two the same, or to prescribe the same policies in fixing the issues.
So, yeah. Different situations with difference nuances that would require different (dare I say...unique?) approaches to addressing the problem.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
>one of the last countries in the world to outlaw slavery; and even after
Not even close to true.
>so that things like explicit racial preferences aren't issues that would ever even arise in other countries.
Are you under the impression that e.g. black people are more equal in Europe than the US? Because they aren't, at least not significantly.
>"Give me your tired, your poor", etc etc. But it's been a long time since any of that has been true, if it ever was at all.
Oh? You think American policy should be dictated by a poem on a statue?
Where are all these non-white countries that have unlimited third world immigration? Oh, there are none? So, this is just special pleading by you?
>Not even close to true.
If you take 1865 at face value, then the US Is near the global median. I don't take 1865 at face value, because large-scale slavery continued afterwards. 1942 (the year the last US chattel slave was freed) is pretty much on the ass-end of the list.
>Are you under the impression that e.g. black people are more equal in Europe than the US? Because they aren't, at least not significantly.
"not significantly" is doing a lot of the work in that sentence.
>Oh? You think American policy should be dictated by a poem on a statue?
I think American policy should try and live up to the marketing material, for once. I want the America in the ads instead of the one we ended up with.
>Where are all these non-white countries that have unlimited third world immigration? Oh, there are none? So, this is just special pleading by you?
Why are "non-white" countries relevent? Who is talking about unlimited third world immigration? Was this intended for someone else?
"If you take 1865 at face value, then the US is near the global median."
Do you take the global median at face value? Because there's large scale slavery to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
"I think American policy should try and live up to the marketing material, for once. I want the America in the ads instead of the one we ended up with. "
Listen up everyone, a Jewish women wrote a poem so now you have to take in all the wretched refuse of the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I_u5fvB15Q
>Do you take the global median at face value? Because there's large scale slavery to this day
Take it up with the guy who posted the map in the first place. I don't have any interest in defending his position for him.
>Listen up everyone, a Jewish women wrote a poem so now you have to take in all the wretched refuse of the world.
And then they put that poem on a prominent statue that partially symbolizes America. And then both the statue and the poem were happily used as propaganda for decades. If the poem and statue weren't supposed to be representative of America's ideals, then we should be much more upfront about it.
But like, does anyone care about that? That's small feed. Barely even government action- more university action. Irrelevant culture war stuff. It seems to me that matters to how far left or right a country is, is things like:
1. What is it's safety net like for the poorest?
2. How long are its prison sentences for equivalent crimes?
3. What percentage of people die due to inability to access medical care?
4. How eager is the country to go to war?
5. What steps is the country taken in relation to it's greenhouse gas emissions?
6. What steps has it taken to allow mothers and fathers to balance career and parenthood.
7. What steps is the country taking in relation to income inequality?
8. Is there an underclass of non-citizen workers exploited as a pool of cheap labour, their legal status used against them by abusive bosses?
9. How often do people go to prison for abortion? (And, apropos the US, does this number look set to increase).
10. Are there serious attempts to criminalize LGBTQ people essentially just for being themselves?
11. Are there minorities with huge life-expectancy gaps?
Politics is about things that kill or maim lots of people. Anything else is mostly sound and fury *in comparison*.
Now I grant that's small consolation if you're the white son of a poor coal miner who missed out on Harvard due to AA, or the professor fired on tenuous metoo grounds (I haven't researched this case, but I'll accept, in arguendo, that it is tenuous). But for those most part, the issues I listed seem to me to be where the life blood is. Even if we were to grant that "dodgy universities being oppressively woke" belongs on the list, it's only one item.
It's far more than just the universities. It's also the CDC and other government bureaucracies, which said outdoor gatherings were bad but once BLM happened called racism a pandemic. It's every large corporation releasing BLM statements. It's the spread of gender ideology in K-12 and the prescription of puberty blockers to children, a practice banned by Finland (see https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fins-turn-against-puberty-blockers-for-gender-dysphoria/ ). It's the civil rights bureaucracy (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights?s=r). It's that "everything" is liberal (https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal?s=r).
The US is far to the left than most rest of the free world, e.g. Estonia, Israel, Japan on race, gender, and trans issues. Maybe it's not more left than the Anglosphere.
I'm not sure if abortion is really left-wing in any real sense. Christianity is anti-abortion, but Judaism and Islam do not care too much and even the most religious are totally OK with IVF and abortions at the beginning of the pregnancy. Abortion is an issue in the US and in Poland because of a Christian right but it's not an issue in Israel or even a semi-developed and semi-free Muslim country like Turkey where it's legal and not really controversial.
The US is also very pro immigration. Any Japanese politician that supported an American-style immigration policy (birthright citizenship, and large scale immigration and naturalization of ethnic minorities) would be considered far-left. Abolishing birthright citizenship is considered a right-wing or even far-right position in the US, but most of the rest of the free world does not have birthright citizenship.
Again you're missing immigration. Immigration is a big issue where the US is much more pro-immigration than European countries. As to whether immigration is right-wing or not, I think the right-wing position is just to strongly prefer some immigrants (high-skill, some ethnicities etc) and the left-wing position is to oppose this right-wing position and not discriminate, or even favor low-skill immigration more. The reason that anti-immigration is often right-wing is just that it's associated with nationalism, which is right-wing, but it's not an intrinsically right-wing position (look at the US Democrats' position on Cuban immigration).
Europe is left-wing in other ways, compared to say the US, Israel, Japan, UK. Not too many skyscrapers. EU bans GMO food. Old architecture. Not big on exploring space.
1) Yeah, the US is to the left of Europe and much of the free world, to the right of most of the world.
2) I think same as 1 here.
3) I think same as 1 here.
4) US is really up there, we fight a lot of wars. A lot of this is a function of being a superpower, the USSR fought a lot as well, as did Maoist China. I think it's changing though, there's a consensus we spent way too long in Iraq and Afghanistan.
5) Yeah so I think again same as 1. I think that nuclear power is right-wing though.
6) Likely again same as 1.
7) Likely again same as 1.
8) The use of the word "exploit" is wrong and biased here. Is having illegal immigrants work for low wages right-wing? I think so. So the UAE is very right-wing. The US is more right-wing than most other countries in that we do more of this. But it's because we have more immigration.
9) This is bad, but this is more Christianity, I think it's quite rare everywhere, because the places where abortion is illegal and you can go to prison people aren't doing it much or at least not doing it much and getting caught. Again I'd say same as 1.
10) No. In the US? No. In the Muslim world, yes. Unless you believe that opposing gender ideology is rightist. Gender ideology is too strange to even call left-wing. The US is supporting gender ideology more than almost anyone else, even the Finns are against it. I grant you that Canada is more supportive, and also that a few people in red states still somewhat anti-LGBT, just because of Christianity. But overall the US is pretty pro-LGBT, even by the standards of the free world, though maybe not compared to Canada or much of Western Europe. Estonia has civil unions only, Japan has civil unions only (this is recent), Israel recognizes foreign gay marriages but does not perform them (It has no civil marriage). South Korea doesn't even have civil unions.
11) In the US? Maybe more than most countries, but Europe doesn't publish statistics on life expectancies of Black and Muslim migrants. Japan doesn't have enough minorities. A country like Estonia probably has Russians living not as long. Israel has huge life expectancy but Arabs don't live as long. Outside the free world, but still in the developed world, Malays in Singapore probably don't live as long. But here there are lots of confounders. I mean, when you have demographics with lower IQ and higher crime rates (and/or with a Russian drinking culture, or a bad diet full of soul food, high obesity), of course the life expectancy is going to be worse. A function of demographics. Height is also negatively correlated with life span. Asians live much longer than Whites in the US. High IQ, High SES, low crime, short.
As far as things that kill and maim lots of people, you are missing crime. The US is left-wing on crime or right-wing? Singapore is right-wing on crime. I mean, also car accidents, obesity, and many things killing a lot of people are not that politicized.
You're also missing immigration policy. Can I suggest:
1) Does the country have birthright citizenship?
2) Does the country have any ethnic preferences in its citizenship laws? Has any politician advocated those ethnic preferences?
3) What proportion of the country's population is foreign born?
4) How hard is it to naturalize? Is there a Denmark-style assimilation campaign for new immigrants?
5) How many immigrants come per year in proportion to the population?
I can also suggest:
6) Do the largest companies in the country release political statements? What kind of statements?
7) Do the universities pick students and faculty based on race and gender?
8) Does the country allow puberty blockers to be prescribed to people under 18?
9) Does the country have anti-harassment laws that effectively restrict speech in the workplace, or regulate romance between people in a workplace setting?
10) Does the country have the death penalty? Here the US is to the left of Europe and Israel but to the right of not only most of the world, but also Japan.
11) Does the country's State Department tweet things like this? https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1509538506674221067
12) How does the country feel about new technologies, like genetic engineering, nuclear power, and space travel? Does it have many skyscrapers for its size?
13) Does the country have robust free speech protections? What kind of speech is criminalized?
Anyway, I agree with you that Europe is to the left of the US economically and has more of a social safety net. It's much easier for a country without lower IQ and higher crime minorities to have a generous social safety net though. Look at Danish immigration policy, and the burden on their social safety net from the lower IQ and higher crime demographics.
Looking at the rest of the free developed world though, while some countries are to the left on race/gender (Canada), a lot are to the right (Estonia, Israel, Japan).
I'm confused. At point 1 you seem to say that Europe has a weaker safety net for the poor, but at the end you appear to contradict it.
Assuming your point at 1 isn't a typo, and you do think the US is to the left of Europe on its safety net for the left, I'm a bit confused. I'm curious about where you are getting your information from? On the social safety net for example have without providing any evidence, asserted that the US is to the left of Europe. Now the quantification of a social net is a difficult thing, but initial signs are not good. For example, the United States has the highest level of relative poverty in the OECD. Thus if there is a safety net, it's not working especially well:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/8483c82f-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/8483c82f-en#fig6.4
Very few job seekers receive benefits compared to other OECD countries:
https://blogs-images.forbes.com/niallmccarthy/files/2018/07/20180723_Job_Seekers.jpg
Moving onto point 2. Once again, it is difficult to quantify relative sentence length, but initial signs are not good, but a quick Google found this article. Granted the countries chosen might be cherrypicked, but, prima facie, it does not look good for the US, that is if you favour shorter sentences:
https://archive.attn.com/stories/14338/how-prison-sentences-america-compare-other-countries
Yeah, feel free to chuck in a question about immigration if you feel like it, because it does effect a lot of people. My list is nothing like comprehensive, it's a list of some important issues, not all of them.
I don't think there's a consistent left right gradient on new technology in general.
Political statements by companies are broadly meaningless. When people get fired for political reasons, I at least care about that, but it's still a statistical blip so I'm reluctant to include it (although, I'll grant that this sort of thing can have a chilling effect, and I'm almost universally opposed to it).
This is off topic, because it's hard to map onto left v right at the moment, but in my opinion Free speech is an area in which the US is ahead of many other places. HOWEVER, at will employment limits the real effectiveness of this right.
It's a typo in Point 1. Point 2: Yeah the US has long prison sentences even compared to most of the world, that's right. It's true that as far as social welfare and prisons are concerned, the US are right-wing compared to Europe. That's true. But our positions on race and gender and immigration are way more left-wing than Europe. Again, look at birthright citizenship, affirmative action, civil rights law. Gender is tricky because we don't give maternity leave, but we have more gender-based wokeness.
> As to whether immigration is right-wing or not, I think the right-wing position is just to strongly prefer some immigrants (high-skill, some ethnicities etc) and the left-wing position is to oppose this right-wing position and not discriminate, or even favor low-skill immigration more.
It's funny, as I would have describe it the exact opposite way. I guess this is just a symptom of the usual tendency to see only the reasonable nuance on your own side and the extremists on the other side.
The right is opposed to illegal immigration and the immigration lottery. Low skill immigration. Not sure how you got the opposite idea.
I for one want to build a wall to stop the exploitation of non-citizen labor.
You made me chuckle. Just to be contrarian – and make a point -- here's are some POVs that are obviously outside of your leftist hive you may consider. These are not necessarily mine, though I agree with a few of the following:
1. What is it's safety net like for the poorest?
1. Really, the poorest? How about, “What steps has the government taken to protect citizens who don’t use government services, want contact with government bureaucrats, and would rather be poor than mime the government-promoted vision of ‘a good citizen.’” For example:
a. How free are you from government harassment if you forgo two incomes to home school?
b. How free are you from government harassment if you choose NOT to be injected with big-gov/big-pharma chemicals -- vaccines? Did the government protect you from losing your job because of government-coerced COVID vaccinations?
d. Can you opt NOT to pay to recycle or use ethanol petro (because you see this as expensive and ineffective virtue signalling?)
2. How long are its prison sentences for equivalent crimes?
2. Really, are you more worried about criminals or the law-abiding? How about, “What steps has the government taken to help you defend yourself against criminals (which may perhaps include the government itself?)
3. What percentage of people die due to inability to access medical care?
3. This is the classic Obamacare mentality. How about, “What percentage of people die because they’ve been forced into substandard public health care when a private option, one more tailored to their needs and budget, could have been retained?”
4. How eager is the country to go to war?
4. The government IS at war, against its own citizens. How about, “Is the government willing to defend citizens against an invasion of illegal immigrants? Is this a proxy war against heritage Americans?”
5. What steps is the country taken in relation to it's greenhouse gas emissions?
5. Still counting polar bears? How about, “What steps has the government taken to protect the economic interests of citizens over the job-killing, petro-price increasing hysteria of environmental globalists?”
6. What steps has it taken to allow mothers and fathers to balance career and parenthood.
6. First wave feminism peaked decades ago. Now, there’s the countermove. How about, “What steps has the government taken to protect families who have opted to retain a traditional one-earner family with many children?”
7. What steps is the country taking in relation to income inequality?
7. Jesus said it best: “The poor will always be with us.” Given this truism, “What steps has the government taken to permit the freedom to be successful without regard to one’s race, gender, etc?”
a. What steps has the government taken to protect white and Asian males harmed by its own rules and bureaucracies?
b. Do excessive government regulations, rules and taxes hinder business formation by younger Americans trying to make that first and second step into the economy?
8. Is there an underclass of non-citizen workers exploited as a pool of cheap labour, their legal status used against them by abusive bosses?
8. Oh gawd. How about, “What steps has the government taken to stop the surreptitiously encouragement of foreigners to immigrate with the implicit goal of reducing the political, cultural and economic power of traditional, heritage Americans?”
9. How often do people go to prison for abortion? (And, apropos the US, does this number look set to increase).
9. How about, “Is adoption promoted and funded as much as abortion, if not more?”
10. Are there serious attempts to criminalize LGBTQ people essentially just for being themselves?
10. Hmm. One could ask this about other “minority” groups more accurately. There’s a huge POSITIVE pressure toward this sort of sexual expression. So, how about, “What steps has the government take to decriminalize Christians who choose to live according to their deeply held religious beliefs?”
a. What protection was offered to Christian bakers who did not want to bake a cake for a gay couple who could have gone down the street to another baker, or, better yet, become entrepreneurs for a gay-only bakery, for example?
