Mnementh said:
sc94597 said:
The left-right paradigm isn't necessarily directly determined by state control. In so much as it makes sense (and yes there are limitations), it a measure of one's orientation towards social hierarchy. Those who support and preserve current social hierarchies, or want to return to past social hierarchies are on the right. Those who want to deconstruct them are on the left.Â
This paradigm originated in the French Revolution with the left aiming to deconstruct the Ancien-Regime and the right aiming to protect it. "Left" and "right" coming from where these individuals sat in the National Assembly (on the left side or the right side.)Â
When you consider that social hierarchy is the dividing principle, then you can fit it on a single axis. There are cultural hierarchies, economic hierarchies, and organizational hierarchies -- and its hard to be a critic of one without criticizing the others. Anarchists are at the furthest left because they aim to deconstruct all social hierarchies and to have a society where social relationships are horizontal, agglomerative relationships rather than vertical, top-down ones. This is why anarchists didn't just aim to abolish the state, but capitalism and organized hierarchical religion as well.Â
Fascists are on the far-right (although not as far right as absolutists/absolute monarchists) because they believed that hierarchies were not just "good" but necessary parts of the social organism manifested in the state. There is an idea of corporatism in politics that the societies can be thought of as "bodies" or "super-organisms" in themselves, and fascist corporatism heavily conflates society and the state.Â
Personally I don't think multi-dimensional accounting of politics where axes are orthogonal to each-other are correct. Social hierarchies in human settled society come in packages. The state, patriarchy, religious hierarchy, economic hierarchy, gerontocracy, etc all work together and reinforce each-other. So those who support one tend to support the others, and those who want to deconstruct one tend to want to deconstruct the others as well. Multi-dimensional models can exist, but they shouldn't have orthogonal (perpendicular) axes.Â
This isn't to say the left-right paradigm captures all of politics, but it does capture this particular principle of social hierarchy vs. social anarchy.Â
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True as well, the different views on things are interconnected. But sometimes in difficult and intricate ways. I said I doubt a number covers it, but yeah, even a vector probably doesn't really cover this spectrum. Political views and even the subset of left-right isn't as easily captured.
But I know these details are often lost. How often the discussion goes there I am critical of capitalism and this instantly elicits the reaction: so you are for communism? This is incredibly tiring. Political views are more multifaceted than this black and white view. So I am really enjoying this discussion of more intricate details. :)
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Yep, if I were to mathematically model my thoughts on this. If we were to perform a Principal Component Analysis or Independent Component Analysis on political coalitions, we would see that overwhelmingly the left-right paradigm accounts for a large (>60% but maybe <80%) of the variation between the coalitions. Sometimes though, secondary components can come into play where a second, third, fourth, etc left-right axis or some non-left-right paradigm (i.e cosmopolitanism vs. rusticism, technologicalism vs. primitivism, etc) accounts for some of the variation as well.
So most of the time the left-right paradigm is useful as a measure of how coalitions and associations form within politics, especially when it is a struggle for majority control over power, but there are other components upon which people divide as well. They're just not often predominant, like the left-right paradigm.
