Political Spectrum
From iGeek
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There's confusion over what is left or right wing, and it means different and often opposing things in the U.S. versus the rest of the world. So if anyone says, left or right wing, I want to know, on which spectrum are they talking about:
- Authoritarian/Liberal/Anarchist : traditionally authoritarian means right-wing. In the U.S. left-wing authoritarianism is far more common than right.
- Collectivist/Moderate/Individualist : traditionally individualism is left-wing, while in the U.S. it is right-wing.
- Progressive (Postmodernist)/Moderate (Modernist)/Traditionalist: traditionally this didn't map to left or right, in the U.S. it's mostly progressive left and traditional right.
- Tribalist/Nationalist/Globalist: traditionally this didn't map to left or right, in the U.S. the right still has all three while the left purged most non-globalists from their ranks.
- Isolationist(Pacifist)/Moderate/Interventionist(Militarist) : traditionally this didn't map left/right. While the left pretends they are the isolationist/pacifist, in practice, they've been as bad or worse.
- Secular/Agnostic/Religious: traditionally this didn't map left/right. In the U.S. the left has purged more of their religious from their leadership, leaving more diversity on the right.
- Social Justice/Realist/Hedonist: traditionally this didn't map left/right. In the U.S, the left thinks they're about Social Justice and the others are just selfish, but it's really just arrogance, myopia and hypocrisy. How is stealing from and controlling others not hedonistic? Both sides want to help the downtrodden: the right by equality opportunity (and more of it), the left by equality of outcome (punishing success and rewarding failure). While the left vilifies the right as greedy, the right gives more to charity, and in the U.S. most crime is by leftists in leftist cities/regions.
Left | Center | Right |
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Authoritarian - Historically, while the right in some countries CAN be authoritarian/totalitarian, the left MUST be. You can't have a Fascist, Socialists, Communist or other leftist government, if people can just opt out. Democracy is the tyranny of the majority. Leftism exist to further the agenda of themselves or the collective, and force people to live "better", more socially just lives -- and that requires the stick.
. So the right is often referred to as authoritarian, but in practice, it is the left is more authoritarian. Fascism, Communism, DNC, Islam all believe in force for their agenda (people control), just their agenda changes slightly. |
Classical Liberalism (Libertarian) - This is where you mostly want to leave people alone and pick your battles wisely. This of course has a wide spectrum depending on how much they want to leave people alone, and what areas they are willing to make laws to punish people for not doing what they want. On one end is minicharists -- and on the other are those that don't want to make new laws encroaching on people, but they aren't ready to eliminate laws that are encroaching on them either. Progressives are virtually always to the authoritarian left of conservatives on this one (progress is almost always about new restrictions on businesses and individuals). But there are a few exceptions like immigration laws or abortion: but even there, since they want subsidies to pay for it, it's still more authoritarian in practice. RNC, most right wing is about picking battles. |
Anarchist - There is no such thing as Anarchy. It's a myth or an oxymoron. Put 3 kids (age 5) on a playground, and in 5 minutes they'll have defined the rules for a game and how they want to play. Anarchy is unstable, and it quickly decays back to a stable state of a libertarian or minarchist kind of government (military, police and courts), protect individual and property rights, and that's it. Then the right spreads out from there. Since there is no true anarchy, and the right starts usually to the left of minarchy (with some social programs, regulations and laws beyond just personal property/liberty), the right starts well towards the center, and moves left. While the left starts on the far left, and moves lefter.
There are very few that are actually on this end of the spectrum. Anarchism is the reductio ad absurdum that the authoritarian progressives use to accuse anyone to the right, "If you don't want my great idea, you must be an anarchist". |
Collectivism - Socialism/Communism/Fascism (leftism) is collectivism: the idea that you create a group (collective/insiders) and protect them from the market forces of an unjust world. There are those that agree with them (part of the collective) and outsiders that must be destroyed, re-educated or overridden. Us vs them (exclusion) is a prerequisite: the philosophy of "the collective", means the exclusions of those not in the clique. Leftists are NOT fighting for the betterment of humanity, just those in their mean-Girls club. | Conformism - there's some middle ground, those that will go along with either the collectivists or individualists. That's not really a moral position or one based on ideology or ethics. It's more Confucianists (or Japanese): don't make waves, just fit in. The nail that sticks up gets pounded down, and the Law of Jante. | Individualism - As Ayn Rand said the smallest minority is the individual. The left claims to be for minorities, by crushing individual liberties and promoting the tyranny of the majority (assuming they're the majority). Look at places the left controls, and imagine you disagree with them and see how well you're tolerated. |
Progressives - Progressives by nature want progress. Since the majority of progressives are young kids (or old children), that suffer from chronic Dunning-Kruger effect (those that know the least are the most self-assured) and think they know how to fix everything better than the people who have spent their lives in those industries, progress is virtually always an immature "knee-jerk" far-left reaction on how to make things better, that results in unintended consequences and would make things much worse. If only they had the wisdom to listen to the experts before regulating/legislating. But if they had that wisdom and temperament, they would be moderates. | Moderate - These are rational folks who understand both the need for change and some progress, but are wise enough to understand that there's a speed limit on change. Even the best ideas adopted too quickly, will hurt people and cause backlash. Moderates want some change, but don't want to break the speed limits that set the movements backwards. Because they'll never pass the progressive litmus tests for being progressive enough, they are mocked along with the traditionalists. | Traditionalists - Some measure left/right versus "Forward/Backward" direction of progress. Leftist is hope and change, versus rightism is a return to our roots (Making America Great Again). But even most traditionalists don't want to go back, most just want to slow the rate of going forward. Ask the most ardent conservative in America if they want to bring back segregation or slavery and they'll look at you like you're a CNN watcher: of course not. They just understand that most change comes with unintended consequences that can make things worse, especially when that change is unvetted emotional appeals by the far left. |