11. Are there minorities with huge life-expectancy gaps?
11. Could it be that the life-expectancy gap is due to mal-adapted behaviours chosen by these minority groups? How about, “Does the government destigmatize behaviours which decrease health and life-expectancy instead of promoting behaviours that are obviously psychologically and physically healthier? Should positive behaviors be promoted by the government? If so, how about: no smoking, no obesity, no alcohol/drugs, no long hours of computer gaming, no divorce, no out-of-wedlock child-bearing, no contact sports, no anonymous sexual encounters, no rioting, no gay bath club behaviour, etc
If you think the US is to the right of Japan, Chile, or Poland you... are wrong. But yes, I generally agree that there's a lot of equivocation between "Western Europe" (plus maybe Canada/Australia/NZ) and "the world" in these memes.
Oh it's definitely to the right of some OECD countries, especially if you disaggregate down to cultural and economic issues, but the claim is that it's quite far right by a kind of OECD average
The average OECD country is usually a country like South Korea, Slovenia, or Hungary. Depends on the statistic. So no, the claim fails compared to the OECD.
The only way the claim works is if you restrict the comparison to a few very left wing Western European countries. And usually add in a strong dash of wishful thinking and American ignorance of how those countries actually work.
But yeah, it's fair to say the US is to the right of (for example) France, Denmark, and probably even the UK or Australia. Modulo a few specific policies. But that list only has like 10 countries on it. Maybe 20. Out of two hundred.
You sure about that? Looking up the two indicators I care most about- unemployment benefits and incarceration (chosen because they can be taken as indicators of how far a person can fall) they seem to be pretty right wing for the OECD:
https://data.oecd.org/benwage/benefits-in-unemployment-share-of-previous-income.htm
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/incarceration_rates_in_oecd_countries
Still, although I would argue the US does qualify even if we use OECD, the OECD does seem to have become quite a big club. Maybe we'd be better off saying something like "the twenty richest countries by median income". The median income thing is to avoid the inclusion of pure tax havens and oil states.
I'm sure you can find stats where the US is near the bottom. You can also find stats where the US is at the top. Even on "left wing" indicators. Picking two isolated stats and then restricting the sample size is blatant rigging to get the answer you want. You're giving yourself waaay too many degrees of freedom. Under your standards I can prove the US is left wing, right wing, or nearly of any political persuasion. I just need to restrict it to 20 countries and pick a few relevant stats.
Yes. Definitely...and the Western Europeans (along with left-wing Americans don't realize that Western Europe is the real outlier from a global perspective...).
Much better take than the last article, for sure.
A similar idea is when people refer to entire countries as "right-wing" or "left-wing". It really depends on the issue you're talking about. The US has a dysfunctional right-wing healthcare system, for example, but it simultaneously has immigration policies that are radically liberal compared to those of European countries.
>Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?
I'm inclined to be a little more generous to these people and say that this is mostly a product of geographical self-sorting. Their Overton Window isn't based on themselves, necessarily, but on the set of people they interact with on a daily basis. This statistically tends to be people with similar worldviews. I think this is borne out by the fact that the people making these comments (anecdotally of course) don't consistently describe themselves as being "in the middle"; self-described centrists have a different flavor of lazy cynicism.
Yeah, that's what I said. The US is way to the left of most of the developed world on immigration. Birthright citizenship. I agree the US healthcare system is dysfunctional, I guess it is somewhat "right-wing", at least it is not single payer. What is Singapore's healthcare system? Functional. Right-wing or left-wing? I've heard it's both.
The main conclusion I get from this is that a Japan/Czechia hybrid would be a very interesting nation to live in.
The Czechs are, on average, probably the most direct people I've met, and the famous Japanese polite-indirectness is hard to overstate, so that would be a fascinating culture indeed.
The beer would be nice also.
They aren't as "Liberal" as this survey claims though...
Not that Czechia is famous for its absence of alcohol. In fact, the only way I can imagine Japan ending up ahead of Czechia on that question is if it simply didn't occur to the Czech survey respondents to count beer as "alcohol".
"Is not the alcohol, is liquid bread."
A more relevant question is not the left vs right breakdown but rather globalism vs localism. Have both major parties in the US moved towards a form of global classism? In this view, politicians at the national level become more influenced by corporations and billionaires than by those they supposedly represent. Local voting patterns would in theory realign their interests back to their districts interests. However, the power of media conglomeration, targeted advertising, and bot driven social media may have become so effective that the voting public may have essentially lost its “free-will”. In this view the direction of the global political class will diverge from the voting public until it reaches some breaking point. If past history is a guide, the breaking point is usually run-away inflation and/or food shortages.
I agree that there's a shift from left/right to globalist/nationalist that the parties haven't fully corrected for. Also agree that essentially all people in the professional class (including me) have incentive to dismiss anti-globalist sentiment as luddite claptrap.
Probably our only disagreement is that anti-globalist sentiment is luddite claptrap. Unless folks are willing to smash the internet, the economy is now global. I'll grant that lower-middle class and poorer folks from the developed world get the short end of that stick in the short run at least. But the amount of wealth that has been generated, especially in developing nations, as a direct result of globalism, is unreal. Sometimes there are growing pains, and we should address those. But the best I can tell, nationalist candidates' solution to those growing pains is to cut our legs off and pretend that they've stopped the growing.
I used to see it similarly- in the 90s. Globalization seemed here to stay, even logical. Mostly for trade reasons, not so much for the claptrap about how we’re all ready to sing kumbaya. I think that trend has been definitely broken for the time being. Global trade was destroyed this year and will only get worse. We’re going back to a more local world, in spite of the internet.
Completely flummoxed by this graphic. More Republicans than Democrats believe that contraceptive use is morally acceptable? Only ~38% of Democratic respondents support divorce?? What does this mean? What Democrats OR Republicans are out there arguing for the rollback of the legalization of divorce? How do these "morally acceptable" questions correspond to actual policy decisions? I guess these questions would all be answered if I read the paper, but right now I am just very confused
EDIT: reading the comments, I guess everybody else has already pointed this out. Shame on me for commenting without reading the comments first I guess.
Normally people mean mean the Democratic Party is the right of the mainstream Conservative party in many countries don't they. Don't know if that's true or not though.
It's laughably false if you look at other anglophone countries. What they're really observing is that the US system is (by design) slower than systems in those other countries, which makes it harder for the left wing party in particular to enact their objectives.
No, what they're observing is that the allegedly "left wing party" doesn't enact any meaningful left wing policies even when they have a supermajority of all aspects of the government. No actually enacted policies can threaten capital, that's why it's a right wing party.
Maybe economically.
Economics are the only policies they actually care about because that's a) where most of their donations come from, and b) where they'll get their cushy consulting/lobbying/speaking jobs after they're done with "public service". Both parties cynical exploit anything else to distract from the economic policies they're pushing. For Democrats these days it's identity politics and Russia, for Republicans, it's typically CRT, abortion and various religious "freedom" issues, like that old chestnut, the "war on Christmas".
One thing I've been questioning is the meaning of "far-right". Colloquially it means either fascism or some sort of neo-reactionary monarchism, but shouldn't it really mean anarcho-capitalism? The more "right wing" you get the more varied and mutually irreconcilable views you encounter, to the point where I don't think we really have a coherent sense of what "right wing" even means.
I think "far-left" is easier to pin down, my first guess is it basically means "Everyone should have all their needs and many of their wants provided through [INSERT SYSTEM], preferably in an equitable way". Probably a Stalinist and an anarcho-communist will agree on this?
I have a right-wing friend who says that there is a universal leftism but there are many different rightisms, including some very stupid rightisms (ISIS, Trumpism).
Your friend is basically correct.
I feel like using a one-dimensional system to classify politifal positions is overly simplistic.
I get that i makes sense when talking about US politics because there are only two parties and these parties lknd of fit the two poles but as soon as you look at countries with more then two parties it falls apart.
I started introducing a two dimensional view into political discussions and I've made the experience that it reduces the heat and objectifies the discourse.
There are multiple versions of the two dimensions but ultimately I comes down to:
Authoritarian <-> Liberal
Progressive <-> Conservative
Its still not a comprehensive space but introducing spaces with more dimensions makes of to complicated for a oral discussion and I feel like its a good compromise.
In your example, far-right can have two directions, a liberal (anarchocapitalism) direction or a authoritarian direction (facism).
Far-left can also have two directions, the liberal (socialism) and an authoritarian (Bolshevism/Leninism)
(I also try to avoid the term left because there is a party I'm germany (where iam from) that is called "the left" which always results in mix ups between the actual party and the political direction. I guess in the states its the other way around with one party called "the conservatives")
The problem is that the Republican party is a coalition between pro-tradition/pro-nationalist/pro-authority types and libertarian capitalists, who don't really have a home.
Those philosophically incompatible fault lines are causing significant issues for the party, which is why, e.g. they have no platform for the first time since the mid 1800s. The only thing Republicans currently agree on is that they really hate Democrats.
So far right in a U.S. context usually means "really really really hates Democrats and would rather the government not function than function as a Democratic government." The thing is that the only folks who talk in terms of "far right" are Democratic sympathisers so it's hard to tell how accurate that assessment is.
Actually I would argue that the far left is pretty diverse as well. Did not think it was until I started exploring leftist spaces. This video describes it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-jwkMEGHG8
The American parties are more like TIE fighters. Terrible designs, but when sensible accomplished people like Thrawn try to do anything about it, they can barely be heard over stupid prestige projects like the death star.
"Left" and "Right" in the contemporary American sense, really only make sense in the specific context of contemporary USAian politics.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who realizes this. Left/right isn't some inherent divide of the universe, it's just where the two clusters happened to end up currently in the US. The fact that there are two clusters is guaranteed by FPTP, but the clusters morph over time, so even comparisons across long periods of time are pretty much meaningless.
" Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?"
Well, I don't get angry, just disappointed with my fellow Americans. :)
From a non-US perspective, both parties reflect the two different sides of America. It's easy to tell the difference between a Democrat politician and a Republican, most of it is squabbling at the fringes about the issues du jour. Which, if we're honest, are merely the trimmings of the socio-economic pie- the big stuff has been more or less agreed. America, regardless of which party controls the apparatus of the state, is the land of trade, opportunity, capitalism, world policeman, head honcho, guffawing tycoon etc.
America has two left/right wing parties in the sense that both of them agree that there is an AMERICA. Even with the new found rhetoric from the left about evil empires and reparations and so on, ultimately the people who are making their speeches about the indignity of the flag are just jaw droppingly AMERICAN to an outsider. Looking from afar at scuffles between, say, Antifa and Trump supporters, it just screams a certain Americanised way of behaving*.
And it isn't just a matter of culture, the politics of your nation is so interwoven with the fabric of your society (freedom! democracy!) that to be AMERICAN is to scream a certain political stance to the rest of the world. Of course, you'll get the communists and the libertarians, politically polar opposites, but even just their voice will betray the irrefutable truth that at the core of their thinking lies the same psyche.
*I'll note that with globalisation the American psyche is rapidly becoming the de facto Western psyche. For example, BLM was imported wholesale across the anglosphere regardless of the completely different cultures on the ground. What seems to matter more and more is the culture of the internet- which is American.
https://youtu.be/Rr8ljRgcJNM
I think a lot of Democrats don't meaningfully believe in AMERICA. Because if you believe that the definition of an AMERICAN is literally anybody who sets foot on American soil, then you're saying your nation doesn't really exist. When you want to tear down everything that makes America meaningfully American (e.g. "cancel" its founders, get-rid of the constitution (even just by de facto)), I don't think its meaningful to say you believe in America.
If the US's two major parties were the Communist (Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist (Revolutionary), I think it'd be fair to say that both parties are left-wing, and not just because they're to the left of where we are now. To the extent that "left" and "right" are meaningful categories, your position on the spectrum is about how much you subscribe to one memeplex/ideology/etc, how much you reject the other one, how much the other one rejects your views, etc. Since the two communist parties both subscribe to the left-wing ideological cluster, they're both left-wing. If both parties in the US subscribed to the right-wing cluster, they'd both be right-wing.
The right-wing party in Australia are called the "Liberals". In France the Radical party went from far-left to left-wing to center-left to center to center-right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Party_(France)
In practice, Marxists yammer on about left vs right deviationism within Bolshevism all the time. Anarchists consider themselves further left than state-socialists, and anarcho-primitivists dismiss ordinary anarchists as bourgeois & insufficiently radical.
> The right-wing party in Australia are called the "Liberals".
Which makes perfect sense. It's only in the US that "Liberal" has somehow come to mean "left wing".
Someone forgot to tell Gilbert & Sullivan:
I often think it's comical – Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
And that's the point - there is no objective center and no objective choice of which dimension is the left-right axis that would make something objectively left or objectively right.
And every English speaking country except Australia
Just so everyone's aware, the liberals of Australia are vastly to the left of the republican party of the US.
And Canada...
> The objective standard? Are you sure that exists?
Yes. Recall yesterday's post on parties being "extreme": Similarly there are multiple reasonable objective definitions of "center".
For example, there's a very common one you may have seen involving a grid and left/right auth/libt axes, used in a million memes. It has its roots in a pretty standard 20th century dichotomy where "left" meant socialist and "right" meant capitalist. In that system, the center meant a mixed economy, and center left / center right meant a mixed economy with a bit more socialist / capitalist stuff, respectively.
There are other definitions you could use too. It depends on your purpose. It's fine. It's good. Let's not demand a single perfect definition that captures all intuitions, and so flail our arms in the air and declare it all "just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable".
Where is that center though? Is it US economic policies of the 1950s? Or US economic policies of the 1990s? Or something else?
(You might have replied to the wrong post? Mine was the "there are multiple reasonable objective definitions of 'center'" one & didn't attempt to identify a unique center.)
Oh, I was looking at your middle paragraph, which did seem to be identifying one particular center, and I was suggesting that even that definition doesn't do a good job of identifying a center.
Ah yeah, I mentioned the left/right axis of the "political compass" memes as an example. It's not based on the economic policies of the US (or anywhere else) though. It's based on ideology.
Like suppose I personally favored a mixed economy that is predominantly capitalist but still has more socialist features than we currently have. On that axis I'd therefore count as center-right, even if the vector from here to there meant moving left.
But that's just one definition. It's a very popular one for its history and memeability, but if you think it's not empirical or precise enough for your purposes, I have no reason to insist on it.
The within-country differences paper doesn’t seem to look at economic issues at all, even those are many of the biggest policy differences between the United States and other countries, not to mention between parties in the United States. Compare to gambling and alcohol use, which aren’t even meaningful partisan issues in the United States.
Wait, what? Less than 30% of Democrats think homosexuality is morally acceptable? Only about half of Democrats think *contraception use* is morally acceptable? Really? How about alcohol? Don't most people drink? Does anybody understand these results?
Ah - should have read the paper. One option you could select (which wasn't graphed above) was "not a moral issue". Sheesh, that really changes the results.
Renders the whole thing almost worthless.
My sense is that this paragraph is where people who seriously make this claim disagree:
"Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left. You can probably argue that the Republican Party’s structural advantages cause both parties to be a little to the right of where they’d be without them, or that Americans’ ignorance of party platforms means you can smuggle a few points in that are slightly more extreme than what they’d endorse, but it’s going to be a small effect."
