To me it still doesnât make much sense to scale functional democracies along an authoritarian-libertarian axis. It just feels like one needs to stretch the meaning of the word âauthoritarianâ to something else, but Iâm not sure to what exactly.
Also libertarianism isnât much of thing here, as far as I know. What is even an extreme form of libertarianism? Pure anarchy with no government at all?
Should I interpret that axis as a âpowerâ axis of the state vs the individual? If that is the case, wouldnât functional democracies be fairly balanced, and close to the middle?
Yet you should, itâs pretty legit and, beyond being merely reliable, did some quality journalism. I recall they even won the Pulitzer price recently.
But your reaction is common. Maybe they should change their name, Iâm not sure itâs doing them any good.
Personally, Iâm more concerned with a party saying âyou will follow our policies or there will be consequencesâ or âwe are losing support from the working class and we want to maintain power, so we will start using police and military to enforce our willâ. Hence why I look at the charts and things I posted.
Any party/country can succumb to authoritarianism, and I fear that more than being socially progressive or conservative. An authoritarian progressive is equally as bad as an authoritarian conservative to me.
While D66 has often participated in government coalitions here, they have always been a coalition partner to larger, less progressive parties, so they are not really in a position to by themselves take power away from citizens or companies to boost the power of the state, even if they wanted to. It would also be against their liberal core principles, so their voters would probably punish them for it in the next elections.
I think itâs more in line with socialist and social democrat parties to aim for more power to the state, to enable their goal of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor.
But they wonât get a majority by themselves, so theyâd end up in a coalition with some more liberal party, which would limit how much can be realized.
I suppose that some of our nationalist parties would love to isolate our country and rule it in full law & order style, by a powerful government, while restricting free media and independence of judges.
Theyâd probably still be in a coalition with conservative liberals and/or moderate christian democrats though, so they wonât get it all done, but still this scenario is the most worrysome for me.
The idea of âliberalismâ arose in medieval education (the liberal arts as opposed to manual arts, or vocational skills), which aimed to train reason and judgment through a broad curriculum, rather than by rote learning in a few narrow subjects. It was also applied to a Protestent movement for intellectual freedom. Since these roots embodied the idea of a broad outlook (of curriculum and religious tolerance), liberalism became closely associated with broadmindedness. Ironically, these origins are largely contradicted today, as education becomes increasingly specialized and religious freedom is seriously endangered.
In the U.S., John F. Kennedy, Herbert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson, and, more recently, Joseph Lieberman are some of the many classical liberals who were also strong on defense. Furthermore, Kennedy even made significant tax cuts that greatly helped the economy. George McGovern unwittingly began the destruction of the term âliberalâ with his extreme, some would say Communist, proposed agenda, which led to his landslide defeat. In another irony, Nixonâs salary-and-price controls seriously damaged the economy, leading to the âstagflationâ under Ford and Carter, who were completely overmatched by the problem (under Carter, the highest inflation in my lifetime until now). Reagan used this disaster to complete the blackening of the term âliberal,â with Democrats hanging on to it for some years, fighting a rearguard action. Casting about for a new term, Democrats tried out âModerateâ for some time and then resurrected âProgressive,â an optimistic term from the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Who can oppose progress, right?
Meanwhile, the Republicans are divided into the RINOs (Republican in name only), the Establishment (the do-nothing, get-along guys), and the Constitutional Conservatives, who self-identify by a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. The latter refer to Democrats as the Left, or Extreme Left, when they are being polite. There are no more Moderates. Manchin and Sinema had a small claim to the title, but revealed feet of clay in recent months, while Constitutional Conservatives regard the RINOs as Left of center and the Establishment Republicans as spineless and corrupt.
Judging political parties by their name will lead to nothing. They never, ever stay true to the dictionary definition.
Political parties should be judged by their impact on a) daily life of the average citizen b) general stability of the country c) the balance between stability and fear.
You canât possibly say that a party surviving on fear campaigns is a party who works for the good of the people. Or that a party who restricts personal freedoms is a progressive party, just because their financial policies are in the progressive spectrum (etc for other sectors). What does âprogressiveâ and âconservativeâ or ârightâ and âleftâ mean nowadays anyway?
We stick to the labels of the past as if our lives depended on them. We should separate the financial policies, the foreign affairs policies and the educational policies and not apply outdated labels to any party. For example, we can have a non-racist party that restricts financial progess, stangles education and refuses any kind of aid, but we can also have a racist party that brings income from tourism, promotes mathematics and gives out coupons for gas. Where would they stand in a graph?
To me, the reign of labels shows one thing only: the propaganda for each and every label is so well-though of and so well implemented that it transcends time and civilisations and makes us waste our time on fruitless philosophical debates about things that only exist in some PR specialistâs mind.
We fight predefined battles and never go near the real issues.
I agree that fear campaign in itself is not specific enough to determine a partyâs ideology. Youâd need to look for what are theyâre spreading fear exactly.
Progressive parties may promote a pro-EU agenda by spreading fear for war if the EU would disintegrate, or promote green policies by spreading fear for powerful energy companies that would destroy the environment.
Socialist parties may promote their worker rights agenda by spreading fear for unbridled capitalism that would exploit working class people to the point of slavery.
Nationalist parties may promote their anti-immigration agenda by spreading fear that immigrants would cause a huge increase in crime and also endanger our precious cultural identity and ethnicity.
Liberal parties may promote a corporate tax reduction by spreading fear for economical collapse if all large international companies would be chased away to more entrepeneur-friendly countries.
