Dear Roughly the Same as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama:
If "ultimately labels are relatively unhelpful in political discussion,"
why do you bother with your "tests"?
I suggested a consistent usage for the terms "Right" and "Left" in order
to try to make clearer what we're talking about in politics. There are
a lot of attempts to make that unclear -- e.g., Barack Obama has risen
to prominence on his ability to obfuscate.
Such a usage might lead us to see why the Democratic party is not on the
Left, since they've worked vigorously since last November to frustrate
the democratic demand for an end to the war. That raises the questions,
Why did they do that? Whose interests are they in fact serving, if they
aren't serving the expressed will of the voters? An inquiring nation
wants to know, and the answers are being kept from them, in part by the
form of the discussion.
The proposed usage also makes it plain how the political Right can
occasionally act for justice. Authoritarians can see the need for
social peace. E.g., social security was invented by Bismarck, who was
no democrat.
Many discussions of "the Left" and "the Right" make the logical error
called "undistributed middle," in which true premises lead to a false
conclusion, e.g.,
1. All men are mortal;
2. Socrates (my dog) is mortal
3. Therefore my dog is a man.
The middle term, mortal, is "undistributed" because neither premise,
though true, refers to all mortal entities. Similar arguments are quite
common in politics (hello, Robert?), e.g.,
1. Traitors don't support the war;
2. The Left doesn't support the war;
3. Therefore the Left are traitors.
The cure for this sort of mistake might be attention to the rules of
logic; even better would be saying what we mean by Left and Right.
Still better would be determining what the substantive political
positions are and if they're correct -- without worrying about whether
they're Right or Left positions. I don't. --CGE
PS--Regardless of how they would answer if asked, do you think the
Democrats (or the Republicans) in the national government actually
"identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish
and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most
wise, depository of the public interests"? In fact, they're sacred to
death of them and work strenuously to see that they have no real effect
on the policies of the Untied States, often by lying to them.
John W. wrote:
> At 10:45 PM 7/15/2007, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Why not accept a consistent usage for the terms? We might ask, whose
>> interests are served by keeping their meaning "amorphous"? Let's say
>> what we mean.
>>
>> It makes sense, e.g., to say that the Left (those who favor democracy)
>> want to promote democratic control of the economy, while the Right
>> (those who favor authoritarianism) want the economy kept in private
>> hands. --CGE
>>
>> ==============
>>
>> In a letter to Henry ("Light Horse Harry") Lee, the father of R. E.
>> Lee, Thomas Jefferson wrote shortly before he died that people are
>> "naturally divided into two parties: (1) Those who fear and distrust
>> the people, and wish to draw all power from them into the hands of the
>> higher classes; and (2) Those who identify themselves with the people,
>> have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest
>> and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public
>> interests."
>
>
> Here are four well-known political tests that you can take in about 10
> minutes or less on the web. All involve more than one dimension
> (basically the same two dimensions, though they label them slightly
> different), and all are (arguably) marginally more useful than the
> unidimensional definition Carl proposes. But ultimately labels are
> relatively unhelpful in political discussion.
>
>
> http://www.politicalcompass.org/ - economic and social scales I
> like this one the best by far, for a variety of reasons. The questions
> are phrased in such a way that they're easier for me to answer. And I
> score roughly the same as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. :-)
>
> http://www.okcupid.com/politics - economic and social dimensions
>
> http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html - personal issues/economic issues
>
> http://www.politicalbrew.com/politest.cgi - fiscal and non-fiscal issues
>
>
> The problem with Carl's definition is in its application. It's too
> subjective, requiring us to rank ourselves on only one question: Do we
> or do we not "identify ourselves with the people, have confidence in
> them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although
> not the most wise, depository of the public interests"? I'm sure just
> about all of us reading this would answer a resounding "Yes!", including
> Rob Dunn and I. Yet Rob considers me "Left" and himself "Right". So
> where's the usefulness?
>
> John
>
>
>
>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>
>>> All this seems simplistic. The "left-right" distinction does not seem
>>> to me to be one dimensional. There is no non-amorphous delineation.
>>> In addition to the democratic distinctions Carl alludes to, there are
>>> others. Customarily attributed to these adjectives is a social
>>> dimension, ("socialism", "communism", political and economic
>>> egalitarianism [not simply reducible to democracy]), and, of course,
>>> there is the issue of capitalism, which Marx in particular brought
>>> into play, although I don't remember whether he used "left-right"
>>> terminology. All that said, "it is a demarcation fraught with
>>> ambiguity", and I'm afraid not resolved here.
>>> (I really didn't want to get into this… A debate could last
>>> indefinitely. )
>>> --mkb
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jul 15, 2007, at 11:04 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>>
>>>> It's a commonplace that the distinction between Left and Right is
>>>> fraught with ambiguity. (When the Democratic party is spoken of as
>>>> on the Left, it's gotten pretty silly.) And it's also generally
>>>> accepted that the terminology arose from the seating arrangements in
>>>> the French National Assembly of 1789.
>>>>
>>>> But if we want a consistent usage for the Left/Right distinction, we
>>>> might think of political parties ranged along a line according to
>>>> how authoritarian or democratic they are. The further Right one
>>>> goes, the more authoritarian the parties, and the further Left, the
>>>> more democratic. (At the far Left end are the socialists, who want
>>>> not just a democratic polity but a democratic economy as well --
>>>> investment decisions made not by corporations but by elections.)
>>>>
>>>> Lenin's Bolsheviks, then, must be seen as a right-wing Marxist
>>>> party, as must all twentieth century communist parties in the
>>>> Marxist-Leninist tradition, owing to their authoritarianism. (And
>>>> they were indeed so described by left-wing Marxists like Rosa
>>>> Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek.)
>>>>
>>>> The commitment to democracy and an ever-widening franchise means
>>>> that it has been the Left under this definition that has called
>>>> attention to marginalized groups in the modern West. The historic
>>>> task of the Left has been to include in political and civil society
>>>> groups formerly excluded on the grounds that their full humanity was
>>>> denied -- e.g., Africans, Amerindians, and women.
>>>>
>>>> <http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook01172003.html>
>