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Coco McShevitz's avatar

I don’t think you were attracted to liberalism per se then, you were attracted to the libertarian aspects of pre-2000s liberalism. Modern liberals are authoritarians, because there is nothing about either liberalism or conservatism that mandates whether they be authoritarian or libertarian, it varies by era. But don’t make the mistake of associating liberalism with tolerance or free speech -- those may be liberal values in some eras, but they are always libertarian values. Because “liberal” and “conservative” change their meaning over time, no one should establish a permanent identification as one or the other. In particular, you have to see if “your side” is using authoritarian means to achieve their goals -- if they are, they are probably the bad guys.

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Madjack's avatar

Always best to minimize labels and discuss individual topics

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Ruth's avatar

Absolutely! Sick of the labels and the isms...let’s go issue by issue.

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Gavin Farrell's avatar

Libertarians are basically Classical Liberals. They're one and the same.

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Coco McShevitz's avatar

Basically, but modern liberals have substituted something different for “liberalism” than classical liberals or even liberals of the ‘60s and ‘70s understood as liberalism. It is another example of the nominative fallacy, mistaking the label for the thing, without realizing that the underlying thing identified by the label has changed.

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Dwhy's avatar

Not true. Libertarians are the right-wing sect of Classical Liberals.

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Jeff's avatar

The whole right, middle, left paradigm is a crock. You're either for ordered liberty or for some form of tyranny.

I love all of the malleable labels, definitions, stereotypes and caricatures people can come up with on the left. I seriously don't know how the hell you can keep up with it all.

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Gavin Farrell's avatar

Plato had it right. You can have Oligarchy, Tyranny, or Democracy. I assure you though that there also is indeed a Left and a Right. The basic tenets of Leftism: the common good is more important than individual property rights. Natural resources should be used for public benefit, not private gain. All people should be provided with medical care and housing. Monopolies should be nationalized, turned over to the workers, or broken up. Banking should be a public utility, not a privately managed interest-taking sector. All peoples of the world share a common humanity, war is just the elites sending the working class to die so the elites get richer and get more sphere of influence control. Workers of the world unite. THAT is Leftism, which is very very distinct from centrism or being on the Right.

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Jeff's avatar

I agree with your definition here but at best left/right are place holder/identifier words for the sake of discussion. Many beliefs claimed to be of the "right" by leftists that I do not harbor or have never encountered here on the "right" side of the isle.

It's dumb luck that someone hasn't been within arms reach of me to call me a fascist, nazi or racist with all that's been going on in society especially the last few years.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

The basic tenet of Leftism is fairness. (And of Rightism, freedom.) The rest is details, but of course there the devil lies...

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Dwhy's avatar

The basic tenet of Rightism is tradition married to power, not freedom. Not by a loooong shot.

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Jeff's avatar

If all your bullshit claims were even remotely true you wouldn't be here posting comments making a fool of yourself. This "rightism" you dream of would have seen to that. Wait until you become useless to your cause Robespierre.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

You're confusing the opportunistic leaders with the rank-and-file true believers. Leaders are chameleons and showmen, yes, looking for power. But I don't consider them to represent the ideology.

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Dwhy's avatar

I'm not confusing shit. I grew up in deep red country, and it's the most authoritarian place I've ever been in my life, bar none.

60% of Republicans are anti-abortion. That's not a stance compatible with "freedom".

50% of Republicans oppose legalizing pot. That's not "freedom".

74% of Republicans say the police do a good or excellent job of "holding officers to account when misconduct occurs", and 73% for "using the right amount of force for each situation". Anyone who lives in America can see that these stats are only compatible with an extremely authoritarian view of what constitutes "misconduct" and "the right amount of force".

Either you're confused, or you know what you're saying is bullshit and you just don't care.

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S Smith's avatar

Where are these random stats that you are spewing? I live in an extremely red state and we passed both a medical marijuana and now recreational marijuana state statute that legalizes it. Anecdotally, most of the rednecks I knew hated the cops and most have been in some kind of car chase or mix up with them. If you bought a house smack dab in the middle of a rural red state people would just leave you the fuck alone to homeschool your kids, smoke your pot, and NOT force you to take some heinous experimental vaccine or wear masks for respiratory virus. The auth-woke want to control nearly every aspect of people's lives; in fact there thought policing is the definition of fascism.

