I’ve come to two realizations recently:
One
The sudden tankie willingness to believe that Trump cares about a cease-fire in Gaza, and got tough with the Israelis and then they capitulated which Biden could have done at any time, sheds some interesting light on how the tankies think. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of shifting their realities around, such that anything Biden does is good, anything the State Department says is always true, even if it contradicts itself or basic common sense or reality. I always thought that this was just a lazy reality-free arguing tactic, but in retrospect, I should have realized that it’s a tell about their own thought process. Just like it’s a warning sign if someone constantly suspects their partner of cheating, or is constantly on an absurdly hypervigilant lookout for scams and people trying to cheat them out of money, this is a key revelation about the way Hexbear itself looks at reality.
Trump is a capable diplomat, if believing that lets them trash Biden. Trump cares about Palestinians, if believing that lets them trash Biden. The cart is firmly in its place in front, and everything else including the horse can follow along depending on what the cart dictates.
Two
Hexbear’s censorship, and wild hostility to anyone who comes to “their” place and tries not to toe the party line, really does do a pretty effective job of distorting the view of reality and consensus that their users are able to experience.
Take a look at these and compare:
The political spectrum isn’t a line: it’s a circle. It doesn’t matter if you go left or right, once you go far enough, both sides meet on “authoritarianism.” Trump wants to be a dictator. Tankies love dictators. Social cohesion is infinitely more important to these people than how they get there. As long as there’s a government regulated “in” crowd and they’re part of it, they’ll justify any level of doublespeak, goal post moving and hypocrisy, and they’re willing to perform any amount of mental gymnastics to get there.
this is a ridiculous take, just entirely forgetting the existence of anarchists, it seems. by that logic, anarchists are the enlightened center now, by virtue of being as far removed from authoritarianism (and therefore political extremism) as possible.
also, how does that form a circle? if i go even further left than left-auth, would i go over right-auth, right, right-moderate, until i end up at… where exactly?
I mean, if you want a real genuine answer, it’s that simplifying the entirety of political thought into a binary is a rediculous premise to begin with, and highlights one of the core fallacies that the human condition leads to time and time again: that of false dichotomy. Calling the political spectrum a circle is exactly as absurd as calling it a line, and taking either of these paradigms to be literal and infallible is to grossly misunderstand politics.
My point is more that both routes, left or right, have a path through extremism into authoritarianism. Try not to take the silly analogy I used to communicate this point so literally.
right, my objection came more from you making it seem like extremism=authoritarianism, as if libertarianism isnt an extremist idea.
the second paragraph was mostly me having a bit of fun, though tbh i still dont see how a cirular political model holds any merit except that it gives one the ability to say: “look at those extremists, they are all the same!”
I do believe that extremism lends itself to authoritarianism. The deeper you are rooted into your belief structure, the more likely you are to believe everyone else has gotten it wrong, and the more likely you are to think imposing your beliefs on others is in their best interests. The circular model that I proposed is simply a way of highlighting this.
While I am sure this isn’t true of all libertarians, they tend to be ogliarchs (or wannabe ogliarchs) in sheeps clothing. We may have another word for rule by the rich and economically powerful, but I do not think the gap between them and fascists is wide enough to avoid the blanket of “authoritarianism.” I do think libertarianism is an extremist idea that just leads to a different flavour of authoritarianism, thus my point.
extremism isnt an objective thing though, just like centrism, its always dependent on the overton window. thus imo trying to tie any meaning more specific than “outside the frame of common political discussion” to extremism is a fools errant.
besides that, i think we simply speak on different terms. with “libertarians” i refer to both left wing and right wing, while your last post indicates to me that you are specifically talking about right wing libertarians (i.e not anarchists) correct? in that case i agree that this form of libertarianism inevitibly leads to rule of oligarchs.
I think this is something a lot of people here miss. The farther you move to the extremes the more reality gets distorted. Tankies are so far left that there views are wildly distorted. Part of the extremes is also authoritarianism but that’s mostly because that’s the only way maintain there limited world view.
They are not in any meaningful sense left. What happens is it when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. The reason tankies look so similar to magats. Is because they are unified in a Devotion to strong men and a authoritarianism over left or right. They believe that might makes right and disagreement is punishable by Death. No more no less. They are authoritarians and will use whatever economic policy they think serves the case in point china.
I disagree. The defining characteristic of the left is the belief in owning the means of production. Authoritarian right still believes in privately owned corporations owning the means of production, while the authoritarian left believes in state ownership of the means of production. (Which, IMO, is slightly worse than corporate ownership, as you have no higher authority to whom you can appeal.) The anti-authoritarian left believes that the people themselves should directly control the means of production, without an intermediary like the state.
The problem is they don’t under leninism. Not in any actual sense. The vanguard party does. Everyone else are disposable proletariat. To be imprisoned or slaughtered should the vanguard party feel threatened.
Modern Russian oligarchs were given their wealth and position by the vanguard. Not by the proletariat. China is a similar story. Leninism/maoism has never, and will never work. It’s just a system that creates the same wealthy ruling class via slightly different means. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Not all of leftists are Leninists though. Certainly some are, maybe most. But Leninism is only one form of leftist belief. I’m personally much closer to an anarchist than a Leninist. (…And I’m very, very aware that anarchists end up getting executed as soon as leftist coalitions take power.) I also recognize that a truly non-hierarchical society is functionally unworkable at anything larger than a tribal level, and that there’s a strong tendency for non-hierarchical socialist societies to devolve into authoritarianism at the slightest provocation.
I don’t think that I ever implied that they were. Because that would be really silly me being a left anarchist/libertarian. I have no problem with leftists or knowing what leftists are. I just have problem with authoritarians whether they pretend to be left or right.
And yes hierarchies are not completely avoidable. But they should be as local and as granular as possible. And we can have a really vociferous and act of debate on that. But National level organizations have always been one of the biggest problems.
I agree with that 100%. No matter how good the local group is, it can quickly be poisoned by the national org. I understand wanting to organize nationally, because that’s how you start to wield real power, buuuuuuuttttttt…
Yes they may be a necessary evil to some extent but they should always be the ones answerable to others and not the one to be answered to. So many of our current problems with parties here in the United States stem from over concentration/centralization. Large unanswerable on accountable organizations that ignore the General Public. And especially when it comes to Democrats do not invest locally.