Socialism is not totalitarian, and totalitarianism is not a system of government, it is a mode and consequence.

Edit 1: Stalinism is totalitarian, Marxist-Leninism can be but ideally isn’t, Marxism can be but only during a transitionary period. All of these are popularly considered communism, but Stalinism really isn’t communism at all, and none of these things are socialism.

Communists and socialists don’t like each other very much and rarely get along. For perspective, the difference between communism and socialism is larger than the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. That is why socialists would rather vote for the Democrats than a communist party.

Americans are taught political science wrong on purpose. You are not taught the difference between socialism and communism because it is easy to reject communism and if you did understand the difference, the rich people of America might have to start paying taxes.

Edit 2: And then there’s a whole discussion about authoritarianism and totalitarianism arising as an unintended consequence of a system. Anarcho-capitalism is specifically not supposed to be authoritarian, but it decays into totalitarianism really fast; just look at the rise of surveillance capitalism, and the abuse of those products for employment background checks. We are already at a point where people are denied employment on the basis of political opinion. Under anarcho-capitalism there would be no limits to how much companies could do this, and denying employment would be a guaranteed death sentence just as surely as saying the wrong thing in Nazi Germany would be.

Of course it's flawed but I think creating a more perfect model (of course I thought of the x-y axis we've all seen) loses obvious meaning. Although the circle is technically 1D it shows at least two things in addition to relative position. Movement towards/away from other ideologies and opposing ideologies.

Anyway, it was fun and I appreciate your comments.

You can have edges wrap around on a 2d axis as well, it's a torus shape.

Summary of Haley

I would probably graph political stances as a directed acyclic graph, with notes on the arcs explaining basically what problem in the predecessor that system is trying to solve. That is I think the most meaningful way of explaining things.

Jon, why is free trade collectivist? I thought the liberal argument for free trade isn't that it's good because it serves the shared interests of all countries that participate in it as a group, but because it serves the separate, individual interests of each country that partake in it (i.e., there's a harmony of interests).

I think I can now see what the whole difficulty behind this discussion really is.

You are talking about political movements. I actually would submit that the most meaningful invariant in all contemporary discussions (to say nothing about the historical origin of the distinction from revolutionary France) mostly has to do with individual psychology more than anything else. Steven Pinker explains it pretty concisely:



Of course, people might try to project these human perspectives onto words like "libertarian" and pretend it means anything, but the map is not the territory.

My basic view is that the left and right represent two opposite psychological strategies for coping with scarcity, complexity, and the question of in-groups and out-groups. Whereas the left tries to optimize globally with the assumption that everybody is potentially a member of the in-group, the right argues that in practice, a local, greedy algorithm which optimizes for the material conditions of a smaller in-group (that of course always includes people similar to the very people making this argument), performs no worse than plans of social and economic organization offered by the left, in practice. (The problem with this argument is that right wing activists make it difficult for leftists to actually implement their plans, because to be a right-wing activist means to obstruct those plans. So the right can always say things like "socialism never works", but only because in part because they had a hand in stopping it from working.)

And I agree with Jon that Americans are educated stupid on purpose.

FWIW I generally think of the differentiating feature of left and right is how each relates to history. On the left, most ideologies assume that the best possible society is one that has never existed in history, and therefore history and tradition doesn't provide models for how society should be structured. Alternatively, right-leaning ideologies are wary of the utopian dimension of left-leaning ideologies, and therefore believe history and tradition, or, at least, the status quo, provide the best models for the ideal society.

There are tons of reasons why this way of describing the right-left distinction isn't perfect. For instance, many anti-imperial liberal movements in the 19th century were nationalist liberal movements, meaning they saw value in the national group, whose existence is a product of history, while they also sought out self-determination and rule of law. And there are also right-leaning ideologies that have utopian dimensions (see American conservatism). But I still find it's a helpful heuristic.

Free trade expands the wealth of your country but demands a harsh sacrifice from anybody who is outmoded by foreign competition.

Free trade is collectivist, the sacrifice is made by exactly the people who can least afford it, and the benefits are reaped by those who least need them. That is why free trade is so controversial and why it happens despite the outrage.

What's interesting to me is that if we think of free trade as being associated with neoliberal policy, which is favored by libertarian ideology that underlies much of the intellectual right, then we are forced to admit that the right is actually supporting a "collectivist" idea, which in my psychology-related post, would be presumed to be something the left is more inclined to support, generally speaking. But also, it would be absurd to say that the left hasn't used protectionism to achieve it's ends. Perhaps this has more to do with the far left's radical opposition to global capitalism, and it's assumption that the very wealthy capitalists are thought of as the ultimate out-group.

At any rate, my feeling is that when right-wing opinion makers talk about markets, they almost always relate it to personal anecdotes about personal responsibility, and paint lazy people on welfare and food stamps as the out-group. Of course discussions about accumulating wealth and the filthy rich get swept under the rug and anybody who brings these things up are engaging in "class warfare". Kind of funny how it's warfare when somebody simply talks about something (as opposed to actually engaging in said warfare while desperately trying to stop people from talking about it).

What am I missing? Why is that collectivist? Everything about that (competition, rewards to individuals based on competition, inequality) seems individualist.

Perhaps here collectivist = altruistic, in the sense that it potentially hurts members of an in-group for the cause of the greater good.

