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.
“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.
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.
"Woke" is perhaps the freaking platonic ideal of what this article criticizes.
I'm black. It once was just a mostly fun little word that meant "Hey man, are you paying attention to the world around you?"
And today it is completely without concrete meaning. For the left, it's kind of whatever, because it's responding to what it is for the so called right -- literally nothing more concrete than "what I don't like right now that might be associated with any group possibly considered a minority."
It has been obvious to me for a long time that the people using the term woke now don't even have a concrete definition of the term, but I was still blown away by the sheer stupidity and obliviousness of one of those right wing people posting about how they are not woke, they are awake [to the world around them].
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.
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.
> the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space.
Take the CK shooter: Initially he was said to be left-wing, then it's come out that he was likely a groyper with some views to the right of CK. Some terms in that community are used ironically so it's difficult to know what they really believe. Much of the "ideology" (if you can even call it that) is incoherent and nihilistic. Difficult to place them on a simple left-right axis while much of the corporate media and politicians were quick to do so.
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.
> "socialism" pretty much destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember
This is actually the best definition, for certain values of government. What's bizarre is that a bunch of people gave communists ownership of the definition of socialism. The communists who never even described it specifically, just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution that they do actually describe. Even worse, those people tho give communists total ownership of the concept don't claim to be communists (because it's too strict, and requires too much reading.)
Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group. Socialism as a governance system is when that cooperation completely subsumes other methods of resource distribution and dispute resolution. To be clear: Socialism is when the (popularly sovereign) government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialister it is.
Markets can also be socialism. Markets are artificial constructs within which transactions are enforced by an overarching power. If that power is popularly sovereign, and the markets are meant to equalize distribution without regard to the power of individuals, of course they're socialist. There has never been a "socialist" society that has not introduced markets. There are still market socialists, maybe look them up.
Markets can be used for any purpose, but a very obvious one is that if people all begin with the same amount of currency, but with a different array of needs, they can use markets to get rid of the things they don't need to get the things that they do, in a fair way.
"Socialism" instead has become popularly defined among a certain class as a society that has infinite wealth and distributes whatever anybody wants to whoever wants it, without requirement or delay, and allows people to contribute in any way that they see fit. It's just rich kid summer camp.
A million kinds of socialists showed up to the First International. Communists bullied them all out (and they would eventually be the "social fascists" who were a bigger danger than even fascists, and needed to be liquidated), and decided that they were the Workingmen now. Now, the children of the most elite classes on the planet dictate that real socialism is their socialism.
It's very hard to find out about a lot of those different socialisms, because how overjoyed they were to see a worker's revolution had happened in Russia, how they flocked to it, and how those people were slaughtered or forced to conform to Stalin's new socialism with classes (S++, maybe? The Fabians couldn't get enough of it.) Whatever Kronstadt hadn't said was said when Stalin explained how some people deserved larger apartments than others, and ruthlessly suppressed those who disagreed.
Read Owen. Learn about labor vouchers. Read anything but Marx and Engels.
Engels was a mill owner who was sleeping with his employees, and Marx was a brilliant economist who relied on Engels entirely for his financial support. Engels served a badly determined mishmash of socialist theories that were already ancient by the time he arrived, wrote a nice thing about the state of the English working class, and needed Marx to lend him intellectual authority.
Marx wrote Capital, which adds almost nothing new to economics and makes the same mistakes that all other economists were making at the time (it's basically Ricardo), but wrote it from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to nations, which was revolutionary. It was not a message to princes, it was a message to wage-laborers.
Engels frankensteined this into his own warmed over cliches, and never allowed Marx to publish a word that he hadn't scribbled all over. Please ignore them when thinking about socialism. We've done the experiments (although we started with peasants instead of a society well prepared by capitalism), and the first output was Stalin.
Maybe give the Left SRs a little attention, or remember Fanny Kaplan. It's a miracle that Bogdanov survived, but even the Bolsheviks couldn't bring themselves to kill the person who came up with the idea of "dialectical materialism" which they hopelessly butchered because Lenin clearly didn't understand what he was reading. Read Bogdanov. Lenin once "refuted" him by basically denying the existence of the material world, and sneering at those who believe in it. Lots of parallels there to today.
