4 ms·

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 i

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.
- charlieok 15y ago
  I think there is some overlap between what you and I are suggesting. If people on the right put more weight on allegiance to a tribe, and respecting authority, I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealist past attributed to their tribe or authority. If people on the left put more weight on ending harm and injustice, I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealized future in which these evils are dealt with and solved. I don't doubt that there are really many dimensions to political ideologies, but it seems entirely reasonable to expect a lot of correlation between ideas that seem logically orthogonal to one another. This strikes me as similar to the ideas underlying hunch.com -- that they can ask you about your preferred operating system and brand of fast food, and then predict how you'll vote or what music you'll like.
  - astine 15y ago
    I'm not going to say that there isn't an overlap, because I suspect there is, but you'll have to explain (for example) which so many forms of identity politics, which by definition oriented around tribal loyalty, considered left-wing causes? For example, feminism, minority rights, and class consciousness? (Your average proponent of these causes are simply expressions of the more general fight against injustice, which is true to some degree, but your average skinhead will say the same thing about his cause.) In general, I'd say that your average right-winger and your average left-winger (in American politics anyway) care the same amount about reducing injustice and harm but have radically different understandings of what constitutes injustice and harm and that's where the difference is. EDIT: re "I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealist past attributed to their tribe or authority." In my experience, as often as not, they are just curmudgeony.
    - charlieok 15y ago
      You might be right. I'll confess to a limited knowledge of this subject :) As for which groups have more tribal loyalty... maybe there is something to be gleaned from which have an easy time keeping their members marching in lockstep, vs which have a hard time with that.

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.

charlieok 15y ago
I think there is some overlap between what you and I are suggesting. If people on the right put more weight on allegiance to a tribe, and respecting authority, I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealist past attributed to their tribe or authority. If people on the left put more weight on ending harm and injustice, I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealized future in which these evils are dealt with and solved. I don't doubt that there are really many dimensions to political ideologies, but it seems entirely reasonable to expect a lot of correlation between ideas that seem logically orthogonal to one another. This strikes me as similar to the ideas underlying hunch.com -- that they can ask you about your preferred operating system and brand of fast food, and then predict how you'll vote or what music you'll like.
- astine 15y ago
  I'm not going to say that there isn't an overlap, because I suspect there is, but you'll have to explain (for example) which so many forms of identity politics, which by definition oriented around tribal loyalty, considered left-wing causes? For example, feminism, minority rights, and class consciousness? (Your average proponent of these causes are simply expressions of the more general fight against injustice, which is true to some degree, but your average skinhead will say the same thing about his cause.) In general, I'd say that your average right-winger and your average left-winger (in American politics anyway) care the same amount about reducing injustice and harm but have radically different understandings of what constitutes injustice and harm and that's where the difference is. EDIT: re "I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealist past attributed to their tribe or authority." In my experience, as often as not, they are just curmudgeony.
  - charlieok 15y ago
    You might be right. I'll confess to a limited knowledge of this subject :) As for which groups have more tribal loyalty... maybe there is something to be gleaned from which have an easy time keeping their members marching in lockstep, vs which have a hard time with that.