Do you mean this is a vice of regular people who say they are leftists? Because there are many left theorists of economics and rationality and so forth.
I do not see the regular people on the right deeply engaging with economic theories or theories of rationality. They often believe wholesale nonsense.
But the comment below from Phillip makes me think you mean the left is dogmatic. That's true in some circles.
As for 'destabilizing Western conceptions of rationality' there are many versions of this claim. Some are stupid and some are interesting. Perhaps it is Nietzsche who pioneered the idea. The left is sometimes interested in the idea but it's not particularly leftist. Marx doesn't have any interest in this, even if he raises some pertinent questions about what we sometimes take to be universal rationality.
I don't see postmodernism as particularly leftist, though I suppose they think they are. Maybe that's the problem.
I am always annoyed by the left so I definitely want to know what you mean because you're probably right about something. But I do not see it right off the bat.
I'm talking about the left construed as a cultural formation, the norms, ideas and rhetoric it broadly endorses.
The right claims a kind of ownership over economics, asserting that economics supports its views. Energetic popularisers (e.g. Sowell) have pushed this line. The left has failed to contest this, and broadly accepts the narrative about economics and politics the right asserts (economics is rightwing) but with the moral polarity reversed. This is bad.
I don't think the left is more dogmatic than the right. Certainly both sides are dogmatic in some sense, but the left's reasons for being dogmatic are better than the right's. This is not the primary topic of this piece.
I think it's fair to say that postmodernism swept through the left, particularly the academic left, and gained a great deal of traction. People are still complaining about Western ideals of reason being colonial in 2023.
I see what you are saying but I think when the left criticizes 'economics' they are criticizing a certain type of economic tradition, aren't they? I guess it's true that the left doesn't respect microeconomics as much as the right but they do offer reasons for that, I think? There are many leftist economists--some are even popular figures among the young social media leftists like Richard Wolff. There are tons of leftist economists. Piety, Roemer, Galbraith. Maybe some leftists don't know about them though.
The things people say about 'Western rationality' are maybe all over the place, and not engaged enough with the unavoidability of people sharing certain rational norms. I suppose there are different branches of the left where the critiques differ? I don't have a perfect map in my head. The critical theorists aren't skeptical of rationality, though they re-interpret it. The feminists sometimes are, but also might be more understood as expanding the domain of rationality and being skeptical about whether some norms are rational. The postcolonial theorists --are they really throwing out rationality or just look at its uses? E.g., to use the norm of Western rationality to discredit people as knowers when they surely must know something or you could not explain what they successfully are able to do. It's hard to say. I am not completely sure. But criticizing the uses of the concept of rationality or the understanding of rationality isn't always a rejection of rationality itself (I think?) They criticize the ideal of universal rationality wherein someone can pontificate for all time and place like the godseye view but it's hard to defend an ideal of rationality like that. And that's probably not what people are doing when they use rationality anyway.
Now I gotta go find a book about this. I guess I have had a similar question. The critiques of rationality make sense to me in a lot of ways. You don't have to be a postmodern leftist to criticize it--don't the pragmatists criticize it? But then once you criticize it as an ideal or dump foundationalism or whatever it is they're doing, don't you need to give some account of what you're doing since you're constantly offering reasons and using rationality? Do they ever do this? Or once you've poked enough holes in rationality does that just seem like an impossible task? There's probably some French theorist responding to Derrida who explains it but heck if I know.
It's better not to cede all territory to one's critics. I agree with this. The problem with trying to figure things out is that one cannot constantly spend all one's time refuting critics. Then you would simply revolve around whatever view of knowledge is dominant, constantly trying to defend an idea that critiques it. But if you think you are onto something, then you might want to make your own tradition starting with the insights you have. (Or preserve your tradition since what's standard in anglo-American thought won't even be your tradition if you are French, so you would not want to be revolving around the angio-American critique constantly if you've decided they are wrong-headed about something basic in economics or political theory or philosophy.)
It's common for liberals to ignore the leftist sources for ideas which are successful. So while people are talking like the left is a bunch of college sophomores quoting Mao, things like sovereign wealth funds are leftist ideas.
