(12-15-2024, 01:08 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(12-15-2024, 10:14 AM)TDOSS Wrote: Actually, I agree that the radicals on the left have been ushering in too much change at one time, which has pushed those right of center further right, to the point that they begin to resemble the old Nazi/fascist right.

I also agree that the left/right paradigm is an inadequate measure. However, I'm not a big identity Democrat or someone focused in the extreme on multiculturalism. You're oversimplifying, too.

There's a huge difference between being attached to traditional hierarchy and forging toward equality without forcing an end to hierarchy by merit. But money isn't merit, and neither is traditional hierarchy. Time only goes in one direction, and it favors eventual progressive social values and more egalitarian distribution of wealth, even though there may be small reactionary turns.

You argue that it is important to place historical events in a contextual perspective and compare them to alternatives from that time. Saying that Nazism developed as a reaction to the threat of communism is partially correct, but it does not explain why the Nazis themselves adopted ideas that were deeply authoritarian and anti-individualistic. It is also misleading to call these "leftist ideas" simply because the state played a central role.

Let us not forget that it was conservatives who brought Hitler to power and supported him in becoming Chancellor. Socialists, on the other hand, were his main opponents, and once he consolidated power, he imprisoned them. Many prominent socialist figures were executed, and even "ordinary" socialists without political influence were arrested. My grandfather was one of them.

In physics, time only moves forward.  But in politics, time can move any direction for any amount of time.  It won't ever move precisely backwards, as if decades and centuries past could be recreated and relived in hi-fi, but it can angle strongly towards that direction.

I question this. In politics, there isn't a general move forward or back. Individual issues move. All over the developed world, we have had anti-abortion movements, for example, and they have become louder and apparently more powerful. But if you examine the views of individuals on annual polls going back to the early 1970s, there has been only a slow evolution in the progressive direction, not a backtracking. The angling in that direction is louder speech and the rise in political power of certain individuals through gerrymandering. But it isn't real political power, which can only come from the majority, not some loud elite.

Just to go back to to your other point. You stated that:

Quote:The main enduring appeal of Marx is also one of his main errors: he thought he could predict the future. He thought Germany would broadly become a capitalist and bourgeois democracy as the UK and France had, and he thought the UK and France would inevitably be the first to become dictatorships of the proletariat, with every other nation in the world inevitably following that pattern.

Germany isn't a capitalist and bourgeois democracy? And the UK and France have all those mitigating social programs, as does Germany, of course, that were first ideas of socialism.

It isn't that Marx had no predictive power - part of the reason social conflict theories survive well is that conflict as a concept allows one to pick out the differences and variations, without which scientific prediction isn't possible. Rather, once Marxist theory inspired some of those below and scared some of those above, behavior worked to preserve capitalism and bourgeois democracy by modifying it in the direction of social democracy.

There have even been arguments that scientific paradigms in the social sciences were affected. In social/ cultural anthropology, for example, Malinowski's paradigm of participant observation, turning away from the Boasian and other historical orientation, was an attempt to make a non-Marxian anthropology, as if being oriented to historical change had necessarily to be Marxian.

Quote:There's more we could say about this, but it's enough to point out that Democrats, and you, embrace this today. That way, every time you lose, you haven't really lost for good, it's just your eventual victory has been delayed. It's quasi religious pap for people who have rejected or been disappointed by traditional religion.

 This is silly. This attitude is what individuals need psychologically to keep working and fighting for what you discuss next:

Quote:And it's dangerous! The good stuff we have today, the wide distribution of wealth and power, the permissive social values, we have to fight to keep that, if we want to keep it. It does not inevitably grow. In fact, if anything in political economy is inevitable, it is that the powerful and wealthy today will attempt to make their power and wealth permanent, they will pull up the ladder behind them. We have to resist that.

Nobody fights to keep things or restore them after setbacks if they do not have a psychological edge.

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