this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
799 points (85.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
29665 readers
1339 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's reaching a quite a bit. Reddit itself is very left leaning. Pair that with the fact that the (probably few) ring wing people leaving Twitter recently might not be interested in a forum style platform such as Lemmy.
My guess is that the number of right leaning people joined Lemmy in this last wave of new accounts was small in comparison to the left leaning ones.
Reddit used to be very left-leaning, but I don't think that's true anymore. Even if you look at a community with a conventionally "leftist" moderation like /r/europe you will see a huge amount of authoritarian and outright fascist comments.
The definition of right wing politics is being pro-hierarchy. Or believing hierarchy and inequality to be normal. This fits well with authoritarianism.
The left, by definition, wants to end inequality, or make things as equatible as possible. This is the antithesis to authoritarianism.
So, no. I'm not aware of this and don't believe it. If someone told me they're both left and authoritarian I would tell them sticking feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken.
Would you consider Mao and Stalin to be left, or right? Would you agree, regardless, that they are authoritarian?
They're authoritarian. Left and Right get conflated with communism/capitalism but all four exist separately from each other.
Leftism is about equity of power and the right is about protecting power structures that exist even if unbalanced (the status quo).
Capitalism and communism are economic systems, not political positions.
You need to enforce equity though, it’s not something that humans do naturally.
Through that enforcement of equity you are choosing authoritarianism.
There is no equity equilibrium to reach unless it’s from the threat of violence, to keep everyone down to the lowest rung. While hiding all the inequity that the ones at the top enjoy, or making excuses for it.
Sort of how bill gates believe he should be able to fly in private jets because what he is doing is more important than what you would need to fly for is. So you’ll accept it.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/02/08/bill-gates-private-jet-bbc-contd-orig-na-fj.cnn-business
The libertarian left is anti-authoritarian. But unless you are going to exclude all marxist-leninist from the left, regardless of their advocacy for equality and opposition to the capitalist system, left authoritarianism obviously exists. I think perhaps you are engaged in a no true Scotsman fallacy?
The libertarian right is also anti authoritarian
Eh, only because their ideological blinders block their understanding that what they are advocating ends up in corporate feudalism. Their hierarchy is property based.
I mean, it only makes sense.
If I want to stand where you’re standing, there is going to be some way to settle who gets to stand there
Sure, and when a small set of people basically own all the property, that is very similar to a feudal society. It ain’t anti-authoritarian.
Which is what communism is
The libertarian right is also anti authoritarian
I mean, the political situation in Europe has changed a lot in the last fifteen years. Lot's of those may be the same users/mods who's opinions have shifted along with that.
I was going to say this, I'm glad you did instead.
People's opinions have changed a lot in the last 25 years. In the late 90s we got to see the last gasps of the real power of the religious right, in the early 2000s we got to see the dominance of the neoconservative right, in the late 2000s we got to see a massive shift leftward as a backlash against the religious right and the neoconservative right, then from the more chill hippie left wing we got to see the rise of the authoritarian woke left, and right now we're starting to see a backlash against that. It isn't always from different people, it's often from the same people changing their minds.
For quite some time I've thought of it like steering a car. If you steer hard to the left you're going to hit the ditch, if you steer hard to the right you're going to hit the ditch. Really what you need is to course correct at times just stay on the road. Sometimes you need to turn the wheel pretty hard in one direction or the other, other times you want to just nudge the wheel, and get other times you don't really want to move it at all.
Some regions voted hard for Clinton, then voted for bush, then voted for obama, then voted for trump, then voted for Biden. Such a thing might look completely inconsistent, but politics is a dynamic system where circumstances change, certain movements win and then we get to see the consequences of those movements, new movements form, and maybe old movements collapse.
This isn't a new idea. Hegelian dielectic proposes that in politics, a dominant idea (thesis) eventually leads to its opposite or challenge (antithesis), resulting in a resolution or synthesis of the conflicting ideas. Such an idea predates Marx, so it's been around for quite some time.
There are quite a number of examples historically of people completely changing their mind on a topic. The father of Canadian universal healthcare, Tommy Douglas, was a powerful advocate of eugenics when he was younger, and as he got older he realized that he made a terrible mistake and changed his mind. Solzhenitsyn apparently early on in his life believed in the Soviet project but once he learned of the gulags had his views fundamentally change. A lot of people like to pretend that national socialism died with Adolf Hitler in that bunker, but a lot of people believed in and supported national socialism in Germany, and those people continue to exist after world war 2, but I think it's safe to say that for the most part they learned the error of their ways. I'm sure there are lots of people who supported Putin internationally in the 90s who wish they could go back and change that decision now.
To me it's one of the deepest dangers of the purity spiraling we are seeing from the left right now. The fact of the matter is, as you kick more people out of the left, it becomes a less and less viable movement. As the left acts as if people become irredeemable the moment that their opinions are wrong, it becomes something that will inevitably fail.
I feel like the modern left would take a look at post war germany, and post to japan, and would just immediately start implementing genocide. "Nope, they were Nazis they are irredeemable they need to be pushed into the sea". The most amazing thing about the end of world war II is the incredible wisdom with which the world powers helped to rehabilitate Germany and Japan into some of the most powerful nations in the world today, but for the most part lacking in the qualities that set them off to war and atrocity way back when.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you say here. But I was refering just to events in Europe in the last 18 years since Reddit started.
Back in 2005 it was a pretty good time for most people. Since then we had the 2008 crash, austerity, major terrorist attacks, the refugee crisis, Brexit, Covid, huge inflation, a war on our borders, unrest, etc. France has had two sets of riots this year alone. It's not surprising people's views change when presented with all that.
Also, people grow and their life and priorities change. A mod who was a twenty year old student when the site formed, is now a thirty-eoght year old who's spent plenty of time in the real world, may be married, have kids, etc. They will view the world differently to the kid that set up the sub back then.
/r/europe will ban you for insinuating that rich people are making the world worse for everyone because "it's communism"
My local subreddit, a liberal city, has been banning a bunch of people after it got taken over by anti-choice conservatives who don't even live there.
I don't think i ever viewed Europe as leftist. Now, WPT... That's a great example of authoritarian leftism.