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Comment by Claudus | Hacker News Reader

My perception of the mindset of the typical liberal in the past was that it was more about making change for the benefit of everyone in the country (don’t worry conservatives , this will work out for the best). Now it is more about making change that benefits some at the expense of others (screw you conservatives). In order to push political agendas like this, political opposition needs to be more negatively portrayed and demonized. My perception of conservatives is that they are trending in this direction too, and the result is more fracturing of our societies.

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'Liberal' and 'conservative' are just labels that no longer describe the same ideologies as in the past.

19th C liberals were sort of like modern day libertarians, but in the context of the European monarchies at the time which were explicitly oppressive.

20th century progressives with their universal social programs were social democrats.

Modern day liberals are split between 'centrist' neo-liberals and more hardcore leftists.

The neo-libs are basically still trying to promote universalish improvement, but are not willing to tax their corporate donors to do it. So all they're left with is culture war posturing and legislation, since that's fiscally free.

The more hardcore leftists, in America, seem to heavily skew towards helping particular disadvantaged groups, as opposed to the universalizing efforts of early 20th C socialists(be it racial or sexual minorities or whatever). And some of these groups care more about equality than they do absolute improvement for everyone.

As for conservatives, modern day American conservatism is HARD reactionary and in no way conservative. The social programs they are trying to privatize and dismantle have existed for 60-80 years. The conservative position would be to preserve things like Social Security and Medicare. If anything the most conservative force, when it comes to the role of government, in American politics right now are the Centrist Democrats, since they're the party of small tweaks.

It's curious that you see a spectrum in the left, but not in the right. That might suggest bias, but I'd like to give you the benefit of doubt. There is no universal conservative position, nor are all conservatives reactionary. Just as those far to the left have strayed from classical liberalism, those far to the right have strayed from classical conservatism. With the rampant labeling and tribalism so popular these days, many of us just don't know what political camp we fit into anymore.

Update: If you're downvoting, please do share why, or share a critique or rebuttal. I'd genuinely like to read some opposing opinions. I had thought that was a fair reply to the parent as the political spectrum in U.S. politics has been rather well-documented as diverse both to the left and to the right.

I’m always a bit entertained by people who claim they want to express a non-biased view of partisan dynamics, and then proceed to express something that is a perfect representation of the fundamental attribution error.

Personally I think the primary contention that exists between the dogma of the left and the right is just the contention between collectivism and individualism. But outliers aside, I don’t think you end up with substantially different policies from one side or the other, regardless of the contrast in the dogma. I don’t think members of either tribe are substantially different in their dogmatism, reactionism… or in their proclivity to deeply reflect on the views they hold. For any person who finds themselves substantially aligned with a mainstream political ideology, I think the chance that they’ve put a substantial amount of critical thought into their world view is very close to 0.

> is just the contention between collectivism and individualism

Yes.

> I’m always a bit entertained by people who claim they want to express a non-biased view of partisan dynamics, and then proceed to express something that is a perfect representation of the fundamental attribution error.

Were you commenting on the parent to my reply, or to my reply specifically? Genuine curiosity.

Sorry for not being clear, I think the error is in the comment above yours. I think your comment is very level headed.

I guess you got downvoted for both-sidesing it(Upvoted, btw :D)? I mean both parties do quite suck, even though I still think the GOP is actively harmful, while the Democratic party has good ideas that it fails to build on.

The actual party policies only really diverge on social issues. Economic policy consensus has been corporatist since the Reagan years. The main difference is the democrats are willing to blast out the occasional one-off stimulus and the GOP is also willing to do that but a smaller one-off stimulus.

I don't really see collectivism vs individualism as a left-right split. The religious conservative wing of the right is culturally collectivist, the catholic conservatives are also pretty economically collectivist. The liberal mainstream is highly culturally individualistic(well... within the boundaries of acceptable lib behavior). The left can be almost culturally atomistic, if you go into the disown your racist/homophobic relatives areas of the ideology.

I made the distinction between dogma and policy because I don’t think the two are very strongly connected. I think there are localised outliers like California and Texas, where the ideological differences are more effectively implemented in policy and legislation. But generally speaking, I don’t think you get a substantially different government when one party is elected over the other. The dogma however is substantially different. It’s just that speaking differently doesn’t necessarily translate to acting differently.

