Well, what is it?
The opposite of right.
I don’t think there’s an objective answer to this question, it’s a fun question, that gets asked here from time to time.
Unlike say Euclidean geometry, it’s open ended.
So I could’ve asked, what is the left to you?
For me at the moment, the right is a culture’s thesis, its conventions, staples, the left is its antithesis and the center its synthesis.
Largely there’s only one rightwing, but many lefts and centers.
But usually there’s a dominant left, the dominant opposition to a culture.
Exactly!
You win!
Here’s what I wrote somewhere else:
[b]In most ways, leftism is just the opposite of conservativism, or what leftists imagine conservatives believe, the yin or left to conservative’s yang or right.
So if conservatives are ‘racists’, they’re ‘anti-racists’.
If conservatives are ‘misogynists’, they’re misandrists.
If conservatives are for cis straight monogamy, they’re for trans gay polyamory.
If conservatives are for economic and reproductive growth, they’re for degrowth.
If conservatives are meat and potatoes, they’re for anything but, exotic foreign cuisine, vegetarianism, veganism, crickets, mealworms…
If conservatives are into health and fitness, they’re into ‘body positivity’.
If conservatives are hierarchical, they’re egalitarian, at least in theory, in practice they often just establish new hierarchies or strengthen existing ones (in)advertently.
If conservatives are into reason, experience, orthodoxy, pragmatism and common sense, they’re into emotion, theory, heterodoxy, idealism and nonsense.
If conservatives are theists who believe in freewill and worship God, leftists are atheists, determinists and worship human beings, whether it’s themselves, celebritards, ‘victims’ (negros, natives, women, queers…) or activists.
A minority of leftists get into Satanism and the occult, increasingly
their influence can be blatantly seen all over pop culture.
Another minority get into transhumanism, which can be thought of as a form of fake salvation through Ai, cybernetics and genetic engineering.
If conservatives are nationalists, they’re globalists.
If conservatives are capitalists, they’re social democrats.
If conservative are isolations, they’re interventionists and Russophobes.
We can think of Actual liberal democracy, journalism and science as neutral ground, something neither left nor right, but unfortunately leftists have nearly completely taken over mainstream and social media, the soft sciences and even managed to pollute some of the hard like ecology and virology with their ideology.
Of course they’ve also dominated the entertainment industry for decades.
I guess it’s because conservatives have families, churches and communities, so leftists needed places of their own to congregate, and they chose academia, media and entertainment to spread ‘the message’.
It was a mistake for conservatives to let them takeover these places, we need to take them back and make them at least neutral again, places where freedom of thought/speech/inquiry reign.
When you think about it, it’s pretty stupid to base your whole worldview on just being against whatever another group of people are for, but that’s what leftists have done, and that’s why I think leftist is a better name for these people than liberal or progressive, because they’re simply and stupidly left of whatever the right’s been doing because it’s usually worked out for generations upon generations.
Really these people have no imagination or creativity, ‘I’ll have the opposite of whatever that guy’s having over there just out of sheer spite and because I have no ideas, sense or taste of my own’![/b]
My apologies for being a bit mean with the left, really I’m not anti-left, we need the left and the right, just I don’t like the direction the modern, mainstream left has been headed for the last several years.
I think it is a mischaracterization to say the left just wants to change the status quo just to change something, and that the right wants to conserve it just because they hate all change.
What we should all be asking is:
What do we agree is good, that we can conserve, cultivate and grow together?
What do we agree erodes that good stuff, that we can weed out, or build neighborly boundaries against to protect our common interests?
Focus on those things, and the rest will work itself out.
I don’t think it’s a mischaracterization, but it is a simplification, of course there’s nuance, and no sane person on the right or left is 100% for or against the status quo.
“Well, we can haggle about that.” Prof Albright
I also wrote:
[b]There are even some leftists who oppose math and science because ‘they were created by white men’ and so ‘are racist and sexist’.
…it wasn’t always this way.
There was a time when the left wasn’t just the opposite of convention.
When the left mostly agreed with the right, especially on the fundamentals, when they just wanted to make some adjustments here and there.
…but that was in the past, today’s left isn’t meaningful and thoughtful opposition, it is simply a form of decadent and nihilistic cancer, a manifestation of a civilization’s desire to commit suicide, a sign that western civ may be teetering on the brink, ready to do itself in.[/b]
Anyway, despite what it might look like, I don’t want to make this an anti-left thread, I am leftwing in some ways, for example I’m a social democrat.