An observation I've made elsewhere: In discussions like this, the term "Right" refers to the leaders and supporters of the main rightwing party (LNP, US Republicans, UK Tories), accounting for about 40 per cent of the population, while the term "Left" refers to a minuscule fringe (Marxists, academic postmodernists and so on), accounting for perhaps 1 per cent of the population.
On the other hand, I am surprised you can find any 'left' to complain about. In Australia the federal Labor Party is getting all its advice from the bigwigs that used to run the Liberals before they went totally insane.
My hope is that Greens and independents can get together and make some new rules about how an effective management can be created with a large balance of independent - but rational - members.
Perhaps we need new parties based on common sense, rather than nothing but money.
This seems to be directed at a very specific subset of the academic left, that's been in decline for some time. The fight over global heating has put (nearly all of) the left on the side of rationality and science, and (nearly all of) the right on the other. I called the switch in 2003
The far left regularly makes completely unsupported pseudoscientific claims like "climate change is going to kill most people" or "nuclear power is dangerous". They're closer to the truth on this point than the right, but just by chance, not any particular rational impulse.
Nuclear power is dangerous. Nuclear accidents do happen with the potential to cause death, illness and destruction.
It may not be a good reason to avoid nuclear power, but this doesn't make it a false statement.
The view humans won't survive a much warmer planet is an outler view as this is so unlikely Yet it IS a view someone could hold as an outlier, and some scientists do, given the difficulty in determining how the future will unfold.The view need not challenge the fundamentals of science or climate science climate science in any way. It could be a prediction about human behavior, e.g., that we are likely to use our lethal weapons and create additional ones.
Some speculation about the future cannot be disproven until the future has arrived.
It doesn't seem analogous to the right wing denials.
It is completely analogous. Nuclear energy is safer than all other forms of energy production but solar, which it's about tied with. Ignoring the data doesn't make it stop being true.
Some scientists also believe that climate change is not human-caused or won't cause any issues at all. Both this and the "everyone is going to die" view do in fact challenge climate science's findings. There is no plausible mechanism through which people in rich countries are suddenly unable to provide for themselves. See The Precipice for a good summary of this. Yet the far left regularly engages in unscientific doomsaying on this point, very similar to that of right-wing religious cults who talk about the rapture and the antichrist in order to control people. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/426353-ocasio-cortez-the-world-will-end-in-12-years-if-we-dont-address/
"Some speculation about the future cannot be disproven until the future has arrived." is trivially true for all predictions about the future. It applies to climate science just as much as it does to Qanon's predictions about the government and your mundane predictions about what will happen to your arrival time if you choose to take a different route to work. This sort of selective failure to understand basic logic is *exactly* what I see from right-wing pseudosciences.
From what it seems like the Left shelters in little enclaves, because they can't win over most other people with bold intellectual work. Most of what the Left talk about is old and unhelpful ideas that are dressed up as original. We've been living under Leftism since the Enlightenment, and equality for all seems to have its limits. Not to say that the Right is any better on these issues.
The "left" is very conservative, and sometimes quite as demanding of allegiance and mocking the "right" as ignorant. I say the left is conservative because they are stuck on the status quo of the current "democratic practices v. the "mag trend towards "authoritarianism. Perhaps that is not the issue at all.
"The perceptions and the needs will continually remain in flux and unless democracy becomes aware that in order to continually remain it has to do contemporaneously and evolve season after season both by continually reforming the processes of increased democratic sharing of authority and power but by maintaining a constant desire for democracy by reforming its processes. From the view of the Trump follower it is not a choice between autocratic Trump vs. democracy; it is a choice between hoping one’s grievances will be met vs. the autocracy of the status quo that has created the grievances."
Hmm, I think the same argument could be made about the right ceding "science" to the left. Lots of science supports right-wing positions! But instead they retreated into nonsense like antivaxxination and climate change denial and let the left claim the flag of science for themselves.
I think that’s different in that the leaders of those movements are deliberately playing possum: these specific examples of “science” are so well-established that even governments (most of which are generally right-leaning) generally have to act on them. But this type of right-wing group likes to agitate and organize for itself by pretending “the left” already have a dangerous amount of power and must be fought off vigorously (in reality, we have none).
So, it’s not really about saying the left is correct about science, so much as it is about painting the most inoffensive government policies as threats to freedom that are part of the left agenda.
