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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   23631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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I have seen some people say that Maine is a purple, or slightly-blue state. If it elects this guy to the Senate, then I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the state is quite a bit more left than that.

Left and right are not always the best words to describe these populations. Many voter groups have ideosyncrytic beliefs that can fit with both the far left and far right. No party is socially right wing, economically left wing and isolationist, but voters increasingly are. Due to the economic fallout of the Iran war economic matters are very salient right now, which would benefit a guy like Platner, particularily in a state like Maine with a less religious population.

The typical swing voter probably has a negative view of both parties, war, immigration, crime and billionaires, yet somehow political strategist keep envisioning them as a love child between Hillary Clinton and Liz Cheney.

Left and right are not always the best words to describe these populations.

I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement. There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.

The categories become much more relevant and legible if you accept the Milton and David Friedman model of Left and Right as being about collective vs individual responsibility and agency.

It’s not a psyop; politics wasn’t and isn’t one-dimensional.

The political compass has its own issues, but it illustrates this one nicely. Economic collectivism, social conservatism. Distinctly lacking in the egalitarian, enlightenment ideals underpinning the Western Overton window.

I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement.

If National Socialism was ever a "fundamentally left-wing movement" then nobody told Hitler's contemporaries. The right found him sympathetic and the non-communist left didn't.

There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.

Only because of the Nazi-Soviet pact. A number of Communists went from being loud and proud anti-fascists to pacifists when Soviet policy changed, and straight back to being anti-fascist after Barbarossa.

If National Socialism was ever a "fundamentally left-wing movement" then nobody told Hitler's contemporaries. The right found him sympathetic and the non-communist left didn't.

The lineage is messy, but "leftist movement that walked back some important bits" is a reasonable ballpark description. Their formal party platform reads like a "What if Bernie Sanders was a really self-hating Jew" skit. "Non-communist left" is still usually quite communist-sympathetic, and the German conservatives seemed to think they were making a deal with a lesser devil against the greater.

Personally, I like the simplicity of the /politicalcompassmemes solution: Call them auth-center and let the comments section slapfight it out.

I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement. There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.

I think fascism really can't be summed up as anything other than Third Position. Intellectually it inherits from both the then right and the left. It combines the 'lets remake society based on my rational principles (charitable) / my ideology (uncharitable)' of the left, which the right hates, in the service of many institutions and cultural mores, such as natural hierarchy and nationalism, that the left hates. The fascists typically allied a lot more with traditional conservatives than the left in the interwar period. At the same time, they allied with the left on occasion such as working with Communists to bring down the Weimar Coalition. They were a very different ideology and both democratic conservatives and continental authoritarian conservatives had a lot of negative things to say about Fascists.

Anglo American conservatism didn't really have anything to do with Fascists. Unlike their continental counterparts, they never made any alliances with then nor did they have much ideological shared lineage. There was some admiration from the then progressives in the US for Fascism and even Nazism, but there also was admiration for Stalin as well. Many American technocrats thought the Communists and Fascists were technocracy done right, until it became obvious they were failed experiments. To be honest, both the Anglosphere left and right are so far removed from Fascism and Nazism that I don't think any comparison or contrast is useful. It's like comparing Democrats or Republicans to the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia or the Taliban; they are just so different there isn't much to say.

These are all excellent points, but I want to push back a bit against fascism being "a Third Position" at least in the Anglo-American context.

As you yourself acknowledged, Anglo-American conservatism never really had anything to do with the Fascists. But this often obscured either through willful misrepresentation, (IE using "Fascism" as a generic label for anything leftists don't like regardless of content) or through conflation of vocabulary. People today see the word "Corporatism" and immediately think Wall Street, when the reality is that what men like Mussolini, Mosley, and Eco described as "Corporatism" or "Corporazioni" was a very different beast from the typical Anglo-American understanding of the word which is more about being beholden to corporate interests. and at the end of the day Fascism remains rooted in the same Marxian critique of Capitalism in particular and Western Civilization more generally as Communism.

I just find it deeply ironic that the same people who'll label anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a Nazi have chosen a self-described revolutionary socialist with an SS tattoo to be their guy.

The categories become much more relevant and legible if you accept the Milton and David Friedman model of Left and Right as being about collective vs individual responsibility and agency.

Seems wrong. The right sometimes talks about individual responsibility and agency, but they are right there complaining about opioids, OnlyFans, and FanDuel as if people don't actually have agency.

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