When I took Civics in high school, I was taught the political spectrum like this (from left to right):
Radical – Liberal – Centrist – Conservative – Reactionary
Nowadays (almost 50 years later), I hear and read the term “radical conservative,” which sounds like an oxymoron. If a radical is liberal++, how could a conservative be an uber-liberal? What is it supposed to mean, reactionary? If so, why don’t they just use that term?
One definition of the term (from Google) is:
So it would seem that one could be a “radical” on either end of the political spectrum. The center tends to shift over time, mostly to the left. The average Democrat today appears to me to be more liberal than those who were called “radicals” in the 1960s when I was a teenager. And people nowadays who think like centrists did back then are likely to be labeled “radical conservatives” or “reactionaries.”
There is even a radical center.
Well, there you go.
The right-to-left thing is a shorthand convenience but is, really, a way oversimplified way of describing the possible range of political positions. Insofar as it even works at all - which is, to be honest, not very well - it only works within a limited scope of political opinions familiar to the Western political scientists who came up with it in the first place.
You can apply words to political positions all day but what will happen if we insist on debating through nomenclature is that we’ll soon be in a huge semantic dispute and not actually be talking about politics at all.
Franco in Spain was a radical conservative, so was the Argentine far right (most prominently the ruling regime 1976-1982). It’s generally a point of view more common in southern and eastern Europe and in Latin America than in Anglo-American culture, though there are some here.
The spectrum I heard was Revolutionary – Liberal – Centrist – Conservative – Reactionary. Radical was just a term for being out on either extreme. So a Radical Liberal was a Revolutionary and a Radical Conservative was a Reactionary.
The way I heard it was to think of the spectrum as a circle, with conservative and liberal opposite each other, centrist at the bottom and anarchist and fascist next to each other at the top. Fill in with other labels as you see fit.
The problem is that political thinking isn’t always along a linear spectrum. There are political philosophies that don’t fall anywhere along that x-axis. Of course, to an outsider, these philosophies are neatly placed along the linear spectrum anyway, usually toward the opposite end.
Conservative squares are the roots of radicalism.
What’s a “reactionary?”
Goes back to the French Revolution – used then to mean those who wanted everything back the way it was before the revolution, Crown and Church and all.
A Conservative believes change is inevitable but should happen slowly with due caution. A Reactionary believes we’ve gone too far and must reverse change.
There is almost no state wide elected US representative that calls themselves a conservative that is indeed one.
So, should the Communist Party of the Russian Federation be called “reactionary”?
They might be if they wanted to restore the old Soviet system, but, apparently not.
The circle concept is valid in that the greatest extremes of left and right often tend towards confluence of [del]craziness[/del] thought.
Is Trump a radical centrist?
If so, why?
Well, sort of. More broadly, the far left in Russia mostly idealizes something loosely based on the Brezhnev administration. My own politics are not that far from the modern KPRF, and I’d have no problem self describing as a reactionary communist, or in my case a neoreactionary communist.
To be on the left post-1989 is in some sense inherently to be a reactionary, insofar as 1989 marked a big turn to the right.
FWIW. the KPRF is pretty explicitly neo-Stalinist and takes conservative stances on cultural issues for populist reasons. It’s platform in many ways is basically Make Russia Great Again.
Who’s their leader, Donald Fyodorovich Drumpfski?