I’m starting to think political definitions only have use as propaganda. Definitions are definite, yet political definitions are anything but.
In the US, much is made about “the left” and “the right”, but we can hardly describe what these things mean. “The left” is simply more liberal than I, while “the right” is more conservative than I. On what issues, no one knows, because we hardly ask.
The point, I think, is simply to label the opposition while hiding any commonality or points of agreement. Useful for propaganda, but useless for substantive political discourse; you know, the kind that underpins a healthy democracy.
What is "liberal" here? Seems like that term has gone obsolete as well, what Americans call liberal is not what I call liberal, to me they are pretty authoritarian.
“The left” and “the right” are, IMO, useful terms in the sense that they are explicitly meaningless (unless you are in charge of some seating arrangements in France).
“Liberal” and “conservative” are not good words for describing the teams in the US. These words have more conventional meanings. Liberalism is a political philosophy based mostly on personal freedoms. Conservatism describes how fast you are willing to change the system. The US was founded on Liberalism, and most Americans would probably be best described as liberal conservatives.
Left and right are useful labels, and while the exact border may be somewhat ambiguous or perhaps arbitrary, they do identify a useful spectrum. Ultimately, left vs. right-wing thought boils down to views on hierarchical power structures. On the extreme right, there's the view that hierarchies are good and natural, and should be reinforced and expanded. On the extreme left, there's the view that hierarchies are evil and unnatural, and should be abolished. In between you have a whole spectrum of views like "some hierarchies are a necessary evil", "some hierarchies are good", etc.
Individual issues sometimes unambiguously map onto this spectrum: Supporting slavery (a pretty obvious hierarchical construct) is further right than wanting to abolish it, for example. Other times, issues occupy some certain space on the spectrum, with opposing viewpoints on both sides of it: a left-leaning individual might oppose free-market Capitalism because it forms a hierarchy of wealth, while a further right-leaning individual might oppose Capitalism because it gives the "wrong" people higher standing than they should (according to some other "better, more natural" hierarchy).
Propaganda helps you ascend to power and then constrains what you do with that power.
Ultimately if you want to look objectively, you have to look at the concrete, at history. But propaganda matters: history would unfold differently without it!
There are "right wing issues" and "left wing issues" and there is friction between them.
What concerns me most is political "slurs" where everyone forgets the meaning of the term but constantly throws it around as if it's just a bad word. Then the conversation just goes off the deep end as soon as they're invoked.
"You're a wokie" or "you're a fascist"; as if either of the people using those terms even knows what they're referring to primarily, they just decided it's bad and because the person they're talking to is bad they must be whatever bad word I have in my vocabulary.
PS: I will say that "woke" has a more concrete definition than fascist to many, but I don't want to be accussed of being for (or against) any particular side when writing this comment, and I can't come up with many off the top of my head that the right wingers use against the left wingers... so, sorry.
This article was a good read but having been written in 1992, it completely misses the 2009 inflection point and subsequent polarization. Which has more recently resulted in becoming extremely violent for politics. Now the definitions are even worse than the article proposes. It's clear that the definitions are being abused intentionally.
This is the death of a political definition, I cant give it a label, see OP. It will become a religion after this; only then will we have the violence end in our politics.
I would say the EU pact from 1997 was brilliant. They had to have known of the human costs; but it's over now. We've seen the end. Mind you, yes, there's stillpain to come; but it's too big.
I'm predicting, since history is repeating for like the 6th time, we're still about 10 years out on the end of political violence.
Tom Givon used to say in class: "What true language requires a dictionary?"
Language is decontextualized in the West, it's about attributes of individual objects where simplifying laws are derived, rather than language used as interdependent.
At a certain point arbitrary language dissolves into meaninglessness. That's entropy and arbitrariness. As we accelerate language and primate status spirals the role of language is simply to dominate subjectively. It has no end point except for dissolution.
In the United States, terms such as "conservative" and "liberal" seem to be used primarily to describe whatever currently happens to be popular in the duopolistic Republican and Democratic parties. I'm old enough now to have witnessed both parties, and the definitions of those terms, morph into something unrecognizable to partisans of my youth. And the (morbidly) funny thing is that people today call themselves "true conservatives," for example, apparently with no recollection or recognition of the recent past.
My own view is that the terms don't signify real, stable ideologies but rather just give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics.
