One thing the right is good at doing is falling in line, no matter that the agenda being pushed.
Yeah the flaws of leftists is understanding what they are voting for and not operating purely on loyalty.
Gotta maintain that rigid tribal culture so it supports whoever steals the leadership role!
The right opposes free thought and favors conformity to support the privileged few.
The left favors free thought and opposes conformity, because that would impede social progress.
Yeah, I wonder why one of those groups is likely to have public arguments.
Not necessarily. Some leftists demand conformity in beliefs. “If you don’t believe XYZ, you’re a shill/neoliberal/fascist etc.”
I feel like favoring free thought and opposing conformity leads to arguments, but demanding conformity leads to enemies (like this meme).
The problem is not public arguments, but groups rejecting other groups for ideological reasons. I personally know people who are like “you can be a communist, or you can be wrong”.
The reality is that there are left groups, especially far-left groups, who will already dismiss your opinion on everything for not categorically rejecting a (social) markets economy. Doesn’t matter if you agree in all other points.
That reminds me of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, where some members of a Maoist group call others “conformists” or something to that effect because they hold different views on the finer details of communism/socialism.
The right is also driven by fear and hate. It’s easier to get coordination and conformity that way.
Yugopnik made a good point on the term “Leftist” and how its so broad that it includes many different idealogies that are quite honestly conflicting, i.e. stalinists, anarchists, etc., so that it appears leftists are always fighting since they are all lumped into the same category.
I approve of any leftist as long as they are anti-authoritarian.
so that it appears leftists are always fighting since they are all lumped into the same category.
I always say it is because the left in general has its roots in old school liberal value of “think for yourself”. So there typically tends to be maverick attitude and in-fighting. The best example is the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War; you have soc dems, communists and anarchists fighting together not just against fascists, but also themselves. The right, meanwhile value order and hierarchy, so they tend to easily set aside their differences. Again, the Spanish Civil War is the best example, with the Spanish Nationalists also composed of various factions with competing agenda, but managed to set aside their differences, which made it easier to do because they had a strong man figure to rally to.
And the right won that war, which goes to show the value of unity
Yeah sometimes I get frustrated because I wish “the left” could be adults for five minutes and deal with the issues at hand. Like I don’t care about the socialist alphabet soup if you’re from PSL, or DSA, or ISA or whatever, we all agree that people are being kidnapped by I.C.E. is evil and alarming, can we just deal with this right now? We can get back to bickering about philosophy later.
But even that is complicated since there are disagreements that can’t be ignored, like whether to work with democrats, who time and time again undermine and cripple movements whenever able and divert them for fundraising.
And the right won that war
I assume you are from the US. It may be the case in your country, but it is not necessarily that the right as a whole won the war, considering that other parts of the world still have leftist and liberal politicians ruling. As a matter of fact, they have gotten more popular as Trump’s brazen corruption and incompetence is setting example why not to elect populist right wing politicians.
For what it’s worth, if nothing existentially happens that would stop US from becoming a nation anymore like a civil war, politics typically swing back like a pendulum. Even at the extreme, politics could dramatically swing back to normalcy and empathy. We have had countries that were under dictatorship, but are now democratic like Spain and Portugal. Because the problem with dictatorships is that they become too corrupt and reality eventually catches up to those who were swooned by initial sweet promises of demagoguery.
Of course, what I just said now may not be reassuring to you because I am speaking from a place of relative safety, so you can take it or leave it.
I am American, but I was more making a point about how the rights tendency to fall in line makes them more effective, and maybe we should emulate that
For me, it makes much more sense to think about it all as pop culture. I’ll use America but this goes for any country.
The right leaning party represents pop culture. A dominant culture. The popular culture is American Apple pie and blue jeans with letter jackets.
The left represents everything outside the pop culture bubble. It’s a larger population as a whole, but they’re like little bubbles they all contain their own culture. Those cultures can conflict or merge and compliment each other. But they’re individually separate.
The pop culture is always feeling threatened. It needs to maintain the status quo. Every outside sub culture is trying to fight their way into the dominant culture.
So this is why the right leaning voters trend towards rejecting things like immigrants, minorities, LGQTB and often other sub groups that are not wildly accepted by the pop culture. This is also why the left leaning groups do not. They trend towards infighting about how to do things but overall they all focus efforts on taking status away from the pop culture.
When I view politics as a clash between pop culture and sub cultures, it makes so much of it make so much more sense.
Which is also why I believe this is useful because it highlights how to win. Pop culture is much more sensitive to culture jamming. If anyone remembers ‘yes men save the world’ they were buried a bit, but they managed to fuck with so many things in pretty smart ways. You can really start to see how to focus efforts on them with this context I think at least.
To me it sounds like you’re starting to broach on the concept of reactionary vs dialectical analysis
I’m not sure what that means. I’m interested though. Is it something you can explain here or is there some topics you can’t suggest I read up on
Its a bit of a complex topic, but in basic terms reactionary thinking is kneejerk reaction, what “feels right” without broader analysis. The popular surface level, like how people complain about trans people in sports cause it “feels unfair”, but when you look at the actual numbers there such a small section of out trans people in general, and even then they do pretty regular on average. Or how you here how believe all women will somehow make it “dangerous” for men dating, when in reality false accusations form less than one percent of cases, but one in four women experience assault. Whereas dialectical thinking is the thought that larger processes and symptoms influence outcomes, and one should take a step back and analyse the context and direct facts about something through critical thinking before coming to a conclusion. Like how study after study have proven that the number one factor contributing to a person engaging in violent crime is poverty, not just a person being born bad. Or how despite the narrative, immigrants commit crime at a lower percentage on average than natural born citizens. But since dialecticalism is a much bigger analysis and uses a fair amount of hypothetical and philosophical thinking you end up getting a fair amount of groups believing that their hypothetical analysis is best, such as you get with different philosophers.
I’ll start my own leftism, with Blackjack and hookers! If fact, forget the blackjack. Ah, screw the whole thing.
I have never met a leftist I didn’t like
but I only consider somebody a leftist if they respect human rights.
So it’s accurate but they’re both wrong because
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He is the left.
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He shouldn’t even be trying to converse with literal USSR advocates and literal anarchists as if they were part of his base.
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Why can’t we have Leftist Unity? The fucking Rightists can agree on hating “The Libz”
Why can’t we agree on hating cons? Sadly I can’t even get Leftist factions to agree on “LGBT Rights are based and cool”, because Left-Learning TERFs exist and I’ve had Tankies pull “LGBT Rights is racist because it means forcing Western Ideals where they don’t belong” crap on me.
Of course the only reply to this is a “srs leftist” who immediately proclaims you an enemy for shit you didn’t say
We can’t have leftist unity because the right has never run short on useful idiots
People on the left love to “well actually…” every issue, every opinion, because nothing in the world is 100%, but when something is 85%+ we should just stfu about it, agree and move on to more pressing issues.
But of course we can’t, so we keep losing.
Nobody is left enough for anyone else on the left. You agree with me on an issue but differ on execution? You may as well be Trump!
Circular firing squad
I’ve seen situations here on lemmy where I would cause it if I where to argue with someone
I am leftist
The bigger problem is that politics today isn’t BS association to what “left” is versus BS association to what “right” is, it’s becoming those that are willing to work within a system versus those that are just willing to exploit it. Trying to map out left and right is a concept so absurd no amount of coordinate systems is going to make people across language barriers and international barriers agree on how you label them.
Reasonable people that disagree are going to have more disagreements than an echo chamber masking a defrauding scheme that is open to be bought by the highest bidders.
