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I'm a German and I wonder if the word "right-wing" is understood in the same way by US Americans as it is understood by us. Because of our past, we treat everyt

• count 15y ago
  You are correct with respect to the USA - right wing here is traditionally just 'conservative'. Recently that's started being tinged around 'religious' as well. Definitely not 'skinhead racist'.
  • cchurch 15y ago
    As someone who could easily be described as "right-wing" in the USA, I'm curious how Germany would describe someone who is for limited-government, individual liberties, and reduced entitlement spending? Or, also in the scope of "American right-wing," how would Germany describe someone who injects Christian morality into their politics?
    • eru 15y ago
      > As someone who could easily be described as "right-wing" in the USA, I'm curious how Germany would describe someone who is for limited-government, individual liberties, and reduced entitlement spending? Liberal. > Or, also in the scope of "American right-wing," how would Germany describe someone who injects Christian morality into their politics? Religious nut. Germans don't mix politics and religion. (Quiet piety is OK, but don't talk about it in front of voters.)
      • hvs 15y ago
        As to your second point, people like me can only dream of a day when Americans didn't mix politics with faux-religiosity. (I refuse to call the way that many Americans use religion in such a public manner as having anything to do with true piety or spirtuality).
    • erikb 15y ago
      What you describe is like the governing party in Germany at the moment. The 2 big parties in Germany are a little like the 2 US parties, although we have more parties which are just not that powerful. But both big parties are considered as central, one a little leaning to the left, one a little leaning to the right. The conservative/christian party is the more right-sided one, but nobody would call them right-wing.
      • eru 15y ago
        The CDU is for limited government? And individual liberties took quite a beating. (The greens and FDP seem somewhat more in favour of indidivual liberties.)
    • sixothree 15y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
• borism 15y ago
  Extreme right-wing is understood the same pretty much everywhere except maybe extreme right-wing itself. Now here in Estonia and I venture a guess in pretty much all of liberal democratic countries (and most notably USA) right-wing IS actually associated if not equal with extreme right-wing, since there actually is no left-wing. So when Obama or our centrist parties are labelled "communist" by teabaggers and such, you actually begin to understand that something is terribly out of balance with democratic systems of ours.
  • hvs 15y ago
    To make a statement like "the right-wing IS actually equal with the extreme right-wing" is to invalidate your entire argument and show that you can't differentiate people that you disagree with.
    • CWuestefeld 15y ago
      I'm surprised you didn't also cite his claim that "there actually is no left-wing" in America, and the implication in "Obama or our centrist parties" that the American left is really just the natural order of things. All-in-all, the post you reacted to is a remarkable example of political blinders. Although I'm just guessing, it seems to be exactly what pundits are talking about when they refer to the Internet "echo chamber". I can have a productive conversation with someone who disagrees with me, but understands the philosophies on which my ideas are based. Talking with someone who believes that there are no other legitimate philosophies is just wasting air.
      • borism 15y ago
        I am very well aware that there is left wing in America, it just isn't represented in any meaningful way in political system in my and many others' opinion. Can you bring counterexamples? Here's an article that is shaping my opinion on the matter from very respected "progressive" James K. Galbraith: http://www.alternet.org/economy/151949/how_obama_is_neutralizing_the_left_and_tilting_rightward/?page=entire http://www.alternet.org/economy/151949/how_obama_is_neutrali... P.S. if you disagree, I'd appreciate explanation about what exactly.
• charlieok 15y ago
  I'd guess the definition of "right-wing" slides along with the definition of "moderate" or "center" (and also "left-wing") in any particular place. If the US is in general more right-leaning than Germany, then "right-wing" should also be farther right in the US than in Germany, yes? It seems careless to compress political opinions into a single dimension stretching from "communist" on the extreme left to "fascist" on the extreme right. I'm guessing this simplification holds up as well as it does because of a tendency for people's beliefs to cluster according to the weights they put on a few basic ideas of morality (and perhaps more fundamentally, whether they consider those ideas to be moral issues or not). Jonathan Haidt gave an interesting TED talk about this ( http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.ht... ). He named five 'types' of morality: Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity. His thesis was that people on the left tend to value Harm and Fairness far above the other three, while on the right people tend to value all five roughly equally.
