this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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My radical opinion is that the left-right political spectrum isn't real. It's all really arbitrary like the Big Endians and Little Endians from Gulliver's Travels. We've decided one group is left and one is right. When an issue comes up, one group takes a position and the other group feels like they need to oppose it. Depending on which group supports an issue and where we decided that group is on the spectrum, that's where we put that issue.
But most issues are way more complicated to fit on a one dimensional line. Many problems are completely orthogonal to politics. Global warming for example is a scientific thing. More CO2 in the atmosphere, more warming. Gotta get that CO2 level down or we're going to have serious problems. Where does that fit on a spectrum? We just plop it onto the "left" part because the parties on the "left" tend to want to do something about it.
Foreign policy doesn't really fit on a spectrum since it's all around the interests of the country. Who should we be allies with and who are our adversaries? That's largely dependent on what those other countries are doing isn't it? But gotta put it on a spectrum, so I guess this war the left wing supports and this other war the right wing wing supports.
Ultimately ideology is for the intellectually lazy. Don't want to think about individual issues in-depth so just consider a few, sign on to whichever ideology is the closest fit, and go along with whatever the ideology says about anything else. The left-right spectrum is a rationalization for this, making it seem commonplace for people to be a dot on a line to feel justified in going along with whoever is on the same part in that line.
But it's just a construct. Issues are more complicated than that, and two people that agree completely on one issue may completely disagree on another. Because there really is no political spectrum. It's something that only exists in a poli sci classroom and doesn't really mean anything anywhere else. Why would anyone want to be a dot on a line anyway?
this is a bad take, it ignores the political philosophy foundations of left and right political theories and is a very naive perspective borne of the American two party system which doesn't adequately represent leftism
I thought the same thing but honestly I understand them from a uninformed casual observer perspective.
American politics are very contrarian.
Fair enough but I'm a little over uninformed people having political opinions
Understandable and same. I just see the why. I don't like it either.
It's been memed to death at this point, but this is one reason I like the political compass. It's got width and height, and does a little bit of a better job at representing things.
Even that doesn't really work. A libertarian is someone who's based their political ideas on a flawed understanding of economics. Authoritarianism is just a scam that convinces people they should be ruled over by someone that will [make their country strong/make them more equal/protect them from whoever they're afraid of]. It just further legitimizes ideas based on a flawed understanding of the world and invents new issues just to have things to slot onto the graph.
Like how do you feel about "late stage" capitalism? How do you feel about bad people eating people's pets? I can point at government inefficiencies to prove that the government should be eliminated so we can all live in a libertarian utopia. And we can plot these things on a page, and legitimize them as real ideologies. But really they're just things people have made up or have exaggerated to push people away from solving the problems towards "ideologies" that need those problems to exist to justify their existence.
A large part of politics is about perception. We have a fairly good understanding of how the economy works. We also have a good idea understanding of how the climate works too. Biden actually did extremely well on the economy. But the perception is that he was terrible on the economy issue. There's a lack of understanding of how things work and so we end up with the idea that voting in a Republican will make the economy better because they're going to drill for more oil. The right of the spectrum is good on the economy and the left of the spectrum is bad on the economy, everyone knows that! But really this spectrum thing just allows people to exploit perceptions and calcify those perceptions.
Also totally valid. We need a political hypercube or something. It's a complex thing, with a lot of gadgets and variables. Just human nature to try and simplify it I guess.
Or maybe we should just consider every issue individually?
I mean, obviously. As a single person, definitely. But issues require groups, groups require compromise, and that's the political system. The whole thing is set up to encourage factionalism. And factions get boiled down to their simplest parts.
I feel like I just wrote in a big circle. Anyways, yeah, I agree. Lol.