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by burfog 2637 days ago
Libertarian isn't equal to right-wing, but neither is nationalism or racism or anything else that you may see in fascism.

Fundamentally, the left is about collectivism and the right is about individualism. The difference is whether you think the state is a provider or a parasite. It's about wanting the government to take care of you or get out of your way. It's about wanting the government to make everybody have equal stuff or an equal opportunity.
1 comments
dragonwriter 2637 days ago
> Fundamentally, the left is about collectivism and the right is about individualism.

No, its not. That's pretty much the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is largely orthogonal to the left-right axis. Libertarian socialism is not only a thing, it's an older thing than modern, pro-capitalist right-libertarianism. (It's also older than Leninism.)

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burfog 2637 days ago
So what exactly is left-right in your mind? It's looking like you don't think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are on the left, and you don't think Rand Paul and Clarence Thomas are on the right.

Perhaps you are calibrated to a non-US definition. If so, you should qualify it as something like "UK right" or "UK left" or whatever.

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dragonwriter 2637 days ago
> It's looking like you don't think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are on the left

Relative to the center in the US they are on the left and also, if not on the authoritarian side, at least not on the libertarian side either.

> and you don't think Rand Paul and Clarence Thomas are on the right.

Paul is, rhetorically at least, a right-libertarian. Thomas is a partisan Republican who is quiet enough on ideological issues that I wouldn't try to place him other than somewhere vaguely on the right.

> Perhaps you are calibrated to a non-US definition.

No, actually, my degree is focussed on the US political space, not that it really matters (the US center is way to the right of the developed world, such that what is by broader standards a center-right faction has recently been dominant in the left-most of the two major parties, but that just affects position on that axis, not what the axes are; it's also true that US politics seems unidimensional due to the two party system, so all variations often get characterized as left-right even when they aren't and only weakly, if at all, correlate with left-right variation.)

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