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Whistleblowers are anti-authoritarian, which is typically a right wing/conservative position in contemporary politics. To the people downvoting me here: can yo

Whistleblowers are anti-authoritarian, which is typically a right wing/conservative position in contemporary politics. To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. The people protesting lockdowns, protesting vaccine passports, and protesting any sort of central planning have been on the right. Free speech has become a right wing position which leftists mock (muh freeze peach), gun rights are right wing.

deleted 5y ago
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Kuinox 5y ago
Ahem what, anti-authoritarian mean "right wing" ? That's far from the truth. Left/right came from the French revolution, the left wanted the king death, king being the symbol of authority in the country.
- vaxxedormasked 5y ago
  That was centuries ago. Leftists today think you should take the jab or lose your job, because the government says so, even if the jab doesn't really work, and even if you still have to take other non pharmaceutical precautions. And the leader of the left today, President Biden, doesn't really care if he has the legal authority to issue the decrees he has issued, and has said as much, about the eviction ban he unilaterally levied in defiance of the Court I can do this for idiots on the Right, too, by the way. Authoritarianism is at home everywhere on the political spectrum, because at least in the US the political divide is largely cultural, not ideological, despite all the rhetoric claiming the contrary
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    I know a lot of leftists who would do a spit-take laughing about you calling Biden the "leader of the left today". Contemporary leftists hate Biden/Harris almost as much as they ever hated Trump.
lexapro 5y ago
Isn't anti-authoritarian typically considered a leftist position? So the opposite of what you are saying?
- willcipriano 5y ago
  Depends on who currently is the authoritarian. Left wing authoritarians make right wing anti-authoritarians and vice versa.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    I think this is obviously the right answer. There have clearly been left wing avd right wing authoritarians in history. These days in, western countries at least, most authoritarian are right wing. Trump and the conservative party in the UK being the clearest examples. I define here authoritarian as someone who is decreasing democracy and transparency. Not caring if they do it for the right or wrong reasons. Also clearly all leaders are a bit authoritarian, Obama did sine things as did Blair. But it pales in degree to the current leaders.
    - _ivvf 5y ago
      [flagged]
      - kmonsen 5y ago
        You cannot use heartland institute as a source. If the claim is that it is leftwing because they are supported by the working class than the republican party is leftwing/socialist which is hard to take seriously. As for your question the easiest and clearest example would be Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte of Chile that was supported by the right wing forces in the US, including Milton Friedman. I would encourage you to look aside from your partisan lenses. Note that I do not in any way argue against that Stalin or Mao most likely should be considered left wing and were brutal authoritarians that was a stain on the world.
        5y ago
kypro 5y ago
I think you're being downvoted because historically anti-authoritarianism has been associated with the left and that was where I always found myself politically. However, these days I would agree that a lot of people who consider themselves "anti-authoritarianism" are on the right. I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had me accused of being right wing -- supporting the brexit vote, being in favour of freespeech, opposing mandated government lockdowns, etc. I'd also add that there are probably two fractions of right-wing thought today: the "establishment/republican" right-wing and the new "right-wing", as you say, people like, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Russel Brand, etc. It's the latter group I think you're referring to specifically.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I don't think that Russel Brand would take too kindly to you labelling him "new right wing" even with double quotes on. There's a word we don't use much these days - iconoclastic - that I think would satisfy him much more, but even so, in some ways he likes to think of himself as a traditionalist in some areas.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Edward Snowden is absolutely a leftist (see this recent Twitter post, for example: https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/1445193463960457216 https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/144519346396045721...). Russel Brand is a leftist, though he sometimes speaks in ways the cultural left would rather he didn't. Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange both certainly used to be leftists, and may still be at heart, but they've both let personal grudges define their alliances for them and offend a lot of allies on the left. They're certainly not meaningfully right-wing, though.
  - alentist 5y ago
    > Edward Snowden is absolutely a leftist On what basis do you claim that? Does the following paint the picture of a leftist in your mind? > And he became furious about Obama’s domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. “See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment,” Snowden wrote, in another chat. “Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.” > At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) [...] He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential primaries. Ayn Rand seems to have inspired his personal philosophy. [0] [0] https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-galt https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-...
gibrown 5y ago
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? Martin Luther King.
- dgb23 5y ago
