I am curious what comes in you mind when you see the word moderate right thinking about current politics in the US. Assuming it doesnt include libertarian people like you or Caplan
I think of institutions such as the Catholic church, the Mormon church, and the Federalist Society. It seems notable that these have been getting much less attention in my information sources than the left-wing equivalents.
I think that's a good point, because the term "right" is more bogus than the term "left". "Moderate right" is an oxymoron; "right-wing conservative" even more so. All paradigmatic right-wingers, like Nazis, white supremacists, and theocrats, are political radicals today. You can't be a "moderate white supremacist". There is not a dimension from 0 to 10 on which 7 = conservative and 10 = Nazi. That is a myth the left has worked very, very hard to promulgate, but which is completely false.
During the French Revolution, the "right" was composed mostly of the nobility and the Catholic Church, while the "left" was the capitalists and protestants. The workers, peasants, and sans-culottes weren't in the Assembly. The French Revolution is always brought up as originating the terms, but it really has little to do with how we use them today and is IMHO brought up only to deliberately give the false impression that "the right" today means "conservative".
The term "right" became attached to moderate progressives during the split between Left and Right Hegelians around 1830, which is I think when theocrats began being considered to be on the "right". By around 1920, the term "right" in English no longer included conservatives of any kind, but meant "socialists or labor unionists who want to try negotiation before revolution".
Meanwhile, the "left" in America was I don't think it was linked with racism until the Nazis, who emphasized the "Jew" more than the "capitalist" in "capitalist Jew". Meanwhile, the American progressive party was racist and the Republicans were anti-racist. Woodrow Wilson was a very active white supremacist. (The Italian fascist party was not anti-semitic until 1936, when they became so to appease Germany.) During the 1920 & early 1930s, "left/right" was not considered an important distinction; the important distinction was between conservatives and radicals.
>There is not a dimension from 0 to 10 on which 7 = conservative and 10 = Nazi.
How about the dimension of "how much do you romanticize the past"? Nazis sort of believed they were bringing back a mythical "aryan" golden age. MAGAs sort of believe that they are bringing back American greatness. Milquetoast conservatives these days just want the thing that leftists call "progress" to happen a bit slower.
First, I don't consider MAGA people to be typical conservatives. It's strange to call a movement that didn't exist before 2015 "conservative". It's a populist personality cult. To me, conservative means the Wall Street Journal, the Cato institute, people who write for The Economist, people who want to balance the budget, and people who want to conserve the liberal democratic order created during the American Revolution. I'd call MAGA culturally conservative, but not economically or politically conservative. But I still object to that, because when people call MAGA "culturally conservative" they actually mean "racist"; but there's no basis for that claim that I'm aware of. Racial hate crimes overwhelmingly take place in districts that vote Democratic, even when controlling for racial demographics.
Second, the left romanticizes the pre-historical past of Rousseau. The noble savage and the General Will are crucial to socialism. This romanticizing is more obvious in Europe, where even professional archaeology has been hampered by three successive waves of phony leftist romanticism of pre-history: first the 1970s-80s "Mother Goddess" theory; then the "everyone was peaceful before agriculture" theory; and now Rene Girard's whacko egalitarianism-based-on-scapegoating theory, which sadly the people in charge of Çatalhöyük today adhere to.
(It is more-complicated than that. Socialists, communists, and fascists use propaganda phrased in terms of the General Will (of the proper class or race, if not of humanity), while at the same time their doctrine/practice says that the masses must be kept out of the loop, and important decisions made by "the right people", usually "scientifically". E.g., Plato, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and today's Ivy League elite. The woke today would say that a "General Will" is an oppressive fiction created by the dominant group; yet they unknowingly rely on there being such a general will, as otherwise equal opportunity would not create equal outcomes; each person or group would have more of those things they valued more.)
Thirdly, the left and the Nazis are/were romanticizing a mythical past; both MAGA and conservatives are remembering a recent past which they lived through. They aren't fantasizing; they're remembering how things were for some personal time period of choice within 1940-1990. So the romanticizing of Nazis was more like the left's than like that done by people who voted Republican.