(There’s also a side-goal, that used to be the main goal, of defunding public services like museums and education, and the easiest way to smear these is to pretend they’re actively harmful.)
> pretending “the left” already have a dangerous amount of power and must be fought off vigorously (in reality, we have none).
I'm not really sure how to respond to this. The left and right have about equal political power due to the median voter theory, and the left has far more social power since its members tend to be more educated and better respected, and the ideology pushes them towards vocal activism, whereas conservatism teaches "just keep your head down and help your local community".
Is the right at risk of being defeated or rendered irrelevant? No, of course not, and they wield the power they do have to oppress the left whenever they can, just like the left does to the right. But when oil companies are changing their Twitter logos into pride flags, the president of the United States is trying to cancel student loans, and you can get fired for using a gender-neutral pronoun for a trans person, claiming that the left has no relevant power is nigh delusional.
Or if you prefer data to anecdotes, this is extremely clear any time you look at social statistics like who's donating to political campaigns:
I agree with what you’re saying. It is very rare that “the left” engages in frank and open discourse, where you are free to challenge their views. That is one positive about more right-wing publications, news outlets, and online media presences, as you actually get the impression that you could change their political views with a strong enough argument. There is no such feeling with the left.
You must be engaging with more intellectually honest right-wingers than I tend to see as the figureheads of their movement. (Not saying they're worse than the left, but they certainly don't seem much better to me.)
Perhaps it’s an error on my part for being so hopeful, but I would argue that the right argues more with facts, the left argues more with emotion. Whenever I attempt discourse with peers who are left leaning it always seems to follow that they become outraged at how someone can be so opposed to what their emotions consider to be a reality. Leftist ideology is more dangerous than the right because it exists under the guise of fairness and equality for all, but can be just as fascist as far-right ideology in how it divides people by race, ethnicity, and class.
It is concerning to me that the left has so much sway in political discussions by effectively guilting the neutral into their believing ideas are reality, without providing a solid argument for why. Since Biden, we have seen a sharp rise in extremely leftest ideology becoming the mainstream, causing anything to the right, or against it, to be considered far-right ideology, and shouted down - consider BLM.
I think that what Philosophy Bear is arguing is that the left consistently fails to provide objectively reliable evidence and sound reasoning toward their ideology in an academic context, or in general discourse.
I agree with pretty much all of that, my objection was just to "the right seems more open to changing their minds". If you're talking about the "intellectual dark web" or other factions of the more online, libertarian-leaning right then that's probably true, but the traditional conservative Trump-loving people who make up the majority of the party are much worse. They're just less visible to you and me since they tend to have very insular communities and live in their own bubbles like Truth Social, whereas the extreme leftists insist on inserting themselves in the middle of every new drama.
Sure, I agree that there is a large portion of the right who exist in pockets, while the left insert themselves into the argument as much as possible. There are clearly people on both sides who insist that their opinion is fact due to their own insistence to ignore any other reasonable thought processes. However, I would argue that in most cases, the right (except the extreme right) generally have a more centralised perspective. The left sees the ‘central marker’ as being much further left of the actual centre than the majority of the right see the centre as being on the right. For this reason I would posit that the majority of the left’s perspective is fundamentally more skewed against objective reality than that of the majority of the right. The problem is, the tactics used by the left to guilt-trip and shout down anyone who opposes them has created the situation we are currently in, where the right enjoys discourse in its own insular communities and the left has forced itself into the position of 1. in our cultural politics. The right doesn’t utilise the same tactics, as I would argue that, except for the extreme, the right actually holds more frank, and objectively more logical, political discourse that is ignored in favour of the more attention seeking left. Therefore, the tactics used by the left beat the tactics of the general right. If there was more readily available open and honest debates between the two, supported by facts and sociological investigations, I would argue that the right would win. However, the left would never accept that as they actively avoid that form of debate.
The far left is definitely more prone to redefining terms to equivocate themselves into a rhetorical victory, that's for sure.
My take on the situation is that the left and right are both about equally prone to bad faith and responding with anger to (or just ignoring) facts they don't like, but the left is composed of smarter people, so they tend to employ more effective rhetorical strategies, and as such have managed to win the PR victory.