  And a few others with media attention from the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  He said contemporary American society. MLK died 53 years ago.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Are you intending to claim that the second half of the 20th century isn't contemporary? I'm not a historian, but I've understood "contemporary" as a term that refers to events that have occurred in the lifetimes of active historians. Given that a decent chunk of the US's population was alive in 1968 and hasn't even retired yet, it probably fits neatly into that category.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    Right, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history "[..] a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present."
dragonwriter 5y ago
> I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. I’ve never seen that for Snowden, and for Assange and Greenwald they’ve been accused of becoming agents of the right leveraging appeal left-coded ideals and their past left association to advance particular right interests fairly recently, so even the accusations of them personally being on the right doesn't support the idea that the framework they use is one of the right. > To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? anti-police protestors (protesting the agents of authoritarianism and their insulation from accountability by state power), pipeline protestors (protesting seizure of land by centralized state power for pipelines), etc.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  The anti-police riots last year are interesting to me. There were plenty of right wing militias present at those things fighting the police as well. Here's a video of the "boogaloo boys" in Kenosha WI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYsKMkrMDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYsKMkrMDM While I totally agree that it was primarily a left-led movement, and recognize that "fighting the cops" does seem on its face like a liberal idea, it does seem a bit internally confused. Some of the founders of that movement call themselves marxists (about as authoritarian as you could possibly get), and much of the imagery and iconography used in the protests was borrowed from soviet/communist history. There was also the tacit threat of more violence if the trial didn't go the way the protestors wanted; suppression of the court system is hardly a liberal idea.
woodruffw 5y ago
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? Noam Chomsky?
- Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
  Georg Orwell Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Orwell is a fantastic example. He's also a profoundly amusing example, since quoting him is inversely correlated with (1) actually agreeing with his politics, and (2) familiarity with (dystopian) fiction outside of a 10th grade English class.
    - Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
      It seems blatantly accusing everyone mentioning Orwell of being uneducated and misinformed has itself become a meme. Sadly the effect of the unprovoked and needless regurgitation of such ad-hominems is that people regret mentioning him, even when, as you yourself proclaim, the mentioning is perfectly valid.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        Everyone is uneducated and misinformed, but some are more uneducated and misinformed than others!
    - alentist 5y ago
      Despite being a socialist, Orwell was very critical of the socialists of his time (especially the Soviets and Spanish communists), to the extent that he gradually became a Labour reformist later in life. In all, his most significant contribution, as he himself perceived it, was opposition to totalitarianism and to the corruption of language and thought by the political Left. On that, one can certainly "agree with his politics" without agreeing with all of it.
mywittyname 5y ago
I equate authoritarianism with police support. I'm sure others do as well, since the police are the enforcement arm of the government. Specifically support for their extra-judicial murders, civil asset forfeiture, creation of training protocols designed to encourage, or even mandate brutality against citizens, a culture that protects abusers, etc. People protesting murders by police are almost always leftist. The people protesting CAF are largely leftist. The few politicians looking to rein in police abuses are largely leftist. And "Thin Blue Line" supporters are nearly all right wingers. If you can't get the police to follow the law, then you're going to end up with an authoritarian society.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  Are those positions really ideologically consistent though, or based on any underlying political philosophy? Were the “anti police” people at any of the protests for Ashli Babbitt? Were any of them any of the protest for the prisoners being held for crimes like “conspiracy to commit interstate commerce” after the January 6th riot? How many anti civil asset forfeiture people also believe in “red flag laws”? Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; that doesn’t mean that sometimes left-voters don’t accidentally protest authority when it suits them. A violent revolutionary trying to topple a western liberal democracy to replace it with a communist dictatorship is locally anti authority, but authority is still the core of the political philosophy. They just want to get rid of the existing authority because they don’t think it is strong enough.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    > Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; That's just not true, though. Leftist political authority is about overthrowing the dominant existing authority (formerly, feudalism, today capitalism), and replacing it with something where whatever authority remains derives more meaningfully from the people governed. Marxism-Leninism was a strategic philosophy about using as much authority as necessary to prevent counterrevolution; Lenin's writings specifically refer to the state "withering away" as it is no longer needed to defend the revolution. Of course, in practice, the need to defend the revolution never ended, which meant the state could never wither away, which is, I'm sure, how a lot of Soviet bureaucrats liked it. On the other hand, there was never any shortage of criticism of Lenin from the left, starting with Luxemburg (supportive but critical) and Makhno (actually fought the Red Army) to Trotsky (more critical than supportive, killed by Stalin's agents). I'd also note, with regard to your example of "red flag laws", that actual leftists are much more supportive of gun rights than liberals. Look into the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association if you're interested.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Kuinox 5y ago