Left-wing people who believe this argue (something like) that the US is a sham democracy ruled by an oligarchy that uses domination of the media and the churches to convince people to vote against policies that are in their interest and that they (in some broad sense, or with the correct information) support. This is the "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument or the "Manufacturing Consent" argument.
Right-wing people who believe this argue (something like) that the US is a sham democracy ruled by a permanent civil service bureaucracy that stymies all efforts at conservative reform plus an academic/cultural elite that effectively ostracizes anyone who speaks up for the common-sense views of ordinary people. This is Curtis Yarvin's argument, Andrew Breitbart's argument, and to some extent Trump's argument. During the Bush administration, the argument was more specifically that most Americans are conservative but that nonwhite people and some "white ethnic" people were "heritage democrats" that would switch over to Republicans once they became convinced that Republicans didn't hate them.
Both of these arguments can find support from polls showing overwhelming agreement with some properly worded progressive or conservative ideas.
I generally agree with Scott that while we're all obviously being manipulated by powerful forces all the time, and the manipulations are probably often successful, on average people tend to vote for politicians that say they'll do things that people want them to do, and the median voter is somewhere in between the Democrats and Republicans on most issues. But I don't think this is obviously true, and I could be convinced by empirical evidence that it's not true.
"domination of the media"
Very funny.
Hey, I'm just summarizing what I think the argument is :)
I think it's pretty obvious that most media outlets lean left (and my personal sense is that most left-leaning outlets have become more left-leaning since Trump). But Fox is pretty big and Sinclair owns a lot of local media outlets.
Plus, I think leftists would argue that outlets like the NYTimes favor Democrats over Republicans but ignore or dismiss ideologies to the left of the Democratic party. If your argument is that the two parties are both to the right of the true will of the people, that's the relevant part.
Yes, what's up with Czech Rep.?
I too would like to talk about the Czechs.
And also Pakistan. These are the really interesting questions here. I wonder if the paper's authors messed up a few countries in a way that caused them to produce much more extreme results? Maybe when they were translating the option for "not a moral issue", they accidentally picked a translation that would make it less likely for people to choose that option.
Czechs are happy the Soviets are gone, deeply tired of people minding others' business, and mostly just want to go work on their cabins.
Czechia is known as the most atheist country and the home of the most porn studios, among other things. I suspect it's the place where the liberalizing tendencies of communism (i.e., it's opposition to religion, nationalism, sexism, etc.) were strongest, while the experience of the Prague Spring in 1968 kept them from going too much for the authoritarian tendencies of Soviet Communism.
I am sorry, but you are wrong. Between 1956 and 1968, we had relatively liberal communist regime, compared to other communist countries. After the Soviet invasion (which happened in 1968), things got worse.
Czechia is more liberal than other postcommunist countries because it was more liberal than them before communism, and despite Soviet occupation, it retained some of this legacy. Imho partially it can be explained by the fact that Catholic Church discredited itself due to its support for the Habsburgs, imho, but mainly, we were fully industrialized country when Communists came to power, unlike most of Eastern Europe, and industrialized countries tend to be more liberal
Well, Bohemia.
Native here. The result on homosexuality is very suspect. We do not have same-sex marriage, and it polls probably worse than in the US; at least if I remember correctly from previous post that it is on 70 % support in the US (I don't have time to find relevant polls right now, sorry). It has a highest support here from all postcommunist countries, though. Casual homophobia is common, although I cannot rule out that all other countries are worse in this regard.
Yes. We were first postcommunist country to have them /national pride intesifies, pun intended/. However, our same sex civil unions grant couples fewer rights compared to our marriage laws.
There were a few bills introduced in our parliament attempting to upgrade it to marriage, so far without success. Again, so far no postcommunist country allowed same-sex marriage, yet.
I was shocked that only 50% of US democrats said contraception was acceptable, so I skimmed the paper and saw an additional 40% said it was not a moral issue.
In that poll, there were three options: "morally acceptable", "not a moral issue" and "morally unacceptable". The first two options are nearly equivalent, but only one of them counts in the chart. I would be much happier if the comparison chart went by the percentage who said a thing was morally unacceptable.
Credit to Jonah Goldberg for this phrasing, but rather than two far-whatever parties, we’ve got two parties “determined to be minority parties”. In many cases the institution of the party itself has changed from being concerned with assembling electorally valid coalitions under a loosely aligned set of policy preferences with somewhat consistent messaging and mood affiliation into institutions focused on assembling an narrow coalition less concerned with electoral viability and more concerned with purity, enforcing narrow alignment, and a no enemies to the left (or right) approach - electoral considerations and institutional coherence be damned.
Debates about left-wing and right-wing are tiresome.
We are a two-party democracy - an 18th century quasi-monarchical hybrid. Third parties will come and go but none can establish itself as a major force because of the way our republic is structured. We have a chief executive elected independently of our legislature, a figure operating outside of it who cannot be removed for reasons of competence or policy . Our elections are at set intervals, so governments cannot fall. There are not any no-confidence motions in the US system, but minority parties rely on the no-confidence mechanism to exercise power. And then there's the Electoral College.
Given that we have, and will only ever have, two effective political parties, the real question of interest is this: Do those we have represent the American people sufficiently well that the will of most of the electorate can be expressed by voting for one or the other?
In my opinion, the Republican Party represents a substantial but likely minority of American people, and does so very well. The Democratic Party does not represent enough of the remainder to fill its proper role in our system. That's why there's so much interest in third parties.
I'm one of those who's opinions are not well represented.
The issue is - the people who want third parties are split between those who want some sort of fiscally liberal, but socially conservative party, weirdo libertarians, leftists, and centrists who just want to stay in the middle.
Also, the reason third parties fall in America is because the two major parties steal their views - the GOP was originally a 3rd party, and the reason they actually rose up is because the Whig's were split between pro and anti-slavery wings and couldn't agree, so the GOP actually passed them. After that, every major 3rd party movement, whether it be the Populist's, the actual Socialist's in the early 1900's, or even Ross Perot eventually got chunks of their movements into the two major parties.
The answer to your question is no
The only problem with Scott's argument here is that he assumes that people are saying smarter things than they really are. When someone says "America has two right-wing parties," 99% of the time they're not making a considered comparison with some other country. They're just saying: I wish the American political parties were both more left-wing. And vice versa.
One of the biggest interpretive mistakes you can make is to over-interpret what the other guy is saying. Usually there's less meaning than you think, not more.
I don't like defending trite clichés, but I think this is kind of missing what people mean when they say such things. The mistake here is assuming people are treating "left" and "right" as parts of a continuum rather than distinct and discrete sets of ideas.
Concretely, when someone says "both parties are socialist" they (probably) don't think of socialism as any point at least x standard deviations left of center. Instead, they (probably) mean it as an ideology with some axiomatic, normative idea(s) against which you can compare a party's program and decide one way or another.
Stereotypically (but maybe a bit strawmannish) a right-winger could conceive socialism as the idea that the state has a right to individuals' property and income. Since both parties to some degree support taxation, they'd then both be straightforwardly socialist. Or maybe the right-winger defines socialism as handouts, and neither party outright rejects welfare support, hence socialism. In a third case, regulating the market at all is socialism, etc.
(Also works as a case "for" socialism as common sense, see: Bernie Sanders arguing that fire departments are socialist. The natural conclusion is that everyone is at least a little socialist.)
Conversely, a left-winger might conceive socialism as workers' ownership of the means of production, or abolishing the "chaos of the market" or some such. Since both parties support private capital and markets, they're both liberal or rightist or whatever.
It obviously gets a bit more nebulous when using the phrases left and right rather than the more specific "socialism", but I think generally it's implicitly still about discrete minimum requirements rather than points on a spectrum.
NB. This way of understanding these phrases also gives enough benefit of the doubt to them that they come kind of close to really interesting questions. For example, there is a wealth of literature and think-pieces trying to figure out why the US (and Canada) never developed anything like a European-style labour/social-democratic party. That's a very legitimate mystery – it's a distinct type of party which most comparable countries developed in the 19th-20th century, and yet which even New Deal-democrats only kind of approximated. Doesn't the question of "America's missing labor party" kind of sound like what people are getting at when they say both major parties are right-wing?
This historical argument for saying both parties are left wing is correct.
The OECD argument for saying both parties are right wing is wrong. On basically every cultural issue, Democrats are to the left of other rich country left wing parties. On economics, the Bernie wing (maybe a third of the party and its loudest speakers) is substantially to the left of social democrats elsewhere.
Furthermore, Republicans like to claim MLK for themselves, which is absurd and representative of how dominated by the left most of the political discourse (X is the real racist!).
most of the political discourse is*
Yeah, I’m aware, but I can’t get it to work on the app and I was too lazy to get on my desktop
How about 240 parties instead of 2?
Rodes.pub/RealElectors
Is that supposed to link to anything? I just see a Google authentication page
Let me look.
Try again and thanks for the heads-up.
I generally share this view. But in the interest of steelmanning or whatever, a few other possibilities (not that I necessarily believe them) (mostly from the POV of both parties being to the right but I'm sure you can flip it around)...
Maybe you have one left party and one right party compared to the zero-point of the median voter, but maybe two right parties compared to the zero-point of the median person. Add to that the idea that nonvoters are disproportionately on the left, or hand-waving arguments about why certain people vote but don't count.
Ignorance of party platforms being a bigger deal than you say. In particular the hot button issues that get the attention are a subset of all the issues out there, and maybe on the ignored issues both parties are right wing compared to the nation. Or maybe parties do a better job of hiding the ball on what they care about then you think.
Related is by only considering certain types of issues in your accounting of who is left and right wing. So e.g. the idea on the left that the right uses culture war issues to get elected and then pursues big money interests - you an extend this a few ways. Maybe a view where both parties are to the right on economic issues relative to the median voter, and (though it's not usually phrased this way) the average of the two parties is to the left on social issues, and you consider economic issues to be the "real" measure. Or maybe to the right on economic issues, more center on social issues, and your weighting of the two is simply different from the voters'.
Or relatedly, maybe the parties are centered around the zero point because the two axes aren't "social issues" and "economic issues" but "issues" and "vibes". Then the idea would be, I guess, that both are right wing on "issues", and Dems are left wing on vibes and Republicans are right wing on vibes, but people vote based on vibes. Or perhaps a weighted average of vibes and issues but same basic idea.
Finally on the question about being left/right relative to OECD/American history. I think the reason they don't specify the group they're comparing to is that they see it as obvious. Like, of course the zero-point is measured by reference to other first world democratic nations! Or, of course the zero-point is measured by reference to American history! Sure if you want to use more exactitide you should say who you're using for reference, but since when is political rhetoric like that?
Ok, entirely different nit to pick since no one else seemed to call it out :
"both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left."
It suggests one is to the right of the median American VOTER, and the other is to their left, not the median American. Relatively few eligible Americans vote, something like 50-60% in presidential elections, much less in off year elections. It is possible that the people who don't vote are distributed sufficiently like those who do that the median would still be in the middle somewhere, but it is conceivable that e.g. the median American is a smidge to the left of the Democratic party, but since young people skew left learning and don't vote much the median voter is farther to the right of the Democratic party.
Nit picky, but worth noting that those 40-50% of eligible non-voters in presidential elections are doing... something... and it might differ significantly from the voters, who are a minority of the whole population.
The two main political parties in Poland struck me as both right of center, at least the last time I looked into it a few years ago, with the ruling party being more populist and the the former ruling party being more pro-business.
Israel is pretty much all rightists these days, too, with Bibi being replaced by Naftali Bennett, who identifies as being to the right of Bibi. Eventually Bennett is supposed to be replaced by his coalition partner, who is to the left of Bibi but not by all that much as far as I can tell.
Of course, within Poland or Israel, the various contending parties probably seem quite different to each other.
Absolutely correct (the "both right of center" part, to be exact). The two biggest political parties in Poland started out as natural ideological allies and literal coalition partners. Then they both won big and one refused to share power with the other. That's it, that's all what the conflict between them is about - factional struggle for power.
Of course, that's been almost 2 decades ago and they've been slowly diverging ever since, to the point where they genuinely represent two different, antagonistic parts of the voter and activist base. But both their top brass are still the same old bunch of ideological conservatives. An average Polish voter would prefer access to abortion AND social transfers, but their best option is choosing exactly one and hoping that the party promising it will feel compelled to reluctantly reward their votes instead of simply pointing out how much worse the other one would be.
It doesn't help that our left is an even bigger joke than the one in the West. Western left-wing parties being taken over by prole-hating managerial elite is still a relatively new development. Here in the second world, they've been that way since, like, the 1950s.
Israel used to be a self-consciously leftist country. Labour won the first 8 general elections in Israeli history.
But not anymore.
I am definitely one of those annoying people who are often found quoting the likely apocryphal, but to my knowledge ascribed to Bastiat, quip that "America needs a second party". Allow me to explain.
I am a lifelong classical liberal/small-l libertarian, which means that I describe myself, politically, as socially liberal and fiscally conservative. My ideal government is a representative, constitutional democracy that focuses on protecting natural rights. In practice, I want a government that is dedicated to safeguarding my and everyone else's individual liberty to engage in both whatever voluntary revenue generating activity appeals to me, and whatever victimless personal behavior that is meaningful. My priorities are: 1) do no harm to others' persons or property; 2) seek fulfillment, happiness and flourishing by whatever means you see fit.
Neither American party has ever represented me. I often find the question in American politics to be, "Do you care more about personal (D) or economic (R) freedom?" Willfully leaving aside commentary on how neither party has lived up to these standards, I resent the fact that this should be the dichotomy.
Personal and economic freedom are not mutually exclusive. I favor both equally. I would love there to be a policy agenda aimed at maximizing ALL victimless freedoms. There is no party that represents me.
I mean, there is a party, it just appears there's not enough people who agree w/ you and care enough to not vote for the two major parties to be electorally successful.
Well, the argument goes that the kind of economic freedom you crave is simply not possible without a strong set of commonly shared and enforced values (i.e. some "social conservative" limitations on personal values freedom). This is supposed to be what makes libertarianism an unworkable fantasy in practice, nice as it sounds in theory.
Like for example if some people think usury (charging interest) is immoral, and other people think women shouldn't be allowed to own businesses, and some other people think problems should be solved by appealing to the local mafia don, imam, or head of clan, and when private violence ensues it's no outsider's business -- all of these things make the libertarian live 'n' let live ideal kind of fall apart.
Even if the values chaos doesn't affect you directly, you end up appealing to an executive for police protection, or a judicial system for justice, and if the values they represent and enforce aren't consistently and strongly along a certain axis (basically a limited form of social conservatism, where nobody can tell anybody else what to do, cash is king, laws and contracts are enforced strictly according to their text, and without regard for religious pieties, "social justice" considerations, or unwritten tribal norms) individuals can't prosper and business fails.
I dunno if the argument is correct, since we've never really seen a purely libertarian state, so we don't know if in fact it *would* implode, but to the extent the argument is accepted by the kind of people who form and run political parties, it would explain why no one is interested in catering to that particular values set.
