In practice however that tends to be modified into “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” Sometimes implicitly, sometimes literally (google it, lots of people use the second version).
The problem with that is, anything can be explained by incompetence if you make enough assumptions, so it amounts to a blanket denial that malice even exists. Really, that IMHO is why “The cruelty is the point” got picked up and repeated so much; to make the point that yes, these people are actually ill intentioned, not just mistaken, misguided or ignorant of what they are doing. Because for so long there was a constant refrain that malice didn’t exist and everyone was and is well meaning.
Which in my opinion helped the return of fascism, since it meant that the more openly malignant the Right got, the more everyone else felt obligated to rationalize that malice away. It rewards and encourages malice.
I agree. The problem happened because previously the tail (center and center right people like Mitt Romney and John McCain) was wagging the dog (ordinary rank and file authoritarian voters). Around 10 years ago, the dog started wagging the tail, and the tail realized just how small it was in comparison. Now here we are.
In other words the fundamental problem (at least if we’re just talking numbers) is that the curve isn’t bell shaped, but rather has a bimodal distribution with one hump at the far right, another at the center left. There’s a gap in the center / center right, where the Liz Cheneys and Mitt Romney of the world were left to hang out to dry.
I agree. At least if we’re talking about 2025 rather than 2016. It isn’t the authoritarians that are compromising with themselves, it’s the voters that are economically conservative but socially moderate to liberal. Of course (at least as it seems to me) that combination (what in an overall graph I would call center right) is actually a very small block, even though back in the day they probably thought they were more powerful than they actually were.
There’s also the leftward move on social issues, specifically LGBTQ. I know that the people involved do not see it that way, do not see themselves as moving left, but historically yes I think it’s a leftward move, maybe even hard left at this time when you look at the scope of history.
As compared to other people who want to send their kids to religious schools, they have not really changed that much in the last 10 years, but they are more likely to be grouped in as “hard right” due to failure to comply with what the hard left social movement wants.
It’s just an anecdote, but I suspect this is different than how things were back in the day. My parents sent me to a Catholic elementary school. This was back in the mid 80s. They were traditional Catholics for that time in terms of things like homosexuality and abortion. But they were also liberal on the economy and liberal on other social issues like race, immigration, etc. As a young man voting in his first election my father voted for Nixon in 1968, but otherwise they have always voted Democratic. As far as I can tell, most of their peers (uncles, aunts, their friends and neighbors they grew up with, etc.) were pretty much in the same boat. They were / are traditional family value Latino conservatives from small town Texas. But they aren’t at all like the people that are currently pushing for vouchers to the detriment of public schools.
I’m not really interested in the voucher issue. A lot of people have problems affording these schools as it is. Because with Catholics or anything else there are more childless people, more church shoppers who don’t want to pay for a school that they don’t have kids in or don’t CURRENTLY have kids in. A lot of that support has eroded, and the people who want it are more on their own. So they band together.
Or something like a young couple in their early 20s, both virgins, who want to get married. Women who are virgins who want to married are not going to get ANY support in online forums. Even if the man is young and a virgin too, the woman is going to be strongly pushed to lose her virginity before marriage and not to the man she will be marrying. If it was the 70s, 80s, 90s they would just be making a socially conservative choice, people would be okay with it and they wouldn’t get blasted.
So yeah, there’s been a leftward movement socially. It is a movement. I expect I will get many denials that there has been any movement at all. I think it’s kind of added up and I dunno, Trump and the conservatives are doing just fine with younger voters and it may be seen or felt differently by young people living their lives rather than political discussion where a lot of things kind of can’t be said right now.
At this point someone who is advocating even what would be historically very mildly for any sort of traditional gender support simply is not going to get any support from the left that is concerned with social issues, or trying to be. They will be told explicitly that they are not supported as well. So they drift away and look for people who will support something closer to their views.
Got it. In that case, I’d say that even within the left to right spectrum on social issues, there are different areas, with a lot of people, even MAGA, who have moved to the left. Premarital sex, contraception, etc., aren’t going to make a comeback because even the MAGAs benefit from that stuff personally*. I think they’ve faded so much into the background that I don’t even consider them when I think of the political spectrum on social issues.
*. Unless it’s bundled together with things that hurt “those people”, such as with cutting welfare for single minority teenage mothers and things like that.
On one hand every single political advancement of the human race (universal sufarage, freedom of speech, abolition of slavery, ending child labor, the weekend) was at some point considered far left. So yeah they’ve achieved a lot.
On the other hand, since at least the French revolution, there has been a segment of the radical political spectrum, who self identify as some synonym of “far left”, who are not interested in seeing any left wing policies enacted except through completely dismantling of the political and economic system. They would not pollute their political purity by actually doing something practical to help those less fortunate than themselves, in fact their suffering is a good thing, as it will only hasten the collapse of the system. Anything short of that is just making their chains more comfortable and is worse than doing nothing at all.
That kind of "far left’ has achieved nothing at all except on the odd occasion they actually ended up in power, where they managed to get themselves and a good chunk of the population murdered.
There were always reformists, always radicals, but the left-right distinction didn’t exist until the French revolution. Since then, there have always been a share of liberals sympathetic to all of those things above. So I disagree with your assertion, though if you could bring evidence I’d be happy to have a look at it. For example, Benjamin Franklin was an early abolitionist, but I seriously doubt he was ever considered far left or its equivalent. A reformist? Sure. Maybe some pamphleteers more radical than Thomas Paine would be far left.
AOC could be fairly characterized as left wing, which is something different than far left. Because she’s on the left wing of the Democratic Party, just as Tommy Tuberville is right-wing.
