Today's political question is....

[RickW]

Reading the thread on torture at Gitmo, and seeing Doug's last reply....

We have people on the left.....

We have people on the right....

We have Doug the anarchist....

Now, where the heck does anarchy fall on the political scale?

If you don't believe in big government, well then, anarchy's pretty far to the right.....

If you believe that we ALL should run the government, and every man, woman, child, rock and tree should get their say, then you're pretty far to the left.....

I need more coffee, that's what I need.... why am I thinking about this stuff at this time of the morning.....

[theevan]

Anarchy is all the way to the right, a few miles starboard (or is that port?) of the libertarians.

To me, the French Revolution is the classic example of anarchy (and why I think it a worse evil than "big government").

[patrick]

I don't see the political spectrum as a straight line with "left" and "right." I tend to see it as a circle, if you go far enough in one direction, you end up at the other.

[Supertramp78]

I've always wondered about that myself. Was Hitler conservative or liberal? Probably depends on if you ask a modern day conservative or liberal. He certainly liked centralized governmental power, public works projects, wage and price controls, so the right could say he was a lefty. He also was really big on building up the military and massive budget deficits , rather strict law enforcement tactics, limited due process, had a very strong opinion regarding traditional family religious values, and ignored the opinions of the international community, he abolished trade unions, and was really big on the death penalty so the lefties could claim he was conservative.

All kidding aside, I guess facism is probably just a style of governing, not a political leaning. Anarchy is just a desire for no rule at all, which of course just means hundreds of rules or rule of the strongest in your neighborhood. Since no viable long term anarchy has existed at any time in recent memory, it is kind of hard to evaluate it.

[Dub]

Half of the political spectrum is missing in the US. There are virtually no leftists here of any sort, just centrists and varying degrees of rightists. Using the optical color spectrum as an analog, let's imagine you took away all the colors from the longest green waves clear through to red and infrared. Would you then refer to the warmest green colors as red since they are now the limit of the spectrum in that direction? No, they'd still be green.

Just because there is no left in the American political spectrum doesn't mean that the least right-leaning centrists are now leftists.

Here at The Soundhole, I am probably the farthest to the left politically and yet I'm no leftist.

And I think Doug's anarchism assumes a civil and informed populace. He'll correct me if I'm wrong.

- Dub

[Cornflake]

What Patrick said: it's a circle, not a line. I remember (vaguely) reading about the Spanish Civil War, where real live anarchists played a significant part. They were "left-wing" anarchists but Doug would have gotten along with them pretty well.

[Doug]

I see no right in the US political spectrum just shades of left.

That being based on Karl Marx. Government education - left Progressive taxes - left etc. If Marx put it in his list then it's left.

As Tramp likes to point out there is no long term working anarchy, but then there is no long term working government either. If there was the Romans would still be in charge.

Anarchy" just means "without a political state", not "chaos", which is the exact opposite of anarchy.

The often described problem with anarchy is the "power-vacuum problem". The power-vacuum problem is the re-establishment of a new government on the ashes of the old.

Until that is solved the best you can hope for is a gradual increase in the tyranny of government, a fall and the cycle happens again. Been going on for thousands of years.

[Doug]

What Flake said about left wing anarchist is right. We have our own, Dharma is real close to being left wing anarchist in what he seems to believe.

Hippies of the 60's and early 70's were left wing anarchist. Peace, Love, and you do your thing and I'll do mine and the government has no business being involved.

[Russell Letson]

One problem with left-right models of politics is that the "spectrum" or "range" metaphor doesn't have enough dimensions. Another is what labels (which is to say, extreme condtions or limit cases) go at the "poles": is it capitalism/communism or free will/oppression or what? I'd say the first step in making sense of a political-social-economic situation is to figure out how many dimensions you need to describe the space--and where and whether the binary-defined axes cross, and in fact whether all the variables reduce to binary pairs. Cornflake's circle is just a "left-right" axis bent around to meet itself, which assumes that 1) the binary-value model is an adequate description of the value space and 2) that the polar opposites resolve to the same value.

