He's a twonk and Britain is essentially a police state at this point. The American Revolutionary War was fought over far less than what is going on right now.
Traditional labels are becoming useless anyway, liberal can mean anything from libertarian free market enjoyer to radical progressive depending on who you are talking to. And I am talking about self-identified labels!
You also have many right wingers (internationally) moving towards things like industrial policy, subsidies, and a populist labor focus (coupled with anti-immigration rhetoric of course). In some cases, even nationalization is under discussion. It’s a wild time to try and label things.
My main point was there is not a single axis. Even left and right are not strictly opposites, you can have a society that decides based on some mix of authority and democracy (individual preference). They are only opposites at the extreme, if you insist that every political problem has to be addressed in the particular way.
The labels are not useless, they represent certain values and disagreements over how society should be governed. Of course, each of the values has a failure mode, but they are different. The values are:
- Right-wing, conservative, authoritarian - society should be governed by elites, conflict should be resolved by submission to authority
- Left-wing, socialist, democratic - society should be governed by equal peers, conflict should be resolved by democratic consensus
- Liberal, individualist, pro-freedom - the question of societal governance (and the arising conflict) should be avoided if possible by giving each participant their own life independent on others
Of course it is confusing because people cheat and do not always want to state their aims clearly. The values are also not opposites, but independent; they can also be applied per problem. For example, most famously, some communists were both left (they wanted a socialist society without classes) and right (they wanted the transformation under the party authority). But each pair of these has a similar conflict like that, so (aside from the communist spectrum above) you get also capitalist spectrum between right vs liberal, and anarchist spectrum between left vs liberal. In the middle of all 3, things are roughly social-democratic.
This is the traditional view, I’m saying it’s becoming useless because ordinary people don’t make these distinctions and the labels have become useless for communication and understanding. All politics is becoming syncretic/heterodox and terms like “liberal” have been stretched to meaninglessness. The labels that political science uses no longer map to reality in a useful way. Maybe we need new labels.
I think this is also why the term “right-wing” has been misapplied to anyone who challenges the status quo, regardless of their other political positions or their nominal political orientation. Things are bad when literal Communists can be labeled “right-wing” because of their position on some issue. (Yes I have seen this happen.)
That's very reductionist, and itself a kind of right-wing (authoritarian) idea - all politicians are corrupt so there is no meaningful way to change things.
Indeed. Aside from being extraordinarily intellectually lazy, bothsidesing actually enables corruption by failing to identify it, or failing to distinguish degrees of corruption that are so severe as to be more differences in kind than differences in degree. And thus in the U.S. we get Trump and his entire cabinet, Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Federalist Society, the Kochs, money pouring into elections via Citizens United courtesy of John Roberts, and much of the rest of the GOP political apparatus ... in large part a result of people staying home or voting 3rd party because their "principles" didn't let them vote for "the lesser of two evils".
It's not intellectually lazy, it's being intellectually tired.
Both parties only every get anything done in this country when it comes to voting to restrict our rights. Ideologically, I'm slightly right leaning. My primary value is individual rights are more important. But if I could, I would vote for Ron Wyden(D) despite the fact that I disagree with many of his positions, he's still one of the few that has a spine to oppose things like the federal spying apparatus.
I just don't see the point of investing myself in caring when 98 percent of our reps just really don't care and only focus on manufacturing outrage around wedge issues that they can't or won't actually address so that they can keep their jobs and continue to accrue massive amounts of wealth from lobbying and insider trading. We get Trump because the system is so thoroughly broken on both sides and enough people are frustrated the point that they are "protest" voting.
I can understand it's tiring. But, as someone who was born in totalitarian regime - you still have plenty opportunities to change things in the U.S. Many U.S. states have direct democracy, which is unique in vast majority of the world. You still have free media. You can influence primaries of the two parties.
I don't think people are "protest" voting. You're the one protest voting - by not voting at all. You should ask yourself, why they bother, when you do not.
The system does not allow good candidates to make it through to a vote. (When it does, they are quickly either ejected or “brought in” to the system.)
There are other, more effective ways to vote than at the ballot box. Money, time, voice (depending on your reach), protest, direct action can all have a greater impact.
IMHO building parallel systems is the most important thing right now, as the primary political system is entering a period of crisis that it may not survive. Parallel systems, especially strong local systems, have a long and successful history.
Perhaps that's in part a cause of the former in your case ... but you aren't everyone and I was referring to bothsidesing generally.
> I just don't see the point of investing myself in caring when 98 percent of our reps just really don't care and only focus on manufacturing outrage around wedge issues that they can't or won't actually address so that they can keep their jobs and continue to accrue massive amounts of wealth from lobbying and insider trading.
More intellectual laziness, as well as intellectual dishonesty, offering ignorant simplistic but oh so handy explanations and excuses.
> We get Trump because the system is so thoroughly broken on both sides and enough people are frustrated the point that they are "protest" voting.
This is another fine example of such intellectual laziness. People who actually put in the effort to understand politics know how simplistic this is.
Since you're so tired and don't care, I won't respond further.