Fourth, both "the left" and fascism are progressive movements, looking more to the future than the past. The main fascist modern art movement was called Futurism. Richard Evans wrote that "The voters who flocked to the polls in support of Hitler, the stormtroopers who gave up their evenings to beat up Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews, the Party activists who spent their free time at rallies and demonstrations - none of these were sacrificing themselves to restore a lost past. On the contrary, they were inspired by a vague yet powerful vision of the future, a future in which class antagonisms and party-political squabbles would be overcome." (The Coming of the Third Reich, Penguin, p449)
I don't think any conservatives want what the leftists call "progress" to happen at all, since all that "progress" relies on the creation of a totalitarian government in which a small, closed elite ruling class makes all decisions for everyone. That would be the right wing of the French Revolution, which was conservative in that time and place, but would not ever have been called conservative in America.
>Fourth, both "the left" and fascism are progressive movements, looking more to the future than the past.
Well, since we can't go to the past, it's not a real choice for people who prefer being alive to avoid looking to the future. And yet it does seem to me that the core difference between leftism and rightism, taken broadly, is the notion that it's possible to improve upon the best that the past had to offer ("progress"), something that the left endorses, while the right just wants to reverse degeneration/get back as close as possible to that old time greatness (with some inevitable adaptations). But your point that the left also romanticizes the past in its way is well taken.
>I don't think any conservatives want what the leftists call "progress"
I'm mostly referencing the joke that conservatives want to "conserve" the "traditional family values" of 70 years ago, which obviously had plenty of leftist ("progressive") influences. The notion of returning to the 19th century social mores (or earlier) is a non-starter anywhere but in the fringiest of fringes.
The funny thing about "family values" is that it's always Christians who talk about them; yet literally everything Jesus said about the family, was anti-family, in the same way and for the same reasons as Sparta, Plato, and Marx: the family was a great danger, because familial love hindered complete dedication to the state / the Good / God.
> And yet it does seem to me that the core difference between leftism and rightism, taken broadly, is the notion that it's possible to improve upon the best that the past had to offer ("progress"), something that the left endorses, while the right just wants to reverse degeneration/get back as close as possible to that old time greatness (with some inevitable adaptations).
That Richard Evans quote about fascism being progressive is from Sir Richard Evans, https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-sir-richard-j-evans , a professor at Cambridge who specializes in the history of Germany from 1750-1945. It explicitly denies that common belief about the Nazis. Just like the communists, the Nazis talked about creating a new kind of society that had never existed before. Probably they said it was what the First & Second Reichs were aiming at, but never achieved. That was also a key point of the first major theorist of fascism, Giovanni Gentile, who was also a Hegelian progressive, and claimed that the purpose of fascism was to complete the program of the Risorgimento (the 19th-century movement for Italian unification). It seems that fascists said they were going to fulfil the unrealized dreams of an earlier age.
Fascists arose as splinter groups from communism. Communism comes from Hegelianism, which comes from Christianity, which was originally communist (literally; people joining the Christian church in the first century were, according to St. Paul, supposed to give all their possessions to the church.) Christianity comes, IMHO, more from Plato than from Jesus. (I can point you to a long gdoc I wrote enumerating evidence for this if you like.)
Like communists, Christians, and Plato, fascists wanted to create a new kind of society, based on creating a new kind of sinless human. Like communists, Christians, and Plato, they rejected individualism, free trade, liberal democracy, governments built with checks and balances and incentives to help selfish people cooperate, and all other Enlightenment discoveries and values. Like communists, Christians, and Plato they would do this by creating a totalitarian state which governed every aspect of every citizen's life. Like communists, Christians, and Plato, this totalitarian state would be managed by highly-educated elites and not subject to democratic controls or check or balances.
So the left and the right agree on nearly everything, and disagree on nearly everything with Enlightenment liberals.
Unlike communists and Christians, but like Plato, fascists seem not to have envisioned a classless society, but IMHO this was more just a matter of Plato and the fascists being more-honest about what they were doing. Both communists and fascists were Taylorites, who actually wanted something more like a modern technocracy, with an elite class which managed everything using modern technology and Taylorism.
IMHO, fascism is just the second stage of communism. I think you can see this in, for instance, China (a racist, nationalist Han colonial empire that uses state-controlled capitalism), Venezuela, & Cuba.
>It seems that fascists said they were going to fulfil the unrealized dreams of an earlier age.
I'll endorse this characterization as what the right at large is about, unlike the left (at least on the aesthetic level, the actual policies do often look very similar), would you still disagree with that?