Sorry for hijacking your offhand comment. But congestion pricing is socialism.
> Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group.
No, that's altruism: putting the group ahead of the individual.
Socialism is when the means of production are socially owned, instead of privately owned. It implicitly is altruistic by nature, but that's of course not guaranteed.
Nah. Don't waste your time reading about Owenism and labor vouchers. It's utter tripe, wishful thinking made up by some random guy with no connection to objective reality. The labor theory of value has never and will never work in practice.
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.
> No consistent ideology or underlying theory of government
> just blind support for your chosen side's leaders.
These are two different questions.
I'm not sure whether the political parties should have consistent ideologies. Even if they did, it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans. Each of the two major US parties have always consisted of shifting coalitions of interests.
On the other hand, loyal partisanship leads to the phenomenon that I described: inventing ideological terms as a kind of personal identity for the partisan, giving the pretense that their loyal partisanship is backed by consistent, stable views, when in fact the parties are demonstrably shifting coalitions of interests.
> I'm not sure whether the political parties should have consistent ideologies.
It's something extremely important, along with "underlying theory of government" which you missed to address. If you think boundless inconsistency and shapeshifting are OK, you better say it straight - if you don't, you need a theory of bounds and it better be consistent.
> it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans.
That's upside down, in fact, 99% of Americans adopt a selection from the views offered by politicians and parties as reflected by the media. The "diverse political views" don't fall from the sky, they are products of the political system.
> Each of the two major US parties have always consisted of shifting coalitions of interests... [ consistent, stable views are just pretense ] when in fact the parties are demonstrably shifting coalitions of interests.
You are conflating "coalitions of interests" with "political views", they are quite different. In order to start a discussion we must separately and clearly define the coalitions, their interests and their political views: if they aren't consistently defined, neither accountability nor even basic security can be achieved.
If interests are a sufficient reason for dishing out pretense pseudo-rationality, then the coalition that is best at pretending and manages to accumulate a critical mass of power will simply enslave those who were gullible to believe them. I shouldn't have to explain this in America but here I am.
I mean, there's very specific reasons either color gets support from their voters. I wouldn't say all of those reasons warrant the same amount of fervor, passion, and loyalty that they do. But "blind support" is a bit reductive when for some people it literally means their rights being stripped away.
What appears to be "blind support" is people desperately clinging onto what tiny bit of representation they have. It's sad for both sides. It's Stockholm syndrome mixed with political pragmatism. It sucks, but the current political landscape in the US has entrenched itself so deeply in a local minima that people feel like they have to work backwards to make progress. Just see how any discussion of a third party is seen as a psyop to get that side to have a spoiler effect.
As someone who typically supports a lot of third parties at the ballot box, I have to say that our problem is actually not people seeing us as a psy-op.
It's people seeing us as, at best, irrelevant; and at worst, a joke.
I've been voting since the late eighties, and have come to realize it is our lack of organization and, at times, our policies. Which in all honesty can be at once, foolish and bizarre.
It's difficult to bring the platforms of any new party in hand precisely because they are attracting people whose ideas are maybe not very popular in the mainstream parties. The mainstream parties have bizarre and foolish policies as well, but they've had 40 years to brainwash their voters. It's hard to have the same effect in, say, 2 or 4 years.
So you have to have a pristine platform and stick to it.
This is where as independents and third party supporters, we've repeatedly failed.
> 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.
People want to belong to a tribe. I think it's often quite a tossup where a young person ends up, depending on friends or whichever online circle accepts them best. It's also not rare for young people to flipflop between nominally widely opposing tribes before setting into one. People gradually learn all the opinions they are supposed to have on the various issues to truly belong to the tribe. It's not unlike learning the dogmas of a religion. It's much much more convenient socially to speak the same language and have the same cultural references and opinions to bond over and feel camaraderie about and curate a bubble of friends following the same opinion-setters, vs. creating one's own grab-bag idiosyncratic set of opinions that doesn't fit neatly into either well known combo-deal. You gotta support either this football team or the other one. People who start to lecture about how they like the goalie of the one team, but the striker of the other are just "not fun at parties", are kind of annoying and hard to relate to, especially online where people decide in a split second whether to upvote or downvote based on a fast pattern matching check to my tribe / enemy tribe.
