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Me, being called a liberal:
Lolno I just don’t think their red authoritarianism and denial of reality looks much different than conservative fascism and denial of reality.
Anything left of the far right, is a liberal idea to someone who lives their life on the far right.
Which just goes to show that they misunderstand who their supporters and opponents are.
It seems to me that academics who study horseshoe theory routinely miss the point. For example, the Wikipedia article on this topic uses this to try to refute the theory:
Simon Choat, a senior lecturer in political theory at Kingston University, has criticized the horseshoe theory. In a 2017 article for The Conversation, “‘Horseshoe theory’ is nonsense – the far right and far left have little in common”, he argues that far-left and far-right ideologies only share similarities in the vaguest sense, in that they both oppose the liberal democratic status quo, but that the two sides have very different reasons and very different aims for doing so.[29] Choat uses the issue of globalization as an example;[30] both the far-left and the far-right attack neoliberal globalization and its “elites”, but identify different elites and have conflicting reasons for attacking them.[31]
But it’s a total strawman. Nobody is arguing that tankies oppose or support the same things as Nazis, or that they share the same goals. What they have in common is an embrace of authoritarianism. Of course the tankies like different authoritarians, like Maduro or Putin instead of Hitler or Mussolini. But the love, or at least tolerance, for authoritarianism is the one thing they have in common - that the ends justify the means.
But not all of the far left is authoritarian. That’s where horseshoe theory fails. The fact that tankies and fascists share some common traits isn’t enough to save it.
Also, while tankies grew out of the left in some sense, it’s pretty debatable whether it’s still a left movement at this point. The philosophical differences with the rest of the left are enormous.
Not all of the far right is authoritarian either. And those non-authoritarian sects support basically the same kind of means for decentralizing power.
Some means that actually centralize power every time somebody tries… But yeah, honesty is not a common trait on either extreme.
Not all of the far right is authoritarian either.
I struggle to think of any far-right ideology, theoretical or practical, that isn’t enamored with hierarchy.
The right is less authoritarian regarding business and environmental regulations than the left, as one example.
Businesses are just a different kind of hierarchy than government.
The point is the right doesn’t want the government regulating businesses, whereas the left does. Therefore the left is more authoritarian regarding regulation of business, just as the right is more authoritarian in regulating personal rights.
I don’t really find that a meaningful distinction in the context of discussing whether far-right ideologies are capable of being anti-hierarchy.
Preferring one authority over another isn’t the same as being anti-authoritarian. People who want complete capitalist dominance over society are not that different from people who want complete state control over society. Different organizational and legal structure, but same type of backwards moral reasoning.
A lot of right wing militias are anti-government, radical individualist, bordering on anarchist. They care about hierarchy, but mostly in-group. I wouldn’t call them authoritarian.
The need for either total autonomy from - or total control of - the evil mainstream society is an example of the theory, not an exception.
Anarchist ideology is not a monopoly of the left.
Ancaps believe in hierarchy, just not government hierarchy. Though the distinction is dubious.
Markets are not hierarchies.
Though, yeah, the distinction between market oppression, government oppression, organizational oppression, racial-minority oppression, and cultural oppression is clear, but they are all oppression.
Markets aren’t hierarchies. Private property, on the other hand, does impose a hierarchy; and markets without regulation inevitably are destroyed by capture by powerful firms.
Political Compass Memes is the most accurate model humanity has ever invented to effectively categorize politics.
The Political Compass, also known as the Nolan Chart, is used in political science to map political ideologies on a left/right and authoritarian/libertarian grid. The memes are just using that template.
I often wonder when it was that tankies inherited the far gone misanthropic crazy of the Chans. Both enjoy hate-posting in each others’ communities, so cultural overlaps were bound to occur, but when did the scales tip and aggressive antisocial behavior become pervasive?
Might just be that the “Everyone is against us and we are special” mentality of tankies and 4chan (see: hate for ‘normies’) attract the same kind of personality.
… I’ll ask. Does it matter if they’re one or the other? Will you somehow like them more if they’re a specific one of the two?
If push comes to shove, I would still prefers tankies, who are only opportunistically genocidal, to Nazis, who hold genocide as their highest goal. But neither are acceptable, and both are absolutely atrocious. Insofar as one can eschew both of them, one should.
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So, horseshoe theory?
Stethoscope theory
LOL I love this
Debunked. Lefties are further than tankies anyway
Tankies, red fascism, stalinists, totalitarian, authoritarian, oligarch & reactionary tendencies have more in common with just regular mask off fascism than with leftism, communism, Marxism…