I think what Carl is trying to say here is that, while social liberalism works extremely well, you will need a reasonably robust state to provide enforcement and prevent corporations from taking over. Thus, straight liberalism is really what you are looking for. \s
Quite the contrary. In the absence of some fortuitous pre-existing cultural homogeneity of high inherent staying power, social liberalism leads to significantly increased demand for economic regulation, because people do not trust others to just do the right thing free of regulation[1].
Contrariwise, if you want to have a very light government hand on economic regulation, you need a significant degree of pre-existing inherent or enforced social values homogeneity, such that when everyone has a wide range of legal ways to act, people can nevertheless predict how they'll act, and that prediction is congenial with their own value systems.
It would be great if human beings didn't work this way, but they do. Wide economic freedom requires a high trust environment, and that only comes from homogeneity in values, and enforcing homogeneity in values is pretty much what being "conservative" means.
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[1] I mean, this is almost a standard left party principle, so I'm not sure why it even needs explaining. Parties on the left are always wanting economic regulation precisely because they believe that people have sufficiently different values that, left to their own devices, they will exploit and abuse each other intolerably. Since the left *also* wants to allow people maximum latitude in personal social values, you find that social liberalism and economic conservatism inevitably go together.
Basically, you are saying that if we chop everyones hand off for stealing then we don't need jails and save money. Ingenious.
Not even a little bit. I am baffled how you could have read what I said that way, so I kind of suspect you didn't really read it at all. Chopping hands off for theft or imprisoning thieves are both forms of social value coercion, neither has squat to do with economic liberties (or constraint).
I'm extremely skeptical of your claim that social liberalism and economic conservatism inevitably go together.
There's an extremely widespread tradition of conservative anti-capitalist thought (uniquely absent in America compared to the rest of the world, although gaining new prominence from Patrick-Deneen-style conservative critics of classical liberalism), which argues that Marx was *right* when he pointed out that economic freedom inevitably destroys traditional forms of social organization like family, religion, and local community, as "everything solid melts into air".
They fully embrace the libertarian argument that both forms of individual freedom naturally go together, and consistently favor communitarian restrictions on it in both cases.
Sure, there's plenty of people who argue social conservatism isn't enough, that you need government to restrict economic freedom *as well* because why would you enforce morals in the individual/family/social setting and then just go laissez faire hands off whenever money changes hands? If it's right for a community to (say) condemn and suppress lying in the personal realm, why would you permit multi-level marketing and misleading advertising in the economic realm?
But I'm not sure why you say this argument is rare in the United States. I've seen it plenty, and you can find arguments like it among the Trumpies. They'll tell you not only does the family need to be strengthened but also we need tariffs, screw the economic inefficiency, for moral reasons also. It's not necessarily a *governing* principle on the right, but it's definitely present and significant, probably growing.
I haven't really seen the argument go in the causal direction you say, that economic liberty leads to the breakdown of social norms. That strikes me a priori as a bit academic-theological, like a lot of Marx's hypothesizing (which is why I don't take him seriously). What's the hypothetical mechanism? How does abolishing a minimum wage law lead to increased acceptance of out-of-wedlock birth? I'd think you have to argue people are strongly affected in their personal decisions by abstract philosophical considerations of the sort on which only an intellectual might dwell. ("The conditions of the poor are so wretched that I shall reject the advice of my wealthy father, bourgeois oppressor, and not marry the father of my children. That for your values, papa!" In my experience few real ordinary people do this.)
Anyway, the issue here is not what is optimal but just how the causality arrow runs. The argument is that social liberalism -- allowing people as much as possible to do what they please, having a minimum amount of community judgment of moral decisions -- inevitably destroys (or prevents the establishment of) economic liberty, just because people's values don't stop at the point where money changes hands. If we don't suppress lying then we are inevitably going to *get* ponzi schemes and fraudulent advertising and exploitive labor contracts, since we do not agree on what a "lie" is or what is "exploitive," and then people will be unhappy and presumably insist on a collective response to the economic ills.
If the argument is that they wouldn't *stop* in such a case, and go on to insist on a collective response that enforces moral codes, that I do find plausible. When the pendulum swings it usually swings hard.
Obviously you’re a raging right winger! /sarc
My complaint is deeper than and subsumes Scott's complaint: I deny that Left and Right are even coherent, much less objective, notions. I deny that there is any such single dimension on which political differences can be measured.
It's not just that political differences are multidimensional, and reduction to the Left-Right is overly lossy. That suggest that we just need to add another dimension, as in the common two-axis political compass charts. I don't think that's right, either.
Forget that you'd every heard of such a spectrum or compass, and ask your, based on first principles, why would one expect political thought to be measurable by one (or two) dimensions? Is the space of, say, computer architecture designs or biological organisms measurable by one (or two) dimensions?
Yes yes yes! Left / right is meaningless when no one agrees on what either left or right means. The vagueness has only gotten worse. IMO politics is tribal for most. You might differ on specific issues with your tribe, but you know what group feels most comfortable.
Left and Right made sense in the 1780s, when the people who thought the King should have more power sat on the side of the King's right hand, and the people who thought the King should have less power sat on the side of the King's left hand. When we got rid of the King, there was definitely some metaphorical sense to be made about how supporting other hierarchies like the priests and corporations, and other traditions like nationalism and religion, would be right wing, while delegating power lower in the hierarchies and supporting minority and dissenting cultural views would be left wing. But after a few more generations, and decades of greater globalization, many of these metaphors no longer make sense, let alone line up. What is actually a left or right wing view on vaccination, or trade policy, or the rights of minorities to practice traditional religions?
I was under the impression that it came from the arrangement of parties during the French Revolution, but yes, tracks with what you say. My question is about centralization vs decentralized systems. As I understand it, most Russian revolutionaries had it mind a radically decentralized system, with the soviets channeling the will of the people upwards. the Bolsheviks turned this into a system of top down control. Who was then left wing? As others have pointed out, sometimes people conflate authoritarianism with the right wing, but in practice the so-called lefties like it too. Maybe it’s the justifications that are different.
I've always thought that a lot of the specific issues that ended up on the right or left in US politics could easily have ended up on the other side. It's not like support for free-market capitalism and fundamentalist Christianity are natural allies. Being in a world where there's a large and influential political movement that opposes both capitalism and religion is probably the reason those two largely ended up in the same party.
> I think most people who claim “America has two left-wing parties” are talking about relative to US history
Wait, who is this? I suppose I’m in a bubble. Even my Republican friends/family don’t say this. Is this some neo-reactionary thing?
> and people who claim “America has two right-wing parties” are talking about relative to other OECD countries.
In my experience, this is true. But to be more specific, I think it tends to be about economic leftism/rightism. On social issues there is less of a clear split; gay and abortion rights are way worse in some predominantly-Catholic Western European countries than in the US.
But on many economic issues (things like taxation, corporate regulation, antitrust, etc.), the Clinton/Biden/DNC wing of the Democratic Party is sometimes viewed more like a business-friendly centrist or center-right party in the EU, rather than an actual “left” party.
> Wait, who is this? I suppose I’m in a bubble. Even my Republican friends/family don’t say this. Is this some neo-reactionary thing?
Well obviously your Republican friends wouldn't say this, it would only be said by people who are too far right to consider themselves Republicans. You may not have any friends who fall into that category.
? What Western European Catholic countries are those. Western European and South American countries are the vanguard of liberalism on gay rights. The map of countries with gay marriage is the map of Catholic countries, with a few Protestant countries thrown in. Gay marriage is in general a fetish of western Christianity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#/media/File%3AWorld_marriage-equality_laws_(up_to_date).svg
Some western Catholic countries have legalised homosexuality for centuries. The British Caribbean and South America, British colonies in general including historically the US, are far more problematic.
Italy, Hungary, and Poland complicate your claim about Catholic countries.
The claim about homosexuality made more sense a decade or so ago, when much of the United States had legalized same-sex marriage and much of Western Europe was still lagging (though this was never really a clear distinction between the United States and Europe the way that immigration policy has been and continues to be).
You might want to look up the definition of Western Europe. Italy is the only country in your list which could vaguely be called Western European - but I would put it in the Southern European category. And it has civil marriage, which is pretty close.
The only thing I would change in my post is to say that the map of countries with gay rights is *largely* the map of western Catholic countries. I include South America in western Catholicism.
I wasn't referring to Hungary and Poland as western Europe any more than you were referring to South America as western Europe. I was using them to challenge your claim about Catholicism - and if you say "western Catholicism", then sure, I don't have anything in particular to say about that concept.
In any case, I think gay rights was not a good example for that person to have used - I do believe that for a few years, the United States was more progressive than much of western Europe on gay rights, though not uniformly so, and not for that long. But I think other sorts of policies like immigration are a clearer example.
I was making a statement about Western European Catholicism in response to a claim that the US is now (not in the past) more liberal than Western European countries. In fact the poster said Western European countries were “way worse”.
I personally didn’t feel the need to exclude Poland and Hungary from Western European countries out of respect for the audience here.
After that I moved onto Catholicism in general. The point still stands that Catholicism is fairly liberal in its heartlands of Western Europe and South America. Mentioning Hungary is no kind of gotcha.
I don’t find your responses all that interesting so maybe you can desist from responding to me in future, thanks.
Thanks, perhaps my claim was overly specific and not up to date. I think I probably muddied the water by using both Catholic and Western European as descriptors, where I think these don’t both apply to both issues; I wasn’t really trying to make that specific a point.
I’d happily leave Catholicism out of it and retreat to the weaker claim that on those social issues, there are many EU (or OECD to use Scott’s selector) that are either recently or still “to the right” of the US, which means it’s hard to make the claim that the US is (on social policy) “two right wing parties”, whereas I do believe that frame had some defensibility regarding economic policy.
TIL Republicans are more in favor of birth control than Democrats. that was not what I expected
More Democrats say that birth control is "not a moral issue" - this only counts the people who say it is a moral issue, but is morally acceptable.
Some people try to claim that New Zealand has a North Island and a South Island. But by OECD standards it's clear that they should be called the Far South Island and the Really Far South Island.
This wins the thread.
I get irritated that issues get bundled into a pair of parties at all. Why should there be correlations on anyone's views on:
immigration
nuclear power
racism
CO2 emission control
human-toxic pollutant control
economic redistribution
sexual minorities of various sorts (and this is itself a bundle)
firearms
surveillance
right-to-repair
nuclear weapons crisis stability (tactics for maintaining stable deterrence)
For intelligent people, there shouldn’t be.
I think there are some natural clusters. E.g. someone might be generally skeptical of government and thus be generally opposed to government action/power.
That's fair. ( I suspect that preference for government action on e.g. immigration and on e.g. CO2 might be _anti_correlated, but I don't have the data )
Because people's object-level political beliefs usually spring from deeper philosophical commitments, and certain commitments naturally tend to produce certain sets of beliefs.
If you have a political system that requires a majority to pass bills, then you will end up with non-ideologically coherent coalitions. If I care a lot about CO2 emission control, and you care a lot about firearms, then we might get together in the cloakroom and say "I'll vote for your firearm bill if you vote for my CO2 bill". Once we've done this a couple times, we may decide that we'll continue acting as a coalition, and then anything that one of us supports will tend to do quite a bit better than a random issue in the legislature, as long as it isn't directly opposed to what the other does. Thus, there will be an arms race by others to put together coalitions as well.
Under some voting systems, you can end up with several of these coalitions that are relatively strong, that then work together or against each other on an ad hoc basis, like in Germany. But when you've got first-past-the-post voting systems, there's a strong tendency for these coalitions to coalesce until there's just two of them.
There's no reason for individuals to initially have correlated views on these issues, but there is reason for members of a legislature to have correlated votes on them, and then once people start to identify with the team in the legislature, then on issues they don't particularly care about, they will convince themselves to adopt the views that members of their coalition hold. And thus the views will now become strongly correlated.
That's fair. As you said "There's no reason for individuals to initially have correlated views on these issues"
and the place my teeth start to grind is
"once people start to identify with the team in the legislature"
I think it doesn't necessarily even take anything as deep as identifying with the team in the legislature. I think most of us have the experience of caring about something only because a friend cares about it, and once you and someone else have traded votes on your pet issues a couple times, you start to feel like friends, and might start to feel like you care about each other's pet issues. For the voters at home who didn't do the vote trading, they might still notice the things the person they voted for supports, and think of them positively, and then associate that positive halo with the other things that person supports.
Probably the team identity makes this all a whole lot stronger, but it seems like it's nearly bound to happen in a system like that of the US even without that.
Hotelling-Down's model.
Yeah, but that says what the winning candidates should converge on. My irritation is with the (low rank?) dimensionality of the views of the full electorate.
It also says that all our complex preferences colapse down to a single dimension. If your pet preference(s) are orthoginal to that single dimension (like me), you are shit out of luck and neither party has something to offer you (like me). If your pet preferences are more colinear with that dimension, then the parties either fight over you if you are near the center of the distribution or count you in their camp if not.
It depends on election structure / how public policy decisions are made. When at least some policy decisions are made by referenda, rather than by electing candidates from parties with bundled policy positions, the collapse doesn't have to occur.
The Hotelling-Down's model, and my comment above, absolutely take as a given geographically bounded, winner take all, representative democracy. Given that this whole post is about US electorate and policies, which take place in a nation with geographically bounded, winner take all, representative democracy, I kind of assumed I didn't need to list that given in the model.
Parlementary systems, plebicites, etc etc will all have less bundling and probably won't have 2 parties.
Fair enough. Some states do have referenda, so they are a component of the US electoral system, albeit at the state level, and mostly a minor one.
Most people don't care about that many issues - they care about a couple at best, and basically don't care about the others until they become high salience.
For instance, the majority of Obama/Trump voters were pro-choice.
That sounds plausible.
If e.g. your moral worldview is the government shouldn't restrict people's behaviors (libertarianism), then obviously there should be a correlation. This is true much more broadly too, because everyone has a model of the world that (usually implicitly) shapes their judgements on things.
A preference for limited government would be a factor in most of these questions, but hardly the only factor, and the same question can have portions where government actions have happened in opposite directions. ( E.g. this has happened with sexual minorities. )
I see no one's mentioned the famous quote:
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them. - Julius Nyerere
I am astonished to find that anyone here even knows who Nyerere is - thank you for the humbling reminder.
I didn't know the Czech Republic was the true home to the light of freedom.
You learn something every day.
Relative to European social democracies, is the comparison I've commonly seen. I initially assumed the meme underlying this post was https://www.fishbowlapp.com/post/europeans-will-understand-this-meme-americans-will-just-get-triggered
I kind of agree with respect to some proportion of this kind of thing, and I get annoyed by the article with respect to another proportion of this sort of thing, when the context adds the meaning which is absent from the claim itself.
In regard to the former - yeah, it's not great. (But also "say what you mean" is actually a really high bar to clear, and maybe a lot of people saying this kind of thing, while they do mean something like "compared to American history" or "compared to a particularly salient reference class of European countries", don't actually know that that is what they mean)
In regard to the latter, I think this feels more like a correction when somebody uses who/whom incorrectly.
