3d ago

American "left" and "liberal" can't decide if they're in the same nutshell.

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It's almost like left and right are bullshit labels, sort of like conservative obviously was to MAGA after Trump was voted in.
- I base my labels on the seating arrangements of the revolutionary French parliament from over 200 years ago. What's wrong with that?
- I think both sides of the National Assembly would have had you guillotined if you said they're a parliament.
  PS: Guillotines didn't exist at that point so this is technically inaccurate.
  
  I'd certainly guillotine anyone who thought that a 200 year old reference merited relevance and was anything other than proof at how bullshit out of touch the labels are. Then again, people being as ignorant as they were 200 years ago seems on cue.
  
  I mean, the split is still there. On the right you have people who want to concentrate power and on the right people who want to distribute it. The left-right spectrum doesn't carry all the information, but it's still a pretty useful descriptor. Why do you think it's bullshit?
  
  Because it shifts from country to country no matter the scales you use. You could put dots on whatever imaginary axis you choose, and they would be unidentifiable across countries - about the only thing it could identify are the people who don't have a clue about political environments elsewhere but think they do.
  Your definition isn't even correct, there are many "left" parties that want to concentrate power and even the most infamously "right" government of them all, that of the GQP in the US, have claimed things like wanting to "distribute" power from federal to state government. About the only universal single axial distinction between parties are those willing to operate and respect a system of governance, and those that only want to game it and change it to what they want, and even that is constantly shifting.
  Right now a lot of our governments are democracies being divided up into the people who want to continue to operate within them being increasingly outnumbered by the people being hoodwinked into transitioning and increasingly operating outside of them. But even that isn't left of right, and it is very dependent on the type of government it is being manifested in the first place - someone might want to play within the system in a high democracy high trust society yet would be willing to support those living in a dictatorship who work to game and change it.
  Left and right is highly psychological. Venezuela's dictator Maduro is placed in the "left" by those that like to criticize their own left parties, while Mile's is "right" while Bukele, who has close links to Milei and Maduro, is not identified by either, having called himself a "man of the left" while increasingly prospering within the "right". Why? Optics and psychology. "Left" and "right" is very easy to manipulate into a bipartisanship, and a bipartisanship can be worn down into an autocracy. The US is a prime example of this.
  A party can be identified by two things: the ideology they say they will represent, of which things like "left"/"right" is the vaguest yet safest thing they can claim and easiest thing to divide society on, and what they actually can and will do, and to define either of these, you need far more labels than different ends of an axis. But people think the creation of the universe is detailed in a pocket book called the Bible, so it's no surprise they think "left" and "right" is sufficient connotation.

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