Edit(I should include this one too): Conservative parties may promote family values and moral guidance in society by spreading fear for diversity and emancipation leading to excessive individualism and loss of traditions and historical cohesion among the population, causing disintegration of society.
I hope my examples above help to characterise some ideological directions. Party ideologies would typically lead to some consistency in policies that those parties promote.
In practice I donât think youâd see a party promoting socialist policies and corporate tax reductions at the same time (unless the country has money to burn).
I also donât think youâd see a party that would oppose economic growth as well as welfare expenditures. What would be the ideology behind such a stagnation policy, who would benefit from that and vote for such a party?
As for tourism vs racism, I donât see a clear connection between those areas and tourism doesnât seem tightly linked to some ideology (or is it in Greece?). I suppose that even very racist parties would welcome tourists for the money they bring and disregard the color of their skin.
I think this is where free media come in. They would fact check party propaganda and make some effort to debunk nonsense and falsehoods. If a countryâs media are lacking in this regard, you may have a problem.
Free media? Hmm. Well, I donât say we have censorship here, in the way it works in other countries, but I wouldnât trust our media to tell me yesterdayâs weather.
Money from tourism is welcome and no politician would say no to money, but this doesnât mean they welcome foreigners in general or that their policies are helpful to foreigners that are not short-term tourists. Tourism = constructions = contracts. Also, racism hasnât always to do with skin, has it?
About political parties: todayâs parties will apply several conflicting policies from conflicting ideologies, as long as they can win the elections and stay in power enough to make money from contracts. I donât think you can find a party that applies one style of policy only. What you can find, is a party that picks what looks good on twitter from all ideologies and applies it in a way that suits the ideology and financial tendencies of the party headquarters.
There are however, some basic human rights and some basic economy rules that tell the truth about what party leaders really want.
ETA
When we vote for a party, we canât choose the relevant parts of its program. We get their financial decisions along with their ideas about welfare and their decisions on security.
My definition is slightly different from his. Leftwing means you think differences in outcomes are based on environment, and also we should aim for equality of outcome. Rightwing means you think differences in outcome are based on inherent differences between people, and also we should accept those differences. From that one might assume tradition is based on something inherently correct or simply an accident of environment unrelated to any inherent truth.
I consider myself essentially syncretism, which is like being centrist, but I believe in both extreme Leftwing and Rightwing ideas. For example, an oversimplification of my economic beliefs is that I think Capitalism and Communism are both moronic ideas, and instead believe strategic socialism is the happy medium. Sadly I share the same economic view as the worst German leader of all time and his National Socialist party (He WAS a socialist, regardless of what leftwingers think), but in a sense he only got public approval to become the monster he was by making strong economic gains first.
That would need to have been a very special kind of socialism, because nazi ideals had few similarities with socialist ideals.
For example, nazis were opposed to equality, internationalism and class struggle, while being strongly in favour of nationalism, racism and social darwinism (survival of the most powerful), which are pretty much polar opposites of socialist ideals.
Just about the only thing that nazis had in common with socialism seems to be that nazis were also looking for votes from working class people (which makes sense, because that was a large part of the population).
That Youtube channel is quite good. I donât expect Mr. Beat would call Hitler a socialist. In fact, Mr. Beat calls Hitler a nationalist (and an imperialist) here, which I would agree with.
Boring?
Not boring, you can easily make a Îetflix hit out of it! It has everything.
What Iâve learned from years of gossip on youtube/celebrities/royals/trashTV is that NDAs are worth less than the paper they are written on. Did he really expect that things wonât leak?
My comment on the whole situation:
a big name with academies and schools and such is using an amateur-ish webpage for his claims. I am sure if geocities was still around he would use it.
My comment inside the comment:
is it on purpose, so he can be able to keep his claims and his business separate by avoiding linking? The average business/association would post it on their news/media page, not somewhere you canât link from it unless you have the link to it.
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A financial deal in the works? Why am I not surprised.
Those ideas you mention are communist ideas, specifically Marxist ideas, so of course Hitler was against it. Stalinâs favourite movie was about racial inclusivity of ethno-africans. Today Russia has Neo-Naziâs now, crazy. Marx saw Socialism simply as an in-between towards communism but an all-out socialist doesnât. So you could be a socialist and still be a terrible person.
Or more strictly, we might say that everything you mentioned are simply embellishments to justify WHY we should use a specific economic system, but have absolutely nothing to do with that system itself. Marxism is communism EMBELLISHED with justifications for it like class struggle and equality.
This is why I find Republicans in America to have contradicting beliefs to the point of hypocrisy. They say they need guns to protect against the power of the state in the case a tyrannical government arises, yet they also want more funding for the police and military of that very state. Then after giving money to the military, they claim theyâre anti-communist, implying they donât know what it is. They donât like when the government does stuff, and I agree with that sentiment of small state, but how is a military in the trillions not the government doing stuff and how is it small state, how is it not being the creep that causes a problem, militarising the state, then giving a suspicious solution, the populace needs more guns.
A socialist simply means people own shares in the means of wealth creation. In Nationalist socialism the State is the absolute representative of the people.
One of the worst things about politics is itâs fundamentally anti-language, which is ironic, since without language all the laws are close to meaningless. Yet thereâs no official dictionary, which means they already are. A meta problem.
What we have done over time is added embellishments to words or purely redefined them for purely political or propaganda purposes. This is the cause of much of the sociopoliticoideoligical break down in not just the so-called west but also the rest of the world.
