2024 US Presidential Election

[Tober]

the-pi-guy said:

Tober said:

An interesting take on the left-right political definition. I would look at it differently. I'm Dutch and we look at it from the perspective we call 'Maakbare Samenleving'.

It essentially means 'can society be engineered to get an optimum society or not'.

The left-right position is the scale on which how strong the belief is in this engineering and how much of it is wanted. Or the level of social engineering in other words.

Far left in this case is a full belief that everything would need to be socially engineered, whereas far right would be a complete rejection of it. Or in other words how much to curb the inane individual Human instincts versus seeking the optimum from a group perspective.

It is for this reason high population area's tend to be left leaning, where low population area's tend to be right leaning, because obviously the more people need to share a certain space, there is a stronger need to engineer/regulate the group to prevent chaos.

Obviously means the higher the level of social engineering is, the more influence a central authority needs to have to make this possible. Therefore left leaning politics tend to lead to more government/regulation and right leaning politics tend to lead to less of it.

This was visible during the Covid era. The more left leaning people accepting the Government's guidance more willingly , where the 'anti-vaxers' where more right leaning and more prone to protest other Covid measures.

From this perspective anarchy I would call far right, because it's a rejection of centralized authority. Essentially the 'Survival of the Fittest' approach. Where far left is a total subjection to the central authority, because 'the central authority knows best.'

The National Sozialistische Partei, or how the British invented the slang word Nazi for it, was founded in 1920 as a follow up to the German workersparty. It had a strong nationalistic belief system and to propagate it would mean to quell any dissent from its message. Therefore implementing strong censorship, rejection of religion and the centralization of power. Essentially 'the government knows best' approach.

As I said earlier, it's interesting how different a take can be looking at the left-right political spectrum. I guess a lot of that has to do on where people live and what their daily exposure is to their regulatory bodies and how that influences their lives.

This doesn't fit where the left/right spectrum came from. The distinction came from the French Assembly, where the left wing was generally in opposition to the King. 

Americans similarly frequently use left to mean big government, and right to mean small government. But that's not what the academic definition is. 

I think this definition of "can society be engineered to get an optimum society" is extremely problematic though. 

What is an optimum society? People have wildly different ideas of what that would look like. Is it one where I have the freedom to choose not to have healthcare, or the freedom to have healthcare no matter what? 

Is it more left/right wing to ban a book from a curriculum or to mandate it?

Right wingers are pushing to ban trans people from playing sports, why isn't that considered engineering?

Right wingers frequently believe their government knows best, when they're the ones in government. They're less concerned about government waste, even when they're wasting more. They're less concerned about certain rights being taken away.

And a lot of this is driven by media. If Fox News and others are pushing that the government is being wasteful, it's suddenly a big concern. If Fox News isn't, then it's not. 

Political spectrums are ultimately arbitrary though. I think it's generally problematic to boil down effectively thousands of political positions into a one dimensional number. And you frequently have left wing people and right wing people that believe the same kinds of things. There are left wing people that are in favor of Russia (in opposition to America).

I personally tend to prefer the two dimensional spectrum where you can add in authoritarianism. There are meaningful differences between big central government communism and libertarian socialism. 

The optimal society is what is deemed depending on the circumstances. Where you live for instance. There is no 1 answer. The left/right perspective is not just what that looks like (most people agree on most of the issues), but more importantly how to get there. 

Let me give an example.

Some time ago I spoke with a few Chinese citizens. As a westerner I obviously have a negative stance towards the Chinese government, being to intrusive and authoritarian. The Chinese though had a different perspective. From their perspective the amount of power the Chinese government has over their citizens was necessary. "We have over a billion people, without the government we have, it would be chaos. Besides the benefit of 1 party is that hey are efficient and don't spend much time on political bickering".

Essentially the Chinese government is the way it is, because the Chinese at the minimum tolerate it or find it necessary. That does not mean another country/culture would believe the Chinese system would be optimal for them.

For the rest of your arguments described above. I mentioned that people will have different perspectives on how they see the political scale. A lot depends on where they live and their experiences are with their political system. With the examples you mention, I assume you are American. I'm not, so it's not surprising there could be different takes on things.

Last edited by Tober - 3 days ago