Can someone tell me the difference between the two parties?
Also, what is all the left wing right wing business?
Time for you to do some reading
As for left wing and right wing business, it is just slang for each party, generally meaning left = dem right = repubs
L and R wings used to denote those who were in favor of the aristocracy reatining special privileges, (Rwing), and those who were opposed, (Lwing).
“Left wing” and “right wing” tend to refer to extreme liberals and extreme conservatives, respectively. Using those terms to describe either major party is inaccurate, because the Democratic Party and Republican Party are both pretty centrist (by U.S. standards), although the D’s tend to be a bit more liberal and the R’s tend to be a bit more conservative.
Left wing and right wing are rather obsolete ways of looking at a political world that can’t be jammed into one dimension, no matter how much people try.
Basically, it works like this:
[ul]
[li]Left wingers are supposed to be liberal, which means they support little economic freedom and a lot of social freedom. That means they support high taxes for welfare programs and huge restrictions on doing business (little economic freedom) and they oppose laws against things like gay marriage and immoral' acts (a lot of social freedom).[/li][li]Right wingers are supposed to be conservative, which means they support a lot of economic freedom and little social freedom. They oppose huge welfare programs and restrictions on doing business (a lot of economic freedom) and they support laws against the immoral’ (little social freedom).[/li][/ul]So, are Republicans conservative and Democrats liberal? No. It’s never been so easy. Republicans tend to be more conservative, and the Republican party is the more coherent of the two in terms of getting everyone behind a single platform, but the Republicans who win elections are centrist enough to get votes from liberals. The Democratic party isn’t even that coherent: Some Democrats support very conservative ideas about religion in government, while others are nearly socialist. Again, the Democrats who win elections tend to be centrist.
Is that all for American politics? Not by a long shot. The party I support, the Libertarian party, is fundamentally different from both of the two main parties in that it supports a high degree of economic and social freedom. Simply marking its place on the traditional left-right spectrum is impossible.
There are a lot of other lesser, or `third’, parties that have had an impact of elections at various levels, and trying to classify them all on a single line is a fool’s errand.
The official sites for the two parties are curiously uninformative.
They do tell which side they take on various specific current issues. But neither site explicitly discusses any kind of overall political vision. There is no mention of any deeper political principles or anything like that.
Wonder why…
-FrL-
I think a lot of that is probably related to Derleth’s observations. They don’t want to set any hard and fast rules and are afraid to alienate people who would disagree with just one of their principles.
The basic principle for both parties is to elect their candidates. In the US, this usually means that you jockey for the most popular positions. The parties only give a list of their principles in their presidential platforms, and those are usually pretty bland to avoid offending.
Democrats tend to favor government programs to help individuals and the poor; Republican’s tend to favor government programs that help corporations and the wealthy.
Left and Right refers to two dimensions of a 4 dimensional plot of left vs right & libertarian vs authoritarian. The best example I can give you is at this site (scroll to bottom) which places many political figures throughout the last century on the graph. You can take the quiz as well to find where you stand.
Bob55 writes:
> Left and Right refers to two dimensions of a 4 dimensional plot
> of left vs right & libertarian vs authoritarian.
I don’t think you understand the idea of a dimension. The plot that you link to has two dimensions. Left vs. right is one dimension, and authoritarian vs. libertarian is the other dimension. Left is one end of a spectrum ranging over one dimension, and right is the other end of the spectrum in that dimension. Similarly, libertarian is one end of the spectrum in the other dimension, and authoritarian is the other end of the spectrum in that dimension.
I think that even a 2-dimensional diagram is insufficent for characterizing political opinions. It’s better than a 1-dimensional diagram, and a 1-dimensional diagram is better than nothing, but it’s still insufficient. I suspect that the whole idea of characterizing political opinions on charts of whatever dimensions is fundamentally flawed.
Wendell: I once described a three-dimensional cube map (my third dimension was progressive/conservative, because I’d abandoned liberal/conservative in favor of collectivist/individualist), and I suppose you could add a fourth spatial dimension in terms of atheist/religious, but making it orthogonal to progressive/conservative would be difficult.
Anyway, it comes down to how much you want to gloss over and how much you think can be described as being orthogonal. Authoritarian/libertarian (my Y-axis) is orthogonal to collectivist/individualist (my X-axis) because we have (or had) governments like Nazi Germany (Authoritarian/Individualist/Conservative) and the Dutch government (Libertarian/Collectivist/Progressive), and Pol Pot’s regime (Authoritarian/Collectivist/Conservative) and the general trend of the US government since, say, the 1970s (Libertarian/Individualist/Progressive).*
*(I know I’m glossing over a lot. That’s my point. But you have to agree, the Dutch government is closer to Libertarian than the Khmer Rouge, no? And the Nazi regime was less concerned with individual wealth than Stalin, which is my prime determinant in the Collectivist/Individualist axis. Hell, I’m doing my knowledge a disservice with only one footnote: Ideally, in any political discussion the footnotes should dominate two-thirds of the page. ;))
Anyway, these maps are an aide de memoire and a convenient summary, not a term paper or doctoral thesis.
Historical note: I believe the origin of the terms left wing and right wing comes from the area in the assembly where delegates with those views sat in France in the period just shortly before the French Revolution. The ‘liberals’ gathered to the left wing, the ‘conservatives’ in the right wing. So they got tagged with those names, and they’ve stuck for the past 200+ years.
(This is entirely from memory. If I’ve mixed up just what country this was from, no doubt someone will be along soon with the details.)