  • erikb 15y ago
    Well, after WW2 there are maybe 2 to 3 generations in Germany who are trained very hard to the idea of "right=fascism". There is no other right-wing in Germany. CDU (the governing party right now) is christian and thus quite conservative. We don't consider them right-wing, though. They are more like the right side of the center. It is probably hard to understand if you never went to Germany. The word "right" itself has a bad touch to it (the meaning of "correct" has another word in German). It is already part of the language and the daily thinking. Just some of us can think a little outside of that box (like me, but I also have a hard time accepting people stretching their right arm for fun or using plates with the German fascist symbols on it). Btw. I can't express that opinion (that Germans have a too simple opinion of fascism and the right-wing) in Germany in the open, because people will think I am plain stupid or maybe a fascist myself.
  • astine 15y ago
    The terms 'right-wing' and 'left-wing' are throwbacks to the French revolution where pro-revolutionary elements of the National Assembly sat on the left side and anti-revolutionary elements sat to the right. The terms have lost most of their meaning over the years and have come to be really just labels for one of two factions vying for control of a nation at any given moment. (There may be more than two factions, but multiple factions will generally coalesce into two coalitions. This is due to how politics generally works and is fairly predictable.) If there is any meaning to the right-wing vs left-wing dichotomy, it's that 'right-wing' political philosophies use as their inspiration an idealized past, whereas 'left-wing' political philosophies use as their inspiration an imaginary future, but even this is a simplification. The truth is that political ideologies don't fall along an axis (or even two axises as the Libertarians claim) and trying to classify someone as either right-wing or left-wing is more often an exercise in politics than clarity.
• hvs 15y ago
  I can understand Germany's aversion to anything "right-wing", but since they have even more recently dealt with the extreme left of Communism, I'm curious as to how you label your more centrist parties. You are correct that right-wing generally means "conservative" in the U.S., but it can also just mean "fiscally conservative" since libertarians in the U.S. are often painted as "right-wing" even though they are socially-liberal/fiscally-conservative. For the most part, though, right-wing means fiscally and socially conservative.
  • eru 15y ago
    In the German political system the liberal party is the right-most party. But that's because we use the original meaning of liberal. The other parties are social democrats, and christ democrats, greens, and there's the party democratic socialists on the left fringe. In practice, everybody's a social democrat in Germany to one degree or another.
    • hvs 15y ago
      I guess that you are raising another important point that "liberal" means different things in Europe and the U.S. "Liberal," in the classical meaning of the term, would most appropriately be applied to libertarians and to the social policies of American liberals. "Liberal" in the U.S. is generally "hands-off" with regard to social policy (many exceptions to that, of course) but tends to believe in having a strong government presence in the economy. It's all a big muddled mess once you really start digging into it. A pretty large number of Americans actually self-identify as "Independent" in elections because they don't want to be associated with either major party (even if they usually vote with only one) and many Americans don't like to be seen as "going with the crowd." My guess is that most Americans are actually pretty similar in their political beliefs, and that what you see from both of the more extreme sides in the news, is actually the exception. But I could be completely wrong on that.
• nhebb 15y ago
  The part I didn't understand was that the slogan for the concert was "Never again communism - Freedom for Germany". Do I take this to mean that anyone opposing communism is considered a right-winger in eastern Germany?
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • erikb 15y ago
    Nope. Just if you say something like "Against Foreigners" you just go to jail. So the new skinheads (neo nazis, as we call them, don't know if that is an English word, too) try to act more political correct, while being in the open.
    • nhebb 15y ago
      They're called neo nazis here in the US too. They're not mainstream right-wingers, but an extreme element on the fringes. I'm still missing the link between not wanting communism to return to eastern Germany and neo-nazism, though. I assume you mean that the slogan is a political misdirection.
      • erikb 15y ago
        Yes, it is meant as being misleading. There is no direct link between anti comunism and neo nazism. I just think neo nazis are against pretty much every thing, so I am also not confused to see them using anti comunism slogans. Their power and attention comes from being against something. What that something is, that is probably not so important.
  • golden_apples 15y ago
    In most of the world where the political "center" isn't as strong as it is in the US, the conflict between extreme left - the autonomen, who are primarily anarchist and to a lesser degree, communist - and the extreme right - neo-nazis is a more central part of the political landscape. The same thing happens here in the US, where neo-nazis respond to groups like Anti-Racist Action by forming front groups with names like "Anti-Communist Action". Its just that both sides are far overshadowed by more moderate liberal and conservative elements.
• eru 15y ago
  > Because of our past, we treat everything coming from the "right" as being totally wrong and stupid (which might be good or not). I noticed this, too. Especially jarring, if intelligent people present being left-wing as the only sane political choice for other intelligent people. While I couldn't care less about labels, my a contrarian self still gets a giggle out of explaining that my libertarian beliefs put me firmly into `right-wing' of politics without making me a neo-nazi idiot.