Tribalist - these are the bigots that can work outside their clan. Black or White separatists, immigrants that never leave their expat communities, Democrats that lose their shit when they see a MAGA hat, even Union folks that hate management or those who don't work for organized labor. Folks that divide us into smaller and smaller special interests, and hate/resent everyone that aren't like them: that's tribalism. If we hadn't of grown beyond that, we could have never made Nation-states. | Nationalist - The left spits "Nationalism" like it's a bad thing. There's Tribalism, Nationalism, and Internationalism (globalism). I find nationalism the least offensive and most tolerant of the three: the former has no tolerance for people outside their tribe/clique, the latter has no room for people outside their ideology. But, "Hitler was a Nationalist". No, Hitler was a progressive, collectivist, statist, authoritarian, imperialist and socialist, but the head of the National Socialist Workers Party was not very nationalist at all, otherwise he would have preferred staying inside his borders, instead of pulling a bunch of foreigners into it (through land acquisition). | Globalist - there aren't real globalists. Not really. There are some that hate their nations so much they want to undermine them, or they want Socialism so bad, that they want to dilute their nation's independence and identity, by enslaving their people to some "World Socialist Collective", in that the New World Order will force what they want on their nation. But point out that if they make more than $50K a year, and they are the 1% they hate (Globally), and that we should tax them at 90% and redistribute their wealth, and when it's someone redistributing their shit (instead of them redistributing someone else's) and suddenly they want sovereignty and protection. But if you really think about what it would mean to eliminate all diversity, culture, and specialization, and make us all one world culture, and it's somewhat vile and depressing. I love diversity, and globalists would eliminate that. |
Secular - in statism (Communism/Socialism/leftist) the first commandment is no other God's before me, so you can't have any religion above state-worship: God/Religion along with traditions, objective norms, traditions, will all get in the way of the state and their shifting post-modernist non-values. Thus the left tends to be more secular, and intolerant and mocking towards the religious. There are exceptions like in the Middle East, Islamic theocratic socialism is more common (they are Islamic and Socialist). Because Socialism/leftist is part of their beliefs, and supporting Islam dilutes American/Judeo-Christian values, which is likely why the left prefers those homophobic, sexist bigots to more tolerant American Religious Republicans. | Agnostic - whether agnostic, apathetic or just tolerant, the moderate middle is people that don't want to intrude on others religion. The left will claim they are in this camp, but then demonstrate the opposite with policies like wanting to outlaw prayer or mentions of God, force people to pay for other people's abortions, or make them bake gay wedding cakes against their religious beliefs. | Religious - Strict religious nations are considered more right wing because of the traditionalism -- though they really aren't (always). For example, Islam has Socialism kind of baked in. Iran is a religious theocracy (wrapped in a fraud democracy), and it's not that right-wing. (They are statist/collectivist, just the state and Islam blur). Israel as well, can be right-wing on defense but very left on helping Jews. (Both are tribally charitable). So in the U.S. there is a religious right, but it's mostly because coastal progressives demean and drive out their religious left. But before post-modern Marxism (1960's) started driving out the religious from the left, this used to not be a right/left thing. |
Social Justice Warriors - The one area where the left can claim that Fascists were right-wing is if you measure right-left as Social Justice versus accepting natural order. The far-left believes that you need government force to make the world more "fair" and to make up for inequalities: handicap the smart, fleet, or rich, to try to force equality of outcome, instead of justice (which is equality of opportunity). Of course, it's a hypocrisy suppository, since the left is perfectly OK with Social Injustice when it suits their agenda (replacing an economic meritocracy with a political or victimhood based one). But at least this claim stands up to superficial scrutiny, just not moral consistency. | Realist - The right believes that humans are generally good and don't need force as their only motivator. They also believe that in order to teach people, they have to have the option to make the wrong choices (and learn from them). So they want Social Justice as well, they just want to do it through equality of opportunity and teaching the culture, and at the local level: instead of criminalizing/taxing/regulating everything they don't agree with. This might put them to the right of the left wing, but they're way to the left (and more towards the center) on the SJW<->Hedonist spectrum. | Hedonist - The left thinks the right is hedonist, anything goes in their imaginary capitalism. But that's reductio ad absurdum: the right just believe in slightly less Government than the left does (and slightly more local). Then the right gives more in taxes and charity than the left does. There are virtually no true hedonists because most humans value helping others. Studies have shown there's no evidence that the left is any less criminal, selfish, or hedonistic than the right, and the left in America are incarcerated at a far higher rate (which the left blames on racism or poverty instead of morals/values). |
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