>Christianity comes, IMHO, more from Plato than from Jesus.
A popular version is that it comes more from Aristotle than from Jesus, but I don't see why Jesus couldn't be backed up further (probably at best the fourth place, behind Paul also).
>So the left and the right agree on nearly everything, and disagree on nearly everything with Enlightenment liberals.
Of course they would. If you're right and your opponents are wrong, surely you deserve to win and enforce the correct order of things on everybody. Liberalism is extremely unnatural, born out of repeated catastrophic failures of various conflicting sides to ensure such victories, forcing them into grumbling compromise. Essentially it operates on the meta-level of limiting conflict, and doesn't have much to say on the object level (and what it does say is largely wrong), while the conflicting sides would obviously prefer total victory instead, if it seems within reach.
>fascism is just the second stage of communism
I'd rather call this convergent evolution. All dictatorships that endure long enough end up looking pretty much the same, because they are shaped by the same constraints.
The apt juxtaposition of alt-right racism and recent Oscar winning films is simply mint
I was completely dumbfounded by Trump's success in the Republican primary for 2016. I referred to him as the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to Rosie. Then about 5 minutes after he won, and the left leaning media who think I am categorically unacceptable got really distressed, I became a fan without any psychological choice in the matter
I agree with your basic premise. I wrote a blog post about the November 2024 election which said, "Neither party was trying to win. Like they had already given up on democracy, and were warming up for a rage-quit. ... I'm inclined to say they wanted to do whatever seemed like it would hurt the other side the most. Not "hurt" as in "diminish their chances of achieving their policy objectives". "Hurt" as in "punch them in the face." "
So what do you suggest creditable commenters do in the face of a Stalin-level autocrat who ignores the rule of law and the Constitution? Aren’t you doing the same thing in your piece?
Yawn, you mean every US President in my living memory? THIS President is different, same old story every president. Remember back with the Dead Kennedy's sang entire songs about Reagan, etc. "Oh no Trump is charging Comey!!", cue Wilson/Debs, Lincoln/Davis, Biden/Trump, Obama/al-Awlak, etc. Remember back when Obama had DOJ going after reporters using the Espionage Act or when Clinton burned down a house of kids? Hell, Kennedy appointed his BROTHER AG, imagine if Trump did that lol.
> Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist
Left and right in the US don't have anything to do with markets anymore. Republicans are currently all for raising taxes via tariffs and tight obedience of corporations and media to Donald Trump. Do what he wants and he might lift your tariffs and even bail you out if you're a farmer, displease him and he will raise your tariffs or threaten to cut your FCC license or take state control of your social media company or demand state control of your university hiring, speech, and curriculum. That is diametrically opposed to free markets.
The more accurate story, in 2025, is that rightists are authoritarian and leftists are anti-authoritarian. The rightists say: the strong man should do what he wants and step on who he wants, and the weak man should suffer. The leftists say: protect the weak, prevent abuses of power.
The strong man is the CEO, the billionaire, the President, the man over his wife, the white man, the soldier and the police officer over the civilian. No taxes, no consumer protections, no environmental protections, no unions, since they restrain the rich man from trampling the poor men. Hurt the homeless, the sick and poor, the immigrant, the trans, the gay, the non-white, the woman, because they are weak. Empower the military because they are strong, eliminate judicial oversight because that interferes with the strong. Centralize executive power so the strong man can do as he wishes.
He was convicted of falsification of business records. It wasn't that he paid hush money, it's that he falsified business records to hide it. It's like how Bill Clinton was impeached not for having sex with Monica Lewinsky, but for lying about it to Congress.
It seems circular for both sides to be entirely in opposition to the other. If this were the case, there would be nothing to oppose. Caplan's story seems much more persuasive, although I think "anti-market" would be better replaced with "naively egalitarian".
This is a great point. You can be so opposed to the other party and whatever it's doing moment to moment you forget why you joined one party over another in the first place.
I think the different tendencies of men and women and their expression in social media spaces is a neglected subject of debate and discussion. The empathetic response, the push to maintain consensus, the use of gossip and reputation destruction in female social contexts has all been amplified and blown up to global proportions in spaces like TikTok and IG. It's actively driving women in a different direction (in terms of ideas and values and even language) than men. I'm actually surprised that I haven't seen more written about it - it seems like a real engine for sex divergence and political division.