Modern US mainstream politics have become weirdly like the ancient Roman "Green" versus "Blue" political parties that evolved out of chariot racing fan clubs. No consistent ideology or underlying theory of government, just blind support for your chosen side's leaders.
> give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics.
I feel like it's very easy to get angry about politics, so speaking clearly is difficult.
I would like to point out that the power dynamics do not always shift randomly, or by the will of the people (be that citizens at large, or party-line voters). The power dynamics have been shifted with intention.
Apart from that intentional push for power, we also have social media dynamics. It feels like online self-critique is always towards the extremes. Once someone becomes energized or activated on a topic, they may start to feel that even trying to understand other viewpoints will cause harm.
In my perception, "true conservative" means "what the label meant in my youth, not what it has mutated to today". I think it is exactly a recognition of the past.
Yeah wow huh! It took me many years of reading HN to figure out that “liberal” means “left” in the US. In my (European) country, the word means nearly the opposite, a belief in individual freedoms, free speech, free markets, small governments and so on. It’s mostly championed by right-of-center parties. I’ve been confused many times reading comments that go like “these liberals who want to ban free speech” which, to me, reads as funky as “these nazis who want to protect minority rights” or “these republicans who want to reinstate the monarchy”.
It’s just, the word did a total 180 in the US and it’s super weird!
The problem is that these terms do signify real, stable ideologies, but the vast majority of people are superficial trend-chasers who don't actually adhere to any stable ideology, so misuse these terms to refer to whichever tribe they emotionally associate themselves with at the moment.
IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse, so gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
What tends to be more conceptually solid is temperament and personality, rather than ideology. That is, things like conformism, trust in paternalistic authority figures, or instinctual contrarianism and distrust of authority, and openness to new ways of doing things, optimism about tweaking the knobs on society vs a more static view of how people are, etc., making it yourself (individualism and atomisation) vs focus on collectivism / community orientedness / family obligations.
For example, an old man with a conservative mentality in Russia may be nostalgic for Stalin and communism. Or someone who has a contrarian, disagreeable personality in a liberal American college environment may decide to become a monarchist or trad Christian to show the middle finger to the real authority figures in his life. And a conformist person in the US workforce would more likely absorb a corporate-HR-compatible (superficially?) progressive worldview.
This reads to me as a somewhat quaint snapshot of politics from 30 years ago.
What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful.
These days I think JREG is doing good work tracking political categories if you’re interested and don’t mind some irony-poisoned jargon check him out.
Yeah, I think we've all seen the term "socialism" prettymuch destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember, for example.
I mean, I've seen people decry market-oriented solutions to problems (eg congestion pricing) as "socialism" which is broadly hilarious.
I agree with the point this article is trying to make. As political definitions change, we start to lose sight of what these terms actually mean. I believe a more helpful comparison than left vs right, is open vs closed.
Afaik, there are already specific political definitions. It's just that "the common man" isn't very educated in them, and the "language of politics" eschews logic and specificity in favor of generalization (in order to induce rancor and thus party-alignment).
Here is the political classification of the top 50 developed nations (I tried to organize them, but it's hard...):
Qatar Absolute monarchy
Oman Absolute monarchy
Saudi Arabia Absolute monarchy
Brunei Darussalam Absolute monarchy
United Arab Emirates Federal absolute monarchy
Kuwait Constitutional monarchy (emirate) with parliamentary elements
Bahrain Constitutional monarchy (unitary)
United Kingdom Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Netherlands Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Japan Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Denmark Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Norway Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Sweden Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Luxembourg Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Spain Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Australia Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Belgium Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Canada Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Liechtenstein Hereditary constitutional monarchy with elements of direct democracy
Croatia Parliamentary republic
Czechia Parliamentary republic
Estonia Parliamentary republic
Greece Parliamentary republic
Hungary Parliamentary republic
Israel Parliamentary republic
Italy Parliamentary republic
Latvia Parliamentary republic
Lithuania Parliamentary republic
Poland Parliamentary republic
Slovakia Parliamentary republic
Slovenia Parliamentary republic
Finland Parliamentary republic (semi-presidential features)
Austria Federal parliamentary republic
Germany Federal parliamentary republic
Switzerland Federal directorial republic (collegial executive of seven Federal Councilors)
Andorra Parliamentary co-principality (two Co-Princes: French President & Bishop of Urgell)
Chile Presidential republic
Portugal Semi-presidential republic
Argentina Federal presidential republic
United States Federal presidential constitutional republic (representative democracy)
Cyprus Unitary presidential republic
South Korea Unitary presidential republic
France Unitary semi-presidential republic (Fifth Republic)
Iceland Unitary parliamentary republic
Ireland Unitary parliamentary republic
Malta Unitary parliamentary republic
Singapore Unitary parliamentary republic
New Zealand Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Hong Kong (China SAR) Special Administrative Region of China with “one country, two systems”
Your "top 50 developed nations" list actually omits China, the nation with the most extensive modern rail and nuclear power, one of the top three space-exploring nations. Or do you consider them "not developed"?
