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| Thread: What's the difference between Left and Right? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Gryphs
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posted March 23, 2016 08:36 PM |
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It probably has to do with where the majority people in Western Society place the beliefs of these entities. Soviet Union and hippies with welfare, socialism, etc, and libertarians against those things etc. I have not heard Hitler being described as "right" though where did you here that?
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mvassilev
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posted March 23, 2016 08:37 PM |
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Nazis are the archetypal example of "far-right", at least in the Western world.
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Zenofex
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posted March 23, 2016 08:39 PM |
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Maybe because nobody care about hippies and libertarians. 
"Left" and "right" may have had some meaning in the political spectrum decades, if not centuries ago but nowadays they are just two sets of slogans to cover lobbyism for different and usually competing interest groups that actually do have enough economic power to transform into political. That's pretty much it.
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Gryphs
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posted March 23, 2016 08:39 PM |
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Edited by Gryphs at 20:41, 23 Mar 2016.
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mvassilev said:
Nazis are the archetypal example of "far-right", at least in the Western world.
Well then I would say it is because racism and xenophobia are often seen in the "right".
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AlexSpl
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posted March 23, 2016 08:49 PM |
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Well, what do you say about Donald Trump, is he left or right? Is he a right president for the U.S.A. who will be missed if left?
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Drakon-Deus
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posted March 23, 2016 08:57 PM |
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So we won't take the left road which is the right road, we'll take the right road, which is the wrong road. Right?
-Dick Dastardly to Muttley in "Wacky Races" 
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artu
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posted March 23, 2016 09:07 PM |
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Gryphs said:
mvassilev said:
Nazis are the archetypal example of "far-right", at least in the Western world.
Well then I would say it is because racism and xenophobia are often seen in the "right".
Traditionally, the most typical characteristic of leftist movements is some form of egalitarianism. And as I said, after Marx, internationalism. (Even their march is called that, workers from all nations are invited to unite.)
Nazis are the opposite of egaliterian, they believe in superior nations, races, obedience to supreme leader. They are also ultra-nationalist.
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fred79
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posted March 23, 2016 09:08 PM |
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Edited by fred79 at 21:09, 23 Mar 2016.
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sounds about right. 
(damnit, artu ninja'd me.  )
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Gryphs
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posted March 23, 2016 09:17 PM |
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Edited by Gryphs at 21:18, 23 Mar 2016.
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artu said:
Traditionally, the most typical characteristic of leftist movements is some form of egalitarianism. And as I said, after Marx, internationalism. (Even their march is called that, workers from all nations are invited to unite.)
Nazis are the opposite of egaliterian, they believe in superior nations, races, obedience to supreme leader. They are also ultra-nationalist.
In America obedience to a supreme leader is most definitely not "right"(or any party for that matter). But the rest, yes.
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Doomforge
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posted March 23, 2016 09:28 PM |
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mvassilev said:
We can seemingly separate the left-right spectrum into multiple dimensions, such as the social and economic, but that makes the clustering of parties and cultural "tribes" more puzzling. The Soviet Union and hippies are both in the cluster labeled "left", and Hitler and libertarians in "right". Why is that the standard distinction? For example, why not hippies and libertarians vs Hitler and the Soviet Union ("top" vs "bottom"?)?
Nationalism is essentially associated with right-wing factions (politically, at least). That's why Nazis fit, more or less. The Soviet Union had an entirely different approach, creating a multicultural environment without national aspirations, thus is often assumed to be left-winged politically.
American system is much less polarized, thus confusing for the rest of the world to understand. To a random Pole, Democrats and Republicans don't differ too much. And yet, some Americans do consider the Democrats "left" and Republicans "Right", which is wrong on almost all levels.
Both "right" and "left" are mostly meaningless nowadays, anyway. Almost all civilized world follows a socialistic (to a degree) system, but with a free market, highly corporatized, with nationalism pushed into the closet but not fully dormant and represented by rising levels on chauvinism and xenophobia all around the world. That's most of the countries' political situation for you.
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AlexSpl
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posted March 23, 2016 09:34 PM |
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Quote:
And yet, some Americans do consider the Democrats "left" and Republicans "Right", which is wrong on almost all levels.
I don't think think so. Republicans are indeed right. All the others are must be left as obsolete.
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Doomforge
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posted March 23, 2016 09:36 PM |
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AlexSpl said:
I don't think think so. Republicans are indeed right. All the others are must be left as obsolete.
Going by traditional classification, both are slightly to the left actually. Both economically and politically.
Traditional classification is obsolete though.
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Zenofex
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posted March 23, 2016 09:41 PM |
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You can't put even the Soviet Union and the other Eastern Bloc countries into one strict category, nationalism (called patriotism though) was initially frowned upon and even persecuted but the tone got much milder lately and individual states were even encouraged to develop some sort of "patriotic socialism", as long as it did not deviate too much from the hard points of the official doctrine. Even during World War II, Stalin times, the Soviet leadership officially used the "motherland" propaganda pretty much unchanged compared to Tsarist Russia to rally the population.
