commonsense wrote: ↑Sat Dec 10, 2022 3:53 pm
I, for one, found your definition of the Left but didn’t see what you said about the Right.
Libertarians, Anarchists, and other individualists. It's right in the middle. But I'll give you more, if you like, because you're a reasonable person.
There's much debate about what "Left" and "right" might entail. We're certainly a long way from its original days, when it referred to French parliamentary factions. Nowadays, people use it less formally, and to refer to a bunch of different ideological orientations. "Left" and "right" have become less like definable ideologies in their own right, and more like compass orientations toward which certain ideologies point, to one degree or another. So my definitions are not going to be uncontestable, but rather take the form of generalizations that I would say often hold.
To make it simple, the Left's hallmark is
collectivism. The right's is
individualism. Where the Left is for big government, the right tends to be for smaller, more limited government. The Left advocates market regulation, and the right, more free markets. The Left advocates group rights and mass management, and the right tends to advocate individual rights and personal liberties. The Left talks about diversity, but insists on ideological conformity; the right tends to welcome a "free market of ideas," or at least a much less constrained one. The right tends to favour meritocracy, and the Left opts for forced pseudo-equalization (it's never actual). The Left leans toward utopianism, and the right toward laissez-faire. The Left believes in the social construction of identity, and the right, that identity is a combination of something like nature and nurture...
There are lots of other such distinctions, but these will do for a start.
One of the most serious liabilities of the Left, however, is its invariable romance with totalitarianism, as we have seen in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and every other place where Leftism has been allowed to rule. That, if nothing else, should make us very skeptical of Leftist ideologies. They kill far too many people.