Why did you feel the need to specify that the USA are a representative democracy? A lot of other countries on your list are, I think this it is far more common then direct democracy.
"..summon “unsullied” socialism, a game with ever more variations, which long since has become confusing—and boring."
to quote a comment I found, because it puts it better than I could;
"Murray Bookchin's concept of communalism and his follower Abdullah Öcalan's similar concept of democratic confederalism. It can be summed up as "refocusing politics around local government by popular assemblies, while higher levels of government being confederations of these local units". Thus communalism does mean there would still be a state, although far more decentralised. This was one reason why Bookchin stopped calling himself an anarchist, though his disillusionment with the '90s the anarchist scene was another."
.
libertarian municipalism + communalism, a kind of libertarian socialism
with social ecology as the philosophy framing our situation
some use the meme of "google Murray Bookchin", because once you get into their work, so much of it makes good sense (and their polemic bits are funny too)
and there's the adapted democratic confederalism of Ocalan, which is actually used in Rojava (Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria)
The rise of populism, especially in the US, has accelerated the breakdown described here. It's difficult to place political parties or even individual politicians in neat boxes, which would be a benefit in some ways in theory if it wasn't really caused by the political parties (and one in particular) becoming completely unmoored from their historical platform and agenda.
These shifts have happened a few times in the past, and it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
amradio1989|5 months ago
In the US, much is made about “the left” and “the right”, but we can hardly describe what these things mean. “The left” is simply more liberal than I, while “the right” is more conservative than I. On what issues, no one knows, because we hardly ask.
The point, I think, is simply to label the opposition while hiding any commonality or points of agreement. Useful for propaganda, but useless for substantive political discourse; you know, the kind that underpins a healthy democracy.
bilbo0s|5 months ago
To be fair, this kind of presupposes that all actors in a polity actually have as their goal, "healthy democracy".
Pretty sure that's not the goal of most people in power nowadays. (At least in the US it's not the goal of people in power.)
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
Jensson|5 months ago
What is "liberal" here? Seems like that term has gone obsolete as well, what Americans call liberal is not what I call liberal, to me they are pretty authoritarian.
bee_rider|5 months ago
“Liberal” and “conservative” are not good words for describing the teams in the US. These words have more conventional meanings. Liberalism is a political philosophy based mostly on personal freedoms. Conservatism describes how fast you are willing to change the system. The US was founded on Liberalism, and most Americans would probably be best described as liberal conservatives.
OkayPhysicist|5 months ago
Individual issues sometimes unambiguously map onto this spectrum: Supporting slavery (a pretty obvious hierarchical construct) is further right than wanting to abolish it, for example. Other times, issues occupy some certain space on the spectrum, with opposing viewpoints on both sides of it: a left-leaning individual might oppose free-market Capitalism because it forms a hierarchy of wealth, while a further right-leaning individual might oppose Capitalism because it gives the "wrong" people higher standing than they should (according to some other "better, more natural" hierarchy).
vmchale|5 months ago
Propaganda helps you ascend to power and then constrains what you do with that power.
Ultimately if you want to look objectively, you have to look at the concrete, at history. But propaganda matters: history would unfold differently without it!
jrm4|5 months ago
Definitions are rarely definite if we're even discussing them.
dijit|5 months ago
There are "right wing issues" and "left wing issues" and there is friction between them.
What concerns me most is political "slurs" where everyone forgets the meaning of the term but constantly throws it around as if it's just a bad word. Then the conversation just goes off the deep end as soon as they're invoked.
"You're a wokie" or "you're a fascist"; as if either of the people using those terms even knows what they're referring to primarily, they just decided it's bad and because the person they're talking to is bad they must be whatever bad word I have in my vocabulary.