I disagree here. You say that the left is composed of smarter people, and i wish i could believe you, but i cannot see anyone from the left, in the public eye or otherwise, capable of systematically breaking down an argument from someone from the (sane) right. All anyone from the left can do (e.g. Hillary Clinton) is appeal to the false sense of moral justification that most uneducated and unworldly individuals use as their flagship for social progression.
That meme from Elon is on the money, because wokism is as extreme as the far right in the modern day, but far more dangerous, because it ensnares the average person into believing that it is the only correct course for moral progression, and that it's centralised, through an effectively big brother-esque thought police mentality.
We could go at this forever, but at the end of the day neither the left nor the right will be able to truly enunciate their beliefs until they are able to engage in calm political discourse, supported by factual evidence and a willingness to listen.
Well, there were quite a few libertarians who voted for Trump. Also, the Right Wing have changed quite a bit over the last 10 years: adopting anti-war, pro-blue collar, and pro-social welfare policies.
This is spot on. A serious problem with the left as a political movement.
Very complex reasons for it, just so many. Liberals have sway within the world, and theirs is a flexible creed, so they don't have to organize around a text. Leftists don't have a way to keep faith while wandering in the wilderness.
Leftists have a technical interest in the structure of economics, given their views. So of course they will 'consult a manual.'
But like the things said about left economics--it's just where you look--there's a multitude of thinkers on left not indulging in these vices. And there are also political leaders who have reduced poverty using left principles--like Evo Morales or Lula. Read the World Bank on the pink tide. They did reduce poverty more than anyone expected.
And on the smaller scale, people are constantly doing things like unionizing nannies, or starting nonprofit grocery stores in food deserts, etc. We simply don't pay attention to it.
It's important not to confuse the online left with the people that do stuff.
I am a materialist about everything with the left. Something --some resource--isn’t there. There the internet also. But I don’t have a full explanation.
Do you mean this is a vice of regular people who say they are leftists? Because there are many left theorists of economics and rationality and so forth.
I do not see the regular people on the right deeply engaging with economic theories or theories of rationality. They often believe wholesale nonsense.
But the comment below from Phillip makes me think you mean the left is dogmatic. That's true in some circles.
As for 'destabilizing Western conceptions of rationality' there are many versions of this claim. Some are stupid and some are interesting. Perhaps it is Nietzsche who pioneered the idea. The left is sometimes interested in the idea but it's not particularly leftist. Marx doesn't have any interest in this, even if he raises some pertinent questions about what we sometimes take to be universal rationality.
I don't see postmodernism as particularly leftist, though I suppose they think they are. Maybe that's the problem.
I am always annoyed by the left so I definitely want to know what you mean because you're probably right about something. But I do not see it right off the bat.
I'm talking about the left construed as a cultural formation, the norms, ideas and rhetoric it broadly endorses.
The right claims a kind of ownership over economics, asserting that economics supports its views. Energetic popularisers (e.g. Sowell) have pushed this line. The left has failed to contest this, and broadly accepts the narrative about economics and politics the right asserts (economics is rightwing) but with the moral polarity reversed. This is bad.
I don't think the left is more dogmatic than the right. Certainly both sides are dogmatic in some sense, but the left's reasons for being dogmatic are better than the right's. This is not the primary topic of this piece.
I think it's fair to say that postmodernism swept through the left, particularly the academic left, and gained a great deal of traction. People are still complaining about Western ideals of reason being colonial in 2023.
I see what you are saying but I think when the left criticizes 'economics' they are criticizing a certain type of economic tradition, aren't they? I guess it's true that the left doesn't respect microeconomics as much as the right but they do offer reasons for that, I think? There are many leftist economists--some are even popular figures among the young social media leftists like Richard Wolff. There are tons of leftist economists. Piety, Roemer, Galbraith. Maybe some leftists don't know about them though.
The things people say about 'Western rationality' are maybe all over the place, and not engaged enough with the unavoidability of people sharing certain rational norms. I suppose there are different branches of the left where the critiques differ? I don't have a perfect map in my head. The critical theorists aren't skeptical of rationality, though they re-interpret it. The feminists sometimes are, but also might be more understood as expanding the domain of rationality and being skeptical about whether some norms are rational. The postcolonial theorists --are they really throwing out rationality or just look at its uses? E.g., to use the norm of Western rationality to discredit people as knowers when they surely must know something or you could not explain what they successfully are able to do. It's hard to say. I am not completely sure. But criticizing the uses of the concept of rationality or the understanding of rationality isn't always a rejection of rationality itself (I think?) They criticize the ideal of universal rationality wherein someone can pontificate for all time and place like the godseye view but it's hard to defend an ideal of rationality like that. And that's probably not what people are doing when they use rationality anyway.
