Both historical "left" and "right" have their shares of authoritarianism, xenophobia, populism, liberalism, internationalism, and democratic governance - so attribute some of these traits to one side but not the other is not grounded in facts. What makes a difference is that is a specific historical circumstance, a course taken by one side is almost automatically opposed by the other. For example, gun ownership is neither "left" or "right" , but under current political circumstance is a bone of contention - one side defends it because the other side opposes it and vice versa.
Ditto for environmentalism or government regulation. In itself, neither is "left" or "right", but the US left espouses both because they are signifiers of anti-capitalism, while the "right" opposes them because they are "left" issues.
The entire modern political "discourse" has been reduced to a shouting match between opposing camps. The main goal of this match is to shut down the opponents, not to decide merits or demerits of their "positions." In fact, there are no "positions" in a conventional meaning of the term i.e. logically coherent systems based on a set of fundamental principles.
Anything goes as long as it scores points for "our" team. Thus, the same health care system that was a brain child of Heritage Foundation and the Republican governor of Massachusetts became "socialism" when proposed by a Democrat president. This shift defies conventional logic, but is perfectly consistent with the logic of a football game - the very same maneuver can be either good or bad, depending is "our" team is scoring or losing points.
For that reason, I am rapidly losing interest in political discourse, just as I have zero interest in spectator sports.
Wojtek
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 8:42 PM, brad <babscritique at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am having a little trouble grasping exactly what you mean by the left
> being defined as 'fight on the side of the oppressed'. Who exactly is
> deciding who is 'the oppressed'? Sure all of us here might agree on this.
> But the left deciding who's oppressed which you claim determines if one is
> on the left is pretty circular. There are plenty of free market wackos who
> would argue that they are fighting for the oppressed. What about stiglitz
> and sachs, don't they claim to be fighting for the oppressed. Are they on
> the left? Seems a bit subjective or open ended.
>
> Brad
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