Sorry, but I reject the symmetry of your argument and agree with Caplan.
Unless we are talking about trolls, or people expressly trying to be influencers on their own side - where you are of course correct, and which exist in broadly similar numbers on both sides - whatever was true in the past, *most* leftists genuinely believe most of their crapola, rather than simply putting those positions out there to “annoy” the left, while most on the right are indeed more motivated by being against the agenda of *today’s* left.
As non-trivial examples, I submit:
- trans rights of biological men to participate in women’s sports
- trans “rights” to perform irreversible surgical and chemical procedures on children [this from the side who cites “protecting children from harm” to justify all sorts of other societal restrictions]
- the right of foreigners to enter the U.S. illegally by the millions
- defund the police (the OG position, not the morphed spun one of “take some money from police and put it into social programs”)
- abolish ICE
- support for Hamas and the righteousness of its October 7th actions
- support for Luigi Mangione
[I acknowledge that my final 2 are not the positions of the Dem party or most of its leading influencers, but rather are positions that millions on the left hold that go undenounced by said leaders.]
The claim that leftists hold and advocate for these positions primarily to “annoy” the moderate right seems kinda ludicrous, does it not?
And if my claims above of “most” are too strong, your claims of most/all/primarily are *far* too strong. I.e. if I’m wrong, then there ain’t no “most” here at all, just a bunch of “somes”.
At some point in the 1990s US politicians figured out that with low voter turnout, the easiest way to get an incremental vote is to convince one of your own to get to the polls, instead of convincing someone on the other side to switch. And it turns out the most reliable voter turnout tool, for most candidates, is fear.
Since then the dominant strategy has been to convince your base that the very existence of the nation depends on defeating the enemy, a battle increasingly framed in moral terms. You want them whipped into a quasi-religious frenzy of existential panic and dread.
It's all very tiring. If we had mandatory voting some amount of it would probably go away.
Whey we lack is a common enemy. Watch those kids in the backseat cooperate in the face of a common threat.
Unfortunately the left is anti-market and the right is anti-left, but not pro-market (anymore).
There doesn't seem to be any serious pro-market faction at the moment. The libertarians are pro-market but are powerless (I think libertarians are usually powerless because they despise power per se.)
There are reasons for hope, tho (short of a Singularity, which may not come):
* Until the Democrat party drops their crazy left-wing extremists, they seem unlikely to regain power. That's a strong incentive to split them off. Then maybe the "abundance" movement will make the Democrats pro-market. Already there are signs that Democrat voters have become vastly more in favor of free trade than they were before Trump and his tariff policies.
* The Republican party is currently so dominant (and under control of MAGA) that it could easily split into two pieces. (I wish I could guess along what fracture line, but I can't.) Maybe one of the pieces would be pro-market.
I can easily see both major parties splitting in the next few years, resulting in a new constellation of parties.
The best examples of left and right purely trying to annoy each other can be seen in the presidential candidates each side selects. Both Trump and Kamala Harris are optimized to infuriate the other side in a way that Vance or Newsom wouldn't quite achieve.
Now it seems that in opposition, each side plots revenge instead of formulating policy.
I am curious what comes in you mind when you see the word moderate right thinking about current politics in the US. Assuming it doesnt include libertarian people like you or Caplan
I think of institutions such as the Catholic church, the Mormon church, and the Federalist Society. It seems notable that these have been getting much less attention in my information sources than the left-wing equivalents.
I think that's a good point, because the term "right" is more bogus than the term "left". "Moderate right" is an oxymoron; "right-wing conservative" even more so. All paradigmatic right-wingers, like Nazis, white supremacists, and theocrats, are political radicals today. You can't be a "moderate white supremacist". There is not a dimension from 0 to 10 on which 7 = conservative and 10 = Nazi. That is a myth the left has worked very, very hard to promulgate, but which is completely false.
During the French Revolution, the "right" was composed mostly of the nobility and the Catholic Church, while the "left" was the capitalists and protestants. The workers, peasants, and sans-culottes weren't in the Assembly. The French Revolution is always brought up as originating the terms, but it really has little to do with how we use them today and is IMHO brought up only to deliberately give the false impression that "the right" today means "conservative".