Doug cites a traditional root-meaning notion of anarchy (no rulers), and he correctly points out that this doesn't equal chaos but simply the lack of a "political state"--and as Dub observes, that implies a particular model of human behavior if it's going to work. The value terms that Doug most often uses suggest that the issue he's concerned with is coercion, with the additional notion that coercion is evil *and* that it ultimately reduces to "do this or I'll kill you." This strikes me as a kind of fundamentalist libertarianism, and my critique of this model is that it lacks some of the dimensions (that is, additional axes) needed to adquately describe human social behavior. But that's a whole other discussion.

I'm sure there are political philosophers who have worked all this out in detail, but my horseback analysis would be that we need several sets of axes (starting with authoritarian/voluntarist and collectivist/individualist), along with some non-axis-friendly data that might not even be easily quantifiable (how big is the population? how varied culturally and ethnically? what is its economic basis? how urbanized is it?)--and even then there's a big hole labeled "model of human nature" that is actually the key to the whole puzzle. (Remember, I'm the monkey-troupe-metaphor guy. Is there a "class clown" school of political theory?)

[Doug]

If you accept "government as a necessary evil" then it becomes an question of scale. And millions don't cut it.

About the only size government that I can see working or has worked in history is the family, and it's self limiting by the fact that the ruled become adults and leave.

[Cornflake]

Geez, Russell, can't you leave our oversimplified verities in peace?

[Russell Letson]

Doug, you do have to account for the fact that our species' working social unit is not the family but the tribe--our primate cousins don't organize in anything smaller than the troupe (orangutans being the only counter-example I can think of). The whole notion of a rigidly fixed "human nature" is pretty questionable, but there do seem to be biases built into us, and the pattern that repeats from prehistory onward is multi-family social groups. That does not always scale up in healthy ways (the big-monkey leader too easily becomes the big bully, with a supporting gang of lesser bullies), and scarcity does not always seem to encourage sharing, but the fact remains that we seem to be neither solitary hunters nor social-insect collectivists but gregarious, cooperative, and often competitive creatures. The science fiction writer Poul Anderson concluded that the optimal political unit would be something like a small (USian) state, and that larger collectives lead to various pathologies as the mechanisms of social and politial control scaled beyond that. This, along with his libertarian bent, made Anderson seem "conservative," but that's an inadequate label for such a complex position. (Myself, I'm a Bokononist. Happy me, happy mud.)

[billhammond]

Russ has his own axes to postulate and grind.

[Russell Letson]

I prefer hammers to axes--everything I see looks like a nail.

[Deleted]

hey i am a backwoods iliterate (spell?) who can't understand these threads.......jeese!

[Dub]

Mr. Letson, I am continually awed by your learning, your intellect and your uncommonly fine skill with language. Were I to find myself living anywhere near St. Cloud I'd spend more time being awed by your music as well.

- Dub

[Russell Letson]

Dub, you gotta get out more.

[Deleted]

what does he have to get of?

[billhammond]

Jul 22, 2008 12:10:01 GMT -5 Dub said:

Mr. Letson, I am continually awed by your learning, your intellect and your uncommonly fine skill with language. Were I to find myself living anywhere near St. Cloud I'd spend more time being awed by your music as well.

- Dub

YOU GUYS WANNA GET A ROOM, PLEASE?

[RickW]

Man, I wander way and a discussion breaks out.

I would have to agree with the thought that the left/right axis is over simplistic. However, as has been noted in other discussions, the public likes things simple - it makes it easy for someone else to tell them how to make a decision.

I'm pretty much as far to the left as anyone here, I think - I'm a social democrat at heart. But I understand some of what Doug espouses. The truth is, the closer the government is to home, the more it affects you - but the less we pay attention. Civil governments have huge power over how you live and what you do, but turnout for those elections is almost nill. Go figure. Not sexy enough, I guess.