I think it’s hard to say. I think right wingers tend to be more in favor of hurting individuals to protect ‘society’ - like the death penalty for example, but then again left wingers tend to be really into political correctness and gender/racial identity.
Define collectivist. Do you mean willing to dominate the individual for the good of society and other individuals?
If so, probably left wingers. We are more interested in social engineering to promote egalitarianism.
Humans are usually social animals, so it’s not necessarily more common to the left or right. “Collectivism” is (apparently) this newfangled Randroid term that they intend to be a slur.
Come to think of it, I was in a human rights course as an undergrad, and one day we were placing “isms” according to their more individualist or collectivist elements, and I wondered where to put anarchism, since it opposes pretty much all hierarchical groups, but is also all about the vast potential of collective action without such oppression. He placed it as splitting the difference.
I’d say that conservatives are more likely to hurt individuals to create the impression that society is being protected (as with the death penalty); and they also support restricting marriage rights, restricting reproductive rights, restricting freedom of sexuality, and suppressing minority voting in the interest of a perceived “greater good.” All of that seems pretty collectivist to me.
Taken to the extremes, and greatly simplified, left wing = socialism; right wing = pure capitalism. Based on the extremes, the left wing favors the collective while right wing favors individuals.
In reality, very few people in the US are in either extreme and, therefore, are much more difficult to classify as “collectivist”. Most “regular” folk favor the collective in some matters and the individual in others.
And yet the Right is usually very collectivist about tribal matters, and similar things. It doesn’t make sense to divide the spectrum along collective/individual lines. It’s about different factors (party of order versus party of movement, etc.), and I’m frustrated with this (modern, America?) misconception.
“Collectivist” is the right-wing term for name-calling left-wingers, and is the same trait that left-wingers call “authoritarian” in right-wingers.
Not in the extremes, which is the only way to answer the OP. Once you start brining in the reality of the spectrum there is no way to answer a pure “right vs left” question. Real people are a mix of illogical and seemingly mutually exclusive ideas. Most “leftists” are all about the collective until the collective comes to take their stuff. Most “rightists” are all about individual freedoms and responsibilities until they are the ones who need help.
Humans are strange.
Left-wingers are more collectivist in the sense that you’re not going to hear a liberal say “there is no such thing as society”*, but it seems to me that whenever I see someone promoting conformism, that person is coming from the right. “The right to be left alone” (the core of individualism) straddles the line, but in the current climate you’re more likely to hear it from the right except on certain specific issues
Probably, left-wingers are in general more in favor of collectivist options being available than right-wingers are.
*I know, Thatcher didn’t say it either.
I think bup has it right:
Not really, most left-wingers have long been perfectly happy and proud to be called collectivists, but, to them, it does not mean the same thing as authoritarian at all. An authoritarian society is rigidly hierarchical. A collectivist one is non-hierarchical and egalitarian, but co-operative rather than competitive. That is the leftist ideal. (Whether or not is a realistic ideal is another matter.)
Of course, when contemporary American conservatives call contemporary American ‘liberals’ and politicians of the Democratic Party “collectivists” they are being silly or even dishonest, but that is because American ‘liberals’ and Democrats are not actually left-wing by any normal standard. Real left-wingers (such as are often important political players in the rest of the world, and exist even in America in small numbers on the far political fringe), really are collectivists.
So, left wingers are (mostly) collectivists, and think that is a good thing. Right wingers are anti-collectivists, and many of them think that a hierarchical society, with strong leaders and followers who know their place, is a good thing. (They differ amongst themselves over what qualifies someone to be leader, however.)
Liberals tend to be both anti-collectivist and (relatively) anti-hierarchical. Whether that amounts to an incoherent nonsense or a sensible compromise between unworkable extremes is … arguable.
Define political correctness from a leftist point of view. Most times when I hear someone talking about political correctness, it’s a right winger attacking someone who isn’t a right winger.
It depends. Authoritarian, social conservative right wingers (there is overlap between religious fundamentalism and right wing authoritarianism) are fairly indifferent to the individual and more concerned with the integrity of concepts outside the individual (faith, nation, culture). Libertarians on the other hand just want everyone left alone.
So maybe with libertarians, yes what you describe is true. But with RWA religious fundamentalists, no. The taliban and Islamists are a right wing authoritarian, fascist movement IMO. North Korea is arguably fascist too.
