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The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

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Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#31

Post by csours »

bonoboTP wrote: post #30
csours wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics. I feel like it's very easy to get angry about politics, so speaking clearly is difficult. I would like to point out that the power dynamics do not always shift randomly, or by the will of the people (be that citizens at large, or party-line voters). The power dynamics have been shifte…

People want to belong to a tribe. I think it's often quite a tossup where a young person ends up, depending on friends or whichever online circle accepts them best. It's also not rare for young people to flipflop between nominally widely opposing tribes before setting into one. People gradually learn all the opinions they are supposed to have on the various issues to truly belong to the tribe. It's not unlike learnin…

Before taking their current conservative role, one of our Supreme Court Justices was briefly associated with the radical left.

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#32

Post by The_Rob »

I agree with the point this article is trying to make. As political definitions change, we start to lose sight of what these terms actually mean. I believe a more helpful comparison than left vs right, is open vs closed.

https://unherd.com/2018/07/open-vs-closed-rise-fall-left-rig...

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#33

Post by bee_rider »

skrebbel wrote: post #16
lapcat wrote: post #8

In the United States, terms such as "conservative" and "liberal" seem to be used primarily to describe whatever currently happens to be popular in the duopolistic Republican and Democratic parties. I'm old enough now to have witnessed both parties, and the definitions of those terms, morph into something unrecognizable to partisans of my youth. And the (morbidly) funny thing is that people today call themselves "true…

Yeah wow huh! It took me many years of reading HN to figure out that “liberal” means “left” in the US. In my (European) country, the word means nearly the opposite, a belief in individual freedoms, free speech, free markets, small governments and so on. It’s mostly championed by right-of-center parties. I’ve been confused many times reading comments that go like “these liberals who want to ban free speech” which, to…

Realistically the mainstream Democratic Party is liberal in the sense that you use it; the US is a fundamentally liberal place, a lot of Republicans are as well.

Even the idea of “banning free speech” that you mention is implemented in a liberal fashion in the US. There are rarely calls for the government to actually ban speech via laws. The ground where that’s fought is actually “should private companies broadcast/highlight via algorithm the speech of individuals who say things I don’t like,” it is a formulation that pits the speech rights of the corporation against the self-expression of the individuals using their services.

The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional free-speech consensus.

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#34

Post by AnimalMuppet »

lapcat wrote: post #18
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my perception, "true conservative" means "what the label meant in my youth, not what it has mutated to today". I think it is exactly a recognition of the past.

I agree that this is the claim of self-described true conservatives. However, I think the claim is empirically false, and they do not actually follow what the label meant in our youth.

I think some actually do. And some follow what they thought it meant, or what they thought it should have meant.

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#35

Post by bilbo0s »

amradio1989 wrote: post #19

I’m starting to think political definitions only have use as propaganda. Definitions are definite, yet political definitions are anything but. In the US, much is made about “the left” and “the right”, but we can hardly describe what these things mean. “The left” is simply more liberal than I, while “the right” is more conservative than I. On what issues, no one knows, because we hardly ask. The point, I think, is sim…

the kind that underpins a healthy democracy

To be fair, this kind of presupposes that all actors in a polity actually have as their goal, "healthy democracy".

Pretty sure that's not the goal of most people in power nowadays. (At least in the US it's not the goal of people in power.)

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#36

Post by dragonwriter »

Gormo wrote: post #10
lapcat wrote: post #8

In the United States, terms such as "conservative" and "liberal" seem to be used primarily to describe whatever currently happens to be popular in the duopolistic Republican and Democratic parties. I'm old enough now to have witnessed both parties, and the definitions of those terms, morph into something unrecognizable to partisans of my youth. And the (morbidly) funny thing is that people today call themselves "true…

The problem is that these terms do signify real, stable ideologies, but the vast majority of people are superficial trend-chasers who don't actually adhere to any stable ideology, so misuse these terms to refer to whichever tribe they emotionally associate themselves with at the moment. IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have e…

> IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime

Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration?

> but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse,

“Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.

> gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.

30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?

(I guess it was also just after a midterm election where the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.)

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#37

Post by Gormo »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #14
Gormo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that these terms do signify real, stable ideologies, but the vast majority of people are superficial trend-chasers who don't actually adhere to any stable ideology, so misuse these terms to refer to whichever tribe they emotionally associate themselves with at the moment. IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have e…

> IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime Can you elaborate?

Tax hikes on American consumers and businesses.

Expansions in federal spending against growing budget deficits.

Government pursuing ownership or de facto control of private industry.

Aggressive use of executive fiat to pursue novel policies without clear legislative basis.

Federal interventions that try to direct or challenge state sovereignty on numerous issues traditionally outside the scope of federal authority.

Hesitant foreign policy that seems overly deferential to traditional US adversaries, especially Russia.

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#38

Post by mxmilkiib »

"..summon “unsullied” socialism, a game with ever more variations, which long since has become confusing—and boring."

to quote a comment I found, because it puts it better than I could;

"Murray Bookchin's concept of communalism and his follower Abdullah Öcalan's similar concept of democratic confederalism. It can be summed up as "refocusing politics around local government by popular assemblies, while higher levels of government being confederations of these local units". Thus communalism does mean there would still be a state, although far more decentralised. This was one reason why Bookchin stopped calling himself an anarchist, though his disillusionment with the '90s the anarchist scene was another."

.

libertarian municipalism + communalism, a kind of libertarian socialism

with social ecology as the philosophy framing our situation

Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971);

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...

some use the meme of "google Murray Bookchin", because once you get into their work, so much of it makes good sense (and their polemic bits are funny too)

a really good podcast on Murray;

https://youtu.be/V0Z2KGudYrA

+

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin

.

and there's the adapted democratic confederalism of Ocalan, which is actually used in Rojava (Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria)

https://nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-h...

this is the group that was US aligned until Trump said no, which allowed Turkey to do a land-grab and dispossess folk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism

http://ocalanbooks.com

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#39

Post by claytongulick »

bonoboTP wrote: post #30
csours wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics. I feel like it's very easy to get angry about politics, so speaking clearly is difficult. I would like to point out that the power dynamics do not always shift randomly, or by the will of the people (be that citizens at large, or party-line voters). The power dynamics have been shifte…

People want to belong to a tribe. I think it's often quite a tossup where a young person ends up, depending on friends or whichever online circle accepts them best. It's also not rare for young people to flipflop between nominally widely opposing tribes before setting into one. People gradually learn all the opinions they are supposed to have on the various issues to truly belong to the tribe. It's not unlike learnin…

There's potentially a genetic predisposition as well? [1].

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101027161452.h...

Re: The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

#40

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bee_rider wrote: post #33
skrebbel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah wow huh! It took me many years of reading HN to figure out that “liberal” means “left” in the US. In my (European) country, the word means nearly the opposite, a belief in individual freedoms, free speech, free markets, small governments and so on. It’s mostly championed by right-of-center parties. I’ve been confused many times reading comments that go like “these liberals who want to ban free speech” which, to…

Realistically the mainstream Democratic Party is liberal in the sense that you use it; the US is a fundamentally liberal place, a lot of Republicans are as well. Even the idea of “banning free speech” that you mention is implemented in a liberal fashion in the US. There are rarely calls for the government to actually ban speech via laws. The ground where that’s fought is actually “should private companies broadcast/h…

> The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional liberal consensus.

I disagree, at least a bit. I think "liberal" here is just used as "the bad tribe". It's not saying that they're not living up to their values, it's just saying that they're "them".

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