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
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