„ By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right;“ The Soviet Union stopped being a radical left wing party in the 1930s - at least culturally. By the 1970s the US had moved far to the left of the Soviet Union on most social questions, other than abortion. Even Putin is to the left of the USSR when it comes to homosexuality, or freedom of expression.
There’s a sea of difference between left wing economic ideas and “bourgeois liberalism”. Progressive ideology isn’t necessarily related to economic leftism, it’s just a historically been the case in the West that these two distinct philosophies aligned, not that there weren’t conservatives left wing voters and politicians - there were plenty.
There is a real difference, but neither party know what it is. The Republicans are the party of self-control and responsibility, the Democrats of Peter Pan, never growing up, and pretending actions don’t have consequences.
Most people will hate this characterization, and will immediately bring up counter arguments (what about climate change?) but those shibboleths, not fundamentals. If someone tells you that you should “follow your bliss” or that “the drug war is all paranoia” you know pretty well which party they belong to.
We are seeing this play out in SF as many many people who thought they were Democrats are learning what it looks like to live in a city devoid of responsibility, from zero consequence crime to open air drug markets to educators who believe their primary mission is not learning but the destruction of “a white privilege” (whatever that is imagined to be).
A smart Republican (so not Trump, but someone else?) will realize this message and rally people around it: “we may disagree about many details, but we agree that America is built on personal responsibility, and I stand for personal responsibility” — and OMG will that work as a rallying cry… People are absolutely starved for a message like this.
Are you sure? I thought the Republican's were the party of Luddites who would have us still living in caves without fire while the Democrats were the party bringing us medicines, cell phones and nuclear power. We must be reading different magazines. \s
What’s with the chart though? When exactly was it that only 30% of US dems found premarital sex morally acceptable?
Nice, thanks for sharing.
The chart seems odd to me. Democratic voters seem very conservative by the standards of the West, even by the standards of the world sometimes. The leadership is fairly radical though.
The chart is misleading. The poll gave three options: morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, and "not a moral issue". So for example, while only about 30% of Democratic voters said homosexuality was "morally acceptable", most of the rest said it was "not a moral issue", which is basically equivalent, while only a small percentage actually said it was morally unacceptable.
Thanks. Very bad wording.
People seem to have a very strong belief in objective leftness or rightness, which I find weird. In my personal life, this mostly manifests as people refusing to believe me when I point out that - stipulating that Hispanics grow to an even larger portion of the US population, and that current Hispanics overwhelmingly vote Democratic - there are no implications for Democratic policies defeating Republican ones. People *want* to believe that more Hispanics means the balance tips permanently over to the Democratic Party and it goes on to implement all of its current goals for no other reason than that those are Democratic goals. But that's not how coalition politics works. Hispanics aren't obligated to support the Democratic Party's current goals - if there are more of them, that just means the Party will shift _its_ goals to be more in line with _them_. (And so will every other party.) That would be a win for economic redistribution, but it would be a loss for environmentalism, feminism, sexual exoticism... and it wouldn't even be a win for the Democratic Party, because every party will shift their policies until a balance of voters is achieved.
In other words, the belief I generally observe other people express is that party platforms exist independently of the voting base (?!), and what policies are implemented is just a question of whether current voters vote for one party or the other one. But it mystifies me how anyone could arrive at, or believe in, this model.
Hang on: Only ~30% of Democrats think Homosexuality is acceptable? What? Am I reading the chart right?
Taking into account non-white Democratic voters and the remaining number of white union members, could be? Democratic voters are often well to the right of the activists, the donors and even most Dem politicians on social policy (and to the left of the Dem establishment on economic issues).
You're reading the chart right, but the chart is misleading. Most Democrats answered that they thought homosexuality was "not a moral issue", while only a small percentage said it was morally unacceptable.
"both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left."
Good scatterplot showing systematic divergence on economic and social issues: https://www.niskanencenter.org/libertarians-just-might-exist/
The median American is CULTURALLY to the right and ECONOMICALLY to the left of the average party position. That's because elites are able to sway decision making into their preferred direction.
As an example: a wealth tax on billionaires is popular but not supported by mainstream politicians. Affirmative action is unpopular even in Democratic states, but still a thing.
I legit read the title as being about two parties (of the late night punch bowl sort) dedicated to X-Wings
The pattern in the west I see is a much bigger divide between the long educated and shorter educated than between left and right. The longer educated have a overwhelming hold on politics, academy, media, and higher level civil servants. This IQ gap is increasing because IQ is hereditary. When you sort by IQ and then put the sexes together at prime mating age you got an efficient eugenic system a.k.a. university.
So there is still left and rights in politics but all we hear from is the eloquent voices of the long educated. If the lower IQ gets too disgruntled, the higher IQ tends to dismiss them out of hand since their voices often sound stupid and dumb, therefore all too easy to dismiss. The fact that 95% of the UK Labor (University educated) MP's were against Brexit while 60% of the members was in favor is telling. Observe how a member of congress has a lot more affinity with the other party's members of congress than their own working class members.
This was different in the 20th century, we then still had many high IQ members from the labor class but the widespread adoption of university education, their stellar careers made their kids breed this out out of the working classes.
So we still have a political left but the eugenic universities system made it very theoretical, desperately lacking the pragmatic power from the lower working classes to keep it grounded. An interesting point is how the US opioid crisis that killed 100,000 people in 2021 is rarely discussed but somehow the very rare transgender issue overwhelms the internet bits.
I think a lot of the confusion about left and right comes from the fact that ~70% of the population is excluded from the conversation but still has a vote. A bit like dark matter.
Here is a model where this would work.
1. People vote on some cultural war positions, say, on abortion and race proxy issues such as policing.
2. The parties satisfy the median voter theorem on these issues, so one is left wing and the other is right wing.
3. On some other issues, e.g. economics, both parties are to the left (or to the right) of the median voter. These issues matter to the voters too, but both parties as so far out as to make their positions indistinguishable for many voters or at least indistinguishable enough for cultural war issues to dominate on the margin.
One could plausibly argue that both parties are to the left or to the right of the median voter because the median voter probably subscribes to positions such as "Keep your goddamn government out of my Medicare" which are both to the left and to the right of both parties.
The meme originated in the late 1990s/early 2000s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll3iyvbsRDM is from December 1999), when the two main US parties were indeed a lot closer to each other than today.
What's striking about your examples is that they bear no relationship to what anyone born before, say, 1980, would consider issues of "Left" and "Right." To the extent that one extreme of these opinions is associated with "the Left", that simply reflects the transformation of those parties from mass movements, often linked to trades unions, to elite boutique political movements run largely by educated middle-class socially liberal professionals. In the days of mass parties of the Left, these parties tended to reflect the social conservatism of their working-class base.
It's truer, in most countries today, to talk of a Monoparty with different internal tendencies. The model is something like the Chinese Communist Party, except not as organised an effective. A career in politics, independent of which label you decide to wear, requires a broad acceptance of various economic and social givens, though there may be sharp disagreements on points of detail. The fact that in most countries this is expressed by the maintenance of a formal two or three party system doesn't prevent a very large measure of agreement within the elite political class: indeed, there is an increasing tendency for politicians to move between parties, much as they would join or leave factions in a one-party state.
The traditional distinctions between Left and Right - who gets to control power and wealth - haven't gone away, but the political system no longer reflects these differences. As I tried to explain in this article, the supply of politics no longer corresponds to the demand.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/why-dont-the-people-vote-like-theyre?s=w
Yeah it is weird that they're *all* social issues. In my formative years I was used to hearing powerful arguments made about the rights of workers versus the wealth-generating power of free enterprise, the good/evil of government regulation of business, how to improve public education so all the children could be above average, how to "solve" poverty, whether unions or tariffs were good or bad, what the best form of national defense was (what mix of military preparedness and even intervention and diplomacy).
Maybe we're all rich enough now that we can spend our argument Robux on who's sticking which body part into whose orifice, or maybe all the poor schmos for whom making it to the next paycheck without having to eat oatmeal four times a week are just shut out of the debate, so it's a bunch of Marie Antoinettes debating Court Protocol, or maybe we've collectively given up on the idea of material progress and have settled, like a medieval town resigned to unchanging material circumstances from birth to death, on fierce arguments over who's a heretic.
I think there are many issues in which left/right is the wrong framing and center/fringes is more useful for understanding them. For example, the domestic surveillance of the War on Terror (which will probably just never go away because few politicians want the intelligence agencies as enemies) was and is pretty popular from center left to center right, but gets opposition from the fringes. The same was true for the bailouts of big financial companies in the 2008 meltdown.
This leads to the common but frustrating situation where there is nobody running in the election that you can vote for to oppose these center-vs-fringes policies.
It often seems to me that the substantial agreement of the people in power from both parties on these big issues is masked by very loud disagreement on social issues which they probably don't really care much about. You have to get groped by the TSA to board a plane and the NSA is going to record all your phone calls and emails forever and the FDA is going to drag its feet on everything and we will be bombing a new helpless third world country for murky reasons ever few years under both parties, but can I interest you in some outrage over the teaching of critical race theory in the schools?
I agree with you on this. My read of the passion on both sides for trans athletes competing with women pro or con? Black reparations pro or con? January 6 or BLM riots, which is worse? What are the acceptable pronouns in polite speech? and on and on is essentially one giant squirrel to distract people from the fact that *neither* party has a realistic plan to ever escape stagnation and slowing technological and entrepreneurial growth, figure out why the rich-poor divide just keeps getting worse and worse, stop the value received per dollar input of public education from continuing to crater, figure out how to make entitlements sustainable before they completely break, figure out whether anything can be done about relentlessly climbing and brutal health insurance and college tuition rates, or even freaking balance the budget. Iti's said that dictatorships start wars to distract from their inability to manage domestic misery, perhaps endless social culture war squabbles are what republics do for the same purpose.
I think economic issues are currently dead in US politics, and it's related to what Scott wrote in his post about class. Previously, the Republicans were the party of the rich and the Democrats the party of the poor, but Democrats are increasingly trying to appeal to richer voters and Republicans to poorer ones.
Right now we're at a crossover point where the average and median Republican voter is roughly as rich as the average and median Democrat voter, so Democrats can no longer afford to be "fuck the upper middle class" and Republicans can no longer afford to be "fuck the poor".
Trump understood this, which is why he was the most pro-union Republican ever. Romney didn't, which is why he lost.
Could be. We'll see what happens this fall, and even more so in 2024. Economic issues are suddenly very much back in fashion, with $6 gas and food and rent costs through the roof.
Well, American has more than two parties.
There's the ruling party, which is center-right by current global standards, and which has "Republican" and "Democratic" wings.
And then there are a number of smaller parties, some of which deviate from the center-right mainstream in one direction or another.
As usual, the implicit assumption is that Western Europe = the rest of the globe.
Yes, exactly. Not sure why so many people think that...especially on the left.
Center right? How many countries to the "left" of the US have birthright citizenship? Race-based discrimination against the minority for e.g. university admissions? Teach their kids that the majority of the population are "privileged"? Elect the equivalent of an inexperienced state senator as leader of the country on the basis of being a racial minority?
This feels a strawman-y to me. At least from my end, I’ve only heard this statement followed by a lot of context.
The form I’ve heard has been that “America has two right wing parties”, with the context that:
1- its relative to the other developed western nations today, OR to American standards since Roosvelt.
2- its mostly in the context of social democracy vs Laissez-faire stuff. Think issues like the size of the welfare state, worker’s rights (% country unionized, maternity leave, paid time off, minimum wage), public vs private healthcare, progressive taxation, antitrust laws, nationalizing certain industries (railways, energy sector, prisons, etc), trade laws (more or less protectionism), etc. They are mostly NOT talking about social issues like lgbtq rights, abortion rights, gun control, contraception use, religious freedoms, or adjacent issues like war, corruption, etc.
I don’t want to claim that everyone has used the “two x-wing parties statement” responsibly every time, with all the necessary caveats. But this article struck me as a little unfair, as I’ve seen plenty of people do just that.
What *is* unusual from a European perspective is that since there are only two parties that matter, they have to be very broad.
Meanwhile, the situation in Germany is very typical for a European country - a conservative party (well, two, technically), a liberal party, a social democratic party, a green party, a hard-left party, and an alt-right party. This does give each a much clearer identity. The Democratic party's voters would split (unevenly) into three or four under this.
The German situation is probably what people treat as a paradigm for a European country, but I think France and Italy have only rarely worked like that, and Spain doesn't seem to have the coherent groupings of liberals and greens that Germany does.
Clearly what we need is a Texan equivalent to the CSU.
The right and conservatives have not "conserved" anything that I care about (except maybe expanding concealed carry at the state level in a lot of places) in my lifetime. Most people on the right have the same impression, which is why they perceive the parties as left, and "lefter."
This is the whole problem with the "extremism" debate, tbh. Neither party can be "extreme" in relation to the average voter, since they both get close to 50% of the vote.
Instead it's a feeling that culture is either lagging far behind or changing way too quickly, and that's contextual. I honestly think both parties' voters expect too much too quickly in terms of feasibility and good policy, but that's a personal judgment. They aren't "extreme," they're just wrong. And they aren't even *objectively* wrong, they're wrong in the eyes of a person who is knowledgeable about policy-making, but who obviously has his own biases and assumptions.
Probably this is one of those models where rationalism can either be useful or worse than useless, and both versions give false confidence about how useful it is.
Earlier comment deleted; I have found the underlying report here: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/global-morality/
But something's gone seriously awry. I think the question got bad answers, because on all these topics, we have very different responses to slightly different questions. On homosexuality, see here: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/06/04/global-acceptance-of-homosexuality/ These numbers look much more like other survey results.
I suspect the translation of "morally acceptable," might not give a uniform impression.
The other part is that the authors of the paper blow through "not a moral choice," as another commenter noted. This gives you about a third of Republicans saying that use of alcohol is morally acceptable, which is deceptive. Having a "morally acceptable" contraceptive use number in the US of 50% or so does not tell folks that the percentage saying it was morally unacceptable was 7%.
So I think this is a deeply flawed interpretation of a flawed survey and doesn't support the underlying hypothesis (on which I do not take a position.)
"The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots"
That FINALLY helps me understand what you think left and right mean. No wonder I have such a hard time understanding your politics posts. I had thought it was just the American-centeredness. I guess this is just another piece of evidence that the terms left and right are pretty useless.
Heck, even most European center-right parties are like, "yeah, the welfare state is fine - can we just contract some of it out to our corporate buddies?"
1. Semantics. According to the first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics, "Left-wing politics is the support of social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy." Conversely, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics begins with the statement that "Right-wing politics is generally defined by support of the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable". Now, those are precisely the definitions I'd personally use, so of course I'd quote a source that confirms them. But I feel Wikipedia can be considered a pretty good indication of where the basic social consensus about these terms' meaning currently lies, and people wishing to adopt other definitions should at least feel the need to explain their choices, especially when they criticize others' usage of those terms.
2. "Both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left" is an obviously circular reasoning depending on redefining the terms "left" and "right" as synonymous with the two parties' and their positions. It's not just a bad, fallacious argument against the "two X-wing parties" adage, it represents precisely the kind of intellectual blind spot the adage is aiming to bring awareness to in the first place.