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AlexSpl
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posted March 23, 2016 10:11 PM |
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Edited by AlexSpl at 22:16, 23 Mar 2016.
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Well. Soviet Union was a great land for those who were flexible enough to be not broken. But actually, there were so many fates that had been passed through a meat grinder. Even our greatest minds lived in fear and dreamed of freedom.
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AlexSpl
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posted March 23, 2016 10:38 PM |
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Edited by AlexSpl at 22:47, 23 Mar 2016.
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So, my word to the true Americans for which Freedom is inherently a miraculous blessing. Fight for your freedoms, fight for liberty, as they are the only true values you should fight for.
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fred79
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posted March 23, 2016 11:26 PM |
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AlexSpl said:
So, my word to the true Americans for which Freedom is inherently a miraculous blessing. Fight for your freedoms, fight for liberty, as they are the only true values you should fight for.
we fight for jobs and traffic spaces, mostly. 
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AlexSpl
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posted March 23, 2016 11:40 PM |
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Edited by AlexSpl at 23:43, 23 Mar 2016.
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The only sacred land I know about that has that deep blue tinge of Freedom in her eyes is Switzerland. And you should mitigate your pain about traffic. It's much more tolerable when the right music is in your earphones.
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blizzardboy
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posted March 24, 2016 10:18 PM |
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mvassilev said:
Additional topic for consideration:
It's sometimes said that the left wins in the long run. Those who say this point to the decline of the social importance of religion, the liberation of women and acceptance of homosexuality, the existence of the welfare state, and so on. But to what extent is this actually true? The Soviet Union collapsed, the nationalization of industry is out of the question in Western countries, there's been some economic liberalization in many countries since the 80s - all seemingly victories for the right. Does society inevitably march leftward?
"The left wins in the long-run" refers to the overall trend that took place in the 19th and 20th century (or 18th century for France & the US) in which stable monarchies - which were good for society - transitioned into democracies and various regulations were to set to help protect the emerging middle class. This phasing is continuing in some African & Asian countries. Although some countries remain technical monarchies, they have for all intents and purposes adopted a rule of law that is determined by some sort of legislature.
Sometimes, when life is bad, you have radical reactions to it that create very unstable and aggressive ideologies, hence the violent monstrosity of socialism in the 19th century. "Socialism" here is being used in the classic sense of the word, not its revised version that is implemented to some degree by various countries today. So you're looking at despotic slums like Maosist China, the USSR, etc. Not the kind of socialism that is currently used in Western Europe or even the US (don't tell them that). This "counter-revolution" to corrupt monarchies lasted for awhile, and then of course eventually fell apart, so in those countries it was a march from the left and then more to the right. Today, China has marched considerably more to the right.
So it really depends where you're from in the world.
In the long-run, the answer concerning the world as a whole is complicated. I think it is 99% inevitable that leftism will win in certain spheres, such as having safety nets for the entire population for things such as healthcare and education. On the other hand, issues relating to personal privacy and giving employers the benefits of digression with labor laws will likely be rightist victories.
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Lexxan
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posted March 24, 2016 10:28 PM |
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Right = protect
Left = nurture
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mvassilev
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posted March 28, 2016 08:40 PM |
bonus applied by Corribus on 30 Mar 2016. |
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To give my own view on this:
To a large degree, "left" and "right" are simply coalitions that have some historical continuity. Sometimes two opposing sub-factions switch coalitions (e.g. doves in the US moving from the Old Right to the left, while hawks moved to the right), sometimes new factions appear (trade unionism) and old factions disappear (monarchism), but during any particular change, most of the sub-factions stay the same, so the left-right distinction is preserved.
But whatever positions the two coalitions ultimately take, they are to some degree motivated by different "moral forces": the left by egalitarianism and the right by tradition/order. More completely, there are at least three major moral-political alignments: progressivism (which includes socialism and communism), which views issues along an oppressor vs oppressed axis, liberalism (including libertarianism) which uses liberty vs coercion, and conservatism, which uses civilization vs barbarism. (These are of course incomplete generalizations.) In contemporary western democracies, the progressive and conservative factions are usually the strongest, and liberals are usually split between the two (except when they exist on their own in some multiparty systems). In the 19th century and modern right-wing authoritarian regimes, the liberal faction was/is typically stronger than the egalitarian one, and they're allied against the conservatives. In areas where the left is strong, the right tends to have a liberal streak, and where right is dominant, it's the left that's more liberal.
Finally, the seeming tendency of the left to win in the long run is more accurately a tendency of conservative defeats, caused by increasing wealth and its social effects. Specifically, there are two mutually reinforcing tendencies. First, increasing wealth leads to a decline in the importance of social capital. If you can get a job that sustains you and survive on your own even if your neighbors/peers/parents dislike you, the cost of dissent (or just doing your own thing) is lower, so people are more likely to do it. Second, increasing wealth reduces traumatization (e.g. your children are less likely to die young) and produces more opportunities for leisure, which means there's more opportunity to think rationally. This often leads to defeats for the right, but sometimes also defeats for the left, since the "we're all in this together" rhetoric doesn't always stick when people see themselves as being fine on their own.
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