(02-10-2019, 11:01 PM)TJBender Wrote:

(02-10-2019, 07:51 PM)MalabarJag Wrote: You apparently spent 20 years being indoctrinated by leftists. Fascism is a leftist concept. FDR modeled his plan of governance on Mussolini's Italy.

As far as Pirkster's drawing, left and right don't exactly follow a Statist vs. Anarchy line, but the political Left is far toward the Statist end.

Some posters wouldn't surprise me with a simple shot at my education. You're not one of them. I'm a little disappointed, actually.

Political theory is generally agreed upon as a horseshoe spectrum. You would be correct in saying that where certain ideologies fall on that horseshoe spectrum, and you'd be right to point out that the most common version of it these days puts liberalism as moderate and conservatism as somewhat more extreme. I'd disagree with the chart pretty strongly there. If anything, classical conservatism is more moderate than classical liberalism, but what we have in our government right now doesn't resemble either of those. I'd say that what we have right now is a left that wants to pass itself off as democratic socialists and a right that wants to pretend it isn't trying to form a theocracy. The actual state of our government most closely resembles a corporatist state. If Verizon wants something done, they just make a few phone calls and pass out a few bucks and now their lawyer is running the FCC. If TurboTax wants to make sure everyone's stuck paying them $60 a year for the privilege of paying the government, they make a few phone calls and a few campaign donations, and the bill never makes it out of committee.

What's funny is that corporatism is generally defined as being somewhere along the far right side of the horseshoe, closing in on the extreme because of how theoretically easy it would be for a corporate-controlled government to take away rights in the name of sales. Democrats are just as complicit here, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in this country who would call the Democratic Party far right. They're not. They've just shifted in actuality to a position on the horseshoe where they start to mirror their friends across the aisle. And can you really tell me, with a straight face, that our government isn't owned by corporations?