They’re analogous to the far right is the main thing. Anarchism/communism/etc. is the gateway to such views. Most lefists don’t go that far (good) but some do. Same thing with the far right, they start off as libertarian, ancap, or run of the mill conservatives etc. and end up going into cuckoo land after they watch too much cable news and facebook conspiracies.
In the USA, we have an environment where it’s far easier and more beneficial to those in power to co-opt people into right wing extremism than left wing extremism, hence the outsized representation. You can definitely find countries where the opposite is true, it’s a fairly big issue in south american and southeast asian nations. What’s interesting to me is that the end goals are nearly the same, which is to implement an authoritarian state where there is a powerful insular ingroup that can exploit the masses to their benefit.
They’re analogous to the far right is the main thing. Anarchism/communism/etc. is the gateway to such views. Most lefists don’t go that far (good) but some do. Same thing with the far right, they start off as libertarian, ancap, or run of the mill conservatives etc. and end up going into cuckoo land after they watch too much cable news and facebook conspiracies.
i don’t think there is a reputable source to substantiate this.
I don’t know of any particular sources but I do have anecdotes of watching friends and family fall into these traps on both ends of the spectrum. A couple of my leftist friends have started treading dangerously close to some pretty sour viewpoints. I mostly see it as pro-accelerationism, everything I don’t like is capitalism/neoliberalism/western values, and are totally blind to the influence propaganda has on them and the weak points in their own ideologies.
On the right, I’ve watched several of my family members go down the fox news alt right rabbit hole and end up at similarly dumb viewpoints. They also want a revolution, except everything they don’t like is liberals/communism/woke etc. They are also totally blind to the influence of propaganda and the weak points in their ideologies. The media machine in the US is set up to make this pipeline far more efficient than the leftist version.
They mostly don’t like the same things, but they’re pulling in opposite directions, and each is convinced that when the revolution comes, their side is the one that will win out, when in reality, we’ll probably just end up with the same shit, different coat of paint.
Me? I think there’s concepts we can borrow from many ideologies that can help us solve specific problems and bring about incremental change until we reach true propserity. The socialists and commies get some stuff right, so do the libertarians, the anarchists, the ancaps, etc. The only thing I think will definitely not help is tearing it all down. There is no silver bullet, it’s all just problems that are met with ever improving solutions. Sometimes we take two steps forward one step back, but I don’t think anyone can deny that the world at large is better off now than when it was almost completely ruled by monarchy, bloody violence, and slavery a few hundred years back.
Exactly this. I’ve been calling them the “burn it down” group. It’s not a fun ideology… sure they don’t have a lot of power today, but that’s how these things work. If they have power it’s too late. It’s worth knowing that this is a growing movement with real people. They are my cousins, coworkers and a few of my friends lol. Not just a social media rhetoric or scare tactic.
Nowhere did I claim such a thing. Some leftist groups want the whole stateless thing. Go even further left into crazy land though and you run into strongarm authoritarianism.
I’d call myself a liberal in the modern sense, I certainly don’t believe that large scale stateless societies are viable but there are definitely things we can learn from ideologies further to the left than what I subscribe to.
Authoritarianism is by definition illiberal and anyone who is authoritarian or supports authoritarianism is not liberal no matter what they claim to be. Centrism is also a meme, anyone who claims to be a centrist is usually just a stan for authoritarians in disguise.
The core tenant of liberalism is respect for the autonomy and civil liberties of the individual and consent of the governed to the rules of the government through the machinations of democracy. Any system claiming to be liberal without subscribing to that is a farce.
The same could be said of the “far left”. They claim to be leftists, and they might have started out as such, but they have stepped out into crazy land and end up supporting things antithetical to the ideologies they claim to subscribe to.
This entire discussion is about semantics, so I see no issue with getting fiddly with it. As for authoritarianism being illiberal, I don’t see how that is tautological. Authoritarianism is when the government or ruler has absolute control and has no obligation to accept input from the populace over which they rule. This violates the consent aspect of liberalism. These are commonly accepted definitions, not stuff I just made up. They’re mutually exclusive concepts and absolute versions of either cannot coexist.
