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Roger Waters

What is the source for that graph? It doesn’t look very good to me, especially when positioning religion (e.g. US evangelical Christianity is just as batshit crazy and dangerous as anything in the Islamist world, yet all we have is Catholicism). I’m also far from convinced anti-vaccine stances belong anywhere near the left, that is very much a right-wing thing both here and in the USA. Science denial of all kinds comes in with the religious right. You’ll find all of it on say the Tories GB News channel or Fox News/InfoWars in the USA.

PS I do think the ‘horseshoe theory’ kind of works theoretically though as both left and right can be highly authoritarian and result in brutal dictatorships. I don’t see that much difference between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.
 
Tony L said:
What is the source for that graph? It doesn’t look very good to me, especially when positioning religion (e.g. US evangelical Christianity is as batshit crazy and dangerous as anything in the Islamist world, yet all we have is Catholicism). I’m also far from convinced anti-vaccine stances belong anywhere near the left, that is very much a right-wing thing both here and in the USA. Science denial comes in with the religious right.
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It's from a quora thread, I don't know who made it originally.

Personally I think that the real far right is just traditional monarchism and the various flavours of fascism hang out somewhere outside the left/right line altogether. One dimension is just not enough to describe what is a more complicated landscape.
 
Chefren said:
Personally I think that the real far right is just traditional monarchism and the various flavours of fascism hang out somewhere outside the left/right line altogether. One dimension is just not enough to describe what is a more complicated landscape.
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I just view monarchism as another form of fascism. It is obviously vastly diluted here in the UK and Europe and little more than a grizzly tourist attraction, but it is born of the same dictatorship, oppression, enslavement and colonialism as any other truly brutal authoritarianism. It is all on the same plane to my mind. An LGBT person about to swing from a crane in Saudi Arabia isn’t going to feel that different to one put to death by Hitler or Stalin, or for that matter one beheaded by ISIS. It is all the same small-brained bigoted shit. The ‘Political Compass’ two-axis thing helps in some ways as it separates out authoritarianism from economics, but I do feel the horseshoe thing has value too. Maybe more so as it plots social conservatism/liberalism to some degree. I just took issue with some of the labelling.
 
Chefren said:
The horshoe theory is a real thing, personally I think that it's just an ill-advised attempt to force the political landscape into a single dimension. This doesn't work because for example fascism and communism are both collectivist.

iu
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Yes sadly it is real, but even those who recognise at as transparently self-serving and detached from reality are happy to talk about “the Red Brown alliance”, which isn’t much better. There are certainly those on the left who actively support Putin but the idea that this constitutes an alliance with actual fascists hardly helps explain it. What it does do is offer liberals and leftists an opportunity to play Hunt-the-Traitor every time someone voices criticism of NATO, and if we want to talk about convergence with the far right, well.
 
Seanm said:
Yes sadly it is real, but even those who recognise at as transparently self-serving and detached from reality are happy to talk about “the Red Brown alliance”, which isn’t much better. There are certainly those on the left who actively support Putin but the idea that this constitutes an alliance with actual fascists hardly helps explain it. What it does do is offer liberals and leftists an opportunity to play Hunt-the-Traitor every time someone voices criticism of NATO, and if we want to talk about convergence with the far right, well.
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As a matter of interest where would you stick Labour on that horseshoe map? To my mind they have never been out of the orange zone in my lifetime. Even with Corbyn as he just didn’t fight vocally against nationalism, didn’t believe in electoral reform, couldn’t manage a very right-wing party etc. With Starmer they are right on the orange/red border, just behind the Tories (who even get their ‘National Conservatism’ slogans from where they are on the map).

PS I’d put myself in the green zone.
 
Tony L said:
I’m also far from convinced anti-vaccine stances belong anywhere near the left, that is very much a right-wing thing both here and in the USA. Science denial of all kinds comes in with the religious right. You’ll find all of it on say the Tories GB News channel or Fox News/InfoWars in the USA.
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I'm not so sure Tony. There was quite a lot of it from the otherwise batty but harmless new age healing crystal hippy peeps too.

Even Evan Parker who I love and respect, and whose politics are certainly not on the right, gave a completely insane interview where he expounded at length on how covid was a hoax.
 
Tony L said:
I just view monarchism as another form of fascism.
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There is a major difference though, monarchism represents the old class society with its class benefits. Like who pays taxes and who doesn't, social mobility is minimal etc.

Fascism on the other hand, like all the other -isms from the 1800s, attempts to resolve the class conflict. Since there are many kinds of fascism, how exactly depends on the country, but the original Italian model was Corporatism. This is not exclusive to fascism, countries with strong centralised negotiations between trade unions and employer's associations, mediated by the state if needed, operate under a related model.

A monarchist would not go for anything like this, the division of society into classes is just the natural order as far as they are concerned, and the peons just need to know their place, or find another job.

Socialism's plan was to eradicate the classes altogether after which society could transform into communism.
 
paulfromcamden said:
I'm not so sure Tony. There was quite a lot of it from the otherwise batty but harmless new age healing crystal hippy peeps too.
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You are right, thinking about it I know one. I still think that it falls massively more right than left, e.g. most GB News presenters are anti-vaxxers, as of course is Trump and the MAGA/QAnon/InfoWars lot. I remember the UK anti-vax protests and they looked pretty much like an EDL rally.
 
