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0 pointsfluoridation11d ago0 comments

I mean, it is quite literally a conservative position (a refusal of change), and the right is typically conservative.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

graemep11d ago· 2 in thread

I think right equals conservative has not been true for a long time. It is the right that promoted globalisation. In many countries it was the right that privatised formally state owned industries. In the UK in the 70s the right wanted to join the EEC (and Conservative Party governments supported greater integration for decades afterwards), and the left opposed it. All big changes. The current US government seems to want to change a lot of things.

oulipo211d ago

Right = "let me do this thing for myself to get ahead, and then forbid everyone else to do the same"

graemep11d ago

Examples? Preferably European given the context of the thread. Ideally UK. Anywhere OK if you are struggling for European examples though.

TFNA11d ago· 2 in thread

Depends at how you look at it. You can also see cultural diversity as sticking up for the little guy against corporate behemoths and as decentralized bottom-up organizing, i.e. things the left has often claimed to pursue.

Peoples being encouraged to maintain their own language in a purist state and develop culture from their own internal resources, was a notable feature of first-generation Communism in the USSR (before it reverted to Russian supremacism under Stalin) and in the PRC (before it evolved into Han nationalism).

fluoridationOP11d ago

The right/left distinction is less meaningful in authoritarian single-party regimes. The Soviet Union and Maoist China were obviously economically leftist, but politically, authoritarian regimes often align in similar ways, regardless of their economical policies. Pro-nationalist policies are favored by them because they're useful to their purposes; you wouldn't want your influence being diluted by outside cultural and economic forces.

TFNA11d ago

That’s an overly cynical view in the context I mentioned above. Lenin was advocating for more language rights and cultural self-development opportunities for the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire years before he had any glimmer of hope of seizing power. At that time, the “authoritarian single-party regime” that leftism in Russia opposed was the tsarist rule, which didn’t permit any local autonomy until after the 1905 Revolution, and even then only grudgingly.

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