You head is so, so far up your ass.

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Dwhy's avatar

Fuck off, I'm not talking to your sorry ass.

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Jeff's avatar

You're confusing bullshit with spewing shit, being completely full of shit and shit for brains. You don't know shit from shinola about right or left philosophical differences either.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

"I grew up in deep red country" And boy, did you re-bel!

So then, you *didn't* grow up in an urban area of a blue state... I grew up in a lightly-urban suburb of Boston, complete with sufficiently dangerous "bad areas", including my own, and attended Catholic school, a place that heavily discounts reality. Also, heavily Democratic partisanship. Yet it, too, was for me "the most authoritarian place I've ever been in my life, bar none". Hmmm....

So how did that happen? Well, it's what the people who don't think, do in its place. It has nothing to do with L/R ideology, and everything to do with being followers looking for direction, structure, grounding, to become -- as some among today's Right cruelly jokes -- NPCs. Most don't actually know what they think, they're only dimly conscious of ideology, and parrot what their brighter friends say. Basically, they just want to fit in. But note, they're doing nothing (morally) wrong in that, as they just don't have either internal and environmental capacities (often both), and thus can't bootstrap it to take on more. So it's the same in "right-wing" country. Just with different non-rational totems.

"Either you're confused, or you know what you're saying is bullshit and you just don't care."

Do you seriously believe this? Or is your emotional reaction get the better of you, so you come here, gifted with quick wit (which has gone to your head, apparently), to dish out your anger rather than learn how intelligent people can still legitimately have different opinions?

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Dwhy's avatar

It's not rebelling to disagree with the authoritarian culture around you.

You can't hold up the Catholic school, which your parents presumably chose to send you to, as an example of what an authoritarian place Boston is. That's a specific institution, not the whole society.

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Gavin Farrell's avatar

Indeed, "Freedom" is quite the tricky thing. Freedom to own property and accumulate wealth? Social, cultural and intellectual freedom? Freedom to consume? I think the most powerful conception of freedom is: "Feedom is participation in Power." But I shall spare additional digressions! :)

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Stuart Nachman's avatar

Perhaps you folks need to read Hayek's "Constitution of Liberty". He was the most eloquent defender of the free society.

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Gavin Farrell's avatar

You should know better than to suggest Hayek to a Leftist. :)

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DarkSkyBest's avatar

Fairness. Freedom. Maybe they can't perfectly overlap, but sort of thought that was the American experiment. "Getting better all the time," as the Beatles sang.

We need a Venn diagram. Paging the Vice President!

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Dwhy's avatar

The left/right paradign describes centers of power. You can be philosophically opposed to one side or the other, but still support them for some reason or another.

Libertarians and Conservatives just happen to overlap in a majority of views and policy positions, and tend to vote almost exclusively Republican. Go figure.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

"Because 'liberal' and 'conservative' change their meaning over time, no one should establish a permanent identification as one or the other."

Yes, agreed. Just as with "Democrat" and Republican" (in the US).

But "Left" and "Right" have essentially fixed meanings, and for that reason, I think it would be beneficial to beef up our understanding and use of them.

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Coco McShevitz's avatar

I don’t think so -- “left” and “right” are relative to the then-current status quo, so modern leftists for example are focused on race over class, in contrast to the leftists of the ‘30s and 40s. What is “progressive” in one era becomes conservative in the next, like how rock ‘n roll was once seen as edgy and progressive but is now considered staid and reactionary. Or, to put it another way, Woodrow Wilson and AOC are both progressives relative to the society of their time, but would hate each other and don’t have much in common viewpoint- or policy-wise. “Libertarianism” and “authoritarianism” however are not relative to the the current status quo, as libertarians in every era prioritize small government, free speech, due process and other civil rights etc. and authoritarians do the opposite.