…and not merely self-interested. That was the default assumption by liberals: if we could persuade conservatives that a policy was in their economic interest, then we could secure that policy. But that doesn’t follow if conservatives mostly get off on punitive measures for the sake of punitive measures. Appeals to self interest might help, but they are not sufficient.
Full disclosure: I consider myself a liberal, somewhere in the vicinity of Elizabeth Warren.
Sidebar, but Noah Smith is one of absolute dumbest pundits ever to draw breath. He’s singing the praises of Elon Musk as a misunderstood genius even within the past week. Anytime he makes a good point, it’s a purely coincidental side effect of the fact that he’s always punching left because he thinks women are too mouthy. He’s not someone you want to cite for any purpose other than mocking him.
I hadn’t heard of him before, so I didn’t realize that. Although I had my suspicions with some of the comments he made like dismissing the threat of climate change and such. Doesn’t make his criticisms of the far left any less accurate from my view having been a part of that world for many years.
It was like how a long time ago I read a great article accurately criticizing US imperialism and the military-industrial complex during the 2000’s and I was sick to my stomach when I realized that Pat Buchanan wrote it. Didn’t make it any less true however.
Yes, and the lack of a consistent definition in this thread makes discussion difficult. In particular, there is a tendency to identify “far left” as “authoritarian” and “dogmatic.” That is why political compass.org uses two axes–left/right and libertarian/authoritarian–to distinguish between, say, Stalin and Chomsky, who may be close on the left/right scale, but are very far apart on the libertarian/authoritarian scale. Similarly, Stalin and Hitler both score very high on the authoritarian scale but are further apart on the left/right scale. I don’t say the scale is perfect, but it is constantly revised and improved and there is considerable explanation of the terms and methodology on the site.
The discussion here also seems to be confused about radicalism and militancy, conflating these sometimes with authoritarian or non-democratic. It is possible to hold an entirely consistent far left, democratic, non-authoritarian, radical position, for example. As noted above, even Chomsky talks about electoral politics, not revolution, to achieve workers’ control of industry and an end to the war machine.
A lot of that is that if extremists aren’t authoritarian (in practice if not always officially), then they don’t really matter because people will simply ignore them. Left or right wing, if somebody wants to remake society according to their pet ideology they have to be authoritarian even if they officially oppose authoritarianism.
Forcing everyone else to do things your way is as authoritarian as it gets, after all.
Of course, governments and capitalists force people to do things their way, even when elected by a minority of the population or, as in the case with capitalists, not elected at all. So are we in agreement that government and capital are authoritarian, on a spectrum, perhaps, but still authoritarian? Compared to the harm they do, the harm done by “authoritarian Marxists” in North America is nothing.
I disagree that the non-authoritarian left doesn’t matter. Without it, the centre slides to the right. And it has always been the left that created and first applied tactics others picked up, such as organizing women and recent immigrants and so-called unskilled workers, sit-in strikes, general strikes, and much more. Their larger vision has inspired them to develop ideas and actions the moderates sometimes used, and as often, stole the credit for. Without, for example, organizers from the Communist Party and the Socialist Party–the far left–CIO would have been a complete failure.
The labour movement moderates and their political allies have purged the left over the last 80 years (in fact, longer: the first US red scare was against anarchists and socialists in 1886, and the AFL leader Sam Gompers was happy to see them shut down) and the result is a US and Canadian labour movement that has shrunk, has no political influence, can’t get the vote out, and can’t organize. It is the the left and far left that are leading the way in what might be a resurgence of labour today.
I don’t agree with this characterization. Noah Smith:
Basically, I see five key facts jumping out at me:
1. Climate change is starting to get severe.
2. Climate change is manageable, but we’re not there yet.
3. The U.S. and Europe are no longer the biggest problem.
4. Green energy is for real.
5.Cutting emissions doesn’t require degrowth.
So without further ado, let’s get on to the charts.
I think #1 falsifies that characterization, but I included the other points for context. He follows up with 4 charts in support of #1.
You are completely ignoring that I said extremists; not the Left (or Right) in general. And in the process missed my point entirely. Extremists have to be authoritarian to matter much. Non-extremists don’t, because they can use persuasion instead of force.
And as demonstrated by history the reason that “authoritarian Marxists” aren’t doing much harm is because they are powerless; not because they wouldn’t cheerfully fill mass graves if they had the power to do so.
It’s important to distinguish between an authoritative voice and someone who publishes enough opinions that, by some random chance, they happen to align with things you believe.
If I find that I agree with Pat Buchanan on something, then I’m going to re-examine what I understand about it, and if I still feel the same about it, I’m definitely not using Pat Buchanan as support.
Absolutely he would. To a pre-independence Tory (or pretty much anyone else in the political spectrum in the 1760s American colonies) his post-independence political positions would be considered absolutely out-there raving radical, lunatic fringe.
There is no universal political spectrum that can be applied in all times and places, but the same can be said for all those human advancements
At some point the Levellers who advocated for universal male suffrage, and the abolitionists who advocated for the end of slavery, and the labor organisers who advocated for the weekend were the absolute extreme “left” of the political spectrum, considered fringe extremists by the mainstream.
Excellent point. I think the same can be said about George Washington and his accomplishment of leaving office peacefully when his term was up rather than declaring himself a dictator. For the time, that was absolutely something that I think can be called far left. Even to this day, I think the number of leaders who leave peacefully of their own accord outside of established democratic systems is extremely small. The only one I can think of off the top of my head in the last few hundred years is Pope Benedict XVI.