In terms of politics and social views, I've known people that are at the extreme ends of the spectrum and it's easy to define those people. However, when people use the terms such as "left of center" and "right of center" what does that actually mean?
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It's a surprisingly tricky question to answer. Most people have an intuitive sense of which specific views are "left" or "right", but have a harder time laying out general principles that encompass those views. They tend to just list specific issues, i.e. "wanting to lower the capital gains tax rate is right-wing", or "supporting affirmative action is left-wing".
The terms themselves come from the French legislature during the French Revolution. The people who sat on the right side of the room supported the Ancien Régime, which was the traditional monarchy and aristocracy, and the ones on the left side of the room wanted to eliminate the Ancien Régime and replace it with a secular republic.
The best general answer I've come across is that left-wing positions are those that tend to produce equality, and right-wing positions are those that tend to produce hierarchy. You can see how that fits the situation during the French Revolution.
Today, libertarianism is right-wing because the natural differences in talent between people will produce income inequality under a free market system, while socialism (left-wing) will redistribute-making incomes more equal. Likewise, support for same-sex marriage ("marriage equality") is left-wing because it makes marriage available to a group that didn't previously have access to it. Nationalism is right-wing because it privileges people within a country over those outside the country, while internationalism/globalism treats the two groups more equally. Etc.
Yeah, let's give it a more accurate description:
-libertarianism is right wing because it market dynamics allow a fair distribution of wealth according to effort and talent; -socialism is left wing because it rewards people regardless of whether they put effort or slack off; -same sex marriage is left wing, because the left sees traditional marriage as a contract of property and believes property rights stand in the way of equality of outcome regardless of effort; -nationalism is right wing because it's the natural evolution of human cooperation: family, clan, tribe, ethnic/religious group, nation; -globalism is left wing because it centralizes power in the hands of ''technocrats'' without accountability towards voters and prevents the latter from having a say in how their communities are managed;
Okay, fair enough, but you're basically doing what I described in my first paragraph. Say libertarianism is letting "market dynamics allow a fair distribution of wealth according to effort and talent" and nationalism promotes "the natural evolution of human cooperation". Even if both of these things are good, it's not immediately obvious what common thread connects them.
In the same way, it's not immediately apparent what connects "rewardING people regardless of whether they put effort or slack off" and "centralizING power in the hands of 'technocrats'". The hierarchy/equality dichotomy I described is a way of tying the different issues together.
When people use either the term "left of center" of "right of center", the usually mean that they think of themselves as a moderate (left or right oriented )from what I've seen.
There is no such thing as left or right. The scales goes like this
anarchy-republic-representative democracy-democracy-socialism-facism-dictataor-communism
With the left side(you could reverse the order and make it the right side), being more scaled toward freedom and the right side scaled towards authoritarianism.
We were started as a Republic, which a huge amount of freedom and personal responsibility, we are going towards democracy/socialism/facism(authoritarianism). Do you know how many insane rules we have to follow? As an example cops can pull you over for speeding. I bet a majority of this forum would be suprised to know the speed limits are arbitrarty and do not correlate with what the safe driving speed is for that particular road. To get the safe speed(and to impose it is something different), you have to have a safety study done by engineers, which most municipalities do not have conducted. So you can make the assumption that speed limits exist simply as a tax and do not provide any marginal benefit, while the cost is personal freedom. So to expand this you have cops instructed to enforce unjust laws, without which there would be ZERO(mostly) merit to even pull someone over and detain them restricting their personal freedom.
Authoritarians, althought it would appear(plausibly) that they do and make the rules for the benefit of the people, actually end up hurting most citizens's constitutional rights.
This is maybe the worst post I have ever seen on politics on this site, and that includes the drivel of CRE himself. How can you possibly, POSSIBLY reduce political leanings to 1 single dimension dependent on freedom alon? HOW? Are you not even aware of the fact that other countries (which of course have to be bound by the same 1 dimension), assign completely different values to any of those designations? How can you possibly compare a country like Singapore, which is nominally very libertarian, but socially extremely repressive, to a country like France where the "republic" is socially laissez-faire, but economically almost socialistic? And that´s not even including countries with a history of very curious system like in South America or even Africa (if you can even call their historical system comparable to ours at all). That is absolutely moronic and it doesn´t suit any intelligent and educated individual to utter such a gross oversimplification of a highly complex topic.
2/10, apply yourself and read a fucking book.
CRE I love your perspective usually but this doesn't really answer the question nor does it help perpetuate a good discussion around the topic.
Keep my name out of your mouth, kid. No need to randomly insult me.
Because, politics from Greece early on towards today has been a constant refinement towards view in liberty. Our own country, the US, was founded on principles of freedom particularly from tyranny(which can take many forms e.g. direct democracy, and monarchism and looked backwards in time towards mechanics in law and government with which to create a framework to keep this freedom.
The point was, and you are right it was meant to be simple, that our current paradigm of left and right is generally incorrect as the two parties have flipped flopped on some issues over time. To simplify the left right scale and to clarify where an issue normally rises, is using the above scale.
Further, I can't really reply to your comments. All you do is denigrate my...well it is not really a logical argument with any syllogistic form, but I guess it would be point that most people YOU included have no concept or grasp of what our current systems of governance is ultimately tied to. I think you miss the point that all laws can be tied reduced to freedom, good bad or indifferent.
I'm trying to cut the the quick and you are ever trying to create complex layers of tribalism, which is nothing more than an intellectual jerk off for yourself.
I've thrown away more books that you have ever owned.
Maybe....all your highly complex layers are mental gymnastics, to what is a really easy way to view laws and politics. If you want to pick a topic, or law or stance in US politics.
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