Now I gotta go find a book about this. I guess I have had a similar question. The critiques of rationality make sense to me in a lot of ways. You don't have to be a postmodern leftist to criticize it--don't the pragmatists criticize it? But then once you criticize it as an ideal or dump foundationalism or whatever it is they're doing, don't you need to give some account of what you're doing since you're constantly offering reasons and using rationality? Do they ever do this? Or once you've poked enough holes in rationality does that just seem like an impossible task? There's probably some French theorist responding to Derrida who explains it but heck if I know.
It's better not to cede all territory to one's critics. I agree with this. The problem with trying to figure things out is that one cannot constantly spend all one's time refuting critics. Then you would simply revolve around whatever view of knowledge is dominant, constantly trying to defend an idea that critiques it. But if you think you are onto something, then you might want to make your own tradition starting with the insights you have. (Or preserve your tradition since what's standard in anglo-American thought won't even be your tradition if you are French, so you would not want to be revolving around the angio-American critique constantly if you've decided they are wrong-headed about something basic in economics or political theory or philosophy.)
It's common for liberals to ignore the leftist sources for ideas which are successful. So while people are talking like the left is a bunch of college sophomores quoting Mao, things like sovereign wealth funds are leftist ideas.
An observation I've made elsewhere: In discussions like this, the term "Right" refers to the leaders and supporters of the main rightwing party (LNP, US Republicans, UK Tories), accounting for about 40 per cent of the population, while the term "Left" refers to a minuscule fringe (Marxists, academic postmodernists and so on), accounting for perhaps 1 per cent of the population.
You have really surprised that bear!
On the other hand, I am surprised you can find any 'left' to complain about. In Australia the federal Labor Party is getting all its advice from the bigwigs that used to run the Liberals before they went totally insane.
My hope is that Greens and independents can get together and make some new rules about how an effective management can be created with a large balance of independent - but rational - members.
Perhaps we need new parties based on common sense, rather than nothing but money.
This seems to be directed at a very specific subset of the academic left, that's been in decline for some time. The fight over global heating has put (nearly all of) the left on the side of rationality and science, and (nearly all of) the right on the other. I called the switch in 2003
https://johnquiggin.com/2003/09/06/right-wing-postmodernism/
The far left regularly makes completely unsupported pseudoscientific claims like "climate change is going to kill most people" or "nuclear power is dangerous". They're closer to the truth on this point than the right, but just by chance, not any particular rational impulse.
Nuclear power is dangerous. Nuclear accidents do happen with the potential to cause death, illness and destruction.
It may not be a good reason to avoid nuclear power, but this doesn't make it a false statement.
The view humans won't survive a much warmer planet is an outler view as this is so unlikely Yet it IS a view someone could hold as an outlier, and some scientists do, given the difficulty in determining how the future will unfold.The view need not challenge the fundamentals of science or climate science climate science in any way. It could be a prediction about human behavior, e.g., that we are likely to use our lethal weapons and create additional ones.
Some speculation about the future cannot be disproven until the future has arrived.
It doesn't seem analogous to the right wing denials.
It is completely analogous. Nuclear energy is safer than all other forms of energy production but solar, which it's about tied with. Ignoring the data doesn't make it stop being true.
https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#safety-of-nuclear-energy
Some scientists also believe that climate change is not human-caused or won't cause any issues at all. Both this and the "everyone is going to die" view do in fact challenge climate science's findings. There is no plausible mechanism through which people in rich countries are suddenly unable to provide for themselves. See The Precipice for a good summary of this. Yet the far left regularly engages in unscientific doomsaying on this point, very similar to that of right-wing religious cults who talk about the rapture and the antichrist in order to control people. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/426353-ocasio-cortez-the-world-will-end-in-12-years-if-we-dont-address/
"Some speculation about the future cannot be disproven until the future has arrived." is trivially true for all predictions about the future. It applies to climate science just as much as it does to Qanon's predictions about the government and your mundane predictions about what will happen to your arrival time if you choose to take a different route to work. This sort of selective failure to understand basic logic is *exactly* what I see from right-wing pseudosciences.
