What is something that was influential back in it's day but is now often forgotten despite it's importance?
What is something that was influential back in it's day but is now often forgotten despite it's importance?
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Nice to meet someone in the wild who knows the difference between libertarian and the US definition of libertarian. I’ve often wondered why US politics takes perfectly decent words (conservative, socialist etc) and proceeds to redefine them at odds with the rest of the world. For example: team red’s loony religious right wing being called conservative or calling anybody from team blue left wing.
Something something left and right are relative to the surrounding culture?
Specifically with politics the left-right spectrum is nothing to do with the surrounding culture. It’s objective rather than subjective. As a result to be classified “left” you cannot be occupying the “right” nor “central” section of the spectrum. Communist - socialist - centrist - conservative - fascist is an easy to remember five steps through the spectrum. Although obviously it is far more nuanced and complicated than that in reality.
Hmm, interesting. But surely to be classified as objective, the definitions of left vs right couldn't be so complicated, and only their relations to various political parties would be? What ARE the actual definitions?
(Very) broadly speaking in politics there’s economic and social positions. i.e. What kind of society to have and how to fund it. It’s complicated because it’s possible to have an identical position but for opposite reasons. For an extreme example imagine two people against slavery in the US civil war. Person one is against slavery because it is a stain on humanity. Person two is against slavery because they don’t want any non-whites living in the US. Identical political policy, diametrically opposed ideology. If I had to commit to one sentence answers about the values of left/right positions I’d probably say: Left - our money spent on our best interests whilst looking forward and being progressive Right - My money spent on my best interest whilst keeping society pretty much as it is or even going back a bit to how it were. This is obviously a gross generalisation and probably quite wrong.
Yeah, that aligns with the usage I see. Thanks