And yes, I do think there has never been a truly liberal society, just as there has never been a truly communist society or any other -ist or -ism based society. They are concepts we can strive for, but adhering perfectly to the academic definition of any of these concepts is not realistic. I think the USA is fundemantally illiberal in many regards, and we would do well to strive to correct those aspects.
As for the definitions of those specific aspects of liberalism, yes, of course it is those aspects defined under the framework of liberalism. It would just take thousands of words to provide the entire context and it’s not super important here. You seem to understand that these words have different definitions in different frameworks, and I’m sure anyone discussing political ideology in this level of depth is also aware of that.
When I’m talking about the extremist sides of the spectrum, far left and far right, I am referring to those who tread into territory where their ideology becomes ostensibly dangerous. The most common version of this is directly supporting things like oppressive authoritarian rulers and population cleansing, There are absolutely people on both the left and the right who would see those as acceptable means to their end of implementing their preferred ideology. Right wingers who want to ethnically cleanse populations they see as problematic or inferior are no better than the far leftists who want to guillotine whoever they decide is the bougouise. This is the crazy land I’m talking about. Not being in crazy land means trying your best to not support awful shit, making sure you are picking the least bad feasible options in your current situation, and revising your positions and who you support when evidence indicates that the bad outweighs the good.
And yes, I actually do have a lot of issues with the French and American revolutions, and I do not think Churchill was a particularly good guy. I don’t think they are the same as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They all resulted in regimes of varying levels of “bad”, but the Chinese and Russian versions resulted in higher death tolls and much more unhealthy systems coming out the other side (in my subjective opinion).
I think to cover the rest of your points, there are degrees here and the real world doesn’t function in absolutes as I mentioned in the second paragraph. I don’t have time to respond to every comparison you mentioned, but Washington vs Lenin for example: Washington did not have secret police killing dissidents by the thousands. Lenin did. Washington did not implement policy that resulted in mass famines resulting in the deaths of millions, Lenin did. Washington did support slavery and ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, and it irritates me greatly that this gets glossed over. Lenin did not. Which one of those guys is worse depends on your subjective values, but for me, I’d say Lenin is the worse guy.
I’m tired and it’s almost 3am so hopefully all that makes sense.
I don’t consider tankies leftists. I’m an anarchist. I consider myself far left.
They’re analogous to the far right is the main thing. Anarchism/communism/etc. is the gateway to such views. Most lefists don’t go that far (good) but some do. Same thing with the far right, they start off as libertarian, ancap, or run of the mill conservatives etc. and end up going into cuckoo land after they watch too much cable news and facebook conspiracies.
In the USA, we have an environment where it’s far easier and more beneficial to those in power to co-opt people into right wing extremism than left wing extremism, hence the outsized representation. You can definitely find countries where the opposite is true, it’s a fairly big issue in south american and southeast asian nations. What’s interesting to me is that the end goals are nearly the same, which is to implement an authoritarian state where there is a powerful insular ingroup that can exploit the masses to their benefit.
i don’t think there is a reputable source to substantiate this.
I don’t know of any particular sources but I do have anecdotes of watching friends and family fall into these traps on both ends of the spectrum. A couple of my leftist friends have started treading dangerously close to some pretty sour viewpoints. I mostly see it as pro-accelerationism, everything I don’t like is capitalism/neoliberalism/western values, and are totally blind to the influence propaganda has on them and the weak points in their own ideologies.
On the right, I’ve watched several of my family members go down the fox news alt right rabbit hole and end up at similarly dumb viewpoints. They also want a revolution, except everything they don’t like is liberals/communism/woke etc. They are also totally blind to the influence of propaganda and the weak points in their ideologies. The media machine in the US is set up to make this pipeline far more efficient than the leftist version.
They mostly don’t like the same things, but they’re pulling in opposite directions, and each is convinced that when the revolution comes, their side is the one that will win out, when in reality, we’ll probably just end up with the same shit, different coat of paint.