3. Surely, the classification is historically specific and only makes sense within some specific frame of reference. I also agree that, in principle, it's always better to be more precise and leave no assumptions unstated. However, I'd propose that there exists a frame of reference that is such an obvious default choice that many people wouldn't consider the need for it to be stated explicitly. To name it nevertheless, "America has two X-wing parties relative to the average beliefs of its population".
4. I blame the essay's failure to even mention "beliefs of the population" on an unexamined assumption that those beliefs can be adequately expressed by the results of elections. This assumption is false for multiple reasons. I already pointed out the problem of it reducing the vast, multidimensional space of possible political beliefs to a single line drawn between the current positions of the two parties, but there's more. What if the parties don't meaningfully differ on some dimension and the voters have no way to discriminate between them and therefore voice their actual beliefs in a meaningful way? What if the differences between them amount to a, largely strategic, choice between two evils? What about all the more immediate reasons to vote for one party over another, completely separate from abstract political positions? What about factual, low-level disagreements about practical effects of specific policies? I could go on, but skipping to the end - what if the existing model of democracy is systematically biased against representing the will of specific group (general population) and for representing that of another (a caste of career politicians)?
5. I posit that the issue of inequality in the contemporary US can mostly be thought of as an issue of economic inequality specifically. But even if economic inequality is not THE defining left-right issue I think it is, in light of the definitions I quoted earlier it should be uncontroversially understood as A left-right issue. Moreover, I posit that, empirically, two facts are true: 1) The US general public wishes for a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth. 2) The economic inequality in the US has continued to rise for decades, regardless of which party exercised control. Now, we can disagree about whether they're true. But if they are, "America having two right-wing parties" is not just a perfectly coherent statement, it's a direct implication.
> According to the first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics, "Left-wing politics is the support of social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy." Conversely, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics begins with the statement that "Right-wing politics is generally defined by support of the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable"
Here's the problem I have with those definitions. Let's separate out those two statements:
A: I support social equality and egalitarianism
B: I believe that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal or desirable.
I think the big difference is that left-wingers support A and not B (and see them as contradictory), while right-wingers support both A and B (and see them as non-contradictory).
Another annoyance of mine: "America really only has one party." While some interpretations of this statement are fair, most are absolute nonsense, and it's so vague it fails to distinguish between truth and nonsense.
Maybe it's supposed to mean "there are no meaningful differences in the policy positions of the parties." This is clear nonsense, they distinguish themselves on a few dozen different issues.
Maybe it's supposed to mean "the differences between the parties are meaningless wedge issues that don't address America's problems." Except America has open primaries in most states. We pick our own candidates, some of whom focus on so-called "wedge issues" and some of whom focus on other things. We tend to pick the "wedge" issue candidates. To me that suggests those issues aren't meaningless to most Americans. This may be another form of "Americans don't know what's good for them and can't be trusted with democracy" which I find not only annoying but dangerous. People get to pick what they care about.
Maybe it means "Both parties support continued existence of large corporations." Which...most Americans consider themselves capitalists and like capitalism. I happen to think a little too much, but see above. Correct, no party that may win a majority of votes supports an unpopular change of economic system, nor are they thrilled by the idea of massive portions of that system failing on their watch. I don't like this at all. I think regular market failures are part of a functional market society, much as woods sometimes need a wildfire to support new growth. But wildfires are scary, and this looks to me like everyone, including the voters, responding to incentives instead of some insidious conspiracy.
It could mean "America is an extreme vetocracy." This is completely legitimate. The American federal government is not made for fast, revolutionary change, even if that change is legitimately demanded by the voters. If infrastructure bills or 3% tax cuts seem like small potatoes to you (which is reasonable), then it doesn't much matter who's in the chairs at the moment. Neither party will ever pass sweeping legislation. But your beef is not with the candidates, but with a system that requires a majority of voters, a super-majority of majorities of voters in each state, and a friendly court that may have been picked decades ago to come into alignment in order to pass any large legislative reforms. Still, in my home state a change of the state legislature saw a minimum wage hike, districting reform, protections for lgbt folks, massive education overhauls, and several other major policy initiatives passed in like 90 days.
Maybe it means "both candidates are always globalists as opposed to nationalists." And Trump notwithstanding, that's a fair charge. This seems like a place where the political elite either has a blind spot or is intentionally trying to avoid conforming to public opinion. People are reasonably scared of the massive changes brought about by the ease of outsourcing work, bringing in labor from out of the country, automation, global trade, etc. etc. The fact that I've looked at this issue extensively and disagree with the assessment that restricting trade will do anything positive shouldn't factor in. Most people want to feel the government is protecting U.S. interests, and the government of both parties has been mostly pro-Globalism for reasons I don't quite understand.
I'm tempted to chalk this up to "well, they're part of the educated class and they know better" but that's just a massive bias on my part. Also I tend to think of political candidates as being empty shirts that get filled with whatever views they need to win elections in all other cases, not sure why that would change now. It could be that the donor class is very pro-globalism, but I remain deeply skeptical that donations have big impacts on elections (generally the best fundraisers lose). My suspicion is that, like me, they are members of the professional class, and cannot conceive of a way to implement the changes people want. Not that they wouldn't make changes that had bad results, just that demands like "bring back the jobs," or "prevent outsourcing," or "leave the U.N." are entirely infeasible to begin with. My (very biased) take is that the political class calculates that the negative consequences would be so immediate and severe that they would cost more than the goodwill gained from giving in to populist sentiment.
Starting with a compliment, I love this because it's like 75% of political discourse these days:
"Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point?"
But: this post is an odd one... Bringing up some possible definitions that are almost completely unused and comparing to countries which aren't remotely the goal of any significant part of US political debate.
Using an objective standard to gauge political sentiment doesn't pass the smell test - is anyone seriously trying to do this? (Perhaps theocrats?) It's almost definitional - politics is about the things we can't all agree on. Anything that can survive 5 minutes of inquiry as an "objective standard" isn't political. "People need food to not die" is an objective standard and not a political question; "we should give people food so they don't die" cannot be objective and thus will forever remain a political question even if largely settled someday. I guess the debate around trans people does raise some of this "objective standard" argument, but the level of good faith around objectiveness there is low on both sides.
“America is to the right of other OECD countries on most issues”
Are a lot of people willfully avoiding this definition? It seems by far the most obvious. Comparisons to i.e. Nordic countries are rampant in US political discourse; no one is trying to be more like Pakistan.
Well, I came here to offer a lame Star Wars pun, but others have already supplied those in sufficient quantity.
So, I'll give a serious answer: The basic assumption of your post is that there are parties in the United States. I disagree. The United States has outlawed political parties a long time ago, what you have instead are toothless folkore clubs that haphazardly dabble in organizing certain marginal aspects of the political day-to-day business.
In essence, a party is a large group of people that publicly bands together to participate in democratic mechanics of government, especially by participating in elections.
But in order to do that a party needs control over its own actions. Specifically it must be able to control who does and does not speak for it and who does and does not run for it. The US system of state controlled primaries has taken this control away from parties. In theory and political myth this was to "empower citizens" against evil party bosses who run things from smoke-filled backrooms. But the reality is that this has disempowered parties against special interests, especially well funded ones. To powerfully act in coordination, a party needs mechanisms to keep its people in line. Every first world democracy has those - except for the US.
Left-wing and right-wing aren't relative, they're meaningful absolute economic positions that one can be more or less of.
Left-wing means supporting economic democracy - nationalization, socialization, worker ownership, unions, strong labour laws, regulation for the common good, strong social safety net.
Right-wing is the opposite. Privatization, consolidation, state support of private enterprise, big business, no unions, limited or no worker protection, limited or no regulation for the common good, limited or no social safety net.
In this sense, yes, America has two right-wing parties. The Dems are centre-right - they support regulation for the common good, are lukewarm on unions and social safety net, but are otherwise mostly econ-right. The GOP is obviously quite far econ-right.
The Democratic party is not lukewarm on either a strong safety net or unions, and to the extent anti-discrimination laws count as labour laws, they are not weak on that either. They are also not weak on monopoly power and seem very enthusiastic about large public investments in infrastructure.
You seem to be stuck in the Bill Clinton Democratic party, which maybe was the neoliberal devil some like to bash, but definitely stopped existing some elections ago.
People have this idea Bernie Sanders was this totally harmless European social democrat when the truth is that when the Swedish Democratic party sent a delegation to observe the election, they liked Buttigieg the most. The boring suits in the Democratic party would be completely at home at any of the major center left parties of Europe, while AOC would swim around in something like Die Linke or Podemos.
The Democratic Party doesn't even support universal healthcare, which is considered a basic plank of the social safety net in pretty much every developed country.
I could go on, but they are only left relative to the Republicans, not in any absolute sense.
Incorrect.
From the 2020 Democratic Party platform:
"To achieve that objective, we will give all Americans the choice to select a high-quality, affordable public option through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. The public option will provide at least one plan choice without deductibles; will be administered by CMS, not private companies; and will cover all primary care without any co-payments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does on behalf of older people.
Everyone will be eligible to choose the public option or another Affordable Care Act marketplace plan. To help close the persistent racial gap in insurance rates, Democrats will expand funding for Affordable Care Act outreach and enrollment programs, so every American knows their options for securing quality, affordable coverage.
The lowest-income Americans, including more than four million adults who should be eligible for Medicaid but who live in states where Republican governors have refused to expand the program, will be automatically enrolled in the public option without premiums; they may opt out at any time. And we will enable millions of older workers to choose between their employer-provided plans, the public option, or enrolling in Medicare when they turn 60, instead of having to wait until they are 65. Democrats are categorically opposed to raising the Medicare retirement age."
I guess that's why Americans now have universal healthcare! Wait, they didn't introduce a bill to that effect? And they're not going to? Even though they control both houses and the presidency?
(Also, that's not what most people would describe as universal healthcare).
They introduce like ten of those bills every session. None of them get anywhere because the Democratic party does not control Congress:
>https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1976/text
>https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-medicare-for-all-with-14-colleagues-in-the-senate/
Here's a breakdown of the healthcare bills of the major 2020 Democratic presidential candidates:
>https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18103087/medicare-for-all-explained-single-payer-health-care-sanders-jayapal
They all intend to achieve something like universal healthcare via government programs, although the exact means differ.
Congress composition:
House - 221 D, 208 R
Senate - 48 D, 50 (!) R
Also, a major spending increase, that would necessitate a major and popular tax hike, in the middle of an inflationary episode, while the president has record low approval ratings seems like a bad idea in general, but maybe you know better.
"(Also, that's not what most people would describe as universal healthcare)."
Laughable assertion and also completely irrelevant. The Democratic party platform on healthcare is entirely consistent with the actual, existing healthcare systems of many rich countries. I'd suggest reading this:
>https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the?s=r
You have a deeply confused view of the world. Try less Chapo Trap House or whatever.
A major problem with this graph, at least in relation to abortion, is that it presents a multifaceted issue as a two-sided one.
My understanding is that on then whole, abortion laws in United States are still some of the most liberal in the world and that most European countries prevent abortion after 15 weeks, though even that is an over-simpification https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/us-abortion-laws-worldwide/
Of note: the chart in this post doesn't have all of the data, which is why the numbers are confusing.
The actual survey asks if a given thing is a) moral b) immoral or c) not a moral issue
That's why, for instance, only 25% of dems think Homosexuality is moral, most of the rest think it's not a moral issue. Only ~10% of dems thought it actually immoral.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Democrat-Republican-overlap-for-moral-issues_fig2_340879762
The relevant question is really: What's the appropriate reference class to compare the US to?
The right wing answer is US history. Which is not surprising for a party that claims to be conservative.
The left wing answer is Europe, or international organizations which contain mostly European countries. I have always found this surprising. Is the implication that the US is fundamentally a European country?
Not sure if you're actually unclear on this point, but obviously leftists don't think the reference class for the US should be Europe because the USA is a European country. That would be very stupid, so much so that it should have suggested you are not properly understanding the position.
The comparison they are trying to make is with other "western" nations. It's a bit of a cop-out to avoid just saying wealthy countries, because if you include rich Asian countries America starts looking centrist on many issues. But there some good cultural reasons to mostly look at western Europe, in that the influence of European history on the USA has been profound.
I agree that the left wing position is ill defined, just not for the reasons you imply. Rather it's too easy to draw boundaries that exclude conservative countries to make America look more right-wing. When leftists gesture at "europe", we don't mean Moldova, Romania or Turkey. We mean everything to the political left of Germany, which clearly cherry picking.
But I think a very fair comparison is to look at the anglosphere: IE Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA. This is probably the most culturally similar collection of countries you can pick. English speaking, white-dominated, colonial, capitalist, constitutionalist, democratic, rich, highly educated. But despite their similarities, America is a weird outlier on most issues: pro gun, pro jesus, anti abortion.
It's not reasonable to compare the US to Denmark (US IS SUPER CONSERVATIVE) or Saudi Arabia (US IS SUPER LIBERAL), but the US has some really close peer countries and comes off as super right wing and anti-progressive.
Of the countries you listed, only two even closely approximate the USA in the broadest impacts of our development (Canada and Australia) and oth of them have stark differences on multiple other important effects, from immigration source and control to government system, and leaving aside entirely the multiple states of the origin and the resulting Civil War.
Obviously they are not perfectly comparable (nothing is, that's the entire problem in a nutshell). All countries are unique.
But really, you don't think the US is comparable with UK/New Zealand? Take your median US citizen: a white, city-dwelling English speaking woman with some college. If you had to help her rank countries by "how easy would it be for me to integrate into this society", what countries beat out the five I mentioned? What countries would even be close?
You mention the civil war, and I get that it was pretty important to your history, but lots of countries had civil wars. Which statement is more true:
A) American is broadly similar to countries that have had a civil war, such as Greece, Turkey, France, Russia, China and Rwanda
or be:
B) America is broadly similar to Anglosphere countries, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Same question applies to basically anything you can think of that differentiates America from the anglosphere. You either end up inventing a category that makes America unique, or you chose a broader category that ends up lumping America with a bunch of random countries who have nothing in common.
The entire (rest of) the Anglosphere has a population less than a third that of America. If the entire Anglosphere was a single country, Americans would be a supermajority. Presumably therefore, the `political center' of the Anglosphere is roughly where the political center of America is...
Given America is the third largest country on earth and 4 times the size of the next largest wealthy western democracy (or 3 times the size of the next largest non western wealthy democracy), this feels like you are trying to create a subclass based on size. Is america more like similarly sized countries, or like Anglosphere countries?
Unless you are ignoring the significance of countries entirely and asking how left/right the average American is relative to the average human, but this is a boring question: I don't think anyone is arguing America is more right wing than the global median (probably they are leftish bit who cares?).
Unless you think the size of a country implicitly makes it more or less conservative/right wing, America's size is irrelevant: the question is how does her political parties compare to other countries, especially peer countries, and how do we select appropriate peer countries.
Again, I don't really have a horse in this race. I think America's parties are pretty conservative compared to her anglosphere peers and that anglosphere countries are pretty good countries to examine in comparison. As a leftist I think this is bad but hey, maybe it should be a source of pride for your conservatives (we hold the line when compared to our decadent peer group!)