Tony L said:
As a matter of interest where would you stick Labour on that horseshoe map? To my mind they have never been out of the orange zone in my lifetime. Even with Corbyn as he just didn’t fight vocally against nationalism, didn’t believe in electoral reform, couldn’t manage a very right-wing party etc. With Starmer they are right on the orange/red border, just behind the Tories (who even get their ‘National Conservatism’ slogans from where they are on the map).

PS I’d put myself in the green zone.
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I just think the whole idea is completely without merit, and that goes double for that particular diagram, which is giving off strong terf vibes. It's not going to help anyone understand their own position or anyone else's, it's just internet brainworm stuff. I tend to think that continuum type models as a whole aren't really that helpful: they tend to miss what it is that *fundamentally* unites broad political tendencies while exaggerating the significance of more contingent or opportunistic "positional" features. For instance I think it’s partly the idea of a spectrum, soft to hard, that makes it difficult to understand the basic identity of so called One Nation conservatism and the far right.

Labour is complicated and really can’t be seen as one thing: I’m a broken record but the dividing line between progressive and reactionary politics runs directly through Labour. Even the Labour right is complicated, with quite meaningful differences existing between old and new (Blairite) right. Starmer’s Labour is new-new right: it’s a Blairite tribute act, and what it’s taken from the original is above all electoral opportunism. It doesn’t have any coherent ideas or analysis, there are just memory traces of old prejudices and positions (anti- universalism, anti-left, anti-public ownership, pro-law’n’order, pro-Saudi etc.) united by an overwhelming belief that they’re the smartest guys in the room and should be in charge. I don’t know how you’d capture that on the horseshoe diagram or anything similar.
 
I can’t disagree with any of that. I just feel a simple diagram is often useful, especially in our situation where we have two socially conservative right-wing authoritarian parties and no real opposition to them. The penny needs to drop that Labour are no alternative to anything.
 
Seanm said:
I just think the whole idea is completely without merit, and that goes double for that particular diagram, which is giving off strong terf vibes
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The more I look at that diagram the worse it becomes, I should have looked harder for a better one.

It's just completely incosistent, like a word salad. Is postmodernism really a political ideology? Fascists in Italy were like I said above implementing Corporatism, yet they are far away from each other on that chart. They also put religious positions on it for some reason, but based on the chart's internal logic, atheism should go on the left with Communism. However since they left that out, I conclude that whoever made the chart is likely an American.

.. also they tried to place anarchism on it (and right next to Islamism!) which is an automatic fail on more or less any of these charts.
 
Chefren said:
The more I look at that diagram the worse it becomes, I should have looked harder for a better one.
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I think the point is that once you get to police-state authoritarianism there really is no end-user difference between fascism, communism, monarchy, or religious tyranny. It is a clumsy diagram and the positioning of anarchy suggests it was done by someone who doesn’t even understand the term. Likewise postmodernism, which seems to be a term solely bandied around by people who don’t know what postmodernism is (which is actually everyone, but most have the sense to shut up about it).
 
Chefren said:
The more I look at that diagram the worse it becomes, I should have looked harder for a better one.

It's just completely incosistent, like a word salad. Is postmodernism really a political ideology? Fascists in Italy were like I said above implementing Corporatism, yet they are far away from each other on that chart. They also put religious positions on it for some reason, but based on the chart's internal logic, atheism should go on the left with Communism. However since they left that out, I conclude that whoever made the chart is likely an American.

.. also they tried to place anarchism on it (and right next to Islamism!) which is an automatic fail on more or less any of these charts.
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The latter point tells us that diagram isn't the product of any informed thought process.
 
Chefren said:
The horshoe theory is a real thing, personally I think that it's just an ill-advised attempt to force the political landscape into a single dimension. This doesn't work because for example fascism and communism are both collectivist.

iu
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Except that there has never been a true Cummunist society, Islamism can be very small "s" socialist and Secularism/Liberalism can become aggressively imposed on others.
Basically everyone positions themselves at the centre
 
In re the graphic appearing in the preceding message:

I've tried to clean up the Political Horse Shoe chart, which I think does have some very good aspects, to rationalize some things, and remove some controversial sub-labels. The ideology labels as I'm using them are generic, not the names of any political parties.

What I most like is the indication that tyranny is non-ideological, and may be arrived-at through either extreme. Bending the left/right continuum into a curve also allows some indication of two leading value dimensions, individualist vs authoritarian, and egalitarian vs hierarchical. But this chart is not a grid, and does not play with the false precision of locating ideologies by ordered pairs of value scores. I basically just claim that the top half of the chart is more individualistic, and the bottom more authoritarian, and likewise that the left half is more egalitarian, and the right half is more hierarchical.

I see each of the ideologies as occupying not a definite spot on the horseshoe, but rather a band somewhere in it, possibly quite extensive. Eg, some conservative christians definately dip into the red. So the positions of labels around the horseshoe should been seen as merely indicative.

Libertarians and Anarchists are both shown as off the continuum. They are very individualistic and vary widely in their beliefs. They may pull ideas from anywhere on the left or right sides, though anarchists in general like the left more and libertarians typically like the right more, sentiments often reciprocated by their counterparts on the continuum. The anarchists and libertarians can even mingle with each other sometimes. Both hate authoritarianism in general, though some libertarians are fine with great money meaning great power.
 
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