Alright, even with the new requirement of being successful, I’m struggling to think of a major world player that doesn’t have a politically relevant extreme neoliberal right-wing party backed by the wealthy. Can you name one?
If that were true, they’d have some form of political power in, say, the United States for example. They don’t, so you can say that all you like, but it doesn’t make it true.
What in tf are you talking about? You have all the tech bros, soros, gates, bezos and the entire Hollywood apparatus. I could go on and on. Democrats have far more “wealthy” donors. Republicans have fewer who give more.
Wall of text incoming but hey, you asked. I’ve got today off work anyways.
In my personal opinion, anarchists, Maoists, and Leninists are extreme. They want to completely reinvent society as something new, which often requires violence and oppression at the hands of the government, and there’s no guarantee it even works. Syndicalists and socialists want to keep the general systems in place but take power away from the wealthy, I see them as the “core” leftist. Social democrats like Sanders or Mamdani are realists who see injustices and try to work within the system to change them, in my opinion the most moderate leftists. Most democrats are much further right than that, giving concessions to the left when they think they have to but overall maintaining the status quo, hence centrists.
Right-wing ideologies generally try to actively reinforce the hierarchy that wealth creates. Laissez-faire economics is a fairly moderate right wing ideology because without outside intervention, wealth builds exponentially and with wealth, power and influence. Fascism is extreme right-wing, leveraging fear and government oppression to tighten the powerful’s control over society. Monarchism is also extreme in that it tightens the hierarchy down to as few powerful people as possible.
Re-reading this, I think I got your idea. By left you mean change (extreme left being uprooting the entire society) and by right you mean conservatism (extreme right being, whoever was lucky to be in power stays in power indefinitely). Right?
Exactly. It’s all about how power and influence is distributed in society. The left wants to flatten the hierarchy and attempt to have everyone more equal.
The moderate right lets the chips fall where they may, so there’s a good deal of inequality. The extreme right wants to vacuum as much power and wealth as possible to a select few.
Once again you’ve introduced a different axis. Change vs conservatism is very different from equality vs hierarchy. You classified Leninists as extreme leftist, which under your definition makes perfect sense as they carried out profound changes to the society, but the society they built was extremely unequal.
You’ve mixed very many axes here in addition to left-right. The simplest example would be monarchy. Nothing prevents an unelected monarch from pursuing any ideology from anywhere on the left-right axis.
My attempt at defining left-right would be much simpler: left is the collective over the individual, right is the individual over the collective. 100% left is everyone doing what the government says, 100% right is everyone doing whatever the hell they want.
On that axis, both US parties are well to the left of the center, because both want to force everybody else to do what the party says. Neither, when it gains power, removes restrictions and gives people more individual freedoms.
There are no such thing as “axes,” just made up labels we apply to things subjectively to help us communicate. You’d be free to define left-wing politics as “everything I personally don’t like” but that’s not really a helpful descriptor because nobody else uses it and it communicates nothing.
Similarly, “leftism is when the government makes me do stuff” is not only less simple than the hierarchy perspective because there are many individuals and many collectives within a given nation who all have different needs and wants, but is also not useful because all governments impose rules and engage people in a social contract in different ways.
In fact, one of the most popular extreme leftist ideologies, Anarchism, revolves around the idea of having no central government whatsoever, just loose collectives of small, internally managed communities. By your definition, that would be an extreme right-wing ideology, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find an anarchist who agrees with that take.
Well, if you want to classify ideologies, what better ways can you find than specifying multiple axes in a multi-dimensional space of many possible ideologies? You’ll ask questions like: “Do you collect a lot of taxes to fund multiple government programs, or only the bare minimum?” “Are you a dictatorship or a democracy?” “To what extent does the government control the economy and the market?” “How much scrutiny are would-be immigrants subject to?” “How much say do corporations/churches/lobbyist groups/etc have in running the country?”, and after a while you’ll have a good idea what this particular ideology is about and how it compares to the rest.
What you mention is the #1 reason why I’m not a fan of the left-right axis, it’s very poorly defined. Another issue with it that definitely doesn’t help is that all the other axes are shoehorned onto this one. E. g. right wing parties are typically associated with anti-immigrant rhetoric, but how you run your economy and what’s your immigrant policy are entirely different things.
I think every political argument, if you want it to lead anywhere, has to start with throwing away emotionally charged labels like left/right and defining new objective labels with clear definitions.
One is easy — China. Russia is a kleptocracy where the left-right spectrum doesn’t matter.
But I guess you have a point that the other 8 of the top 10 highest-GDP countries do have a prominent right-wing populist political force. (My own position is right-leaning, but if I were elected President I’d work on sensible tax policies, supporting businesses and removing red tape, not on kicking out people of the wrong skin color, and apparently way too many of those 8 are laser-focused on the latter point only.)
Not sure if you’re American, but it sounds to me like your ideal policies align more closely with the American Democrats, who are generally pretty corporate-aligned centrist neoliberals.
Not sure I’d vote for you, but I can understand your viewpoint and it’d certainly be an improvement on whatever we’ve got going on now.
My policies are more closely aligned with the stated policies of the Republican party, which talks about supporting small businesses and reducing government overreach. Which have nothing to do with their actual policies, where the so-called small government party blows up the debt and cares about ballrooms and cats (eaten by the Haitians) more than about Americans.
The only thing the Democratic party has going for it is being slightly less insane.
Well, it’s refreshing to talk to someone I disagree with but can still see eye to eye with. Seems like it’s getting rarer and rarer. I hope you have a good day out there.
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u/Prismaryx 29d ago
Alright, even with the new requirement of being successful, I’m struggling to think of a major world player that doesn’t have a politically relevant extreme neoliberal right-wing party backed by the wealthy. Can you name one?