[Sarcasmatic]

Vaccine "skepticism" used to be more prevalent among the (mostly left) urban health freaks. But that is changing rather rapidly, see for example https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/27/anti-vaccine-repub....

This might be a good example actually of people self-sorting into one of the two tribes. And Republicans (not conservatives) have conquered the science-is-bad spectrum so thoroughly they don't need to fear competition in the foreseeable future.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

It doesn't make much sense to use "left" and "right" to describe quite a bit of US politics, but even more so out west, where strange combinations of political outlook and motivation are easy to find.

[crispinb]

It's not just the US. Where I live (Northern Rivers, Australia), large numbers of people in the hippy areas would situate themselves politically as ultra-left and/or deep green. So highly anti-capitalist, anti-racist etc. They'll attack the right for its hostility to science when it comes to climate change, yet ignore any science relating to GMOs, nuclear power, vaccines, chemtrails, 4/5g ("Death Rays!" say the local signs). They're very pro-welfare so kind of Statist, yet left-anarchist on drugs, attitude to cops, etc.

People are a mixed bag, and becoming more so (I think). Longstanding political maps are being redrawn almost everywhere it seems.

[dredmorbius]

When looking at specific claimed values, outside of a specific core, not so much.

When looking at general orientation, particularly in terms of concentration vs. extension of establishment power, there are trends peresistent across millennia.

This passage from the opening of A.H.M. Jones, Augustus, sticks with me:

It was the agrarian problem that sparked off the violence that was ultimately to destroy the Republic. Tiberius Gracchus' bill [Lex Sempronia Agraria, Ed], enacted in 133 B.C. for distributing the public land, after leaving a generous allowance to the occupiers, in small lots to poor citizens, excited such furious resistance among the senatorial landowners that a group of them lynched Gracchus. This was the first in a series of violent clashes between two groups who called themselves the optimates and the populares. The nucleus of the optimates was the small clique of nobles (men whose fathers, grandfathers, or more remote ancesters had been consuls) who more or less monopolized the highest offices and dominated the Senate, but they had wide support among the propertied class, even, as Cicero says, propserous freedman; otherwise they could not have maintained their unbroken hold on the higher magistracies. They were conservatives, who regarded the rights of property as sacred, and therefore resisted bitterly any attempts to redistribute land or cancel debt. They were upholders of the constitution and of religion, which could be used to block any revolutionary legislation. Though at times they had to yield to popular pressure, they always remained the government.

The populares were a much less well defined group. Their leaders were individual politicians or very small groups of politicians, who at intervals attempted to legislate in the interests of the people, by which they meant the common people....

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6i2h0e/ahm_jon...