Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

A lot of the left has a problem with slapping the terms neoliberal, liberal, and bourgeois on anything they don't like whether it actually applies or not. The first two have relatively precise definitions, and the third has a relatively straightforward definition but is also broad enough as to be used by more authoritarian leftists to stigmatize groups to justify their persecution, e.g. describing homosexuality, certain Jewish-coded cultural habits, and non-government approved scientific research as "bourgeois" due to specious connections with the rich and powerful, thus making them undesirable groups to belong to. And then there's using the word "capitalist" to describe things that are more accurately described as "corporatist" when they overlap but are not identical strictly speaking.

From my experiences the stigma of the term "liberal" has to do with it being a term those who identify as radicals use to criticize people they consider too moderate and conciliatory. Likewise left-anarchists who ascribe to Democracy Is Bad and view liberalism aka Liberal/Representative Democracy as inherently fascist because it allows people with undesirable viewpoints to continue to exist with the hopes of the populace being smart enough to not vote them in (such anarchists don't believe the public can be trusted not to do this, and Trump's win in 2016 and the rise of the alt-right are to them proof of the principle), when they should be purged outright.

Edited by AlleyOop on Nov 10th 2019 at 7:32:25 AM

Don't forget "centrist".

Which goes back to the misuse of terms. They use "liberal" to mean "centrist" (at best), and "centrist" to mean "not sufficiently progressive".

Also, I dunno if it's just me, but that description of anarchists makes them sound a little too similar to their enemies.

Edited by PhysicalStamina on Nov 10th 2019 at 7:21:38 AM

Well, the idea is that these particular anarchists still want direct democracy, and their belief is that the purges are less of people who were born into the wrong groups and more of people who choose to threaten society with their toxic beliefs or exploitation of the underclass, and thus so-called liberals who speak of opposing fascists but do nothing to actual stop them are to blame for letting them fester.

In which case I could see their point, if not for the fact that many of them preach authoritarian policy in practice if not in name, are a mix of pseudo-intellectuals and ne'er-do-wells who want to hurt and hate people by using progressivism as a shield, or whose disdain of liberals just leads to actual enabling of fascists via We ARE Struggling Together because for all they talk about punching Nazis they expend all of their energy on expending vitriol at the kinds of people who are broadly on the same side as them but fail to pass their ideology tests.

Edited by AlleyOop on Nov 10th 2019 at 7:33:10 AM

The anarchist schools of thought that oppose democracy and social safety nets are pretty much why I abandoned my position there. I had to move closer to "center" because apparently the center was being anti-authoritarian but not wanting to burn the weak and poor.

The types of anarchists I'm referring to (e.g. anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists) are very much pro-safety net, pro-poor/anti-rich, and anti-capitalist. They just don't think it should be a hierarchal government institution because representative democracy and centralized states are for fascists.

Edited by AlleyOop on Nov 10th 2019 at 8:30:42 AM

Being in a profession that deals constantly with chains of command and hierarchies, I have to say that I never saw the appeal or logic of anarchism. No offense to the anarchists here by the way.

The appeal is mostly the assumption that the person above you is going to fuck you over and that he's institutionally helped to do so.

I'm just extremely skeptical about the ability of systems like that to work beyond very small scale communities (I'm also not sure what their rebuttal to that objection is, since it's probably the most common one).

I guess their vision of the future is a world with nothing but those small-scale communities. No nation states or anything.

Which I guess makes them the ultimate reactionaries in a way even if they don't realize it.

Honestly, I do not take a world of small communities as a good thing because I’m more or less aware that much of what is done in terms of infrastructure and technology nowadays requires huge amounts of human capital, making the concept of city-states borderline obsolete.

That's not really a misuse of the terms, it's only really in the US where liberal is used to mean "left of center". Generally, in European countries Liberals are far closer to what we would call libertarians, pro-free market plutocratic types who are not anti-civil liberties.

