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Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP but,

Right: conservative. Policy designed to preserve corporate interests and wealthy elite. Often masquerading as “looking after the middle class” - when really at best they get some trickle down benefits. Selfishly You should be right leaning if you are a significant owner of capital or have a very high chance of that (they will convince you that everyone has this chance).

Left: Progressive (in that it looks to reform the existing structure). Policy design to assist the working class (wage earners). It typically looks to take from corporates/wealthy elite and redistribute. Selfishly You should be left leaning if you don’t own significant capital and derive most of your income from wages.

Unselfishly you should err on the side of the left as it is aiming for a “greater good”.

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That’s a pretty biased interpretation.

Care to elaborate? Seems pretty accurate to me.

It basically oversimplifies "right" to selfish ideology and "left" to ideology of "greater good".

For once I would argue, it is for the greater good, if "selfish" individual rights are increased - and apart from that, I think using the left right spectrum is not very helpful for anything, but dividing society into tribal thinking.

Capitalism, or more specifically inequality created the tribes. Denying their existence is to purposefully avoid looking for a solution.

It’s not an ideology of greater good. I mean it literally in the utilitarian sense: left thinking, focusing on improving the plight of wage earners literally effects more people and is a greater good.

Improving/preserving wealthy elites will naturally benefit fewer people.

These are facts, with evidence. I can go deeper if you find this simplification too blunt. It isn’t overly simplified it. It describes what the left right spectrum means, and yes I’m applied a value judgement, but I can back up my value judgement with facts.

I’m not an extremist in my views though, and I will accept democratic processes, and there is benefit to floating around the spectrum, rather than committing to a single point.

"Improving/preserving wealthy elites will naturally benefit fewer people.

These are facts, with evidence"

You are implying, that it is a fact that right leaning people want to preserve wealthy elites.

But this is not, what I heard from right leaning people as their goals.

"Capitalism, or more specifically inequality created the tribes."

And I believe, tribes existed way before capitalism.

So I believe, that you are indeed quite extremist in your ideology, if you know as a fact, that left is good and right is bad.

There are many, many different contradicting views and concepts on the right as well on the left. To some I agree, to many I do not.

But as an example, the nazis are considered quite right usually. But it is nationalsocialism. The concept of the greater good for the people (of one race). So they are left then?

I rather think the whole left right concept is flawed and not helpful.

There are not contradicting views. If you look at them with a lenses of preserving wealth they align quite neatly. I’d like to see a counter example.

Nazis are the very definition of preserving the wealth of a few. It’s just you have seen the words “National Socialism” and assumed that meant left. You’ll find the labels are high jacked quite often. But left and right remain more consistent.

Are you saying that trying to bring more benefit to wage earners is not good?

Could you give an example of right wing policy that wasn’t focused on preserving wealthy elites?

I can give you plenty of left-wing policies that ended in mass genocide. How do you fit that into your mental model?

Were they trying to redistribute wealth or consolidate it?

Where does genocide fit into anything I’ve said?

"It’s just you have seen the words “National Socialism” and assumed that meant left."

No, I just happen to live in an area (in germany) with lots of nazis and had to engage with their ideology a lot.

There definitely exist anticapitalist, socialist fascist today, as did back then. Those are the ones, that were put down in Nazi germany in 1934 in the Röhm Putsch, so they did not rose to power, but nevertheless exist. They do believe in a socialist aryan society. So the greater good and negating of the individual, but limited to a certain race.

So how do they fit in, in the left = altruistic, right = selfish metric?

They are not individualists. They are willing to sacrifice themself for Volk und Vaterland.

"There are not contradicting views"

And with contradicting I meant in general. The socialist pagan Nazis do not really agree with the capitalist, catholic fascist of spain for example, but both are labeld right.

While anarchosyndicalist do not really share much with stalinist, yet both are labeled left.

Seems you’ve applied values of your own. I didn’t frame one as selfish and the other as altruistic. I framed one as spreading wealth and one as consolidating it. I gave “selfish” examples for both.

If you care about preserving wealth with elites that is right wing… whatever weird political label you give it.

If you care about distributing it to non elites that is left wing.

Stalinists are not “left” they were about wealth and power consolidation.

This is why right and left are useful measures because it sees passes all the bullshit names/political measures and provides a simple scale: are you redistributing wealth (left)? Are you consolidating wealth (right)? Are you doing something in between (centrist)

Ok, so how do the national socialist fit into your metric?

They are left, because they want to redistribute wealth, from the few rich (jewish) bankers, to the poor (aryan) german masses?

No, they wanted to move wealth, and consolidate it. So you could be fooled into initially thinking it was a leftist agenda when it was “take wealth away from rich bankers”. But it quite quickly deteriorated to something else.

It’s important distinction that at the extremes both left and right don’t look that different. It is essentially use extreme violence to achieve wealth distribution/consolidation. Typically once someone is in control of such power even if they set out/pretended to distribute they pivot to consolidation. I guess this is what is meant by “power corrupts”

So 17 levels below a comment I made about the news just making everyone angry and addicted to it, people are still commenting about whether Nazis are economically left or right. I guess that tracks.

Oh, people can always fight about and against nazis.

But I am not angry, just mildly annoyed, that my point does not get through.

(my point was the left right metric is not helpful - but when applied, you will find not a homogenous group, but right leaning nazis, as well as left leaning nazis, when defining right or left with distributing or conserving wealth. Another common definition would be racist, or not.

But I am out of this semantic debate)

Perhaps we were talking past each other. You were saying left and right is useless because you can have left and right nazi's or left and right socialists. I was saying left and right is useful: Nazi and Socialist are the meaningless label.

I mean, it's true if you reinterpret "selfish" as "individualist". At the end of the day its "prioritize concerns of the individual at the expense of society" versus "prioritize concerns of society at the expense of individuals".

I disagree. Because in your statement you are hiding the fact that the “expense of the individuals” is a tiny number compared to the number of “members of society”.

This seems to the world view of the Democratic Party as described by the Democratic Party.

Not American, so I wouldn’t know. But from outside the Democratic Party looked more right than left. Though I guess it’s mostly left of the republicans.

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