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!
Realistically the mainstream Democratic Party is liberal in the sense that you use it; the US is a fundamentally liberal place, a lot of Republicans are as well.
Even the idea of “banning free speech” that you mention is implemented in a liberal fashion in the US. There are rarely calls for the government to actually ban speech via laws. The ground where that’s fought is actually “should private companies broadcast/highlight via algorithm the speech of individuals who say things I don’t like,” it is a formulation that pits the speech rights of the corporation against the self-expression of the individuals using their services.
The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional free-speech consensus.
> The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional liberal consensus.
I disagree, at least a bit. I think "liberal" here is just used as "the bad tribe". It's not saying that they're not living up to their values, it's just saying that they're "them".
I can definitely see how what I wrote was unclear there, sorry. Inside the quotes, “liberal” was used in the sense that skrebble was using it inside their hypothetical quote, so, basically a faction of team-blue. Afterwards my intent was to continue using it in the way that he (outside his hypothetical quote) and I (everywhere) had been using it, related to the philosophy of liberalism. I’ll try to edit it for clarity, sorry…
Nah the thing we call liberalism is much milder than that. It’s like the watered down, we-do-trust-the-government-but-maybe-tone-it-down-a-little version of libertarianism. I mean the same meaning as eg the Economist gives the term.
I think maybe the term changed meaning in the US because for decades pretty much everyone agreed with it (no social democrats in sight, barring the occasional Bernie). A movement that ~everyone agrees with isn't much of a movement, is it?
It's a movement that won - won so thoroughly that nobody even remembers there was a war. But that means that, since nobody's fighting that war any more, the label (which has "winning" and even "being correct" attached to it in peoples' minds) is now up for grabs for other movements that want to win.
Which is itself an ugly word because the Libertarian Party proper is mostly a bunch of kooks and cranks. So using it invites comparisons to them even if you only are proposing what the above poster was proposing.
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.
I agree that this is the claim of self-described true conservatives. However, I think the claim is empirically false, and they do not actually follow what the label meant in our youth.
Well, I was mainly referring to politicians and other prominent persons. I'm not denying that anonymous individuals exist who have remained consistent over the decades, but they don't seem to have much power anymore.
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.
Yes. Far to the left of Carter, who I'd consider a moderate conservative, and marginally to the left of the more centrist Obama.
I'm construing left-wing as (a) seeing an expansive role for the state -- and in the US especially the federal government -- as being a prime mover in social and especially economic matters, (b) willingness to use political power in novel and unprecedented ways to address perceived social and economic problems without being constrained by established legal and constitutional norms.
Yes, it describes everyone who aims to use unrestrained political power to reshape society, i.e. the precise opposite of what "conservatism" actually means.
Perhaps conservatism doesn't necessarily fit into a left-right spectrum neatly. I recently saw fascism described as a version of collectivism that caters to the right.
Nothing in Russel Kirk's concept of conservatism implies any of the specific policy positions you're attributing to conservatism per se.
Someone whose political agenda is to force society to confirm to a doctrinal ideology that in opposition to the established broad status-quo norms of that society is by definition not a conservative.
> Someone whose political agenda is to force society to confirm to a doctrinal ideology that in opposition to the established broad status-quo norms of that society is by definition not a conservative.
Conservatives believe that the status quo may violate the transcendent order and that they are duty bound to restore it. Neither conservatives nor liberals believe the status quo is sacred.
Do you think the rolling back of Roe vs. Wade was not a conservative act because it was a "status quo norm" ? They never liked it, so perhaps it was not a norm?
> IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime
Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration?
> but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse,
“Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.
> gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?