Me? I think there’s concepts we can borrow from many ideologies that can help us solve specific problems and bring about incremental change until we reach true propserity. The socialists and commies get some stuff right, so do the libertarians, the anarchists, the ancaps, etc. The only thing I think will definitely not help is tearing it all down. There is no silver bullet, it’s all just problems that are met with ever improving solutions. Sometimes we take two steps forward one step back, but I don’t think anyone can deny that the world at large is better off now than when it was almost completely ruled by monarchy, bloody violence, and slavery a few hundred years back.
Exactly this. I’ve been calling them the “burn it down” group. It’s not a fun ideology… sure they don’t have a lot of power today, but that’s how these things work. If they have power it’s too late. It’s worth knowing that this is a growing movement with real people. They are my cousins, coworkers and a few of my friends lol. Not just a social media rhetoric or scare tactic.
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Nowhere did I claim such a thing. Some leftist groups want the whole stateless thing. Go even further left into crazy land though and you run into strongarm authoritarianism.
I’d call myself a liberal in the modern sense, I certainly don’t believe that large scale stateless societies are viable but there are definitely things we can learn from ideologies further to the left than what I subscribe to.
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Authoritarianism is by definition illiberal and anyone who is authoritarian or supports authoritarianism is not liberal no matter what they claim to be. Centrism is also a meme, anyone who claims to be a centrist is usually just a stan for authoritarians in disguise.
The core tenant of liberalism is respect for the autonomy and civil liberties of the individual and consent of the governed to the rules of the government through the machinations of democracy. Any system claiming to be liberal without subscribing to that is a farce.
The same could be said of the “far left”. They claim to be leftists, and they might have started out as such, but they have stepped out into crazy land and end up supporting things antithetical to the ideologies they claim to subscribe to.
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This entire discussion is about semantics, so I see no issue with getting fiddly with it. As for authoritarianism being illiberal, I don’t see how that is tautological. Authoritarianism is when the government or ruler has absolute control and has no obligation to accept input from the populace over which they rule. This violates the consent aspect of liberalism. These are commonly accepted definitions, not stuff I just made up. They’re mutually exclusive concepts and absolute versions of either cannot coexist.
And yes, I do think there has never been a truly liberal society, just as there has never been a truly communist society or any other -ist or -ism based society. They are concepts we can strive for, but adhering perfectly to the academic definition of any of these concepts is not realistic. I think the USA is fundemantally illiberal in many regards, and we would do well to strive to correct those aspects.
As for the definitions of those specific aspects of liberalism, yes, of course it is those aspects defined under the framework of liberalism. It would just take thousands of words to provide the entire context and it’s not super important here. You seem to understand that these words have different definitions in different frameworks, and I’m sure anyone discussing political ideology in this level of depth is also aware of that.
When I’m talking about the extremist sides of the spectrum, far left and far right, I am referring to those who tread into territory where their ideology becomes ostensibly dangerous. The most common version of this is directly supporting things like oppressive authoritarian rulers and population cleansing, There are absolutely people on both the left and the right who would see those as acceptable means to their end of implementing their preferred ideology. Right wingers who want to ethnically cleanse populations they see as problematic or inferior are no better than the far leftists who want to guillotine whoever they decide is the bougouise. This is the crazy land I’m talking about. Not being in crazy land means trying your best to not support awful shit, making sure you are picking the least bad feasible options in your current situation, and revising your positions and who you support when evidence indicates that the bad outweighs the good.
And yes, I actually do have a lot of issues with the French and American revolutions, and I do not think Churchill was a particularly good guy. I don’t think they are the same as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They all resulted in regimes of varying levels of “bad”, but the Chinese and Russian versions resulted in higher death tolls and much more unhealthy systems coming out the other side (in my subjective opinion).
I think to cover the rest of your points, there are degrees here and the real world doesn’t function in absolutes as I mentioned in the second paragraph. I don’t have time to respond to every comparison you mentioned, but Washington vs Lenin for example: Washington did not have secret police killing dissidents by the thousands. Lenin did. Washington did not implement policy that resulted in mass famines resulting in the deaths of millions, Lenin did. Washington did support slavery and ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, and it irritates me greatly that this gets glossed over. Lenin did not. Which one of those guys is worse depends on your subjective values, but for me, I’d say Lenin is the worse guy.
I’m tired and it’s almost 3am so hopefully all that makes sense.
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