PoliticsAsGenre
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Context: PoliticalStuff, OnGenre, MusicalStuff
It's taken me far to long to realize it, but political programmes are really just genres, aren't they?
And parties are like bands.
Now I believe that terms like LeftAndRight are meaningful because they describe real clusterings of political positions.
Transcluded from LeftAndRight
Quora Answer : Can I be neither left wing or right wing? Am I supposed to choose one side?
No one else will force you to choose one side.
Your brain will.
What we call "left-wing" and "right-wing" are just clusterings of opinions about political issues which usually go together.
If you believe some things, such as that racial prejudice are wrong, you are likely to believe others, such that prejudice against people because of sexuality or poverty is wrong. Similarly if you think that government is too interfering in your commercial transactions by demanding health and safety inspections, you probably think it's also taking too much money from you in taxes.
These clusters of ideas are what we call left-wing and right-wing.
Sometimes there are institutions that push our ideas into a certain cluster. For example, I might not be racist by inclination, but if the government decides to impose race-based restrictions on my business, and I HATE government interfering in my business, I may find myself hanging out with a bunch of racists who are complaining about the same restrictions, and find their ideas rubbing off on me.
Similarly, some events seem to cut through the "natural" clustering, and these are confusing and traumatic. For example, Brexit, in the UK, is dividing both the traditional right-wing Conservative party and the traditional left-wing Labour party.
Both sides have fissures into pro and anti Brexit sides. And these are particularly painful because they divide people who are usually allies.
At the same time, I am somewhat bewildered by how traditional groupings have been coming apart in the age of Diagonalism or whatever you want to call it. CrunchyToFarRightPipeline etc.
But if I understand political programmes as genres and parties as bands who start in a genre but potentially drift out of it. Then it all becomes clearer. Because I already think of genres as forming a kind of family tree where they give birth to multiple different and sometimes inconsistent subgenres etc.
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Programmes that start at the same place can end far apart. Most modern politics, including most contemporary conservatism, right-libertarianism, social democracy, socialism, communism, anarchy, are almost all offshoots of liberalism forged in TheEnlightenment. They all are built by emphasizing some currents from the original liberalism, and downplaying others.
Just as dubtep, black metal and cool jazz are basically cousins sharing similar DNA but with varied emphases.
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