(I guess it was also just after a midterm election where the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.)
> Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration?
Tariffs. Deficit spending. Federalization of law enforcement. Hyperpoliticization of social questions. Government ownership/direction of private industry.
> “Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.
They've not been about actual policy domains until relatively recently. These issues have been marginal with respect to actual policy considerations for decades.
> 30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?
GOP candidates in certain regions invoked various wedge issues on the campaign trail in order to put them over the top in elections for contested seats. Upon election, they then did nothing whatsoever to shift the actual policy needle in relation to these issue, and focused precisely on "neoliberal consensus" economic issues of the exact sort that the current administration is diametrically opposed to.
> but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.
But no, it actually is the "essence of conservatism" where conservatism is an actual political philosophy, and not an empty term that refers to the haphazard policy preferences of whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.
> Tariffs. Deficit spending. Federalization of law enforcement.
None of those are left wing (or even “more frequently associated with the less right wing of the two major parties in America”)
In fact, in the period where the GOP has been the more right-wing party, deficit spending has been associated more with them being in power.
> Government ownership/direction of private industry.
Fascist corporatism is not left-wing (state ownership as a proxy for and in the interest of the working class is a feature of some versions of leftist theory, but this isn’t something that Trump’s industrial intervention even makes a rhetorical appeal to.)
> > [...] the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.
> But no, it actually is the "essence of conservatism" where conservatism is an actual political philosophy, and not an empty term that refers to the haphazard policy preferences of whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.
No, you’ve confused libertarianism/minarchism with conservatism. Conservatism, as an “actual political philosophy”, or rather a broad political orientation which is not a single unified philosophy but is conprised of distinct philosophies tending in the same broad direction, arose in response to and is exactly resistance to the downward, equalizing, leveling drive of enlightment liberalism.
The on-and-off rhetorical appeal to libertarianism by the Right especially when out of power is, exactly, a matter of “whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.”
> None of those are left wing (or even “more frequently associated with the less right wing of the two major parties in America”)
These are quintessentially left-wing in the context of the past century of American politics.
> Fascist corporatism is not left-wing
Of course it is. It was deliberately designed as an alternative means for achieving socialist ends by socialists disillusioned with Marxism. It's always characterized itself as a "third way", but still one that seeks to radical change society through political force, and in opposition to those who want to conserve the status quo and admit change only through gradual development. The former is the traditional definition of "left" and the latter of "right".
> No, you’ve confused libertarianism/minarchism with conservatism. Conservatism, as an “actual political philosophy”, or rather a broad political orientation which is not a single unified philosophy but is conprised of distinct philosophies tending in the same broad direction, arose in response to and is exactly resistance to the downward, equalizing, leveling drive of enlightment liberalism.
It should be clear that in a US context, I'm referring to specifically Anglo-American conservatism, which does differ from other varieties in its devotion to particular forms of constitutionalism and to economic liberalism, i.e. the Burkean variety, and not to continental forms of conservatism which have had little historical significance in America.
> The on-and-off rhetorical appeal to libertarianism by the Right especially when out of power is, exactly, a matter of “whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.”
The problem is that you're presumptively conflating party with political philosophy even in levying this criticism. In terms of US presidents in my lifetime, I'd regard Carter, Reagan, and Clinton as conservatives, both Bushes and Obama as moderates, Biden as being on the center-left, and Trump as being on the far left.
Actual political philosophy cuts across party lines -- the parties themselves are just coalitions of factions that are mainly aligned due to mutual tactical opposition to the other coalition, and not by any shared worldview. The nature of these coalitions has far more influence on what rhetoric they employ on the campaign trail than it does on what actual policy positions they take once in office.
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.
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.
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.
For example that the author is a conservative marxist writing that treatise at the time of the "August Coup" which is a pretty interesting historical event itself. It toppled Gorbechev, and Yeltsin took over. Kondylis is also more reknowned than I was aware.