I agree with your view about the left right axis. As far as Pinker’s, er,... well,

Example: anarcho-syndicalism. Where does that fit? Why? It is an extremely cynical view about power and authority. Despite that, it is properly considered socialist, arguably even somewhat close in principle to post revolutionary Marxism. It is deeply pessimistic about the nature of people but also very far left.

Or communism, actually, which is by definition pessimistic about the stability of industrial capitalism, the competence of industrialists, and capitalism’s ability to provide for all workers. But it’s also positive about the willingness of workers to cooperate with each other and better society.

Or right authoritarianism, which is bullish on the bullish and bearish on the bookish.

Or libertarianism, which is pessimistic about central authority but believes the rich will just naturally succumb to perfectly rational noblesse oblige because libertarianism is a ****ing joke.

I mean, I only planned on offering a single counterexample here, but the more I thought about it the more the positive-negative theory fell apart.

I think Pinker probably goes further than I would in his particular choice of characterization. He hit on some of the main points but I agree there are some potentially fishy things in there.

Maybe this has something to do that he himself is sort of a right-leaning guy in some ways, from what I've heard. But I had just remembered the passage as commonly cited for an explanation of left-right in terms of psychological stuff in a very general way.

What is really sad about the state of American education when it comes to politics is that somehow libertarianism became the darling of the intellectual right.

Might have something to do with that socialism shaped hole in our heads that it's not more easily exposed as a facile, toy ideology compared to all the other stuff you mentioned, which frankly I don't even have the background to appreciate. (I guess in this case we're uneducated stupid )

Free trade does not decrease the wages of plumbers and lawyers. It decreases the wages of factory workers. So the plumbers and lawyers get to make the same amount of money and pay lower prices for goods than they were before. Meanwhile, the factory workers get to die of exposure.

In practice free trade does not really mean what we want to pretend free trade means. Like I said earlier in this thread, it is almost impossible for any country to enjoy an absolute advantage in any market. If free trade was really working nobody would bother doing it. What free trade actually means right now is creating labor market arbitrage opportunities and distributing the benefit to everybody except the suckers who got unemployed by it.

When China gets 21st century labor and environmental standards I think we can start calling free trade a rugged individualist libertarian capitalist thing, but that isn’t happening right now and it’s not why we’re doing it.

basically

In a perfect world, all of those laid off factory workers would be retasked. Unfortunately in capitalism you are expected to pay for your own retraining, and if you’re over 40 nobody is going to hire you anyway because you are “too experienced” or a “poor culture fit”.

I mean, really. People voted for Trump for a reason and not all of them are white supremacists. Neoliberalism is a whole bunch of horse****.

Trump's populist support makes this charge against neoliberalism kind of interesting, though. Because you never hear about neoliberalism outside of intellectual circles (except perhaps more recently, as the term was picked up by the populist left). But in order to even be aware that neoliberalism would need defending, the populist right would have to accept the intellectualism that comes with assuming it needs an intellectual defense, whereas academics in its entirety are basically an out-group for them.

It’s interesting because both the Republican and Democratic parties are deeply, irrationally neoliberal, but approximately none of their voters want it.

I guess that's really the crux of the matter, though: the unholy alliance between capitalists and their neoliberal theories, and the populist right that's been scammed by it. Hence the need for all the right wing propagandists to bridge the gap (and also the need for fascists like Trump to divert from his own incompetence by drawing people's attention to out-groups like immigrants or Eastasia).

goddamit guys i turned this thread into another circle jerk

somebody please go back to disagreeing!!1

Bannon-style economic populism is skeptical of neoliberalism. It just couches that skepticism in the antisemitic language of anti-globalism.

Jones, your tragic flaw is that you bring people together.

The trick is to use ambiguous language so that they wouldn't know for sure if they really disagree with you. Then after enough arguments about clarifying the distinctions they read into your language, they realize that you're not really saying much at all that's falsifiable anyway, and they learn to just go along with you. You should also act really nice when they are disagreeing with you so that you make them feel bad for hurting your fragile feelings.

There, I attacked somebody in this thread. Unfortunately it was myself, and the only way to disagree with that is to shower me with praise, so the thread is no less worthless for it.

You know who else's tragic flaw was that he brought people together?

Let's see if we can go a page without mentioning his name.

Of course, I see what you did there. You complimented me, and to relieve the awkwardness, I brutally attacked myself. Clever girl.

If you count people six-feet under: Joseph Stalin?

Speaking of brutal communist dictators, anybody know what this guy's been up to?

Actually this is a good point! And the fact that I didn't think of it when contemplating the usual right wing opinion-makers just goes to show what a blind spot it was until he swooped in... it was just waiting for somebody to sink low enough to exploit it. Call it the H... er, fascist niche.

Bring back the big fat man!

Maybe one way of looking at left vs. right is, the left wants to reward good, and the right wants to punish evil. I think that captures the essence of all of the proposed definitions in this thread without suffering from obvious counter examples.

Normally though right-wing elements are reactionary and want to go backwards to another time in history, the Nazis and Trump both directly stated this. The problem is, you actually can't go back in history or reconstruct the conditions that made past ages possible, so in chasing the past they create "new" utopian ideals just as much as the left.

Or: "The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward."

It’s also impossible because the history they imagine rarely happened.

How many Republican tears have been shed longing for their Leave it to Beaver-esque idyllic family life when that never existed in this or any other universe.

And that’s the most benign example of this I can think of. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

Show me what you got!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he613E96E3E

Definitely... 100%. I had those very things in mind but didn't want to go on for forever with qualifications.