Modern progressives love nominative fallacies, where people get attached to the label of a thing without realizing that the thing it identifies has changed. This is why many “old lefties” continue to support “progressivism” even though modern progressivism is antithetical to many of the things they believed in -- anti war, pro free speech, deeply suspicious of government, etc. In my view, no one should identify as permanently “progressive” or “conservative” under the assumption that those things are immutable, because they aren’t. The liberals of the ‘60s were largely libertarian progressives, modern liberals are authoritarian progressives, and it is important to keep that distinctions in mind rathe than simply reflexively identify as “progressive” or “conservative”, as those descriptors by themselves don’t capture all the relevant dimensions. As Orwell said, the real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between libertarians and authoritarians.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

As a historical record, I agree with that. Thank you. I also see that "Authoritarian" and "Libertarian" are persistent impulses, what ever they are called, in contrast to shifting labels and label-to-label-associations.

But what is a great need today regarding political language? Allowing important words to constantly change meaning at the whim of thought leaders is just one type of potential poison to society. It is well-recognized that the pace of change is certainly driving us crazy today, turning us into a tower of Babel. But there's no reason to assume it is even necessary...

"'left' and 'right' are relative to the then-current status quo"

That's a fair conclusion from their origins in the French Revolution. But curiously, that era also produced what persists today in the French national motto -- Liberté, égalité, fraternité -- where the first two terms neatly reflect persistent fundamental Rightist and Leftist values over the centuries since: Freedom and Equality. So it's important that they persisted here *combined* in a national statement, even as they are assumed to be opposed in Western political ideologies.

I'd tweak the second to what I think is a more widely palatable concept, Fairness, and then you've got two essential, complementary components of societal needs: (individual) freedom and (social) fairness. The third component is one that has been disparaged in recent years, and now with woke politics supposed to be completely dispensed with: Brotherhood, or sense of community, where societies are permitted to define and support themselves in contrast to other societies. It presupposes no necessary hostility, despite what globalists promote.

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Coco McShevitz's avatar

I think the libertarian/authoritarian distinction frequently gets subsumed into or conflated with “progressivism” or “conservatism” because the progressive or conservative movement in any snapshot of time may seek to achieve their ends through libertarian or authoritarian means, and people living in that time assume that “progressivism” or “conservatism” always support those means. But in a broader historical perspective this is not true. Governments on both the left and the right can be either authoritarian or libertarian, and extreme political movements on both sides tend to converge on the authoritarian end (e.g., Stalin and Hitler both united at the authoritarian end though one is on the left and one on the right). I think it is important to disentangle the two axes to make sure you are not reflexively identifying with a tribe because it is nominally “progressive” or “conservative” if they are using authoritarian means (assuming you disapprove of authoritarian means) to achieve their progressive or conservative goals.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

There is also the conundrum that some people, maybe a majority, sincerely like to be told what to do (authoritarianism, though they don't call it that), and likely will not, and cannot, ever be cajoled into becoming full-fledged citizens (i.e. those who, from our POV, do sufficient homework and thinking to justify their votes) -- especially in an unprecedentedly complex world with unprecedented aggregate power (via technologies). I'm confident in fact that's exactly how our quasi-democracy descended to its current state.

Don't misunderstand me -- I'm certainly NOT advocating rights removal, I am attempting to face uncomfortably realities. "Don't shoot the messenger." By raising consciousness about reality, only then can we find ways, including democratic ways, deal with it.

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Coco McShevitz's avatar

Yeah, when deluged with too much data, people fall back on heuristics like in-group identification and pattern matching to come to conclusions. That’s why a lot of modern propaganda just keeps repeating the same message over and over, once you put a pattern in people’s brains, they tend to revert to it when indecisive. Basically it’s the political version of what what web companies do with “dark patterns” to motivate desired user behavior,

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Patrick Powers's avatar

' "Left" and "Right" have essentially fixed meanings,'

Tell that to the media.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

... who work for perpetual shapeshifters barreling toward their their own secret goals. "Change is [always] good!" "Change is inevitable! [even when humans make the change]"

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Esther's avatar

Coco I appreciate this reflection.

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