The term "right" became attached to moderate progressives during the split between Left and Right Hegelians around 1830, which is I think when theocrats began being considered to be on the "right". By around 1920, the term "right" in English no longer included conservatives of any kind, but meant "socialists or labor unionists who want to try negotiation before revolution".
Meanwhile, the "left" in America was I don't think it was linked with racism until the Nazis, who emphasized the "Jew" more than the "capitalist" in "capitalist Jew". Meanwhile, the American progressive party was racist and the Republicans were anti-racist. Woodrow Wilson was a very active white supremacist. (The Italian fascist party was not anti-semitic until 1936, when they became so to appease Germany.) During the 1920 & early 1930s, "left/right" was not considered an important distinction; the important distinction was between conservatives and radicals.
The term "right" didn't denote conservatism more than socialism again until the 1970s. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=right+wing+socialist%2Cright+wing+conservative&year_start=1910&year_end=2020&corpus=en&case_insensitive=true
>There is not a dimension from 0 to 10 on which 7 = conservative and 10 = Nazi.
How about the dimension of "how much do you romanticize the past"? Nazis sort of believed they were bringing back a mythical "aryan" golden age. MAGAs sort of believe that they are bringing back American greatness. Milquetoast conservatives these days just want the thing that leftists call "progress" to happen a bit slower.
That is an understandable question.
First, I don't consider MAGA people to be typical conservatives. It's strange to call a movement that didn't exist before 2015 "conservative". It's a populist personality cult. To me, conservative means the Wall Street Journal, the Cato institute, people who write for The Economist, people who want to balance the budget, and people who want to conserve the liberal democratic order created during the American Revolution. I'd call MAGA culturally conservative, but not economically or politically conservative. But I still object to that, because when people call MAGA "culturally conservative" they actually mean "racist"; but there's no basis for that claim that I'm aware of. Racial hate crimes overwhelmingly take place in districts that vote Democratic, even when controlling for racial demographics.
According to https://www.opeu.org.br/2024/09/18/a-profile-of-trump-voters-the-demographics-of-his-maga-enthusiasts/#:~:text=MAGA%20Republicans%2C%20as%20defined%2C%20are,grievance%20myth%2C%20that%20we%20will , about 1/3 of Republican voters, and 15% of Americans, can be considered MAGA. I see Republican voters today as a temporary and uneasy alliance of conservatives, MAGA, evangelicals, liberals, most Catholics, and people who live near Mexico, each for different reasons. Evangelicals, for instance, are IMHO mostly radicals who would eviscerate the First Amendment and create a totalitarian Christian state if they could.
Second, the left romanticizes the pre-historical past of Rousseau. The noble savage and the General Will are crucial to socialism. This romanticizing is more obvious in Europe, where even professional archaeology has been hampered by three successive waves of phony leftist romanticism of pre-history: first the 1970s-80s "Mother Goddess" theory; then the "everyone was peaceful before agriculture" theory; and now Rene Girard's whacko egalitarianism-based-on-scapegoating theory, which sadly the people in charge of Çatalhöyük today adhere to.
(It is more-complicated than that. Socialists, communists, and fascists use propaganda phrased in terms of the General Will (of the proper class or race, if not of humanity), while at the same time their doctrine/practice says that the masses must be kept out of the loop, and important decisions made by "the right people", usually "scientifically". E.g., Plato, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and today's Ivy League elite. The woke today would say that a "General Will" is an oppressive fiction created by the dominant group; yet they unknowingly rely on there being such a general will, as otherwise equal opportunity would not create equal outcomes; each person or group would have more of those things they valued more.)
Thirdly, the left and the Nazis are/were romanticizing a mythical past; both MAGA and conservatives are remembering a recent past which they lived through. They aren't fantasizing; they're remembering how things were for some personal time period of choice within 1940-1990. So the romanticizing of Nazis was more like the left's than like that done by people who voted Republican.
Fourth, both "the left" and fascism are progressive movements, looking more to the future than the past. The main fascist modern art movement was called Futurism. Richard Evans wrote that "The voters who flocked to the polls in support of Hitler, the stormtroopers who gave up their evenings to beat up Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews, the Party activists who spent their free time at rallies and demonstrations - none of these were sacrificing themselves to restore a lost past. On the contrary, they were inspired by a vague yet powerful vision of the future, a future in which class antagonisms and party-political squabbles would be overcome." (The Coming of the Third Reich, Penguin, p449)
I don't think any conservatives want what the leftists call "progress" to happen at all, since all that "progress" relies on the creation of a totalitarian government in which a small, closed elite ruling class makes all decisions for everyone. That would be the right wing of the French Revolution, which was conservative in that time and place, but would not ever have been called conservative in America.