But I'm not seeing why America being big makes the political culture of other smaller countries incomparable, and I don't think you really believe that only countries with similar population sizes can be meaningfully contrasted.
Well...I do think size is relevant to governance. Stuff that works in a city state doesn't work in a continent-state. And stuff that works in a monoethnic polity may not work in a multiethnic one. I mean, I assume you agree that Vatican City and Lichtenstein are poor comparisons to America? Ditto Singapore or Switzerland? (Both, incidentally, probably more `right wing' than America). Well, New Zealand is smaller than Singapore, and Australia and Canada are not that much larger. They all seem like basically city states to me (the fact that Australia and Canada control vast uninhabited wildernesses notwithstanding).
It is hard to come up with a reasonable reference class to compare the US to. The EU is a decent reference class in some sense - but of course it is not one country. Japan + ROK + ROC is getting there in size, but isn't really suitable since they are extremely mono-ethnic polities. India or Brazil are suitable in some senses, as continental scale multiethnic societies, but they are vastly poorer. And so on. So yes, I do think the US is a bit sui generis.
Is the `Anglosphere not including the USA' a reasonable reference class? Maybe! But if we are weighting by population, then we are basically comparing to the UK, which has a very different history (as in, it's an old world society not a new world one). And if we are weighting by `one country one vote' then we run into the `city state' problem above, where (IMO) three of the four entries in your set are city states...
I don't understand why "the West" includes Spain, Greece, and Poland, but not Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. The US has a lot closer historical, cultural, economic, and genetic ties to Mexico than it does to most of the countries of Europe.
I agree that the core Anglosphere is a reasonable category, but it's too small to do good comparisons: there's only 5 countries and the US is 70% of the total population. I don't think that this is what leftists mean. The Anglosphere as a whole is more capitalist, more federalist, and legally more traditional (common vs statutory law) than e.g. France or Scandinavia.
What is find weirdest about leftists using "the West" as a reference class is that it seems to accept a kind of Clash of Civilizations / WEIRDest People worldview. The US is expected to be normal when compared to other white, Christian countries. There isn't the universalist tendency, with a focus on the Global South, that I would expect from leftists.
I think I am agreeing with you, in that either the US is pretty centrist (amongst the global community) or amongst wealthy nations (as long as we include wealthy nations outside of western europe). Almost every other comparison seems to be cherry-picking in favor of a definition that makes the US look conservative, but I think the Anglosphere is a good candidate for a fair comparison.
And yes, I think it's weird that "the west" is being used as a reference class for American leftists, but to be fair, I think that's a necessary tactic by the left in order to stay in the conversation. There's a reason the mainstream right rarely tries to reference Singapore as an example of a conservative Utopia given that even Western-Europe seems like a strange and foreign place to the average voter.
That said, as a leftist, there's really not a lot I like about the global south. Like, don't get me wrong I think they're disadvantaged and exploited and suffering the aftermath of colonialism and all that jazz, but that doesn't mean their politics or policies are somehow more virtuous. Maybe I fail at egalitarianism or am in fact a huge racist, but I don't really look at the global south for examples of how we can re-order our society to promote human flourishing.
Edit: does size matter here? Yeah the US is huge, but does being a big country make you more conservative? Serious question, I don't think the sample group is too small or the US's size invalidates the comparison.
I do in fact think that Canada, Australia and New Zealand are far too small to be meaningful comparison points for the USA. The same way that Switzerland and Singapore are too small.
I'm more concerned that the set is too small to make too strong of claims about trends and outliers.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland were never colonial powers. The UK, Canada, and New Zealand don't have a constitution. The Anglosphere is not that similar religiously (and the US is about average for the fraction of irreligious people). Canada is only 54% native English speaking, behind Guyana, Suriname, Belize, and several small Caribbean countries.
When you have a group of only 6 countries, it's not surprising when every one of them is extreme in at least one important measurement.
Small sampling is definitely a reasonable concern, but the weird thing about these countries is how comparable they are in most way, and that INCLUDES politics. Canada and America are much closer (left/right) than Canada (or the US) and Saudi Arabia. Also they're much closer than Canada (or the US) and Norway.
If we want to do the dishonest thing and take "western europe" as the norm, ALL anglosphere countries are relatively conservative/right wing (the US just more than the rest). That's why I think it's a good group to use when considering some of these questions, because they are broadly more similar than other groupings but still have interesting differences. The most natural groupset, IE all countries, isn't particularly interesting for the purpose of the discussion, and constructed groups tend to be built with an agenda, or include a bunch of very different countries making actual comparison hard.
That said, your examples are kinda interesting. Canada, Australia and New Zealand most definitely did some serious colonializing, just ask the indigenous peoples. You an argue that they were still technically British while doing it, but if that's the case it sure is strange how American settler colonialism looks broadly similar to Canadian settler colonialism despite America having nominally shed itself of British influence.
Canada has a constitution, as does New Zealand; it's just split up a bit (IE Canada's Constitution act and Charter of Rights are separate documents, but combined are pretty similar to the American constitution). The UK... ok that one's a mess, I see your point re there being outliers.
Ditto language. Canada's extreme in the anglosphere, but not as much as you think. We have about 85% English fluency, because Quebec is a thing. We also bring in a lot of imigrants. That's where the 55% native born english comes from. But in provinces that aren't officially bilingual, the numbers are pretty similar to the US (93% vs 95%).
We could use multiple reference classes, each of which has a well defined criterion, or an intersection of multiple well defined criterion. E.g.: >50% native English speakers, >$40,000 GDP per capita PPP, Western hemisphere, European Union, >10 million citizens, >6 on the Democracy Index by the Economist, >50% Christian, or >50% white. Otherwise, we end up essentializing groups of countries. Which is something that you might want to do. But it is a weird thing for leftists to do.
Is there a reason that you didn't include the Bahamas or Barbados in the Anglosphere?
I think that we agree on a lot. The reference class might be cherry-picked for political reasons, but it looks suspiciously like a reference class cherry-picked by race & religion. There is some love for Latin American leftists, but they rarely make it into systematic comparisons.
If the average voter feels that most other countries are a strange and foreign place, then how does referencing them help the left stay in the conversation? Other political movements draw mostly on American sources. I'm not just talking about big political parties here: also smaller political movements like libertarianism or environmentalism.
I think the average voters feels MUCH more in touch with the idea of "western culture" than "european culture", so it ends up meaning something when you argue "Amongst rich western countries, America is so insanely right wing that it has two conservative parties". That's certainly more significant than "America's democrats would be a center right party amongst the EU parliament". True, but feels less trenchant.
"Not sure if you're actually unclear on this point, but obviously leftists don't think the reference class for the US should be Europe because the USA is a European country. That would be very stupid, so much so that it should have suggested you are not properly understanding the position."
I might understand the miscommunication now. The USA is obviously not a European country geographically. Some people might think that it is a European country culturally or genetically. This would be a strange claim for leftists to make.
As I said, it's more the idea of "western countries" than Europe per-se. Yes, it's weird for leftists to talk about "western culture", but it's honestly necessary if you want to talk to moderates about leftist ideals without coming off as foreign/communist.
Pondering it, the assumption that US and Canada are 'West' whilst Mexico, Argentina, etc are not is a little odd.
What the hell even is "pro-Jesus"? Is there an anti-Jesus party somewhere or something?
The US is only something of right-wing outlier on guns and it remains (don't know if that will last, but the past 50 years it has been the case) a liberal outlier on abortion. For all intents and purposes, it also is a liberal outlier on immigration and, if only because it has been a more or less diverse country for far longer than Australia or the UK, a literal trailblazer in your standard DEI measures (affirmative action and so on).
Overall I think this argument is sound, but I wanted to reply to one claim that's important on its own merits: that we can reasonably assume that roughly half of Americans support the policy positions of each party ("both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left.") Most of Achen and Bartels "Democracy for Realists" is knocking down this exact (reasonable) assumption, and I highly recommend reading it; unfortunatey my copy is in storage in another state so I can't quote the relevant passages and studies, but my brief recollection goes basically like this:
*Most Americans are staggeringly ignorant of the policy positions of both individual politicians and the major political parties, to the point that if everyone tried to vote based on policy without otherwise changing their information-seeking behavior, the result would be a lot more than the "few percentage points" Scott suggests.
*Only a minority of American voters are actually driven by policy in their voting behavior; the vast majority vote primarily based on two factors. The first is partisan identity, both of the traditional sort (I identify as a member of Party X) and increasingly and dominantly, negative partisanship (I recognize Party X has issues, but Party Y is so terrible that I have to vote for X to keep them for power). The second is a sort of point-in-time feeling about How The Country Is Doing (mostly economically, but with a few other factors), which gives elections a certain amount of essential randomness; given that the governing parties policies effects on the economy, if any, typically take years to manifest, there is very little relation between whether the economy is doing good under one party and their policies, and yet voters will vote as if there is a strong relation. This itself leads to median voter behaviors: if you have votes with significant random factors, you're going to approach 50% for each party.
This results in a few things: first, that parties can have policy positions significantly away from the mainstream, and not have it significantly impact how much of the vote they can get. Numerous surveys of Democratic vs. Republican policies have found that most (but not all) of core Democratic policies have majority support, many of them even attaining majorities among Republican voters (e.g. some level of gun control, some amount of abortion access, meaningful response to global warming, at least an honest attempt at reducing police violence and qualified immunity) whereas most (but not all) Republican policies do not.
And this is without even examining the relationship between partisan identity and policy preferences; the traditional theory imagines an informed vote with a set of policy preferences who chooses the "best candidate" for them, but what seems to in fact happen is that voters become aligned with a party, often in childhood (growing up in a Republican Family/Community or Democratic Family/Community) and their policy positions, insofar as they have cogent ones, emerge from the partisan identity and not the other way around. If the party changes, so do they; this is why Trump could suddenly pivot the Republican party from free trade to protectionism and lose basically no voters over it.
In short, we should not assume that just because X% of voters vote for a party, that means that those voters, on average, approve of the party's positions; and we shouldn't even assume that they approve of the party's positions *more* than they approve of the other party's positions, at least not when those positions are evaluated on their own merits. One of the theories for why Republicans consistently support gun control in polling, and yet Republican politicians get punished for even the slightest show of support, is that when actual legislation is introduced, it's inevitably by Democrats, and so the Republicans get punished for "crossing party lines" even if it's for a policy they support, because negative partisanship is so strong.
They're not looking at the same axis. When people say America has two right-wing parties, they mean neither party supports true economic leftism, i.e. abolishing private property completely. Western Europe doesn't do that, either. Clinton-era neoliberalism, by which US Democrats were right even of Western Europe Social Democrats, is probably over, and support for higher average tax burden, more progressive rate brackets, and a strong welfare state, are largely back (though also largely unsuccessful because of procedural conservatism built into the US legislative system), but true socialism was never in the Overton Window and still isn't. So there never has been and probably never will be a true left-wing US party on that axis.
The people complaining about the opposite, that there are two left-wing parties, are talking about a completely different type of leftist, and simply comparing widespread social mores of the current era against widespread social mores of past Americas. Acceptable workplace behavior, what constitutes too far for a joke, the demographic makeup of casting calls, have all changed pretty radically in the last 30 years. A lot of people feel like they no longer recognize their own country, and because this is a form of social progressivism, they consider it "leftist." Historically, I think this is because these were more a matter of class values than political values, and all politicians tend to be of the same social class. Witnessing the Obama-era Tea Party types that very conspicuously made sure they were seen eating fried butter at state fairs, wearing cowboy boots, and firing rifles on the campaign trail, Trupm was far from the first politician to realize he could build a constituency by pretending he didn't share Ivy league lifestyle values, but he was so successful that this has quickly become not only definitely now a political axis, but maybe even the most important thing a whole lot of voters care about. To the extent that "right-wing" means something like a political party where the members honest to God can't stand Hollywood movies and would prefer to watch whatever the heck Dean Cain, Kevin Sorbo, and Kirk Cameron are being cast in these days, there is no real right-wing party.
Yep, the US is politically somewhere between Czechia and Pakistan on most social issues, therefore is not right-wing. Obviously.
Reminds me of people in the west earning $250 a month complaining that they're "in poverty", completely oblivious to the global median income!
There's a saying that Republicans and Democrats don't differ in that they give to their friends, they just have different friends. (Though not always.) I interpret these kinds of equivalence statements as frustration over Public Choice outcomes of the political system. People often assume the result should flow from ideological first principles.
"If people weren't responding to political incentives, we'd have two different perspectives, but [the Evil side] has corrupted [my Virtuous side] so they no longer hew to Righteous principles." Except that's true of all political perspectives. You can't pretend away Public Choice, nor should you want a system run on pure ideology with no connection to real-world conditions. What you want to avoid is capture by small interest groups, which is a hard problem, but it's not just your side getting captured.
In which Scott writes essentially a throw-away article to elicit thesis-level political theory treatises in the comments.
Wait, there are people who claim with a straight face that both major parties are socialist? My mind hurts contemplating that. Also that chart makes the Czech Republic look like a super chill place to live.
And it makes Japan look like a bachelor/ette party.
If the survey is actually representative of voters, the disconnect between a) something like 70-75% of US democrats reporting that they believe abortion is not morally OK and b) actual political outcomes on abortion in dem-heavy states is sure something.
Potential explanations are:
-many voters are personally anti-abortion but are pro-choice when it comes to what they believe others should be allowed to do;
-many voters vote on party lines even if they disagree with the party platform on specific issues;
-there are nuances not captured by the survey/the survey is crap (i did not read the paper, so I am not making this claim).
I was also initially confused by this, but several commenters have pointed ou that the survey had options "acceptable", "not acceptable", and "not a moral issue". Confusingly, only the first category is shown on the graph, though the third was often more common.
Ah. That makes sense.
from their point of view, any state that interfers with econmyin the theoretial interet is socialist relative to the one they prefer,so the two parties from that perspeciuve are differnet places on the socialist scale.
there's a saying "there's the evil party and the stupid pary" The evil party was the the one on the other side, the closer party was stupid in th sense they thoght the moderate things they advocated would d any good.
But this worksfrom both or multiple sides.
Woah the more republicans thinks contraception use is morally acceptable than democrats.
Did not expect that.
Nowadys,conservatives consider aboron the big problem.Back in the day conservatives were againtr contracpetives,but now from the christian perspective they are a definite way toprevent abortions.
dont know where you got tha from but my reasoning on whether it true,
Whereas since contraceptives ae rough on the body and the peoplewho pay the prie and are seen as thus resonsivle for it are women, and lefts tend to agree that society is structurally biased againstr women
I was also initially confused by this, but several commenters have pointed ou that the survey had options "acceptable", "not acceptable", and "not a moral issue". Confusingly, only the first category is shown on the graph, though the third was often more common
I feel like honeslty you ve missed the thread here a bit. of course people are referring to their own beliefs,and prettymuch everyone understands this. Some people like true religous believers do think therer standards are objective by authority of a creator god. sam harris tried to come up with some objective sense of the moral range of humans basedon evolution. but most people even if not explicity have a simialr enough epsitemlogical langayge they see ethics and politcs as different from objective terirotry at least in theory, although they tend to also distort the truth while saying onlyt the othe side distrorts the truth.