Well sometimes accusations of political correctness are just baseless McCarthyism or defense of racism or bigotry, but when leftists advocated throwing people in jail for saying racial slurs or making white people pay more taxes than others I think it becomes a reasonable accusation.
Exactly my point. The groups you describe, aside from pure Libertarianism, are an often confusing mix of right and left. Just because one is socially conservative (and those groups aren’t, by the way. They are extreme religious conservatives with an extremely collective view of society, which they prefer to be enforced by government) does not make them “extreme right wing”. There are social conservatives with liberal financial views, financial conservaives with liberal religious views, religious conservatives with some liberal social views, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
My point is that the theoretical pure conservative always favors individual rights and liberties over the collective while the equally theoretical pure liberal always favors the good of the collective over the individual. These extremes do not exist in reality and, IMHO, that is a good thing. Either position would be stupid.
While I agree that the extremes aren’t viable, I’ve got to say that the religious conservatives - which certainly count as right-wing in American parlance - are very much motivated by ‘collectivist’ behavior and beliefs. The difference is that instead of the collectivism being motivated by politics it’s motivated by religious groups and those being excluded or worked against tend to be those without strong - or those with different - religious beliefs.
So to make one simple ‘right believes in capitalism and therefore the individual’ is a bit of a red herring.
In my mind, I don’t see how collectivism has anything to do with concepts like authoritarianism, anarchism, capitalism, or the like. Rather, I see it as one side of a spectrum of ownership. That is, on the one extreme, property is owned by the people and on the other end property is owned by a person. I would see a conflict between these ideals over something like infrastructure. For example, the internet has a lot of the core stuff that is publically owned, but there’s also plenty of high-bandwidth lines that are privately owned. A collectivist might argue that we need more or all of that infrastructure publically owned and the other end of the spectrum would argue that more or all of it should be privately owned.
That all said, I disconnect this concept from things like authoritarianism, anarchy, and capitalism because there’s no direct correlation. For example, there exists social anarchism, and we also have the example of a place like China which is becoming more and more Capitalist and is very authoritarian but still pretty much owns everything.
Of course, I’m not a huge fan of trying to force everything into a single left-right spectrum, but if I were to do so, it seems to me that, at least in the US, that collectivism is generally more on the left than on the right. Things like social security, universal healthcare, all that sort of stuff generally has more fans on the left than on the right. That said, I really don’t see how it should be seen as a bad term since, in general, we’re all collectivist to some degree. Neither mainstream party is suggesting that it would be a good idea to privatize public roads, the National Parks, etc.
I don’t see how you can call the left the collectivist side. It’s the left that is always talking about diversity sensitivity and tolerance for alternative lifestyles. That seems like pretty much the opposite of collectivism.
The right, on the other hand, is the side that argues that the solutions to social problems will emerge from a free market rather than being imposed by a central authority. And this belief is essentially collectivist - rather than seeing just a series of individual transactions, it sees the market as a whole.
Four words: You didn’t build that. Cheered on the left, booed on the right.
And I mean those words in the sense that Obama actually meant them. They still would have been booed by the right if they didn’t distort it to mean what they did.
I was really trying to focus on “right wing/left wing” as it applies to government, which is why I pointed out the religious factor in the reply you quoted. Religion is a whole 'nuther variable to add in. There are plenty of religious conservatives (which I define here as those who hold their religious texts and interpretations thereof to be literally and completely true) who tend to vote and spend on the left side of the agenda - their war cry is “Jesus was a liberal!”. When one talks about the reality of “right vs left” or “liberal vs conservative” a ton of variables are present, like social views, fiscal views, and religious views to name a few big ones. And they are not mutually exclusive. People commonly choose pieces of both left and right from each variable. I’m not sure a real distinction can be made outside the theoretical realm.
So communists and socialists are not left-wing according to you? :dubious: (From a left point of view, diversity sensitivity and tolerance for alternative lifestyles are not at all antithetical to collectivism, they are necessary if the collective is to flourish. Collectivism does not mean everyone has to be the same, it means everyone has to work together, co-operatively, to build a better world. Given the inescapable fact that people are different from one another, achieving this goal requires us to be tolerant and sensitive to people’s diversity.)
I don’t think you know what “collectivism” means at all. It has nothing to do with viewing abstractions, like “the market” holistically (which is what you are describing).
Faith in the market is pretty much the opposite of collectivism. It is assuming that good things will happen despite no effort of co-operation being made. Stalin’s Collective Farms were (in intent, anyway) collectivist … hence the name.