4 ms·

Authoritarian versus Libertarian? Really?

• tomrod 3mo ago
  Substitute 'Communitarian' and 'Classical Liberal' if you find the common political compass terms too charged.
  • MarkusQ 3mo ago
    Since when are Socialists considered Classical Liberals? It's not that the labels are charged, it's that they are nonsensical unless you look at them from a very narrow bespoke perspective, where "things I like" go on one side and "bad things" go on the other. Objectively (or even from any other biased perspective), it's rubbish.
    • tomrod 3mo ago
      They aren't. You flipped them, not sure if intentionally or by accident.
      • MarkusQ 3mo ago
        So are you saying Xi Jinping is the Classical Liberal and Bernie Sanders is the Comunitarian? Or are you saying it's the other way around? (For clarity: I didn't "flip" them, I'm saying that they are both Communitarian and neither is a Classical Liberal.)
        • tomrod 3mo ago
          Correct, which is why your question didn't make sense earlier. Typically, one would refer to the political compass as a good starting reference. It has two axes, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. Communism is authoritarian left. DSA is more left, with some libertarian and some authoritarian. It's more regions than binary flags.
          • MarkusQ 3mo ago
            Classical liberalism: a political and economic philosophy emphasizing individual rights, civil liberties, limited government, and free markets. We are are talking about the famous Xi Jinping, right? The one that rules China with an iron fist? And not just some guy you know who happens to share the same name?
            • tomrod 3mo ago
              I think you may have thought I claimed classical liberal and communitarianism were verbal substitutes for each other. If so, let us blame my wording and the python-level looseness of English. My intent was to point out that folks sometimes have strange personal issues with the terms libertarian and authoritarian, and if they do, then without loss of generality they may substitute classical liberal and communitarian respectively. Accordingly, your insistence on drawing an equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Xi Jinping reads as very bizarre and out of the blue since Xi is Communist (Auth-left) and Bernie is left (mix of auth and libertarian but left on the orthogonal axis to authortarian/classical liberal). If that doesn't clarify your mistaken read, then let us leave the conversation where it stands as I'm not terribly interested engaging in further platforming someone's personal flamewar topic.
    • mcv 3mo ago
      Yeah, Libertarian is better. The first use of Libertarian was in the phrase Libertarian Communism. That, Libertarian Socialism and Anarchism are what the far ends of that bottom left corner is mostly about, although there is progressive liberalism, which is the more common moderate areas of that quarter.
• MarkusQ 3mo ago
  And the two most "Libertarian" politicians listed (Sanders and Sánchez) are both avowed Socialists...WTF? I really think this says more about the biases of whoever came up with it (or their sources) than anything about reality.
  • summarybot 3mo ago
    Small government vs Big government and Family Values vs Social Nonobligation would have been much cleaner.