I was just blowing off a bit of steam.
If I took a label it would prolly be liberal egalitarian. I would like your feedback on the James’ daughter thread regarding the math/science thing.
The right is present, and past oriented.
They either like the way things are now, or nostalgic for the way things were in recent memory.
They’re also local oriented, they think a nation or region should draw wisdom from its own experiences and traditions or perhaps from nations or regions nearby with similar cultures, rather than from ones in distant lands with alien cultures.
Basically, a nation only has one past and one present, and so there’s only one rightwing, altho we sometimes disagree, mostly about the details, about what happened or is happening.
By contrast the left is future oriented, and there is no one future, there’re many possibilities, even if you’re a determinist, at best you can only make an educated guess at what the outcome of it all will be, and so there are many lefts, Nonetheless a culture usually has a dominant left with a dominant forward thinking vision for how things could be changed and improved upon, made better than they were in the past and present.
Still think you’re wrong about that.
I think the values difference seems to be (or has been presented as) this:
—On the left, we care about bringing about social justice (for those with voices) and preventing past injustices from happening again (for those with voices)… Where social equity already exits, we care about conserving/preserving it. That’s why we care about environmental conservation, because it is the home/context we all share in which social equity can take place.
—The right cares about self-regulation to prevent the past injustices of the tyranny of governmental overreach, and so we want to resist our impulses that upset the fabric of relationships committed to the upbringing of eventual voices who will be self-sufficient, impulse-regulating young adults who will carry the torch forward into old age and pass it on to more eventual voices.
We all need to meet in the middle & rub off on each other & have moderate babies who call b.s. on our hypocrisies of wealth hoarding and fatally silencing future voices.
It’s true the left does try to uphold some, many conventions in fact, like they tried to prevent Roe from being overturned.
So you think the left is a particular ideology, like fighting for what they call ‘socioeconomic’ justice, rather than an all encompassing label for any value, policy or ideology that’s unconventional?
In the French revolution, which is where the terms right and left came from, the right were in favor of absolute monarchy, while from what I gather the left weren’t entirely sure what they were in favor of, there were multiple proposals, limited monarchy, republicanism, democracy and classical liberalism were some of the major ones, but generally they wanted smaller government, particularly when it came to civil rights and the economy, they wanted to end feudalism and the monarchy and church’s dominance over their lives.
Classical liberalism or small government was once considered a leftwing idea, but now it’s regarded as rightwing.
I think it’s because classical liberalism has been around long enough that it’s become convention, part of a longstanding tradition in the west, whereas more recent additions like Roe were, well just that, recent, only dating a few decades ago, and never fully accepted by most, or at least a large portion of our culture, around 50% give or take.
Plus Roe was arguably unconstitutional, and the constitution is a much older and more foundational convention than Roe.
But I get what you’re saying, you can make the argument that the left is either some form, any form, or, a very particular form of social justice, of egalitarianism.
You could make the argument that classical liberalism is no longer considered leftwing because, while egalitarian for the time, is less egalitarian than say ‘cultural Marxism’ and socialism, or at least in theory it’s less egalitarian.
Perhaps the left isn’t one overarching principle like radicalism on the one hand, or egalitarianism on the other, perhaps it’s a collection of principles, and different people emphasize different ones for whatever reasons consciously or unconsciously.
Or perhaps it’s nothing at all, just something we make up on the go, whatever the dominant group over our thinking calls the left, ends up being the left for most people most of the time.
In any case, and also for some thought experiments, I would like to define the left as radicalism, as an attempt to radically change society, government and economics, take them in directions they’ve never been before, or at least not for many, many generations.
In this sense both Germany’s Nazism and the USSR’s socialism could be considered ultra left, because they were both radical change, and so could libertarianism because it too would constitute radical change if ever implemented, especially if implemented overnight.
Anything radical, unconventional, untraditional, is left.
The overturning of Roe was a significant change, but was it radical?
Firstly it was a single change, not many changes.
Secondly many people alive today lived during a time abortion was a matter for the states, not for the federal government.
Thirdly it was arguably unconstitutional.
Lastly, a large portion of the culture never accepted it.
For those reasons, I don’t consider overturning it radical, rather Roe was radical, and the right merely undid a radical change the left made.
As for the egalitarian principle (I mean what is social justice anyway? One man’s equality/justice is another’s inequality/injustice), we leave up in the air, egalitarianism could just as easily be right as left.