I think the reason I’m downvoted (and that my comments would generally meet disapproval in most contexts) is due to the nature of tribalist politics. A political tribalist believes that we are good and they are bad. If our policies fail it’s because of reasons other than our policies being bad, if their policies fail it’s because they were intentionally designed to cause harm. They are the ones behaving tribalistically, while we are open minded and accepting.

A core element of the tribalistic psychology is that you and your team aren’t the ones perpetuating it. Tribalism is bad, and they are the source of it. It is an archetypal example of the fundamental attribution error, and a tribalistic conservative is just as likely to downvote you for suggesting that as a tribalistic liberal is.

> That might suggest bias, but I'd like to give you the benefit of doubt.

No need to doubt: I have a more nuanced view of left politics because I'm left biased and spend more time consuming left content and commentary. This is a politics post. Everyone is biased. Politics is the mind killer and all that. This includes self-described apolitical, can't we all just get along CNN types; they're probably status quo biased and 'biased' against the active reactionary/revolutionary branches of the parties.

> stray from classical

This is really complicated. They now have different policy objectives, but perhaps the same sentiments? I doubt I have it clear enough in my head to explain my view on this, sadly... OK.

The leftist ideals have tended to be to maximize negative and (once you add in socialist views) maximize positive liberty for as many people as possible. Don't restrict people from doing what they want and make sure as many people have the means to do what they want as possible. Libertarianism on social issues and at least redistributive social democracy on economic issues.

The right wing ideal, in my understanding, is that people often times want stupid shit and we shouldn't let them do it. Also evening out social outcomes is a bad idea since it reduces the incentive to work hard in everyone and impoverishes us all as a result. Also why shouldn't the best players of the social game have more power than the worst? So a mix of Burkean cautious respect for tradition and 'competition breeds excellence'.

I don't think the factions have 'strayed' from these ideals that much, but the translation of those ideals into policy positions has changed massively over time.

Anyway, the right-wing camps, in my outsider view.

Corporatist centrists: similar to the democratic centrists but with reversed culture wars allegiance and more tax-cutty.

Religious conservatives: culture war reactionaries, obviously. And I don't think just because they're losing ground in recent times. I'm sure there was opposition to liberal divorce laws and whatnot back in the whenever too.

Neo-cons: Republican trotskyists(lol https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/32f1df/is_th...). There are horrible regimes in the world, and America should replace them with more America. Unrelated, they invest their life savings into military contractor and adjacent corporations. See also responsibility to protect, Rwanda etc. It honestly sounds like such a good idea in theory("Check this out: we go to Afghanistan, we give them freedom and in 20 years time bam it's Minnesota in Central Asia!"), but it always goes so horribly bad in practice.

Libertarians: way more politicians claim to be that than actually live it tho, much more focused on economic aspect than social aspect. Some cynical corporatists hide under this label. I think casual libertarianish attitude describes a ton of the voters: don't increase my taxes, don't make me do anything I'm not already doing, don't make me think about the government just do your job behind the scenes.

Alt-right: culture war reactionaries? Straight up monarchist reactionary trolls? This is one of those labels that just gets painted pretty liberally, so I'm really not sure what a quick summary of it is. Trumpists?

Populist types: supposedly meh on the culture war and economically left-wing, sort of inspired by European Christian Democrat type parties. Hard to really say how much they disdain the culture war since american media is very culture war biased. Which is understandable since clearly everyone would find economic policy conversations boring(wink wink nudge nudge keep arguing amongst yourselves about pronouns and taboo words, dear proles!).

Thanks for elaborating, really enjoyed that read. The Libertarian and Populist takes are particularly interesting.

The big ticket, agreed upon progressive priorities are still for the benefit of all: Green New Deal, Medicare for all, accessible higher education. I find it more difficult to find policies for the common good coming from conservatives these days. Does anyone have examples?

The reason you don't know any is because

>policies for the common good coming

Is a political thing. You disagree with the average conservative on what constitutes policies for the common good.

The (fiscal) conservative view of those items is that paying for them is going to create poverty, or at least a lot of people being less well off because of the taxes. (And that Modern Monetary Theory is wishful thinking that doesn't work in reality.)

The conservatives could be wrong. But they aren't just hard-hearted Scrooge McDuck types who don't want to pay for something that will benefit the poors.

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