PS: I will say that "woke" has a more concrete definition than fascist to many, but I don't want to be accussed of being for (or against) any particular side when writing this comment, and I can't come up with many off the top of my head that the right wingers use against the left wingers... so, sorry.
incomingpain|5 months ago
This is the death of a political definition, I cant give it a label, see OP. It will become a religion after this; only then will we have the violence end in our politics.
I would say the EU pact from 1997 was brilliant. They had to have known of the human costs; but it's over now. We've seen the end. Mind you, yes, there's stillpain to come; but it's too big.
I'm predicting, since history is repeating for like the 6th time, we're still about 10 years out on the end of political violence.
mallowdram|5 months ago
Tom Givon used to say in class: "What true language requires a dictionary?"
Language is decontextualized in the West, it's about attributes of individual objects where simplifying laws are derived, rather than language used as interdependent.
At a certain point arbitrary language dissolves into meaninglessness. That's entropy and arbitrariness. As we accelerate language and primate status spirals the role of language is simply to dominate subjectively. It has no end point except for dissolution.
bonoboTP|5 months ago
josefritzishere|5 months ago
lapcat|5 months ago
What do you mean by that?
lapcat|5 months ago
My own view is that the terms don't signify real, stable ideologies but rather just give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics.
nradov|5 months ago
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-roc...
csours|5 months ago
I feel like it's very easy to get angry about politics, so speaking clearly is difficult.
I would like to point out that the power dynamics do not always shift randomly, or by the will of the people (be that citizens at large, or party-line voters). The power dynamics have been shifted with intention.
Apart from that intentional push for power, we also have social media dynamics. It feels like online self-critique is always towards the extremes. Once someone becomes energized or activated on a topic, they may start to feel that even trying to understand other viewpoints will cause harm.
AnimalMuppet|5 months ago
skrebbel|5 months ago
It’s just, the word did a total 180 in the US and it’s super weird!
Gormo|5 months ago
IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse, so gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
bonoboTP|5 months ago
For example, an old man with a conservative mentality in Russia may be nostalgic for Stalin and communism. Or someone who has a contrarian, disagreeable personality in a liberal American college environment may decide to become a monarchist or trad Christian to show the middle finger to the real authority figures in his life. And a conformist person in the US workforce would more likely absorb a corporate-HR-compatible (superficially?) progressive worldview.
c54|5 months ago
What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful.
These days I think JREG is doing good work tracking political categories if you’re interested and don’t mind some irony-poisoned jargon check him out.
Pxtl|5 months ago
I mean, I've seen people decry market-oriented solutions to problems (eg congestion pricing) as "socialism" which is broadly hilarious.
UncleOxidant|5 months ago
[deleted]
The_Rob|5 months ago
https://unherd.com/2018/07/open-vs-closed-rise-fall-left-rig...
MangoToupe|5 months ago
Edit: apparently that is in "part two" which isn't linked anywhere
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee|5 months ago
Here is the political classification of the top 50 developed nations (I tried to organize them, but it's hard...):
IAmBroom|5 months ago
1718627440|5 months ago
Why did you feel the need to specify that the USA are a representative democracy? A lot of other countries on your list are, I think this it is far more common then direct democracy.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
jrm4|5 months ago
E.g. Capitalism is often either "people making favorable trades" or "exploitation through decreased liability for big money investors" depending on.
(and please, don't get me started on "woke." Sigh)
mxmilkiib|5 months ago
to quote a comment I found, because it puts it better than I could;
"Murray Bookchin's concept of communalism and his follower Abdullah Öcalan's similar concept of democratic confederalism. It can be summed up as "refocusing politics around local government by popular assemblies, while higher levels of government being confederations of these local units". Thus communalism does mean there would still be a state, although far more decentralised. This was one reason why Bookchin stopped calling himself an anarchist, though his disillusionment with the '90s the anarchist scene was another."
.
libertarian municipalism + communalism, a kind of libertarian socialism
with social ecology as the philosophy framing our situation
Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971);
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...
some use the meme of "google Murray Bookchin", because once you get into their work, so much of it makes good sense (and their polemic bits are funny too)
a really good podcast on Murray;
https://youtu.be/V0Z2KGudYrA
+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin
.
and there's the adapted democratic confederalism of Ocalan, which is actually used in Rojava (Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria)
https://nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-h...
this is the group that was US aligned until Trump said no, which allowed Turkey to do a land-grab and dispossess folk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism
http://ocalanbooks.com
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
MangoToupe|5 months ago
bpt3|5 months ago
These shifts have happened a few times in the past, and it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.