In my experience that's how the term is used down here in Brazil too. I'm not really sure at what point "liberal" came to have its present connotations in the US.

Can anyone think of non-obstructive bureaucrats from works that aren't historical dramas?

Most anarchism is not actually about the end state actually. There's quite a few schools that aren't about "no laws forever" but actually about anarchism as the method. What comes next is going to be a thing but first we must destroy what is now and irrevocably tainted by hierarchy.

I can’t give you examples from fiction sadly. Bureaucracy is not something that writers tend to understand or accept in my experience.

There is one famous example of exactly the opposite: Kafka, who himself was a bureaucrat and all his famous works are about the alienation, obtuseness and dehumanization of bureaucratic systems.

Jack Ryan.

Mind you, he's continually upgraded to action hero.

The most common rebuttals I tend to see are:

• People sticking to small communities is a good thing, as industrialization and urbanization are to blame for much oppression, exploitation, and suffering. Some of us are anarcho-primitivists/Luddites and believe the technology itself played a part in that; but many of us are not, and are fine with industrial-era technology as long as it remains humane.
• We don't want a complete removal of all forms of higher government, just ones that use formal hierarchies. Informal hierarchies can be allowed if each of the workers/members of the group vote to allow someone to have that kind of power, but just as they giveth they can also taketh their power if they abuse it. Tends to be a lot more common with anarcho-syndicalists.
• We don't know that you can't apply anarchistic principles to large-scale society, because it's never been properly tried. People who dispute this are just being close-minded.

The first and especially third ones are too subjective in my opinion. The second one I do have a lot of sympathy with, and it has been historically implemented with some success and continues on in the form of many cooperatives. But I dispute the most absolute implementation of this principle, as the bigger ones usually did still have some kind of formalized hierarchy with bosses and pay disparities, albeit highly reduced and more egalitarian than most corporations. And some people simply tend to work better within a system that has clearly defined roles and thus hierarchy (especially in team-based science, it's good to have a dedicated wet-lab person, or a pathologist, and someone to analyze genomic data, and someone on top to coordinate between them as they get pretty into their work and don't always know what each other is up to), so it's not a one-size-fits-all system.

Edited by AlleyOop on Nov 10th 2019 at 9:57:13 AM

The thing is, even if smaller communities might be better, it doesn't really matter that much because it's not viable to restructure human civilization to fit that paradigm because everything runs on a ridiculously large scale now and you can't really break that up, especially when there's no real incentive.

Unless that's not the goal, but in that case, anarchism as a political philosophy still has very limited applications.

Bluntly, the pattern is not working at present and is needlessly causing massive human suffering. So it needs to be dissolved for something better. Reform is much better than overthrow IMHO but the idea we can't do better is silly.

Anarchism is at heart questioning why we need things like hierarchies, nation-states, and other divisions in the Modern World.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 10th 2019 at 7:14:53 AM

What they fail to realize is that things can always get worse. Hence why it's so important to actually have a feasible better alternative when proposing tearing down the old. Otherwise it's all too likely that what you get after getting rid of the old systems will make you wish for them back.

There's also the Sunk Cost Fallacy that was part of the issue with communism in the 20th century as they kept saying that Utopia Justifies the Means and anyone who was against their ideals were worth killing.

The distillation of authoritarian ideals, IMHO.

...so they're still using it wrong, because when American progressives aren't talking about pseudo-libertarians when they complain about liberals.

Yeah, "liberals" includes anyone who is a democratic socialist, social democrat, or reformist in general as opposed to someone who advocates for revolution, although in fairness to the radicals, not all of them believe the revolution necessarily has to be violent. The irony, though, is that many of them are people who decry those who are politically involved as "liberals" while they themselves tend to limit their activism to angrily tweeting about guillotining the rich and little more than that.

Edited by AlleyOop on Nov 10th 2019 at 10:59:00 AM

They probably don't even vote.