>Fourth, both "the left" and fascism are progressive movements, looking more to the future than the past.
Well, since we can't go to the past, it's not a real choice for people who prefer being alive to avoid looking to the future. And yet it does seem to me that the core difference between leftism and rightism, taken broadly, is the notion that it's possible to improve upon the best that the past had to offer ("progress"), something that the left endorses, while the right just wants to reverse degeneration/get back as close as possible to that old time greatness (with some inevitable adaptations). But your point that the left also romanticizes the past in its way is well taken.
>I don't think any conservatives want what the leftists call "progress"
I'm mostly referencing the joke that conservatives want to "conserve" the "traditional family values" of 70 years ago, which obviously had plenty of leftist ("progressive") influences. The notion of returning to the 19th century social mores (or earlier) is a non-starter anywhere but in the fringiest of fringes.
The funny thing about "family values" is that it's always Christians who talk about them; yet literally everything Jesus said about the family, was anti-family, in the same way and for the same reasons as Sparta, Plato, and Marx: the family was a great danger, because familial love hindered complete dedication to the state / the Good / God.
Yeah, Jesus was a progressive appropriated by a conservative institution, an irony which is sadly lost on it.
> And yet it does seem to me that the core difference between leftism and rightism, taken broadly, is the notion that it's possible to improve upon the best that the past had to offer ("progress"), something that the left endorses, while the right just wants to reverse degeneration/get back as close as possible to that old time greatness (with some inevitable adaptations).
That Richard Evans quote about fascism being progressive is from Sir Richard Evans, https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-sir-richard-j-evans , a professor at Cambridge who specializes in the history of Germany from 1750-1945. It explicitly denies that common belief about the Nazis. Just like the communists, the Nazis talked about creating a new kind of society that had never existed before. Probably they said it was what the First & Second Reichs were aiming at, but never achieved. That was also a key point of the first major theorist of fascism, Giovanni Gentile, who was also a Hegelian progressive, and claimed that the purpose of fascism was to complete the program of the Risorgimento (the 19th-century movement for Italian unification). It seems that fascists said they were going to fulfil the unrealized dreams of an earlier age.
Fascists arose as splinter groups from communism. Communism comes from Hegelianism, which comes from Christianity, which was originally communist (literally; people joining the Christian church in the first century were, according to St. Paul, supposed to give all their possessions to the church.) Christianity comes, IMHO, more from Plato than from Jesus. (I can point you to a long gdoc I wrote enumerating evidence for this if you like.)
Like communists, Christians, and Plato, fascists wanted to create a new kind of society, based on creating a new kind of sinless human. Like communists, Christians, and Plato, they rejected individualism, free trade, liberal democracy, governments built with checks and balances and incentives to help selfish people cooperate, and all other Enlightenment discoveries and values. Like communists, Christians, and Plato they would do this by creating a totalitarian state which governed every aspect of every citizen's life. Like communists, Christians, and Plato, this totalitarian state would be managed by highly-educated elites and not subject to democratic controls or check or balances.
So the left and the right agree on nearly everything, and disagree on nearly everything with Enlightenment liberals.
Unlike communists and Christians, but like Plato, fascists seem not to have envisioned a classless society, but IMHO this was more just a matter of Plato and the fascists being more-honest about what they were doing. Both communists and fascists were Taylorites, who actually wanted something more like a modern technocracy, with an elite class which managed everything using modern technology and Taylorism.
IMHO, fascism is just the second stage of communism. I think you can see this in, for instance, China (a racist, nationalist Han colonial empire that uses state-controlled capitalism), Venezuela, & Cuba.
>It seems that fascists said they were going to fulfil the unrealized dreams of an earlier age.
I'll endorse this characterization as what the right at large is about, unlike the left (at least on the aesthetic level, the actual policies do often look very similar), would you still disagree with that?
>Christianity comes, IMHO, more from Plato than from Jesus.