I (like GP, most likely) did not live through the events that occurred in Moscow during 1991. The only news media I consumed at the time was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, which did not cover Soviet politics, and we did not cover any of this in school later in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of what I learned after the fact has been from Fox and MSNBC and Red Alert 2 and Call of Duty - that commies and socialists and Soviets are bad people who want to give kids free school lunches, will disrupt the temporal equilibrium, and give adults universal health care. I can skim the Wikipedia article about the coup [1] and I recognize the names of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, but I cannot even begin to articulate the political philosophies of their platforms or the power dynamics, coalitions, and incentive structures that either used to leverage one position or the other.
The intro paragraph, I think, is trying to use this to its advantage by describing an unfamiliar political landscape with conservatives and parlimentarians and Stalinists and "putschists" (what even is that word?). I barely know what conservativism means as distinct from "whatever the American Republican party does". I clicked on the article because I've observed that liberalism/conservativism/libertarianism/socialism/populism/marxism/fascism/neo___ism/etc. are bandied about more like sports team names to be cheered or derided rather than comprehended, and hoped to understand this phenomenon better.
I'll push through the article eventually, with frequent dictionary lookups for "societas civilis" and "diptych" and "affairs curricula". But it's clearly written for an expert in political philosophy and will take me a long time to do so. I'm an expert in computer engineering and pretty innately talented at understanding that, I'm not an expert in the social sciences and they don't come easily to me. But I still live in a society, and try to participate in its governance as best I can...while neither journalists nor public education have really helped me to get there. I don't observe my peers reading Chomsky, Hayek, Putnam, Piketty, Turchin, and Zinn before they go to the voting booth, but they get one vote each just the same.
I've actually looked it up and found that my local community college offers a "PL230 - Introduction to Political Theory" course, this winter it's held mid-day for full-time students but they're offering it virtually in the evenings next summer so that people who work during the day can participate.
"..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)
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”
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.
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.
“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.
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.)
Definitions are rarely definite if we're even discussing them.
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.
I'm black. It once was just a mostly fun little word that meant "Hey man, are you paying attention to the world around you?"
And today it is completely without concrete meaning. For the left, it's kind of whatever, because it's responding to what it is for the so called right -- literally nothing more concrete than "what I don't like right now that might be associated with any group possibly considered a minority."
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.
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.
Take the CK shooter: Initially he was said to be left-wing, then it's come out that he was likely a groyper with some views to the right of CK. Some terms in that community are used ironically so it's difficult to know what they really believe. Much of the "ideology" (if you can even call it that) is incoherent and nihilistic. Difficult to place them on a simple left-right axis while much of the corporate media and politicians were quick to do so.
https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1757787226815828m.jpg
I mean, I've seen people decry market-oriented solutions to problems (eg congestion pricing) as "socialism" which is broadly hilarious.
This is actually the best definition, for certain values of government. What's bizarre is that a bunch of people gave communists ownership of the definition of socialism. The communists who never even described it specifically, just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution that they do actually describe. Even worse, those people tho give communists total ownership of the concept don't claim to be communists (because it's too strict, and requires too much reading.)
Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group. Socialism as a governance system is when that cooperation completely subsumes other methods of resource distribution and dispute resolution. To be clear: Socialism is when the (popularly sovereign) government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialister it is.
Markets can also be socialism. Markets are artificial constructs within which transactions are enforced by an overarching power. If that power is popularly sovereign, and the markets are meant to equalize distribution without regard to the power of individuals, of course they're socialist. There has never been a "socialist" society that has not introduced markets. There are still market socialists, maybe look them up.
Markets can be used for any purpose, but a very obvious one is that if people all begin with the same amount of currency, but with a different array of needs, they can use markets to get rid of the things they don't need to get the things that they do, in a fair way.
"Socialism" instead has become popularly defined among a certain class as a society that has infinite wealth and distributes whatever anybody wants to whoever wants it, without requirement or delay, and allows people to contribute in any way that they see fit. It's just rich kid summer camp.
A million kinds of socialists showed up to the First International. Communists bullied them all out (and they would eventually be the "social fascists" who were a bigger danger than even fascists, and needed to be liquidated), and decided that they were the Workingmen now. Now, the children of the most elite classes on the planet dictate that real socialism is their socialism.