Ahem what, anti-authoritarian mean "right wing" ? That's far from the truth. Left/right came from the French revolution, the left wanted the king death, king being the symbol of authority in the country.

vaxxedormasked 5y ago
That was centuries ago. Leftists today think you should take the jab or lose your job, because the government says so, even if the jab doesn't really work, and even if you still have to take other non pharmaceutical precautions. And the leader of the left today, President Biden, doesn't really care if he has the legal authority to issue the decrees he has issued, and has said as much, about the eviction ban he unilaterally levied in defiance of the Court I can do this for idiots on the Right, too, by the way. Authoritarianism is at home everywhere on the political spectrum, because at least in the US the political divide is largely cultural, not ideological, despite all the rhetoric claiming the contrary
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  I know a lot of leftists who would do a spit-take laughing about you calling Biden the "leader of the left today". Contemporary leftists hate Biden/Harris almost as much as they ever hated Trump.

lexapro 5y ago

Isn't anti-authoritarian typically considered a leftist position? So the opposite of what you are saying?

willcipriano 5y ago
Depends on who currently is the authoritarian. Left wing authoritarians make right wing anti-authoritarians and vice versa.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  I think this is obviously the right answer. There have clearly been left wing avd right wing authoritarians in history. These days in, western countries at least, most authoritarian are right wing. Trump and the conservative party in the UK being the clearest examples. I define here authoritarian as someone who is decreasing democracy and transparency. Not caring if they do it for the right or wrong reasons. Also clearly all leaders are a bit authoritarian, Obama did sine things as did Blair. But it pales in degree to the current leaders.
  - _ivvf 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      You cannot use heartland institute as a source. If the claim is that it is leftwing because they are supported by the working class than the republican party is leftwing/socialist which is hard to take seriously. As for your question the easiest and clearest example would be Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte of Chile that was supported by the right wing forces in the US, including Milton Friedman. I would encourage you to look aside from your partisan lenses. Note that I do not in any way argue against that Stalin or Mao most likely should be considered left wing and were brutal authoritarians that was a stain on the world.
      - 5y ago

kypro 5y ago

I think you're being downvoted because historically anti-authoritarianism has been associated with the left and that was where I always found myself politically. However, these days I would agree that a lot of people who consider themselves "anti-authoritarianism" are on the right. I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had me accused of being right wing -- supporting the brexit vote, being in favour of freespeech, opposing mandated government lockdowns, etc. I'd also add that there are probably two fractions of right-wing thought today: the "establishment/republican" right-wing and the new "right-wing", as you say, people like, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Russel Brand, etc. It's the latter group I think you're referring to specifically.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I don't think that Russel Brand would take too kindly to you labelling him "new right wing" even with double quotes on. There's a word we don't use much these days - iconoclastic - that I think would satisfy him much more, but even so, in some ways he likes to think of himself as a traditionalist in some areas.
NoGravitas 5y ago
Edward Snowden is absolutely a leftist (see this recent Twitter post, for example: https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/1445193463960457216 https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/144519346396045721...). Russel Brand is a leftist, though he sometimes speaks in ways the cultural left would rather he didn't. Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange both certainly used to be leftists, and may still be at heart, but they've both let personal grudges define their alliances for them and offend a lot of allies on the left. They're certainly not meaningfully right-wing, though.
- alentist 5y ago
  > Edward Snowden is absolutely a leftist On what basis do you claim that? Does the following paint the picture of a leftist in your mind? > And he became furious about Obama’s domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. “See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment,” Snowden wrote, in another chat. “Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.” > At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) [...] He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential primaries. Ayn Rand seems to have inspired his personal philosophy. [0] [0] https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-galt https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-...

gibrown 5y ago

> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? Martin Luther King.

dgb23 5y ago
And a few others with media attention from the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
commandlinefan 5y ago
He said contemporary American society. MLK died 53 years ago.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Are you intending to claim that the second half of the 20th century isn't contemporary? I'm not a historian, but I've understood "contemporary" as a term that refers to events that have occurred in the lifetimes of active historians. Given that a decent chunk of the US's population was alive in 1968 and hasn't even retired yet, it probably fits neatly into that category.
- trutannus 5y ago
  Right, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history "[..] a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present."