A popular version is that it comes more from Aristotle than from Jesus, but I don't see why Jesus couldn't be backed up further (probably at best the fourth place, behind Paul also).
>So the left and the right agree on nearly everything, and disagree on nearly everything with Enlightenment liberals.
Of course they would. If you're right and your opponents are wrong, surely you deserve to win and enforce the correct order of things on everybody. Liberalism is extremely unnatural, born out of repeated catastrophic failures of various conflicting sides to ensure such victories, forcing them into grumbling compromise. Essentially it operates on the meta-level of limiting conflict, and doesn't have much to say on the object level (and what it does say is largely wrong), while the conflicting sides would obviously prefer total victory instead, if it seems within reach.
>fascism is just the second stage of communism
I'd rather call this convergent evolution. All dictatorships that endure long enough end up looking pretty much the same, because they are shaped by the same constraints.
The apt juxtaposition of alt-right racism and recent Oscar winning films is simply mint
I was completely dumbfounded by Trump's success in the Republican primary for 2016. I referred to him as the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to Rosie. Then about 5 minutes after he won, and the left leaning media who think I am categorically unacceptable got really distressed, I became a fan without any psychological choice in the matter
I agree with your basic premise. I wrote a blog post about the November 2024 election which said, "Neither party was trying to win. Like they had already given up on democracy, and were warming up for a rage-quit. ... I'm inclined to say they wanted to do whatever seemed like it would hurt the other side the most. Not "hurt" as in "diminish their chances of achieving their policy objectives". "Hurt" as in "punch them in the face." "
Yes
So what do you suggest creditable commenters do in the face of a Stalin-level autocrat who ignores the rule of law and the Constitution? Aren’t you doing the same thing in your piece?
Yawn, you mean every US President in my living memory? THIS President is different, same old story every president. Remember back with the Dead Kennedy's sang entire songs about Reagan, etc. "Oh no Trump is charging Comey!!", cue Wilson/Debs, Lincoln/Davis, Biden/Trump, Obama/al-Awlak, etc. Remember back when Obama had DOJ going after reporters using the Espionage Act or when Clinton burned down a house of kids? Hell, Kennedy appointed his BROTHER AG, imagine if Trump did that lol.
“So what do you suggest creditable commenters do in the face of a Stalin-level autocrat who ignores the rule of law and the Constitution?’
Defeat him in the November 2024 election.
Which is what Trump and the GOP did by making sure neither Biden nor his VP-as-replacement were able to keep the presidency last year…
[And yes, I’m well aware you were claiming that the reality is 180 degrees the opposite.]
> Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist
Left and right in the US don't have anything to do with markets anymore. Republicans are currently all for raising taxes via tariffs and tight obedience of corporations and media to Donald Trump. Do what he wants and he might lift your tariffs and even bail you out if you're a farmer, displease him and he will raise your tariffs or threaten to cut your FCC license or take state control of your social media company or demand state control of your university hiring, speech, and curriculum. That is diametrically opposed to free markets.
The more accurate story, in 2025, is that rightists are authoritarian and leftists are anti-authoritarian. The rightists say: the strong man should do what he wants and step on who he wants, and the weak man should suffer. The leftists say: protect the weak, prevent abuses of power.
The strong man is the CEO, the billionaire, the President, the man over his wife, the white man, the soldier and the police officer over the civilian. No taxes, no consumer protections, no environmental protections, no unions, since they restrain the rich man from trampling the poor men. Hurt the homeless, the sick and poor, the immigrant, the trans, the gay, the non-white, the woman, because they are weak. Empower the military because they are strong, eliminate judicial oversight because that interferes with the strong. Centralize executive power so the strong man can do as he wishes.
I'm quite impressed with how many comments are modeling the behavior described. Thank you for your contribution
Correlation is not causality.
> Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
- Randall Munroe
No Democrat president ever threatened to cancel the FCC licenses of broadcasters that criticized them.
Trump was prosecuted because he committed felonies.
He was convicted of falsification of business records. It wasn't that he paid hush money, it's that he falsified business records to hide it. It's like how Bill Clinton was impeached not for having sex with Monica Lewinsky, but for lying about it to Congress.
It seems circular for both sides to be entirely in opposition to the other. If this were the case, there would be nothing to oppose. Caplan's story seems much more persuasive, although I think "anti-market" would be better replaced with "naively egalitarian".