It's very hard to find out about a lot of those different socialisms, because how overjoyed they were to see a worker's revolution had happened in Russia, how they flocked to it, and how those people were slaughtered or forced to conform to Stalin's new socialism with classes (S++, maybe? The Fabians couldn't get enough of it.) Whatever Kronstadt hadn't said was said when Stalin explained how some people deserved larger apartments than others, and ruthlessly suppressed those who disagreed.
Read Owen. Learn about labor vouchers. Read anything but Marx and Engels.
Engels was a mill owner who was sleeping with his employees, and Marx was a brilliant economist who relied on Engels entirely for his financial support. Engels served a badly determined mishmash of socialist theories that were already ancient by the time he arrived, wrote a nice thing about the state of the English working class, and needed Marx to lend him intellectual authority.
Marx wrote Capital, which adds almost nothing new to economics and makes the same mistakes that all other economists were making at the time (it's basically Ricardo), but wrote it from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to nations, which was revolutionary. It was not a message to princes, it was a message to wage-laborers.
Engels frankensteined this into his own warmed over cliches, and never allowed Marx to publish a word that he hadn't scribbled all over. Please ignore them when thinking about socialism. We've done the experiments (although we started with peasants instead of a society well prepared by capitalism), and the first output was Stalin.
Maybe give the Left SRs a little attention, or remember Fanny Kaplan. It's a miracle that Bogdanov survived, but even the Bolsheviks couldn't bring themselves to kill the person who came up with the idea of "dialectical materialism" which they hopelessly butchered because Lenin clearly didn't understand what he was reading. Read Bogdanov. Lenin once "refuted" him by basically denying the existence of the material world, and sneering at those who believe in it. Lots of parallels there to today.
Sorry for hijacking your offhand comment. But congestion pricing is socialism.
No, that's altruism: putting the group ahead of the individual.
Socialism is when the means of production are socially owned, instead of privately owned. It implicitly is altruistic by nature, but that's of course not guaranteed.
I'd argue that such a definition of socialism is so expansive as to be worthless.
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.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-roc...
> just blind support for your chosen side's leaders.
These are two different questions.
I'm not sure whether the political parties should have consistent ideologies. Even if they did, it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans. Each of the two major US parties have always consisted of shifting coalitions of interests.
On the other hand, loyal partisanship leads to the phenomenon that I described: inventing ideological terms as a kind of personal identity for the partisan, giving the pretense that their loyal partisanship is backed by consistent, stable views, when in fact the parties are demonstrably shifting coalitions of interests.
It's something extremely important, along with "underlying theory of government" which you missed to address. If you think boundless inconsistency and shapeshifting are OK, you better say it straight - if you don't, you need a theory of bounds and it better be consistent.
> it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans.
That's upside down, in fact, 99% of Americans adopt a selection from the views offered by politicians and parties as reflected by the media. The "diverse political views" don't fall from the sky, they are products of the political system.
> Each of the two major US parties have always consisted of shifting coalitions of interests... [ consistent, stable views are just pretense ] when in fact the parties are demonstrably shifting coalitions of interests.
You are conflating "coalitions of interests" with "political views", they are quite different. In order to start a discussion we must separately and clearly define the coalitions, their interests and their political views: if they aren't consistently defined, neither accountability nor even basic security can be achieved.
If interests are a sufficient reason for dishing out pretense pseudo-rationality, then the coalition that is best at pretending and manages to accumulate a critical mass of power will simply enslave those who were gullible to believe them. I shouldn't have to explain this in America but here I am.
What appears to be "blind support" is people desperately clinging onto what tiny bit of representation they have. It's sad for both sides. It's Stockholm syndrome mixed with political pragmatism. It sucks, but the current political landscape in the US has entrenched itself so deeply in a local minima that people feel like they have to work backwards to make progress. Just see how any discussion of a third party is seen as a psyop to get that side to have a spoiler effect.
It's people seeing us as, at best, irrelevant; and at worst, a joke.