What a lot ofpeople meant by this is that while they are seemingly so divded,they were bothultimatleysubserent to instituions and sturtures thta had evolvedwhich there power dependend on. Neither side would challenge certain fundamentsa stuff.
That has changed more and more as time went on. But it was deifnitelt a feeling as the neoliberals and neoconservatives would always fundamentally supprtany expansion of state power even givinglip servive to why the others were bad-there were well defined wallsof the overton window.
When Ron paul was a candaidte the media and talking heads told us he wasnt a serious candidate. That because there is a conscious prcces through various think tanks to frame the naratvie around the party.
If Ron paul had been treated as legit,how many morempeople would have at least consideered him as better alternative then two party monopoly? its not a selffulflinngprophecy,its part of the machiner of power. peopke can say "hey, this isnt the overton window I accept"
America has two pro-corporate parties. Social issues are a different axes.
America has two pro-bee parties. Neither party supports the eradiction of bees.
Your most extreme imaginable right/left scenarios are interesting. I was gonna say that your profit-seeking nanobot swarm scenario lacks any semblance of conservatism, but just realized that that pretty well characterizes Earth’s biosphere for most of its history. So it’s maximally conservative!
Czech it out, by the way. They have been relaxed about sex there even in socialist times and now they also produce much meth. Sodom or Gomorrha? Very nice people there with a fine old beer culture.
on the "both recieve half votes" thing, I'd like to note that a lot of left-wing people in weimar germany voted for the conservative monarchist hindenburg in an attempt to stop hitler from taking power, while many people from hindenburg's own party voted for hitler, that is to say, a man from a right-wing party (by the standards of the nation in which said party exists) can absolutely be elected by people largely from left-wing parties, that is to say, stategic voting can cause people to vote for people they agree with on few issues, to avoid "the bad person" being elected.
combine this with the fact that a) people don't vote for the candidates, they vote for the people they think those candidates are(or againt the monster they consider the other candidate to be), which may be distorted and b) "Left" and "right" are nebulous concepts in the first place, and you have a framework where groups of people will vote for candidates they do not agree with.
many of the people who voted for hindenburg were mostly trying to keep him out of power.
and given that he then proceeded to make hitler chancelor...
well, I wouldn't call that being in touch with/loyal to one's voters.
Maximum left being an insectoid hive-mind is a really weird intuition, for any definition of "left" other than Cold War era propaganda (even the present-day Right isn't exactly using that caricature). For that matter, the 'maximum right' example is also not my intuition, and I think most right-wingers would agree.
Of course it's debatable as to what qualifies as left-wing and right-wing. If we go with a general utopianism / belief in social progress, maximum left is a permanent revolution (the specifics of how it works depend on one's own political position); maximum right is any society that doesn't change and is incapable of it, probably a monarchy of some sort. The connection to the French Revolution is obvious. OTOH, this places anarcho-primitivism on the right and anarcho-capitalism on the left.
Though really left-right is probably better-described as, as said above, a first principal component than any sort of coherent worldview divide (even though such divides absolutely exist and contribute to this first principal component). Probably an egalitarian hive-mind is to the left of Earth-average on this component, and an expanding sphere of Moloch on the right, but realistically both are fringe political positions that are more extreme on other components.
I suspect Scott's examples were based on putting anarchocapitalism on the far right of views that nontrivial numbers of people earnestly hold, and some kind of Communism on the far left (probably Soviet-style Communism, Marx's postulated end state of "True Communism" that would emerge after the dictatorship of the proletariat withered away, or Star Trek-style Luxury Space Communism).
In general, I feel the left-right axis doesn't make much sense when comparing ideologies that don't share some kind of coherent ideological framework. For example, whiggish ideologies (e.g. modern American mainstream conservatives and liberals) can be compared on a left-right spectrum, as can various revolutionary totalitarian ideologies (e.g. Stalinism, Italian Fascism, and Naziism), but trying to put Nazis on the same scale as whiggish parties yields incoherent results depending on what aspects you're focusing on.
So, I haven't checked all the comments yet to see if anyone else has brought this up, but I'm extremely confused by the last table. A majority of both Democrats and Republicans consider alcohol use morally unacceptable? More Republicans consider contraceptive use acceptable than Democrats, and about half of both are opposed? Less than a third of Democrats consider homosexuality morally acceptable? These don't seem to track with other polling results I've seen on these subjects, or with what seems like a common sense understanding of where the Overton window lies.
Following the link to the paper, it seems the questions had three responses (plus refused, don't know, and volunteered answers): morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, and "not a moral issue".
For contraception, only single-digits of either party said "unacceptable" (more Republicans than Democrats, though), with a goodly number saying "not a moral issue".
For alcohol use, a solid plurality of both parties said "not a moral issue", with something like 20% of both parties saying "unacceptable".
I will note that that figure you included shows America as slightly more conservative than average on all the sexual issues, even in a reference class that isn't just OECD.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The US does not have a liberal party and a conservative party. It has a party that claims to be liberal but in practice is somewhat conservative and a party that claims to be conservative but in practice is batshit insane.
(Conservative compared to European left-wing parties and its own rhetoric.)
> Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists?
I think taxation offers a pretty good example for at least the economic axis: at either end is either 0% of GDP collected as taxation or 100%. The absolute centrist position is therefore 50%.
Boom! Laffer curve solved.
interestingly, top marginal income tax rates in most of the OECD hover around 50%. Maybe it's pure coincidence, maybe not.
Yes that is interesting. I don't mean top marginal rates though I mean combined revenue collection of all levels of government. Most of the OECD is below this but I believe Denmark and maybe a few others are just above it.
The problem is that you can't reduce politics to Right versus Left.
It seems so, most strongly in the US, where the first-past-the post system means that there can only ever be two parties and no more. This flattens all politics into a two-ideologies paradigm. Here in Italy, where multiple parties exist, people also think like that, but a little less.
In my opinion:
1 - political ideologies are multi-dimensional.
2 - the political axes of your time and place don't apply to other times and places.
I'll prove the above, bear with me.
There is in Italy the Partito Radicale (Radical party? which doesn’t sound right). A party that's never had a massive presence in parliament, and from the outside you may underestimate its historical importance, but it has long been a greater influence on Italian politics than its size would suggest. Its positions:
- They are the greatest supporter of social freedoms, from abortion and divorce decades ago, to assisted suicide and gay rights more recently.
- They tend to support American wars.
- They are very right-wing on the economy.
And then there is Italy’s political Catholicism, which is not a party as much as a political area. It used to have a party, of course - the enormous Christian Democracy. But since end of that party and the reshuffling of Italian politics in the early 90’s, political Catholicism has rather become an identifiable ideology, channelled either into a plethora of centrist parties or into centrist currents within rightist or leftist parties.
- They are the most hardcore conservatives on all the social issues the Radicali champion.
- They oppose all American wars, or any war; they are pacifists.
- They love immigrants.
- They are middle of the ground on the economy (in a tradition related to what has been described on this blog as Distributism).
As you can see, both Radicali and Catholics are centrists in the left-right spectrum, even the Italian left-right-spectrum. And yet, they have little in common and are each other’s mortal enemies! Which points to the existance of other axes.
I can think of other examples. The fascist-ish far right fringe in Italy has always been much more pro-welfare than the mainstream right. For years they have advocated universal basic income, since long before it was mainstream here.
Also, free-market globalism made a complete U-turn over the course of my lifetime. It was right-wing and now the left embraced it, while opposition to it was left-wing and now it’s right wing.
And the more you go back in time, the more present day concept of right and left cease to apply. Example: Ethno-nationalism used to be left-wing in 19th century Europe.
Judging from online discussions of politics and history it has always seemed to me that Americans don’t know widely about 19th century European left-wing ethno-nationalism.
Compare the map of Europe drawn by the Congress of Vienna, with the one after the Treaty of Versailles 100 years later. What changed? Borders everywhere have been redrawn to match perceived ethnicity. The countries of Italy, Germany, and every country in Eastern Europe form Greece all the way to Finland, have been created to match a pre-existent perceived identity, while the trans-ethnic Hapsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires have vanished. It wasn’t just ww1, it was a whole century of political and ideological pressure and struggle. I’m saying “ethnicity”, even though people back then spoke rather of “nations”, because this is what “nation” back then meant: an ethnic group.
And it all went together with leftism! These people, the same ethno-nationalists who wrote patriotic poems about how Italians are all brothers united by blood and soil, these people were pro-democracy, anti-aristocracy, anti-clerical, and supported having a liberal Constitution. They were the left of their times. Which violates today's understanding of what left and right are.
Another examples: Guelphs and Ghibellines, the opposing political ideologies in 13th century Italy.
They disagreed on who should be the supreme political authority in the HRE. One side said the Pope, the other side the Emperor. Which was right wing and which was left wing?
I know that some will give the knee-jerk answer that the Guelphs were right-wing because they wanted theocracy. But think it through. The Pope was the only authority preventing the assertion of imperial power over the free republics of Italy. Republicanism is to the left of monarchy, right? Also, the office of Emperor tended towards dinasticism, that of Pope did not. The Emperor’s power was backed more by force, the Pope’s more by belief.
The arguments on either side of that debate, anyways, are incomprehensibly alien to us. My point is: I don’t think you can apply modern categories of right and left there.
When people on the left say both American parties are liberal and both are right-wing, they're using precise definitions rather than relative ones. In that context, "liberalism" is a specific worldview that sees the dominance of markets in our lives as both inevitable and desirable; most parties in most of the world are liberal, but 400 years ago *nobody* was. Right in this context refers to a desire to maintain the current economic system, which in the United States means liberal capitalism; a left-wing party would believe in at least eventually replacing this with a non-capitalist system. The Chinese Communist Party is nominally leftist in this sense, the Soviet one was more so. (These are not, obviously, examples which put the left in a good light.)
The US government has had a policy of stamping out anti-capitalist movements both here and abroad for decades, sometimes through extrajudicial violence. That's why there is no paradox about there being one right-wing party that's a little more right than the median voter and another that's a little closer to the left than the median voter, without a true left party being viable (unlike in Europe, where such parties don't win overall but they get some votes).
I find that "America has two right-wing parties" expresses the reality better than “America is to the right of other OECD countries on most issues", when expressed by someone from one of these other OECD countries, to non-Republican Americans or other people from these OECD countries. It’s a matter of context.
If you center your political map with the current status quo; that is, treat ideology as directional, and then go to a two dimensional political map, it is possible to find extended periods of bias.
For example, in one dimension, the Left was characterized by wanting more equality at the expense of bigger government which the Right was characterizing itself as the opposite. But if you separate these values, for a long period of time the Democrats mostly fit in one quadrant, which the Republicans were a mix of more inequality with the benefit of smaller government and those who just tolerated more inequality. The quadrant of advocating for smaller government and less inequality was largely unoccupied by the mainstream parties. (Jimmy Carter was a notable exception; he was as big a deregulator as Reagan.) Those who did consciously occupy this quadrant tended to be fringe figures: Georgists, conspiracy theorists, and those who actually read Adam Smith.
This bias was broken with Trump. Rhetorically, at least, Trump has pushed the Republican Party kicking and screaming into being a smaller government pro workers party.
Wait, only 20-30% of US Democrats believe homosexuality and premarital sex are morally acceptable? Am I reading the graphic wrong?
I’ve never heard the idea that America has two left wing parties, it sounds like someone on the right heard the much more common claim that america has two right wing parties and just instinctively said the opposite because…well that’s all political discourse is nowadays.
The more common claim of both parties being right wing is much more defensible, given both parties shift rightward post new deal, and specifically with the increase in “triangulation” since the Clinton years where the democrats increasingly suck up to Wall Street banks and monopolist donors.
Thus if both parties are fighting to increase monopoly power, increase the concentration of wealth, and increase deregulation of the banking and finance sectors, etc. And no party is fighting to Decrease those things, then how can either party be said to be left wing on finance issues?
This analysis can be repeated in most areas of government policy.
In my own experience, being on the right, the number of times I've heard some version of the "two left wing parties" line isn't literally zero, but it's orders of magnitude less than I've heard "two right wing parties" from people on the left. And always, so far as I can recall, in a context where the speaker was being deliberately provocative and/or tongue-in-cheek, not saying something he assumed would be accepted as a manifest truth.
That said, I think the intuition, "our current political configuration systematically generates results that inexorably benefit the [right/left], and my own preferred coalition's nominal self-positioning as a party of the [left/right] has proven utterly impotent in arresting this trend," exists just as much -- and quite possibly even more -- on the American right as on the left.
The difference is that on the right that intuition tends not to get phrased as "the Republicans are a left wing party," whereas the opposite is true of the Democrats in the eyes of the left.
There are probably a lot of reasons for that. But there's also a quite simple way of modeling it that IMO makes some sense.
The left's mental model is "the left is virtuous, and the right are opportunistic grifters." The right's mental model is "the right is virtuous, and the left are nihilistic vandals." Everyone's mental model of politicians purporting to support one side, taking their money, and then doing nothing, is "the base is virtuous, and the party are opportunistic grifters."
For the left, it's very easy for the narrative of the base's betrayal by the party to slide neatly into the narrative that the party is actually on the right. For the right, the symmetrical complaint about the party's failure to deliver has to be cast in some other terms.
This analysis does seem largely accurate, though there is some justification for the last paragraph.
On economic matters, policies that are the result of corruption are quite often also the policies aggressively Pursued by the right (even when their rhetoric is sometimes different).
The concentration of wealth for the already wealthy, the entrenchment of monopoly power through law and government policy, restrictions on competition in lucrative industries and lack of any regulation for those existing few companies, corporate welfare for massive successful industries, etc. Follow the money of the benefactors of these policies are you will often find they are the donors to the politicians who passed them. And while some industries are cozier to one party over another, the biggest players tend to equally own both.
The primary difference in the two groups, however, is that the right tends to view these policies as desirable parts of their platform. That these people are “job creators” and that government will only get in their way, etc. Whereas the democrats know they are undesirable, but many of them vote for these policies out of greed/ self Interest while talking up how they need to fight against them.
Thus while both sets of politicians are merely self serving and corrupt, this corruption takes the form of supporting policies that many on the right promote as good policy. This lends creedance to the idea that the Democratic Party is itself just another Conservative party that tries to appeal to a left wing base with a few tolken socially liberal issues. Just as long as they don’t effect the bottom line.
Economic*, not finance issues.
Can I say “damn, the Czech Republic is Killing It”? Is that true, kind, and important, or 2 of the 3?
I note Czech republic is looking pretty liberal in that graphics, so to provide context for foreigners: this is not because of especial wokeness (few things are further from our national spirit), but a culture of true laissez faire - essentially, the mentality is "as long as it doesn't directly impact my life or the price of beer, IDGAF what people do".
Good read.
My only comment would be, that, instead of the median voter, we should consider the US voting system to "set the midpoint" at *the modal voter*; and also that we don't have a national "average" vote - but the accumulation of modal voters at the local and state levels.
Which means nationally we're multimodal, and several of the loca election pools are multimodal as well