How many EU beaureaucrats got their training in East Germany, I wonder?
Or is it rather that they are too young and do not know about/remember what constant surveillance does to trust in a society?
Wouldn't you want to be bureaucrat in late USSR? No threat of purges above you, only endless opportunity to play with your minions as you see fit.
The EC is dominated by conservatives.
I'm not sure about current EC, but the one under Juncker had plenty of far-left-when-young people. Far left as in Marxist and Maoist in 1970s-1980s.
P.S. Fun story from ex-USSR country... At the very end of USSR, it was USSR apparatchiks who were called conservatives :)
I believe the most accurate description is that left-wing are ideas emphasizing equality and right-wing are ideas emphasizing hierarchy/inequality.
On the extreme end one way you have anarchist ideals (everyone is equal because everyone has full ability to do everything they want) but you also have some failed states (everyone is equal because everyone ekes out a miserable existence). On the other end you have, well, Hitler, dictatorships, and yes, literal bureaucracy, which is just a dictatorship hierarchy by another name.
It was highly collectivist and little private property. It was also working hard on building the new homo sovieticus. And the idea of world domination never really went away. It was also equally poor, especially if you skip party elite. Capital was not a thing. Well, social capital did play a big role :)
I can’t agree that left wing is for equality while right wing is anti-equality. Unless you’re talking about equality of outcomes, which is madness IMO.
I’d rather say that left is for equality and right wing is for fairness. Equality leads to unfair outcomes for better-equipped. While fair treatment leads to unequal results. Both has pros and cons.
The original right wing were monarchism apologists. Hitler's right wing set up a hierarchy based on race. Mussolini's right wing set up a hierarchy based on nationality, and later race, and was also explicitly collectivist, by the way, speaking of "the debacle of individualism" and "collaboration between the classes". And capitalism makes a hierarchy based on the number next to everyone's name in the bank's spreadsheet (which is also what a social credit score is, by the way). How many more examples do you want?
The right wing usually defines fairness as some kind of meritocracy based on the hierarchy du jour. For example the current right wing thinks it's fair that people with higher numbers get more stuff. Hitler thought it was fair the German empire would belong to Aryans. Mussolini wanted to expand the Italian empire. And the monarchism apologists thought it was fair that a king's children would have special rights. Sure, they support fairness, by defining it their way, in ways that most of us actually wouldn't call fair.
And yes, ultimately left wing is collectivist.
It is fair that people who contribute more get back more. Otherwise we have USSR style mess where people ain’t incentivised to contribute. Because people were getting same compensation regardless of their contribution. Although at the end of the day it did became fair - nobody contributed much.