I've been voting since the late eighties, and have come to realize it is our lack of organization and, at times, our policies. Which in all honesty can be at once, foolish and bizarre.
It's difficult to bring the platforms of any new party in hand precisely because they are attracting people whose ideas are maybe not very popular in the mainstream parties. The mainstream parties have bizarre and foolish policies as well, but they've had 40 years to brainwash their voters. It's hard to have the same effect in, say, 2 or 4 years.
So you have to have a pristine platform and stick to it.
This is where as independents and third party supporters, we've repeatedly failed.
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.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101027161452.h...
It’s just, the word did a total 180 in the US and it’s super weird!
Even the idea of “banning free speech” that you mention is implemented in a liberal fashion in the US. There are rarely calls for the government to actually ban speech via laws. The ground where that’s fought is actually “should private companies broadcast/highlight via algorithm the speech of individuals who say things I don’t like,” it is a formulation that pits the speech rights of the corporation against the self-expression of the individuals using their services.
The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional free-speech consensus.
I disagree, at least a bit. I think "liberal" here is just used as "the bad tribe". It's not saying that they're not living up to their values, it's just saying that they're "them".
I think maybe the term changed meaning in the US because for decades pretty much everyone agreed with it (no social democrats in sight, barring the occasional Bernie). A movement that ~everyone agrees with isn't much of a movement, is it?
May I ask who?
> And some follow what they thought it meant, or what they thought it should have meant.
This isn't contrary to my claim.
(I mean that somewhat ironically - everybody would say that it fits them. But I also mean it somewhat sincerely.)
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.
Can you elaborate?
Expansions in federal spending against growing budget deficits.
Government pursuing ownership or de facto control of private industry.
Aggressive use of executive fiat to pursue novel policies without clear legislative basis.
Federal interventions that try to direct or challenge state sovereignty on numerous issues traditionally outside the scope of federal authority.
Hesitant foreign policy that seems overly deferential to traditional US adversaries, especially Russia.
I'm construing left-wing as (a) seeing an expansive role for the state -- and in the US especially the federal government -- as being a prime mover in social and especially economic matters, (b) willingness to use political power in novel and unprecedented ways to address perceived social and economic problems without being constrained by established legal and constitutional norms.
I think you are describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_conservatism
Someone whose political agenda is to force society to confirm to a doctrinal ideology that in opposition to the established broad status-quo norms of that society is by definition not a conservative.
Conservatives believe that the status quo may violate the transcendent order and that they are duty bound to restore it. Neither conservatives nor liberals believe the status quo is sacred.
Do you think the rolling back of Roe vs. Wade was not a conservative act because it was a "status quo norm" ? They never liked it, so perhaps it was not a norm?
Status quoism is different from conservatism.
Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration?
> but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse,
“Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.
> gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?
(I guess it was also just after a midterm election where the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.)
Tariffs. Deficit spending. Federalization of law enforcement. Hyperpoliticization of social questions. Government ownership/direction of private industry.
> “Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.
They've not been about actual policy domains until relatively recently. These issues have been marginal with respect to actual policy considerations for decades.
> 30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?
GOP candidates in certain regions invoked various wedge issues on the campaign trail in order to put them over the top in elections for contested seats. Upon election, they then did nothing whatsoever to shift the actual policy needle in relation to these issue, and focused precisely on "neoliberal consensus" economic issues of the exact sort that the current administration is diametrically opposed to.
> but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.
But no, it actually is the "essence of conservatism" where conservatism is an actual political philosophy, and not an empty term that refers to the haphazard policy preferences of whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.
None of those are left wing (or even “more frequently associated with the less right wing of the two major parties in America”)
In fact, in the period where the GOP has been the more right-wing party, deficit spending has been associated more with them being in power.
> Government ownership/direction of private industry.
Fascist corporatism is not left-wing (state ownership as a proxy for and in the interest of the working class is a feature of some versions of leftist theory, but this isn’t something that Trump’s industrial intervention even makes a rhetorical appeal to.)
> > [...] the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.
