this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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My radical opinion is that the left-right political spectrum isn't real. It's all really arbitrary like the Big Endians and Little Endians from Gulliver's Travels. We've decided one group is left and one is right. When an issue comes up, one group takes a position and the other group feels like they need to oppose it. Depending on which group supports an issue and where we decided that group is on the spectrum, that's where we put that issue.
But most issues are way more complicated to fit on a one dimensional line. Many problems are completely orthogonal to politics. Global warming for example is a scientific thing. More CO2 in the atmosphere, more warming. Gotta get that CO2 level down or we're going to have serious problems. Where does that fit on a spectrum? We just plop it onto the "left" part because the parties on the "left" tend to want to do something about it.
Foreign policy doesn't really fit on a spectrum since it's all around the interests of the country. Who should we be allies with and who are our adversaries? That's largely dependent on what those other countries are doing isn't it? But gotta put it on a spectrum, so I guess this war the left wing supports and this other war the right wing wing supports.
Ultimately ideology is for the intellectually lazy. Don't want to think about individual issues in-depth so just consider a few, sign on to whichever ideology is the closest fit, and go along with whatever the ideology says about anything else. The left-right spectrum is a rationalization for this, making it seem commonplace for people to be a dot on a line to feel justified in going along with whoever is on the same part in that line.
But it's just a construct. Issues are more complicated than that, and two people that agree completely on one issue may completely disagree on another. Because there really is no political spectrum. It's something that only exists in a poli sci classroom and doesn't really mean anything anywhere else. Why would anyone want to be a dot on a line anyway?
this is a bad take, it ignores the political philosophy foundations of left and right political theories and is a very naive perspective borne of the American two party system which doesn't adequately represent leftism
I thought the same thing but honestly I understand them from a uninformed casual observer perspective.
American politics are very contrarian.
Fair enough but I'm a little over uninformed people having political opinions
Understandable and same. I just see the why. I don't like it either.