From what it seems like the Left shelters in little enclaves, because they can't win over most other people with bold intellectual work. Most of what the Left talk about is old and unhelpful ideas that are dressed up as original. We've been living under Leftism since the Enlightenment, and equality for all seems to have its limits. Not to say that the Right is any better on these issues.
The "left" is very conservative, and sometimes quite as demanding of allegiance and mocking the "right" as ignorant. I say the left is conservative because they are stuck on the status quo of the current "democratic practices v. the "mag trend towards "authoritarianism. Perhaps that is not the issue at all.
"The perceptions and the needs will continually remain in flux and unless democracy becomes aware that in order to continually remain it has to do contemporaneously and evolve season after season both by continually reforming the processes of increased democratic sharing of authority and power but by maintaining a constant desire for democracy by reforming its processes. From the view of the Trump follower it is not a choice between autocratic Trump vs. democracy; it is a choice between hoping one’s grievances will be met vs. the autocracy of the status quo that has created the grievances."
https://ken9yvonne.substack.com/p/1830s-the-jacksonian-reformation?utm_campaign=email-post&r=1t0tey&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Hmm, I think the same argument could be made about the right ceding "science" to the left. Lots of science supports right-wing positions! But instead they retreated into nonsense like antivaxxination and climate change denial and let the left claim the flag of science for themselves.
I think that’s different in that the leaders of those movements are deliberately playing possum: these specific examples of “science” are so well-established that even governments (most of which are generally right-leaning) generally have to act on them. But this type of right-wing group likes to agitate and organize for itself by pretending “the left” already have a dangerous amount of power and must be fought off vigorously (in reality, we have none).
So, it’s not really about saying the left is correct about science, so much as it is about painting the most inoffensive government policies as threats to freedom that are part of the left agenda.
(There’s also a side-goal, that used to be the main goal, of defunding public services like museums and education, and the easiest way to smear these is to pretend they’re actively harmful.)
> pretending “the left” already have a dangerous amount of power and must be fought off vigorously (in reality, we have none).
I'm not really sure how to respond to this. The left and right have about equal political power due to the median voter theory, and the left has far more social power since its members tend to be more educated and better respected, and the ideology pushes them towards vocal activism, whereas conservatism teaches "just keep your head down and help your local community".
Is the right at risk of being defeated or rendered irrelevant? No, of course not, and they wield the power they do have to oppress the left whenever they can, just like the left does to the right. But when oil companies are changing their Twitter logos into pride flags, the president of the United States is trying to cancel student loans, and you can get fired for using a gender-neutral pronoun for a trans person, claiming that the left has no relevant power is nigh delusional.
Or if you prefer data to anecdotes, this is extremely clear any time you look at social statistics like who's donating to political campaigns:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal
I agree with what you’re saying. It is very rare that “the left” engages in frank and open discourse, where you are free to challenge their views. That is one positive about more right-wing publications, news outlets, and online media presences, as you actually get the impression that you could change their political views with a strong enough argument. There is no such feeling with the left.
You must be engaging with more intellectually honest right-wingers than I tend to see as the figureheads of their movement. (Not saying they're worse than the left, but they certainly don't seem much better to me.)
Perhaps it’s an error on my part for being so hopeful, but I would argue that the right argues more with facts, the left argues more with emotion. Whenever I attempt discourse with peers who are left leaning it always seems to follow that they become outraged at how someone can be so opposed to what their emotions consider to be a reality. Leftist ideology is more dangerous than the right because it exists under the guise of fairness and equality for all, but can be just as fascist as far-right ideology in how it divides people by race, ethnicity, and class.
It is concerning to me that the left has so much sway in political discussions by effectively guilting the neutral into their believing ideas are reality, without providing a solid argument for why. Since Biden, we have seen a sharp rise in extremely leftest ideology becoming the mainstream, causing anything to the right, or against it, to be considered far-right ideology, and shouted down - consider BLM.
I think that what Philosophy Bear is arguing is that the left consistently fails to provide objectively reliable evidence and sound reasoning toward their ideology in an academic context, or in general discourse.