This is a great point. You can be so opposed to the other party and whatever it's doing moment to moment you forget why you joined one party over another in the first place.
Sometimes both sides really do adopt a position just because it seems like the opposite of what the other side is promoting.
'You're vegetarians? Okay then we're carnivores.'
'You want to limit immigration? Okay then we're for open borders.'
I think the different tendencies of men and women and their expression in social media spaces is a neglected subject of debate and discussion. The empathetic response, the push to maintain consensus, the use of gossip and reputation destruction in female social contexts has all been amplified and blown up to global proportions in spaces like TikTok and IG. It's actively driving women in a different direction (in terms of ideas and values and even language) than men. I'm actually surprised that I haven't seen more written about it - it seems like a real engine for sex divergence and political division.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-hive
Sorry, but I reject the symmetry of your argument and agree with Caplan.
Unless we are talking about trolls, or people expressly trying to be influencers on their own side - where you are of course correct, and which exist in broadly similar numbers on both sides - whatever was true in the past, *most* leftists genuinely believe most of their crapola, rather than simply putting those positions out there to “annoy” the left, while most on the right are indeed more motivated by being against the agenda of *today’s* left.
As non-trivial examples, I submit:
- trans rights of biological men to participate in women’s sports
- trans “rights” to perform irreversible surgical and chemical procedures on children [this from the side who cites “protecting children from harm” to justify all sorts of other societal restrictions]
- the right of foreigners to enter the U.S. illegally by the millions
- defund the police (the OG position, not the morphed spun one of “take some money from police and put it into social programs”)
- abolish ICE
- support for Hamas and the righteousness of its October 7th actions
- support for Luigi Mangione
[I acknowledge that my final 2 are not the positions of the Dem party or most of its leading influencers, but rather are positions that millions on the left hold that go undenounced by said leaders.]
The claim that leftists hold and advocate for these positions primarily to “annoy” the moderate right seems kinda ludicrous, does it not?
And if my claims above of “most” are too strong, your claims of most/all/primarily are *far* too strong. I.e. if I’m wrong, then there ain’t no “most” here at all, just a bunch of “somes”.
At some point in the 1990s US politicians figured out that with low voter turnout, the easiest way to get an incremental vote is to convince one of your own to get to the polls, instead of convincing someone on the other side to switch. And it turns out the most reliable voter turnout tool, for most candidates, is fear.
Since then the dominant strategy has been to convince your base that the very existence of the nation depends on defeating the enemy, a battle increasingly framed in moral terms. You want them whipped into a quasi-religious frenzy of existential panic and dread.
It's all very tiring. If we had mandatory voting some amount of it would probably go away.
Whey we lack is a common enemy. Watch those kids in the backseat cooperate in the face of a common threat.
Unfortunately the left is anti-market and the right is anti-left, but not pro-market (anymore).
There doesn't seem to be any serious pro-market faction at the moment. The libertarians are pro-market but are powerless (I think libertarians are usually powerless because they despise power per se.)
There are reasons for hope, tho (short of a Singularity, which may not come):
* Until the Democrat party drops their crazy left-wing extremists, they seem unlikely to regain power. That's a strong incentive to split them off. Then maybe the "abundance" movement will make the Democrats pro-market. Already there are signs that Democrat voters have become vastly more in favor of free trade than they were before Trump and his tariff policies.
* The Republican party is currently so dominant (and under control of MAGA) that it could easily split into two pieces. (I wish I could guess along what fracture line, but I can't.) Maybe one of the pieces would be pro-market.
I can easily see both major parties splitting in the next few years, resulting in a new constellation of parties.
The best examples of left and right purely trying to annoy each other can be seen in the presidential candidates each side selects. Both Trump and Kamala Harris are optimized to infuriate the other side in a way that Vance or Newsom wouldn't quite achieve.
Now it seems that in opposition, each side plots revenge instead of formulating policy.
Kamala was not “selected” in order to infuriate the right.
Kamala became the 2024 nominee because of the identity politics of the left.
Suggestions to the contrary lack all credibility, the fact that they fit the narrative Robin proposes here notwithstanding.
To be clear, I do *not* deny that a big part of the reason Trump was selected was to thumb the nose at the left.
The worst ideas - like many ideas - are often just an antithesis.