> But no, it actually is the "essence of conservatism" where conservatism is an actual political philosophy, and not an empty term that refers to the haphazard policy preferences of whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.
No, you’ve confused libertarianism/minarchism with conservatism. Conservatism, as an “actual political philosophy”, or rather a broad political orientation which is not a single unified philosophy but is conprised of distinct philosophies tending in the same broad direction, arose in response to and is exactly resistance to the downward, equalizing, leveling drive of enlightment liberalism.
The on-and-off rhetorical appeal to libertarianism by the Right especially when out of power is, exactly, a matter of “whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.”
> In fact, in the period where the GOP has been the more right-wing party, deficit spending has been associated more with them being in power.
You're using circular logic: "You can't describe left wing as doing something the GOP does, because I define them to be right wing."
These are quintessentially left-wing in the context of the past century of American politics.
> Fascist corporatism is not left-wing
Of course it is. It was deliberately designed as an alternative means for achieving socialist ends by socialists disillusioned with Marxism. It's always characterized itself as a "third way", but still one that seeks to radical change society through political force, and in opposition to those who want to conserve the status quo and admit change only through gradual development. The former is the traditional definition of "left" and the latter of "right".
> No, you’ve confused libertarianism/minarchism with conservatism. Conservatism, as an “actual political philosophy”, or rather a broad political orientation which is not a single unified philosophy but is conprised of distinct philosophies tending in the same broad direction, arose in response to and is exactly resistance to the downward, equalizing, leveling drive of enlightment liberalism.
It should be clear that in a US context, I'm referring to specifically Anglo-American conservatism, which does differ from other varieties in its devotion to particular forms of constitutionalism and to economic liberalism, i.e. the Burkean variety, and not to continental forms of conservatism which have had little historical significance in America.
> The on-and-off rhetorical appeal to libertarianism by the Right especially when out of power is, exactly, a matter of “whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.”
The problem is that you're presumptively conflating party with political philosophy even in levying this criticism. In terms of US presidents in my lifetime, I'd regard Carter, Reagan, and Clinton as conservatives, both Bushes and Obama as moderates, Biden as being on the center-left, and Trump as being on the far left.
Actual political philosophy cuts across party lines -- the parties themselves are just coalitions of factions that are mainly aligned due to mutual tactical opposition to the other coalition, and not by any shared worldview. The nature of these coalitions has far more influence on what rhetoric they employ on the campaign trail than it does on what actual policy positions they take once in office.
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.
https://unherd.com/2018/07/open-vs-closed-rise-fall-left-rig...
Edit: apparently that is in "part two" which isn't linked anywhere
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.
What do you mean by that?
The intro paragraph, I think, is trying to use this to its advantage by describing an unfamiliar political landscape with conservatives and parlimentarians and Stalinists and "putschists" (what even is that word?). I barely know what conservativism means as distinct from "whatever the American Republican party does". I clicked on the article because I've observed that liberalism/conservativism/libertarianism/socialism/populism/marxism/fascism/neo___ism/etc. are bandied about more like sports team names to be cheered or derided rather than comprehended, and hoped to understand this phenomenon better.
I'll push through the article eventually, with frequent dictionary lookups for "societas civilis" and "diptych" and "affairs curricula". But it's clearly written for an expert in political philosophy and will take me a long time to do so. I'm an expert in computer engineering and pretty innately talented at understanding that, I'm not an expert in the social sciences and they don't come easily to me. But I still live in a society, and try to participate in its governance as best I can...while neither journalists nor public education have really helped me to get there. I don't observe my peers reading Chomsky, Hayek, Putnam, Piketty, Turchin, and Zinn before they go to the voting booth, but they get one vote each just the same.
I've actually looked it up and found that my local community college offers a "PL230 - Introduction to Political Theory" course, this winter it's held mid-day for full-time students but they're offering it virtually in the evenings next summer so that people who work during the day can participate.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt
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
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)
Here is the political classification of the top 50 developed nations (I tried to organize them, but it's hard...):
These shifts have happened a few times in the past, and it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.