dragonwriter 5y ago

> I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. I’ve never seen that for Snowden, and for Assange and Greenwald they’ve been accused of becoming agents of the right leveraging appeal left-coded ideals and their past left association to advance particular right interests fairly recently, so even the accusations of them personally being on the right doesn't support the idea that the framework they use is one of the right. > To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? anti-police protestors (protesting the agents of authoritarianism and their insulation from accountability by state power), pipeline protestors (protesting seizure of land by centralized state power for pipelines), etc.

thepasswordis 5y ago
The anti-police riots last year are interesting to me. There were plenty of right wing militias present at those things fighting the police as well. Here's a video of the "boogaloo boys" in Kenosha WI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYsKMkrMDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYsKMkrMDM While I totally agree that it was primarily a left-led movement, and recognize that "fighting the cops" does seem on its face like a liberal idea, it does seem a bit internally confused. Some of the founders of that movement call themselves marxists (about as authoritarian as you could possibly get), and much of the imagery and iconography used in the protests was borrowed from soviet/communist history. There was also the tacit threat of more violence if the trial didn't go the way the protestors wanted; suppression of the court system is hardly a liberal idea.

woodruffw 5y ago

> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? Noam Chomsky?

Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
Georg Orwell Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Orwell is a fantastic example. He's also a profoundly amusing example, since quoting him is inversely correlated with (1) actually agreeing with his politics, and (2) familiarity with (dystopian) fiction outside of a 10th grade English class.
  - Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
    It seems blatantly accusing everyone mentioning Orwell of being uneducated and misinformed has itself become a meme. Sadly the effect of the unprovoked and needless regurgitation of such ad-hominems is that people regret mentioning him, even when, as you yourself proclaim, the mentioning is perfectly valid.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      Everyone is uneducated and misinformed, but some are more uneducated and misinformed than others!
  - alentist 5y ago
    Despite being a socialist, Orwell was very critical of the socialists of his time (especially the Soviets and Spanish communists), to the extent that he gradually became a Labour reformist later in life. In all, his most significant contribution, as he himself perceived it, was opposition to totalitarianism and to the corruption of language and thought by the political Left. On that, one can certainly "agree with his politics" without agreeing with all of it.

mywittyname 5y ago

I equate authoritarianism with police support. I'm sure others do as well, since the police are the enforcement arm of the government. Specifically support for their extra-judicial murders, civil asset forfeiture, creation of training protocols designed to encourage, or even mandate brutality against citizens, a culture that protects abusers, etc. People protesting murders by police are almost always leftist. The people protesting CAF are largely leftist. The few politicians looking to rein in police abuses are largely leftist. And "Thin Blue Line" supporters are nearly all right wingers. If you can't get the police to follow the law, then you're going to end up with an authoritarian society.

thepasswordis 5y ago
Are those positions really ideologically consistent though, or based on any underlying political philosophy? Were the “anti police” people at any of the protests for Ashli Babbitt? Were any of them any of the protest for the prisoners being held for crimes like “conspiracy to commit interstate commerce” after the January 6th riot? How many anti civil asset forfeiture people also believe in “red flag laws”? Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; that doesn’t mean that sometimes left-voters don’t accidentally protest authority when it suits them. A violent revolutionary trying to topple a western liberal democracy to replace it with a communist dictatorship is locally anti authority, but authority is still the core of the political philosophy. They just want to get rid of the existing authority because they don’t think it is strong enough.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  > Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; That's just not true, though. Leftist political authority is about overthrowing the dominant existing authority (formerly, feudalism, today capitalism), and replacing it with something where whatever authority remains derives more meaningfully from the people governed. Marxism-Leninism was a strategic philosophy about using as much authority as necessary to prevent counterrevolution; Lenin's writings specifically refer to the state "withering away" as it is no longer needed to defend the revolution. Of course, in practice, the need to defend the revolution never ended, which meant the state could never wither away, which is, I'm sure, how a lot of Soviet bureaucrats liked it. On the other hand, there was never any shortage of criticism of Lenin from the left, starting with Luxemburg (supportive but critical) and Makhno (actually fought the Red Army) to Trotsky (more critical than supportive, killed by Stalin's agents). I'd also note, with regard to your example of "red flag laws", that actual leftists are much more supportive of gun rights than liberals. Look into the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association if you're interested.