I agree with pretty much all of that, my objection was just to "the right seems more open to changing their minds". If you're talking about the "intellectual dark web" or other factions of the more online, libertarian-leaning right then that's probably true, but the traditional conservative Trump-loving people who make up the majority of the party are much worse. They're just less visible to you and me since they tend to have very insular communities and live in their own bubbles like Truth Social, whereas the extreme leftists insist on inserting themselves in the middle of every new drama.
e.g. see section III here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Sure, I agree that there is a large portion of the right who exist in pockets, while the left insert themselves into the argument as much as possible. There are clearly people on both sides who insist that their opinion is fact due to their own insistence to ignore any other reasonable thought processes. However, I would argue that in most cases, the right (except the extreme right) generally have a more centralised perspective. The left sees the ‘central marker’ as being much further left of the actual centre than the majority of the right see the centre as being on the right. For this reason I would posit that the majority of the left’s perspective is fundamentally more skewed against objective reality than that of the majority of the right. The problem is, the tactics used by the left to guilt-trip and shout down anyone who opposes them has created the situation we are currently in, where the right enjoys discourse in its own insular communities and the left has forced itself into the position of 1. in our cultural politics. The right doesn’t utilise the same tactics, as I would argue that, except for the extreme, the right actually holds more frank, and objectively more logical, political discourse that is ignored in favour of the more attention seeking left. Therefore, the tactics used by the left beat the tactics of the general right. If there was more readily available open and honest debates between the two, supported by facts and sociological investigations, I would argue that the right would win. However, the left would never accept that as they actively avoid that form of debate.
The far left is definitely more prone to redefining terms to equivocate themselves into a rhetorical victory, that's for sure.
My take on the situation is that the left and right are both about equally prone to bad faith and responding with anger to (or just ignoring) facts they don't like, but the left is composed of smarter people, so they tend to employ more effective rhetorical strategies, and as such have managed to win the PR victory.
I think I agree that the right's perspective on political distribution is more correct than the left's (Elon's meme seems generally correct in this regard https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxbusiness.com/foxbusiness.com/content/uploads/2022/04/1024/512/elon-meme-thumb64.jpg?ve=1&tl=1), but the right fails to correctly perceive reality in other ways, like their beliefs about climate change and religion, and rejection of science and statistics in general. Just look at their presidential candidates: https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1731119290823192658
The left does have many politicians this unhinged, but none of them have a serious chance at the presidency.
I disagree here. You say that the left is composed of smarter people, and i wish i could believe you, but i cannot see anyone from the left, in the public eye or otherwise, capable of systematically breaking down an argument from someone from the (sane) right. All anyone from the left can do (e.g. Hillary Clinton) is appeal to the false sense of moral justification that most uneducated and unworldly individuals use as their flagship for social progression.
That meme from Elon is on the money, because wokism is as extreme as the far right in the modern day, but far more dangerous, because it ensnares the average person into believing that it is the only correct course for moral progression, and that it's centralised, through an effectively big brother-esque thought police mentality.
We could go at this forever, but at the end of the day neither the left nor the right will be able to truly enunciate their beliefs until they are able to engage in calm political discourse, supported by factual evidence and a willingness to listen.
Well, there were quite a few libertarians who voted for Trump. Also, the Right Wing have changed quite a bit over the last 10 years: adopting anti-war, pro-blue collar, and pro-social welfare policies.
This is spot on. A serious problem with the left as a political movement.
Very complex reasons for it, just so many. Liberals have sway within the world, and theirs is a flexible creed, so they don't have to organize around a text. Leftists don't have a way to keep faith while wandering in the wilderness.
Leftists have a technical interest in the structure of economics, given their views. So of course they will 'consult a manual.'
But like the things said about left economics--it's just where you look--there's a multitude of thinkers on left not indulging in these vices. And there are also political leaders who have reduced poverty using left principles--like Evo Morales or Lula. Read the World Bank on the pink tide. They did reduce poverty more than anyone expected.
And on the smaller scale, people are constantly doing things like unionizing nannies, or starting nonprofit grocery stores in food deserts, etc. We simply don't pay attention to it.
It's important not to confuse the online left with the people that do stuff.
I am a materialist about everything with the left. Something --some resource--isn’t there. There the internet also. But I don’t have a full explanation.