Me, being called a liberal:
Lolno I just don't think their red authoritarianism and denial of reality looks much different than conservative fascism and denial of reality.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Anything left of the far right, is a liberal idea to someone who lives their life on the far right.
Which just goes to show that they misunderstand who their supporters and opponents are.
It seems to me that academics who study horseshoe theory routinely miss the point. For example, the Wikipedia article on this topic uses this to try to refute the theory:
Simon Choat, a senior lecturer in political theory at Kingston University, has criticized the horseshoe theory. In a 2017 article for The Conversation, "'Horseshoe theory' is nonsense – the far right and far left have little in common", he argues that far-left and far-right ideologies only share similarities in the vaguest sense, in that they both oppose the liberal democratic status quo, but that the two sides have very different reasons and very different aims for doing so.[29] Choat uses the issue of globalization as an example;[30] both the far-left and the far-right attack neoliberal globalization and its "elites", but identify different elites and have conflicting reasons for attacking them.[31]
But it's a total strawman. Nobody is arguing that tankies oppose or support the same things as Nazis, or that they share the same goals. What they have in common is an embrace of authoritarianism. Of course the tankies like different authoritarians, like Maduro or Putin instead of Hitler or Mussolini. But the love, or at least tolerance, for authoritarianism is the one thing they have in common - that the ends justify the means.
But not all of the far left is authoritarian. That’s where horseshoe theory fails. The fact that tankies and fascists share some common traits isn’t enough to save it.
Also, while tankies grew out of the left in some sense, it’s pretty debatable whether it’s still a left movement at this point. The philosophical differences with the rest of the left are enormous.
Not all of the far right is authoritarian either. And those non-authoritarian sects support basically the same kind of means for decentralizing power.
Some means that actually centralize power every time somebody tries... But yeah, honesty is not a common trait on either extreme.
Not all of the far right is authoritarian either.
I struggle to think of any far-right ideology, theoretical or practical, that isn't enamored with hierarchy.
A lot of right wing militias are anti-government, radical individualist, bordering on anarchist. They care about hierarchy, but mostly in-group. I wouldn't call them authoritarian.
The need for either total autonomy from - or total control of - the evil mainstream society is an example of the theory, not an exception.
The right is less authoritarian regarding business and environmental regulations than the left, as one example.
Businesses are just a different kind of hierarchy than government.
The point is the right doesn’t want the government regulating businesses, whereas the left does. Therefore the left is more authoritarian regarding regulation of business, just as the right is more authoritarian in regulating personal rights.
I don't really find that a meaningful distinction in the context of discussing whether far-right ideologies are capable of being anti-hierarchy.
Governmental hierarchy vs private sector hierarchy is the distinction. The existence of hierarchy does not define authoritarianism in government. Do you consider a head of the household an authoritarian government?
Do you consider a head of the household an authoritarian government?
I would consider traditional patriarchal ideas of the head of a household as hierarchical, and that there's a significant body of work in anthropology that directly relates the outgrowth of complex and hierarchical societies from such family arrangements. So, in the broadest sense, yes. In the narrower sense of a competing polity with a monopoly on force compared to extant states, no, but that's only relevant insofar as those states continue to exist.
Preferring one authority over another isn’t the same as being anti-authoritarian. People who want complete capitalist dominance over society are not that different from people who want complete state control over society. Different organizational and legal structure, but same type of backwards moral reasoning.
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Political Compass Memes is the most accurate model humanity has ever invented to effectively categorize politics.
The Political Compass, also known as the Nolan Chart, is used in political science to map political ideologies on a left/right and authoritarian/libertarian grid. The memes are just using that template.
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I often wonder when it was that tankies inherited the far gone misanthropic crazy of the Chans. Both enjoy hate-posting in each others’ communities, so cultural overlaps were bound to occur, but when did the scales tip and aggressive antisocial behavior become pervasive?
Might just be that the "Everyone is against us and we are special" mentality of tankies and 4chan (see: hate for 'normies') attract the same kind of personality.
.... I'll ask. Does it matter if they're one or the other? Will you somehow like them more if they're a specific one of the two?
If push comes to shove, I would still prefers tankies, who are only opportunistically genocidal, to Nazis, who hold genocide as their highest goal. But neither are acceptable, and both are absolutely atrocious. Insofar as one can eschew both of them, one should.
So, horseshoe theory?
Stethoscope theory
LOL I love this
Debunked. Lefties are further than tankies anyway
Tankies, red fascism, stalinists, totalitarian, authoritarian, oligarch & reactionary tendencies have more in common with just regular mask off fascism than with leftism, communism, Marxism...
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This hate among leftists for each other is disturbing. The defense of Marxist-Leninism and Anarchism isn’t productive and only serves those in power. There’s a great possibility that socialism in America and the west will not look anything like socialism of the past or present. I encourage everyone to think of themselves as post- capitalist.
We don’t have a socialist movement in the West, we have an anti-capitalist movement. We need to show that socialism will work without examples from the past, or comparisons to China. We need to give people a framework for the future, not a dogmatic defense of the past.
The meme said nothing about anarchism. ML and anarchism aren't even remotely the same. And are highly incompatible. Thus no need to defend anarchism.
I agree that socialism in the west will likely look different. Which is all the more reason to not repeat the mistakes of leninism. Capitalism and Leninism both are well disproven outdated ideologies.
Anarchism and ML are both anti-capitalist. That was my concern. Climate change requires a post-capitalist future. Capitalism will not operate under a degrowth or sustainable economy. The debate about centralized versus decentralized states or autonomous regions will never happen without cooperation to dismantle capitalism.
Anarchism is more than anti-capitalist. That's an awful narrow and telling reduction of it. If you want to be extremely reductive in your characterization but still accurate. It would be better to say that anarchists are anti-central Authority and large governing structures. Including Marxist leninism and capitalism.
Nearly 100 years ago it may have been possible for naive anarchists to perceive marxist leninism as possible allies. But now nearly 100 years later. Looking back with the wisdom of history and hindsight. When your best outcome with regards to the sensibilities of anarchist is an asterisk in Cuba. And every other single Marxist leninist experiment being as bad or worse in many respects than the Imperial capitalists. How are Marxist Leninist allies of anarchists?
It would be better to say that anarchists are anti-central Authority and large governing structures.
Which is the crux of my question? If an ideological group is opposed to central authority, and large governments, how can it hope to maintain organization in a large country?
I see Marxist-Leninists and Anarchists as allies in the struggle against capitalist accumulation that has fostered the crisis of climate change. Petty disagreements aside, should this not be the overarching goal?
People in the West don't dislike the tenets of socialism, per se. They dislike the autocratic implementation obsessively favored by MLs, which unfortunately represent most historical examples. This is what the tankies refuse to admit, because they are more obsessed with relitigating the cold war than realistic politics.
The sad thing is that there's like 100 years of revisionist theory which gets past a lot of this baggage, but again - the tankies despise it because it isn't their historical home team.
Then use reason and compassion to make them see the error of their ways. Insults and degradation will only make them defensive and dismiss any arguments, however sound.
You can't reason and compassion someone out of a position they didn't reason and compassion themselves into.
Insults > theory?
Letting fascism know it's not welcome in polite company goes a long way towards reducing transmission.
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